MILLER, Edith Caroline Munckton

Edith Miller's connection with East Melbourne was as a parishioner of St Peter's Church, Eastern hill, East Melbourne. Her name appears on an Honour Board there commemorating parishioners who served overseas in the Great War. 

Before the war

Edith Caroline Munckton Miller was the third of five children (2s, 3d) born to Alexander George Miller (c1851-1917) and his wife Rhoda (nee Munckton) (1844-1922).

Both her mother’s side and her father’s side were pioneering families whose successes in the Australian colonies reflected opportunities available to labourers immigrating in the 1840s and 1850s.

The family of Edith’s mother Rhoda immigrated first. James Russell Munckton with wife Mary Ann (nee Webber) and two small daughters arrived in Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) in 1841. James was a ‘1^st Class farm labourer’ from Somerset with an employer arranged under the Bounty Scheme. Rhoda was born in 1844. The family moved to South Australia about 1845 and continued to expand, being nine children in 1855. Baptismal records and newspaper reports indicate that James was variously occupied as a labourer, gardener and hotel licensee in and around Adelaide. In the 1860s he had land at Woodforde near his original place of settlement in Adelaide, ‘Munckton’s Run’ near Narracoorte and other holdings in the south east (Border Watch, 22.11.1893, p1).

By 1870 the Muncktons had moved to Victoria, where James purchased a sheep run, Coliban Estate, near Taradale. There was sadness there: a daughter died soon after arrival then his wife Mary Ann in 1873. There was also joy with the marriage of several children. In 1871, 27 year old Rhoda married 20 year old Alexander George Miller of Sandhurst (Bendigo), the union announced with numerous notices in Victorian papers.

According to his marriage certificate, Miller was from Hamilton, Scotland. In fact, he had lived in the colony virtually all his life. He arrived in 1851 with his father Francis Miller, mother Helen/Ellen (nee Cooper/Couper) and brother John. Both children were ‘infants’ on the passenger manifest and possibly born at sea (there were five births on the voyage of their ship ‘Sea’ [Argus, 21.8.1851, p2]). Francis and Helen were not from Hamilton but from Wick, Caithness in the far north of Scotland, had been married 18 months and had come under Her Majesty’s Emigration scheme. Francis, a labourer, went directly to Geelong where he had family connections. When he died in 1882, he was a farmer at Avon Plains in St Arnaud in central Victoria.  

Alexander Miller was directly involved in mining in the area as a shareholder, lessee, and manager in the early 1870s. (He or another Alexander Miller was insolvent in the early 1870s and involved in several court cases over mining leases.) He may very well have met Rhoda through her brother John Webber Munckton who was managing several mines around Bendigo at the same time. Their first three children were born in or near Sandhurst (Bendigo): Florence Jessie (1875), Charles Herbert Struthers (1877) and Edith Caroline (1878), and the remaining two nearer the NSW border, Frances Mary in Albury (1879), and Ernest Russell in Tallangatta (1880) where Alexander Miller had land in 1881 (Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 15.2.1881, p3).

It is not clear how or where the Miller children were educated. However, their occupations are known. Charles sought his fortune in the Western Australian boom. He worked with in the WA Railway electrical engineering department in Perth where he became ‘well known and esteemed’. In 1908 his life was cut short in a fierce storm off Broome when he drowned on a pearling lugger (West Australian, 16.12.1908, p7). His brother Ernest went north to Queensland and was working as a stockman when the Great War broke out.

Meantime it appears from electoral rolls that Alexander and Rhoda lived separately for many years. Alexander appears to have lived in Bendigo but died at Mt Duneed near Geelong in 1917 where he had retained business interests. Rhoda, her sister Frances and daughter Florence lived in the Geelong house Frances had inherited from her father and which Rhoda ran as lodging house in the early 1900s. About 1914, they moved to Eltham, outside Melbourne. After Alexander died in 1917, they moved to the other side of Melbourne, to Murrumbeena where Florence died in 1919 and Rhoda died in 1923.

Rhoda’s other two daughters both became nurses. Frances trained and worked at the Alfred Hospital in Prahran from about 1909 and Edith at the Melbourne Hospital in Carlton (1910-13). Edith also worked as a charge nurse at the well-known hospital run by Miss Garlick in Flinders Lane, Melbourne. It was no doubt during that time Edith attended nearby St Peter’s Eastern Hill, East Melbourne. There were a number of nurses in the St Peter’s congregation, and the clergy encouraged their spiritual development and friendships through its branch of the St Barnabas Guild, an international Anglican nursing organisation. Edith’s attendance and presence were sufficient for her to be included among the parishioners who served in the Great War.

War service

Edith formally enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service in August 1915 and immediately embarked for overseas with nursing reinforcements on the RMS Morea (Edith Caroline Munckton Miller, Service Record). Several months later, in December, Frances left Australia on the hospital ship Karoola bound for the United Kingdom with hospital equipment and Red Cross supplies (Evelyn Observer and Bourke East Record, 24.12.15, p3).

Their surviving brother Ernest had already enlisted. A stockman in Queensland, he joined the AIF within weeks of war’s outbreak in 1914 and had been wounded and hospitalised on the Dardanelle peninsula twice in 1915 (Ernest Russell Miller, Service Record). News of his first wounding could have been a contributing factor in the decisions by Edith and Frances to enlist.

All three named their mother, Rhoda Miller of ‘Rellim’, Eltham, as their next of kin.

There were nearly 60 nurses aboard RMS Morea. They intended to staff the newly raised No 10 Australian General Hospital in England but the hospital was never formed (for further details see http://emhs.org.au/person/gemmell/jessie_ross). The nurses were dispersed to various hospitals in England and Egypt. Edith was among the Egypt contingent, nursing at No 4 Australian Auxiliary Hospital in Cairo.

