War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I

Victorian-born Charles Coning Dale took part in the pageantry on 12 March 1913, enacted on the dusty plains of what was to become the National Capital, when Lady Denman, the wife of the Governor General, named the Capital, Canberra. He was then a 19-year-old cadet in the Duntroon guard of honour and may not have even met his 16-year-old Melburnian wife-to-be, Sabina Daffodil Wootten, who was always known as Sybil. It is tempting to think that about 20 months later, Sybil may have visited Canberra to attend the ceremony when Charles Dale graduated in November 1914 in one of the first groups to march out from Australia’s new Military College. Once World War I was declared, the training of his group and the other early cadet groups, was accelerated to enable the graduates to serve as young officers in the First AIF at Egypt and Gallipoli and later on the Western Front. One week after graduating, Charles Coning Dale married Sybil Wootten in their home town of Melbourne. Within nine months Sybil, aged 18, was a widow and the mother of a young baby.

Sybil and Charles Dale were typical of other couples whose connection to Canberra occurred because the husband was drawn to the National Capital either as a cadet or as a member of the instructional staff at Duntroon, as a tradesman in one of the construction teams that had begun to build the infrastructure of the city, or as a public servant employed in the administration of the Territory. The wives of these men were often forced to stay in their home towns because of the great shortage of accommodation in Canberra or the nearby town of Queanbeyan. The alternative was to live with their husbands in one of the ‘tent cities’ or other basic accommodation provided for workers in what was a frontier town.

Canberra in 1914

When World War I began, Canberra was officially just over one year old. In 1914 the population of the Federal Capital Territory (not named Australian Capital Territory until 1938) was less than 2,000. These few thousand people comprised farmers, rural workers, tradesmen and a few wealthy landowners and their families who had lived in the district, some for generations, before it was chosen as the National Capital; the newly arrived workers, officials and office employees, teachers, nurses and domestic workers who had moved to the Capital, some accompanied by their families, to begin building and administering the new city; and the cadets, their teachers, instructors and support staff at Duntroon Military College, which was opened in June 1911 under its first Commandant, Major General William Throsby Bridges.

Canberra had no town centre --the nearest commercial centre was Queanbeyan, over the border in New South Wales, which residents depended on for shops and services, a local newspaper, the Queanbeyan Age, and social, church, community and sporting links. Queanbeyan had been the centre for the district since the arrival of the first European settlers and convicts on the Limestone Plains in 1838 when Queanbeyan was declared a township. Elements of the construction of Canberra were well under way in 1914 but ceased almost entirely in 1916, as resources and money were diverted to the war. By then, there had been an exodus of workers back to their own states, some of the men to resume civilian life, others to enlist in the AIF.

The men and women who had an association with Canberra and who volunteered for service in World War I are commemorated on the ACT Memorial. Of the 106 who were killed or lost their lives on war service, most were single men. This was similar to Australia as a whole where only 17 per cent of the AIF were married. Eight of the married men who had an association with Canberra and who left widows have been identified for this study. Only one had no connection with Duntroon, a pointer to the central role the College played in the National Capital’s earliest years. The exception was John Cecil Drury Reid, a staff engineer with the Commonwealth Government, who in 1912 was transferred from Melbourne to the Department of Home Affairs in the Federal Capital Territory to work on the infrastructure of the new Capital. For the next three years he was employed on surveying and engineering works in the Tuggeranong, Weston Creek, Ginninderra and Majura districts, the Cotter valley and the Brindabellas. When the District Surveyor, Percy Sheaffe, was absent he also acted in that role. His wife, Jessie, may have visited Canberra during this time, but there is no record of her residence in the Canberra district and she maintained the family home in Melbourne.

The other seven widows had been married to men who were connected to Duntroon, some directly--Edith Bridges, wife of the Commandant, Major General William Throsby Bridges, Grace Yates, wife of Albert Edward Yates who was on the instructional staff and Sibyl, wife of Charles Coning Dale who was a cadet--others in more peripheral roles who were employed by the Department of Home Affairs to build and service Duntroon. These employees were provided with accommodation in a workers’ camp near the College and several of their wives moved to Canberra to live in this tent city: Glenora Love, wife of Alfred Herbert Love who was a plumber; Isabella McKean, wife of David Thornton McKean, a plasterer; and Florence Perry, wife of Joseph Perry who was employed as a groom.

