WATSON, Eileen Marriott

Eileen Marriott Watson was the youngest of the five daughters and one son born to the Reverend James Marriott Watson (1842-1903) and his wife Marianna (nee Dunning) (1846-1908). 

James's father was the wonderfully named Brereton Rolla Ross Porter Pemberton Watson, a prominent early colonist in Tasmania. Marianna's father was John Dunning, gentleman, of Bradfield, Staffordshire.  

There were Church of England clergy on both sides of Eileen's family, including two of James's brothers (George Wade Watson and Henry Crocker Marriott Watson) and Marianna's cousin, William Henry Dunning, who married the couple in St Luke's Church, Liverpool NSW in 1870. There was also at least two 'black sheep' among James's brothers and Eileen's uncles: Charles Marriott Watson, a Melbourne solicitor who was declared insolvent with large debts including to Marianna in 1897 (Argus, 9.8.1897), and Henry Brereton (H.B) Marriott Watson, atheist and author, well-known in British literary circles with his common law wife, poet Rosamund Marriott Watson.

Eileen's father James, an outstanding scholar at Moore College in Sydney, had been ordained by Bishop Perry in Melbourne in 1870 and worked in western Victoria in the 1870s and 1880s. He was incumbent (rector) of St John's Belfast (Port Fairy) when Eileen was born in 1887. She spent her early years in the Mansfield rectory (1888-1891), and then in the Melbourne outer suburb of Preston where James was incumbent of All Saints' Church Preston from 1891 until his death in 1903. Eileen was in her mid teens. Her mother Marianna died in 1908. She left the bulk of her estate (over £500) to be divided equally between her four surviving daughters. Eileen like her sisters received £110.

Eileen trained as a nurse for three years at the hospital in Hamilton, where her family had had associations before she was born. On her application form to join the Australian Army Nursing Service, she cited the hospital certificate, registration with the Victorian Trained Nurses Association, three months as acting head nurse at Hamilton, and more than two years carrying out medical orders. 

Australian Electoral Rolls for both 1914 and 1919 give Eileen's address at St Anne's, William Street, South Yarra and list her occupation as nurse. 

War Service

Eileen joined the AANS on 17 July 1915, three weeks after she applied. She gave as her next of kin her older sister Ethel, Mrs J Proctor Berry, CSR Pty Ltd, Labasa, Fiji. 

Eileen sailed for service overseas almost immediately and from September 1915 to January 1916 was attached to No 2 Australian Stationary Hopsital (2ASH), located at Mudros West on the island of Lemnos. The hospital's sketchy war diary shows that the number of patients - casualties from the Gallipoli campaign - fluctuated wildly in those four months from fewer than 100 to over 800. The 25 or so nurses were initially accommodated in tents (see photo below), but in October huts were ordered for them in anticipation of 'boisterous weather ... during the next few weeks'. This was the result of inspection of the hospital by the Acting Director-General of Medical Services Australia, Colonel Fetherstone. 

The conditions and treatments of the patients (who had previously been cared for by male orderlies), and the hospital facilities at 2 ASH and other hospitals on Lemnos were appalling. The nurses' responses to the situation have in recent times become legendary.  Several of Eileen Watson's nursing colleagues left diaries and accounts of their time at 2ASH.  (Janet Butler, Kitty's War: the remarkable war-time experience of Kit McNaughton, 2013, especially Ch 3-4. As there were two Watsons in the unit, the identity of the Watsons to whom Kitty refers is not clear. See also references to 2ASH in Kirsty Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army nurses at work in World War 1, 2011).

In January 1916, 2 ASH packed up and moved back to Alexandria. Watson and the other nurses reported to the headquarters in Cairo and enjoyed some leave, with sightseeing, the races, good food and the happy company of officers (Butler, Kitty's War, Ch 5). There was no accommodation for them in the new location of 2ASH at Tel-el-Kehir, and once more the hospital returned to using male orderlies for nursing care.

In April 1916, some of the former 2 ASH nurses were sent to France. Others, including Watson, were sent back to Australia on transport duty. On 11 April 1916, Watson sailed from Suez on the 'Runic' with soldiers returning to Australia; she arrived in Melbourne on 14 May 1916.

For several months, Watson nursed at Mena House, the hospital located at 29 Simpson Street, East Melbourne. (While a number of the trained nurses there had undoubtedly been to the Temple of Mena outside Cairo while in the AANS, the hospital name pre-dates the war.)