Located in the Napoleonic military barracks at Abbassia, 4AAH treated infectious diseases such as measles, mumps, celebral meningitis and scarlet fever. Infectious diseases, potentially serious and even fatal, were rife among the troops in the crowded and unhygienic conditions at the front and in camps. Edith herself succumbed to mumps in November.

After almost a year in Cairo, Edith was transferred to England. From August 1916 until February 1917, she nursed at Queen Mary’s Military Hospital in Whalley, Lancashire. Recently built as a lunatic asylum, the building became a military hospital in 1915. Its 4000 bed capacity made it the largest in the country. A railway siding meant sick and wounded troops were transported from trains to wards under covered walkways. Edith was transferred there as the hospital filled to capacity with troops wounded at the Somme.

The hospital’s staff were housed in nearby wooden huts on the site. The winter of 1916-17 was severe and snowy, and the nurses were issued with felt spats to prevent chilblains (https://sites.google.com/site/billingtonandwhalleyweb/queen-mary-s-military-hospital). Edith was off duty for three weeks with influenza from Christmas 1916.

In February 1917, Edith was sent to No 2 Australian General Hospital stationed in France in the coastal town of Wimereux near Boulogne. The unit’s war diaries in 1917 were very brief but she seems to have missed the burst pipes and severe water shortages that month. (2AGH, War Diary, February 1917 [AWM]). September to November 1917 saw many serious cases of wounded and sick troops, which necessitated a ‘crisis expansion’ of hospital beds.

Edith Miller was transferred to England in early December 1917, in anticipation of returning to Australia nursing troops on a hospital ship. Her father’s death may have been a contributing factor in her return. She left England on HMAT Runic on 20 December and disembarked in Australia on 12 February 1918. She had been overseas two and a half years.

She was the first of the three Miller siblings to return home. Ernest reached Australia in November 1918, and Frances in July 1919.

The siblings’ paths had both diverged and converged during the war.

Edith and Ernest were briefly in Cairo at the same time, in October and November 1915. When wounded a second time on the Dardanelles peninsula, Ernest was hospitalised in Malta, Alexandria, and finally in Cairo at No 1 Auxiliary Hospital where he spent three weeks recovering from jaundice. Presumably brother and sister met up, perhaps for the first time since Ernest had become a stockman in Queensland. Ernest spent the remainder of the war in Egypt, and there is no concrete evidence from their service records that they met again before returning to Australia.

Opportunities were greater for Edith and her sister Frances to meet. Frances joined the Queen Alexandria Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve after she disembarked in England in February 1916. After working at the Birmingham War Hospital for several months, she was sent to France where she spent the remainder of the war. She and Edith may have met in England when Frances was recovering from illness in the summer of 1917, and perhaps in France in the brief period when they were both serving there in late 1917. Frances spent 1918 and early 1919 in France. She returned to Australia in July 1919.

She was awarded the 1914-15 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal.

After the war

Edith’s return home to Melbourne in February 1918 marked the end of her active service abroad. She continued nursing returned soldiers at No 11 Australian Military Hospital at Caulfield from 1918 until 1921 but severe difficulties with her hip in 1921 necessitated three months in the same hospital.

Edith, Ernest and Frances returned to a family that had seen changes while they were abroad. Alexander, their father, died in 1917 at Mt Duneed near Geelong. Rhoda, their mother, moved from Eltham to Murrumbeena, a suburb south east of Melbourne, to a house she shared with her sister Frances and daughter Florence. Florence died in the winter of 1919, just three weeks after the return of her sister Frances from service in the QAIMNSR (Miller, Frances Mary, Service Record, QAIMNSR [National Archives]; Argus, 26.7.1919, p13).

Frances resumed nursing and spent the remainder of her life in Victoria. She lived with her mother Rhoda until Rhoda’s death in 1992.

Edith and Ernest travelled again. In 1921, Edith went to New Zealand where she married Norman Seader Griffiths (1893-1971), then a farmer. Griffiths had also served abroad, enlisting in October 1914. In July 1917, he became dangerously ill with pneumonia and was hospitalised in 2AGH in Wimereux where Edith Miller was a nurse. He was there almost two weeks before recovering sufficiently to be sent to England and from there back to New Zealand as medically unfit. (Norman Seader Griffiths, Army Record (NZ Archives; accessible online at https://www.archway.archives.govt.nz). Romance must have blossomed between patient and nurse during the worst of his illness despite their difference in age, Edith being fourteen years Norman’s senior (but seven on the marriage certificate).

Family sources indicate that Norman and Edith lived in Hinuera, a small rural town in the Waikato area, near Norman’s family. Edith’s aunt Frances lived with them for a number of years between Rhoda Miller’s death in 1922 and Frances’s death in 1935 (Frances Ann Munckton, Probate, accessible at findmypast.com.au). 

Norman and Edith subsequently moved to Auckland where they ran a floristry business before they died, Edith in 1963 aged 84 and Norman in 1971 aged 78.  

Edith’s surviving brother Ernest Russell Miller had returned to Australia from service in Egypt in November 1918. The former Queensland stockman went further afield, to New Ireland off New Guinea, where he purchased two plantations in the mid 1920s, previously owned by German settlers, and became well known as a businessman. In 1942, he and other residents were captured by the Japanese army and interned on the island. In 1944, he and others died in the horrific massacre on Kavieng wharf, his cement-weighted body thrown into the sea after he had been garrotted with wire. (For the full account, go to http://www.jje.info/lostlives/exhib/potp/index.html).