The remaining deceased soldier, John Charles (Charlie) Mayo and his future wife Florence Roberts had by far the longest connection with Duntroon. They were both employed at the property during its pre-military life as one of the great pastoral estates on the Limestone Plains, long before it was thought of as the site for Australia’s military college. Their marriage in 1905 was performed at St John the Baptist Anglican Church, which had been consecrated in 1845 on land donated by the owner of Duntroon estate, Robert Campbell. Charlie Mayo was a farm worker and his bride, Florence, was given away by the farm manager, Mr E.E. Hudson, and Mr and Mrs Hudson hosted their wedding breakfast at the manager’s residence.

Records of soldiers and widows

The military service and the background of these eight men who were killed during active service with the AIF in World War I are readily accessible since the digitisation of personnel records of World War I volunteers became available on the National Archives of Australia website (NAA Record Search Series, B2455 First AIF Personnel Dossiers, 1914-1920). They are documented, sometimes in greater detail thanks to research by Michael Hall of the Canberra & District Historical Society, on the ACT Memorial website (www.memorial.act.gov.au) and some are also on The AIF Project website, initiated by the Australian Defence Force Academy (www.aif.adfa.edu.au/aif/). These sites usually record little about the men’s wives apart from their names, sometimes the date of marriage, and their addresses as next of kin.

Like most other women who lived one hundred years ago the lives of these widows are difficult to trace because of their absence from historical records. Records of the Department of Repatriation and the Repatriation Commission, made available only recently, provide some limited information allowing glimpses into the lives of these women who were profoundly affected, emotionally and financially, by the loss of their husbands. Repatriation records also reveal some information on the help their children received under the Education and Training of Children of Deceased and Totally and Permanently Incapacitated Soldiers Scheme (NAA Record Search, C138, Personal Case Files, Single Number Series, Australian 1914-1918 War) and (NAA Record Search, B73, Personal Case Files, World War I). An indication of their emotional loss is revealed in the value widows placed on receiving the personal belongings of their husbands and the medals and other marks of their service which they were sent by the Army over the following years. The widows themselves, hearing little officially about the circumstances of their husbands’ deaths, sometimes searched for surviving members of the same unit to discover the intimate stories of how their husbands had died. Florence Mayo heard from a soldier, who had been in the same trench as her husband when he was killed, who was able to tell her of his final moments and his initial burial.

Emotional and financial loss

Australian wives, mothers and loved ones of those who volunteered during World War I became accustomed to fear of the dreaded knock on the door that heralded the arrival of a telegram announcing a death or casualty. Death left families devastated, as Australians read in their newspapers the ever-lengthening lists of casualties from the battlefields of Gallipoli and Egypt and the horrendous toll of the Western Front, where even single battles resulted in thousands of dead. Widows were left unprepared to face the years of responsibility ahead not only for themselves but often for their young children. Eighteen-year-old Sibyl Dale farewelled her husband as he sailed away in February 1915, on what to most of the young men was a great adventure that they expected might be just a short interlude in their lives. Still only eighteen and with a young baby, she heard of her husband’s death at Gallipoli in August that year. As it turned out she was to face a heartrending problem in raising her child. Glenda Love would not have known that her husband had left his training camp in Egypt when she received a telegram telling her he had been killed on the second day after the landing on Gallipoli. Edith Bridges, after a life of thirty years married to a soldier, would have been much more aware of the risks of military service. Nevertheless, she never recovered from the shock of the death of her husband, Sir William Throsby Bridges, Commander of the First AIF, after he was shot while inspecting his troops in the push up the treacherous Gallipoli slopes. This was the beginning of the terrible toll of deaths which accelerated when the Anzacs reached the trenches in Belgium and France leaving devastated families in Australia.

Widows were left to face their lives without a breadwinner and often without a home of their own. Many, particularly young widows with children, had to fall back on support from their extended families to take them in. Sibyl Dale and her baby returned to board with her mother. Queanbeyan citizens promised Florence Mayo, whose husband was killed in the Second Battle of Bullecourt in 1917, that they would provide her with a house for herself and her two young daughters, but fund-raising proved sadly disappointing as war weariness and constant fundraising took a toll on generosity and compassion.