In late 1916, Watson again filled in the enlistment forms, citing 11 months with the AIF and 7 months with the AMF as previous service. On Boxing Day 1916, she sailed on the 'Mooltan' for duty in India. Around a fifth of the AANS served in India in the 1914-18 war, although it was not recognised officially as a theatre of war.  

She worked initially in the Colaba War Hospital in Bombay (January-June 1917) and then in Station (Garrison) Hospital in Rawalpindi (June 1917-November 1918). Colaba was a 550 bed hospital that typically had around 400 patients, mainly officers and trooops from the British garrison in India. It was near the water, 'just the quaintest looking place with the native huts along the edge' according to another Australian nurse there (Gippsland Mercury, 21.11.1916). Staff Nurse McLean, one of her colleagues there, told her family that they were not overworked at the time. Swimming was hazardous because of the water, she continued, and she did not particularly like the food which was 'rather sour' and indeterminate in nature, with cholera an ever present fear. Native boys looked after their rooms, drew their baths and prepared afternoon tea for the nurses Warwick Examiner and Times, 3.10.1917). 

For most of her time in India (June 1917-November 1918), Watson worked at the Station Hospital in Rawalpindi, the centre of the British Raj's Northern India Command. In the latter part of that period at least, Station Hospitals were for Indian soldiers. With the outbreak of fighting against Afghanistan on the North West Frontier at the time, 'the Indian Government was clearly reluctant to lose the services of the Australian nurses ...' (Jan Basset, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War, 1992, p. 81). 

A week after the Armistice according to her service record, on 18 November 1918, Eileen Watson transferred to Bombay in anticipation of travelling to England on the 'Royal George', probably on leave. Ten days later she was 'disembarked for Disciplinary reasons x [from] Royal George'. There are no details about her misdemeanour, its nature or whether it was hers alone or involved others. It may have related to reporting late to the ship, or fraternising with officers or other ranks on shore or on the ship. Whatever the offence, the penalty was cancellation of her passage to England and return to Australia in mid January 1919.

Eileen Watson was discharged from the AANS on 24 March 1919.

After the War 

In 1920 (most probably) Eileen Watson travelled to Fiji, home of her sister Ethel, the Mrs J Proctor Berry of CSR Pty Ltd, Labasa whom she had listed as her next of kin on joining the AANS.

On 2 June 1921 in Holy Trinity Church, Suva, Eileen married John Alexander Colin Leith (1896-1947) (Argus, 26.6.1921). She was in her mid thirties, he in his mid twenties.

Colin, who like Eileen came originally from Victoria, had been working in Fiji when war broke out in August 1914. Like over 400 men from Australia, New Zealand and Britain living in the far off British colony of Fiji, Leith enlisted to defend the empire.  He joined the 1st Fiji Reinforcements which left for England in June 1916,  then the King's Royal Rifle Corps as a rifleman and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutentant in the Corps in 1917 (Christine Liava'a, They did their duty: soldiers from Fiji in the Great War, 2005;  State Library NSW MPG/162; London Gazette, 19.2.1918, p.2205; Duty Done: Colin Russell Leith as told to Cyril Ayris, 2001). He fought in France on the Western Front where he was gassed. He returned to Fiji and CSR in 1919.

Eileen and Colin had two sons while living in Fiji, Colin Russell (1922-2010) and Ian Stuart (b. 1923). The family's life in Fiji and later is recounted in Duty Done. The marriage was a 'propitious one'. Eileen was a strong, independent woman who took charge of running the family home and their servants. With her nursing expertise, people on their isolated sugar cane estate regarded her as the 'district's unofficial doctor', and she was busy in that role when fights between indentured workers led to 'men, women and children receiving terrible wounds'. Both parents and their children spoke Hindi.

The family returned to Australia and settled in Sydney in 1937 when Leith's health declined. Both boys attended The Anglican School (TAS) in Armidale, though the family's financial situation resulted in Russell leaving school aged 15 and joinng CSR as a clerk in 1938. Russell joined the RAAF in 1942, saw action over France as a fighter pilot and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Sadly, Eileen knew nothing of her son's war-time exploits and decoration. She died suddenly at the family home in Rose Bay, Sydney on 23 April 1938. She was 51. Colin her husband remarried several years later but then died himself in 1947.

Eileen's son Russell dedicated Duty Done to his mother Eileen and his wife. Eileen is described briefly as a trained nurse who survived military service in Egypt, India and the Aegean island of Mudros where she nursed casualties from Gallipoli. 

The extent to which she spoke of her life in those days and places will not be known.