Materially, money worries and finding a home dominated the lives of widows who were already facing life without the emotional support of a partner. There was no War Widows Guild to support and fight for them, as it did after it was formed during World War II under the leadership of Jessie Vasey. Legacy, the organisation that did so much to help widows and the children of deceased AIF members in later years, did not begin until 1923 and it took years to become widely established as a body that was concerned with the needs of families of deceased soldiers. Volunteer women’s groups worked all over the country to support the troops overseas (see Canberra Women in World War I: Community at Home Nurses Abroad to read how one community responded to World War I), and similar women’s groups, no doubt, helped individual war widows in their communities, as did the Australian Red Cross, which Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, wife of the Governor General, founded and worked for throughout the war. She was also credited with founding the Friendly Union of Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers, which under its first president, her close friend Lady Bridges, aimed at ‘the promotion of a friendly feeling among the relations of members of the AIF and the giving of mutual help and advice in any trouble or difficulty’. Available evidence suggests, however, that this remained mainly a Victorian organisation.

Pensions for war widows

Soon after the start of World War I the Australian Parliament debated the subject of war pensions for which there had been no previous provision, as only colonial contingents had fought in previous wars. Even the concept of government support for widows was unknown and, nationally, civilian widows had to wait until 1944 for the provision of widows’ pensions, except in New South Wales, where they were introduced by the Lang Labor Government in the 1920s. In the prevailing euphoria and pride in Australia’s first overseas army in 1914 the War Pensions Act, providing for pensions for widows and dependent children of members of the Forces who were killed, and for members who were incapacitated during warlike operations, was passed quickly and assented to on 21 December 1914. The rates were set in line with the rank held by the deceased member of the forces at the time of death. The widow of a private, for example, who had been paid 6 shillings a day, was entitled to a pension of £52 per year, the rate rising through each non-commissioned rank to the widow of a lieutenant, who had received 17 shillings and sixpence a day, was granted £91 a year, with amounts rising further with each officer rank. Dependent children received an allowance of £13 per year. Under the Act, the pensions of war widows who remarried were terminated immediately. These pensions were set at the same rate as those granted to members of the Forces who were totally and permanently incapacitated in war operations. Widows of Imperial reservists were also covered to the extent that their British pensions could be supplemented to bring them to Australian rates.

The original Act was amended by the War Pensions Act 1915, assented to on 2 September, which specified that pensions were to be paid in fortnightly instalments i.e. a pension of £52 a year was converted to £2 per fortnight. The Act was further amended by the War Pensions Act 1916, assented to on 30 May, which provided for a period of two years after remarriage before a war widow’s pension was cancelled. In 1917 the War Pensions Act was consolidated into the Australian Soldiers’ Repatriation Fund Act, under which a Repatriation Commission of seven members was established to handle all matters previously determined by a Pensions Board and all money in the Repatriation Fund. The Commission began operating in April 1918. In 1920 the Australian Soldiers’ Repatriation Act consolidated all previous acts and expanded repatriation provisions to include loans for establishment of industries and supplementing basic pensions with a living allowance which was paid to incapacitated soldiers and widows, with or without children, who were certified unfit to augment their pensions by personal earnings. Under separate legislation there was assistance in the provision of housing and a Soldiers’ Children Education scheme was introduced for the dependents of deceased soldiers and totally and permanently incapacitated soldiers. The Act also included a new schedule under which pensions were increased to £2-7-0 per fortnight for the widow of a private at the lowest level rising in steps through the non-commissioned ranks to £3-17-6 for the widow of a lieutenant with corresponding increases for higher ranked officers. Children’s allowances were set at £1 for the first child, 15/- for the second and 10/- for any other children, all payable per fortnight.

Pensions paid to widows of men below officer rank were considerably less than the basic wage leaving them dependent on help from relatives or on charity. The payment was described as ‘at the lowest acceptable financial level’, unless a war widow had other income or housing security. Widows, particularly those with young children who, in addition to housing problems, were usually unable to supplement their pensions with employment, were most disadvantaged. None of the subjects of this essay undertook employment and only two attempted to earn money through business: Isabella McKean who kept poultry and Grace Yates who took in boarders.

Four of the eight widows, Lady Brooks, Sibyl Dale, Glenda Love and Jessie Reid, returned to live in Victoria. Four also returned to New South Wales, Florence Mayo to Queanbeyan and Isabella McKean to Berowra and two British-born women, Florence Perry and Grace Yates, who were stranded in Sydney when their husbands went to war. Victoria had an unusual status as the site of the temporary federal capital of the Commonwealth of Australia, in supplying many of the workers and administrators who worked in Canberra in the early years. Melbourne was the seat of government from Federation in 1901 until 1927 when the Commonwealth Parliament sat in the Canberra for the first time. For more than a quarter of a century, Federal politicians gathered for sittings of the parliament in the Victorian parliamentary building. The Governor General lived at Government House, Melbourne, which was vacated for him by the Victorian Governor who took up temporary residence, lasting about thirty years, at Stonington Mansion in Malvern. Commonwealth departments, including during wartime the all-important Department of Defence and the Army headquarters, were in Melbourne. As a consequence, many of those drawn to work in the new National Capital in the early years were from Victoria and returned there when the war began or when building and other work ceased in the National Capital and their husbands joined the AIF.

Friendly Union of Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers

Of the eight widows the most prominent and the only one with a public profile was Lady Bridges. When her husband left Duntroon to raise and lead the first AIF, Edith Bridges and her family left Canberra to live in a flat in Toorak which was close to Government House, Victoria Barracks, and the city. As the wife and then widow of the first commandant of the First AIF, she held a unique position. Befitting her status, she became the initial president of the Friendly Union of Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers, an organisation set up early in the war by her close friend, Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, wife of the Governor General, Sir Ronald Craufurd Munro Ferguson (later Lord Novar), to provide support for families of soldiers of the first AIF. In a short time, the organisation was very active, attracting the wives of senior military officers including Annie Legge, wife of Major General J G Legge, and Susan Sellheim, wife of Major General Victor Sellheim, as well as leading figures in women’s groups and charitable and patriotic organisations in Melbourne. The Patron was Lady Forster, wife of the Victorian Governor. The focus of the Union’s activities was organising meetings and singing groups and providing help with clothing in Melbourne suburbs and Victorian country towns. As the war progressed more and more widows and mothers of deceased soldiers were among the wives and mothers whose welfare had been the organisation’s original purpose. Edith Bridges persevered in the position of president of the Friendly Union until 1916 when the stress of life in the public eye became too much to bear. As will be seen in the biographical entry on Lady Bridges, the shock of the death of her husband, Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges, less than a month after the landing at Gallipoli, and the prolonged and very public commemorative ceremonies and ritual associated with the return of his body to Australia and his reburial in Canberra, affected her health to the extent that she was forced to relinquish this position and retire from public life. As she explained to Lady Helen in 1916, ‘the shock of last year’, together with her deep anxiety for her son, Captain Noel Bridges, who was at the front in Flanders, left her ‘just “a poor thing” where energy of mind is required’.

Absence of women in historical records

The widows of the other seven soldiers shared the fate of many other Australian women in the 1920s and 1930s, living largely unrecorded lives as housewives and mothers. While male counterparts might appear in newspapers, government gazettes, in newsletters of organisations as office holders or members, in advertisements or published lists as professionals, tradespeople or in other occupations, or in court cases for civil or criminal actions, most women lived in the shadow of anonymity, present only in electoral rolls where their occupation was usually recorded as home duties. As far as can be ascertained, none of these seven widows led public lives and none appeared as office holders in organisations. Their stories, however, provide a microcosm of how war widows throughout Australia coped and how repatriation measures worked out in practice. Jessie Reid and Glenora Love took advantage of the Education and Training Scheme to educate and train children of war widows and incapacitated soldiers; Isabella McKean and Grace Yates tried supplementing their incomes with home based money-making endeavours; Florence Perry as the widow of an Imperial Reservist stranded in Australia experienced both the benefits and the conflicts in the complicated and frequently changing pension entitlements in the United Kingdom and Australia; the young Sibyl Dale was the only one of this group who appears to have endured the moral inquisition sometimes directed at war widows, while Florence Mayo, described as ‘a plucky woman’, demonstrated her own brand of independence in pursuing the dream of having her own home in Queanbeyan.

Repatriation in action

The experience of Jessie Reid in educating her three young children in a country state primary school during which she was reimbursed for any necessary books and through private secondary schools, where from the age of thirteen they received living allowances, indicates that the Repatriation Education and Training scheme worked well, if in an extremely bureaucratic manner. Jessie had to obtain detailed receipts and submit them on the correct form with several confirming signatures, while even minor decisions were referred to higher-ranking officers and sometimes to committees. Balancing this, bureaucrats showed genuine interest in the advancement of the children, even on one occasion suggesting a lucrative scholarship that Jessie’s son could apply for.

Glenda Love (Bolch after her remarriage) experienced the training aspect of the Education and Training scheme as her daughter progressed through a four-year apprenticeship as a ladies’ tailor. Glenda arranged her daughter’s apprenticeship which was then approved, subsidised and supervised by Repatriation. Esther’s apprenticeship wage, very small in the first year, rising in each successive year, was subsidised to bring her total income to 30 shillings per week. In return the Department required extremely detailed regular reports from her employer on her regularity and punctuality, industry, application and progress.

Both Isabella McKean and Grace Yates tried to make money with home-based industries but only Grace took advantage of a provision providing government help in establishing an industry. She received a grant to help her furnish a house to an acceptable level so that she could take in paying boarders. Isabella McKean, who lived on block of land at Berowra where she attempted to earn extra money keeping poultry after the death in action of her husband Scottish-born, Sapper David Thornton McKean, in 1916, appears to have been unfortunate in not being advised of her entitlement to help while she was a war widow. Although her income from keeping poultry appears to have been minimal, it became essential when she lost her widow’s pension two years after her remarriage in 1919 and her second husband proved a doubtful provider due to health problems.

Moral inquisition

The only widow in this group who is known to have been the subject of inquiries regarding her moral status was Sibyl Dale. Only 18 when she was widowed, official demands regarding her morals may have been because her youth may have made her subject to speculation. When she applied for a supplementary living allowance, while boarding with her baby daughter, Valda, at her mother’s home, she was required to submit a statement from a recognised organisation that she was ‘a respectable woman’. Later when notified that Valda, aged 4¾, was ill with diphtheria, the Department reassured itself that she was being ‘well cared for by her mother’. Tragically when Valda was seven, she was confined to a mental asylum where she remained until her death decades later.

The statements on Sibyl’s respectability and competence as a mother appear to reflect a judgmental interest in the moral character of such a young widow. There is nothing comparable in the files of the other widows in this study. Joy Damousi, in The Labour of Loss, has documented many instances of the surveillance of war widows who, she wrote, were expected ‘to live by morality and etiquette appropriate to those deemed responsible for perpetuating a sacrificial memory’. Society’s attitude that women charged with maintaining the memory of fallen soldiers should live exemplary lives was also probably influenced by jealousy at a time when there were no pensions for civilian widows.

Mothers of deceased soldiers

This essay is concerned with a small discrete group of war widows, but even in their stories there are hints of the anguish of the mothers of deceased soldiers. Jessie Reid’s mother-in-law, Mrs Sibyl Reid, mother of the late Lieutenant John Cecil Drury Reid MC, asked in a letter to Army Base Records: ‘Am I not entitled to the British War Medal?’ The reply merely stated the legal position that when available, the medal ‘must be forwarded to the late officer’s widow, who is the person entitled to receive, in keeping with the instructions under the Returned Soldiers’ Estates Act of 1918, and mementos will be similarly dealt with as they come to hand’. This bald statement of the legal position would have been cold comfort to a mother who had lost a son but had no tangible evidence of his sacrifice. It is a situation that would have faced many mothers of sons lost at the war who left widows while mothers who lost unmarried sons were often named as their next of kin and entitled to receive their possessions and medals. Reid’s widow Jessie is the subject of a biographical entry.

It would be difficult to overstate the devastation of a mother, such as Mrs Wilhelmina Mayo of Queanbeyan, the mother-in-law of Florence Mayo, who lost two sons in just over a month in the Battle of Bullecourt in 1917, which took the lives of 10,000 men of the AIF. The first was her youngest son, Sergeant Ernest Frederick (Ernie) Mayo, 29, after fighting with the AIF since Gallipoli, was killed in action on 11 April 1917 while fighting with the 13th Battalion during the First Battle of Bullecourt. Just over a month later, her eldest son, Private John Charles (Charlie) Mayo, 36, whose widow Florence Mayo is the subject of a biographical entry, was killed fighting with the 54th Battalion in the Second Battle of Bullecourt.

Another Queanbeyan mother, Mrs Mary Maria Maxwell (nee Wall), lost a son at war too, but her story had a different ending. Already the parents of twelve children aged from 36 to14, three of whose sons fought in World War I, Mary and her husband Thomas Philp Maxwell, auctioneer and stock and station agent at Queanbeyan, raised as their thirteenth child, Arthur Thomas Maxwell, born late in 1918. The baby was the child of their unmarried son, Sergeant Thomas Joseph Maxwell, who after surviving the fighting at Gallipoli, the Sinai and Palestine in the 7th Light Horse, was killed by a bomb during an air raid on Jericho in the Jordan Valley in May 1918. The baby was born later that year to Ellen Thompson, a nurse Tom had met while serving with the Light Horse in the Middle East. Ellen later married in Sydney and had a family while no doubt maintaining a secret memory of her love child.

The introduction of a late child into this long-established family that had been associated with the history of the district for generations as drovers and stockmen and whose eldest six children were among the first students when a half-time school opened at Tharwa in 1899, occasioned community comment in an era when the stigma of illegitimacy permeated Australian society. It was even rumoured that Arthur was a child of one of the unmarried daughters of the family. Arthur grew up in Queanbeyan, where he attended St Gregory’s School. In the 1969 New year’s Honours, he was awarded the British Empire Medal for his work as Principal Senate Attendant in the Australian Parliament, where he was employed for 35 years. He died in Canberra in 1995, leaving a wife Dorothy and a daughter Carmel Koenig who was fifty before she learned of her father’s true parentage.

Women’s resilience

The trauma of World War I left millions of devastated families on bush farms in country towns and city suburbs all over Australia. Long after their initial shock and disbelief, memories of their losses remained with the families, the widows and the mothers. This essay indicates, however, that some women, whether widows or mothers of lost soldiers, and however diminished by absence and deprivation they might be, were able to draw on reserves of resilience to forge lives that were, at varying levels, satisfactory.

DR PATRICIA CLARKE OAM FAHA

Archival sources

  • NAA files, B2455, First AIF Personnel Dossiers 1914-1920; B73, Personal case files, World War I: B72, Repatriation Department, Personal Cases, World War I; B73, Assistance, Education and Training Scheme; C138, Personal Case Files, single member series 1914-1918.
  • NLA MS696, Papers of Ronald Craufurd Munro Ferguson (Lord Novar), Box 10, Lady Bridges to Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, ‘Rosemount’, South Yarra, 6 June [1916], p. 7999; Lady Bridges to Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, ‘Holmwood’, Brighton, 11 August [1917], pp. 8000-1.
  • AWM, Appeals and Fundraising Souvenir Collection, 4/1/7, ‘Friendly Union of Soldiers Wives and Mothers AIF’.
  • AIF Project, www.unsw.adfa.edu.au
  • ACT Memorial, www.memorial.act.gov.au
  • War Pensions Act, 1914, 1915, 1916.
  • Australian Soldiers’ Repatriation Act 1917, 1920.
  • Relevant birth, death and marriage records and electoral rolls.

Published sources

  • Nicholas Brown, A History of Canberra, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2014.
  • Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1999.
  • Jim Gibbney, Canberra 1913-1953, AGPS, Canberra, 1985.
  • Matthew Higgins, A Century of Learning, Tharwa Primary School, 1899-1999, Canberra ACT.
  • Clem Lloyd and Jacqui Rees, The last shilling: a history of repatriation in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton Vic., 1994.
  • Wendy and Roger McLennan, The Mayo Connection: A tribute to the pioneer families of the Canberra region, Canberra, 1996.
  • Information from Ross Maxwell and Carmel Koenig.