Alice's grave: Christine Grayden sifts myth from fact in a real life mystery. By Christine Grayden
Recently I had cause to read an article published in the Australian Medical Journal back in 2002, ‘The contagiousness of childbed fever. A short history of puerperal sepsis and its treatment’, by Queensland Professor Caroline de Costa (Obstetrics and Gynaecology).
Why was I even reading Professor de Costa’s article? I’m a writer of community history, not obstetric history.
As I continue to work with my friend John Jansson on several community history books, including one about the local men and women who served during World War One, I’ve persisted with my quest to trace any war nurses who came to Phillip Island.
Recently I had cause to read an article published in the Australian Medical Journal back in 2002, ‘The contagiousness of childbed fever. A short history of puerperal sepsis and its treatment’, by Queensland Professor Caroline de Costa (Obstetrics and Gynaecology).
Why was I even reading Professor de Costa’s article? I’m a writer of community history, not obstetric history.
As I continue to work with my friend John Jansson on several community history books, including one about the local men and women who served during World War One, I’ve persisted with my quest to trace any war nurses who came to Phillip Island.
I was able to borrow the early committee minutes of the old Warley Bush Nursing Hospital from the Phillip Island & District Historical Society archives. Given that the inaugural Superintendent of Nursing at VBNA was distinguished war nurse Sister Edith Clare Cameron, it made sense that she would use her network of returned war nurses to staff the fledgling Cowes hospital. Warley Hospital was established in a relocated house, donated for refurbishment into a small hospital in Cowes in 1923, by well-known and loved benefactors, William and Lucy Thompson.
I kept focusing on finding war nurses in the minutes as I read of the usual trials of a very small and isolated rural community trying to support a full-time nurse, a part time domestic maid, keep the fires burning with donated firewood, keep the supply of donated fresh eggs and milk up to the patients, and bring the building up to Health Department standards. But in the March 1929 minutes I read a note concerning one of my grandfather Grayden’s cousins, Charles “…sympathy on the serious illness of his wife”.
This referred to Alice Grayden (nee Denham), whose strong presence dominates a family photo burned into my soul. She is standing in calf-length dress and black apron on the roadside, greeting her sisters-in-law in their buggy on a dusty Ventnor road in the mid-1920s. Some of the visiting small children and her older son are lined up behind Alice as she bends, perhaps to retrieve something from the jinker footplate, while the cart horse stands patiently. Someone with a camera has called out and Alice has turned her head to them, with the start of a smile on her face. It is an archetypal image of women’s strength in rural Victoria in the struggle times just before the Great Depression really hit.
There were Grayden family stories about her dying in childbirth, so I eagerly read on. Charles’s wife Alice had died in Warley on 3rd June 1929, seven weeks after giving birth to a son, Ken on 10th April 1929. I knew Ken quite well for the 20 years before he died. She also left sons Ian and Bernard. I was very close to Bernard who, although totally deaf, was a prodigious genealogical researcher most of his life. Neither Ken nor Bernie really spoke to me of their mother. Bernie has typed a caption under the precious photo.
I kept focusing on finding war nurses in the minutes as I read of the usual trials of a very small and isolated rural community trying to support a full-time nurse, a part time domestic maid, keep the fires burning with donated firewood, keep the supply of donated fresh eggs and milk up to the patients, and bring the building up to Health Department standards. But in the March 1929 minutes I read a note concerning one of my grandfather Grayden’s cousins, Charles “…sympathy on the serious illness of his wife”.
This referred to Alice Grayden (nee Denham), whose strong presence dominates a family photo burned into my soul. She is standing in calf-length dress and black apron on the roadside, greeting her sisters-in-law in their buggy on a dusty Ventnor road in the mid-1920s. Some of the visiting small children and her older son are lined up behind Alice as she bends, perhaps to retrieve something from the jinker footplate, while the cart horse stands patiently. Someone with a camera has called out and Alice has turned her head to them, with the start of a smile on her face. It is an archetypal image of women’s strength in rural Victoria in the struggle times just before the Great Depression really hit.
There were Grayden family stories about her dying in childbirth, so I eagerly read on. Charles’s wife Alice had died in Warley on 3rd June 1929, seven weeks after giving birth to a son, Ken on 10th April 1929. I knew Ken quite well for the 20 years before he died. She also left sons Ian and Bernard. I was very close to Bernard who, although totally deaf, was a prodigious genealogical researcher most of his life. Neither Ken nor Bernie really spoke to me of their mother. Bernie has typed a caption under the precious photo.
At the time of Alice’s death the volunteer hospital committee comprised a cross-section of influential local men and women, and Charles, who was a farmer and became an early tour guide.
From what I can read in the minutes there seems to have been major efforts to try to firstly cover up the true cause of Alice’s death, then some slick fast-talking by the doctor (Dr Burgess) to squash the family’s request for an enquiry. There were even rumours spread ostensibly by the housemaid and a relative of Alice, that Charles’s family had TB and/or VD, which were the causes of her death. These causes were flatly denied by Dr Burgess at a special meeting called to placate Grayden family representatives, but the true cause was not minuted there either.
The whole situation was opaque, to say the least. However, randomly inserted loose later in the minutes book, I came across the draft annual report written in the secretary’s writing. This clearly states that the cause of death was ‘puerperal septicaemia’, of which I knew nothing until reading Professor de Costa’s article.
This cause of death had not appeared in the official typed annual report presented to the AGM, only that the case involved ‘sepsis’ and resulted in the nurse and housemaid being exhausted after seven weeks of constant care of Alice, and so requiring leave, while the hospital was closed, fumigated, repainted, new screens fitted to windows and doors, drainage work done, all linen replaced, etc. This was required by the Health Department after any case of infectious disease had been present in the hospital.
The nurse, Sister Becker, had been there for several years and rendered excellent service. But she tendered her resignation via the Bush Nursing Association and was gone by February 1930. The housemaid had been dismissed. Within six months of Alice’s death, Dr Burgess had sold his practice to Dr L Davies and moved to Melbourne. The hospital had also called in voluntary labour to construct a morgue with concrete floor, after pleading in vain for some years with both the Health Department and the local council for funding assistance for a separate morgue building, stating “A hospital is not a suitable place for a morgue”.
After Alice died, the hospital suffered major financial loss because of having had no patients for over 10 weeks of expensive fumigation and refit, and deep distrust among the community. Fortunately they had recovered by the next AGM, which was attended by several Grayden family members, including Charles’s brother; recently elected onto the local council.
Charles married again and fathered two daughters, one of whom (now aged in her 90s) told me: “The nurse had come straight from a dead body to deliver the baby”. An older local resident told me they thought Alice had died in childbirth, and was surprised to hear her real fate. She also told me that there was at least one independent midwife active on the island at the time; but midwives rarely dealt with corpses – the source of puerperal sepsis.
Alice more likely contracted the infection in Warley hospital. This would certainly have been a blow for the doctor and the nurse – Sr Becker, no other names given, who I have traced as Elizabeth Catherine; the sister of Caroline Louise Becker who is listed as serving in India in Ruth Rae’s Nominal Roll of Australian Nurses who Served in the First World War. The sisters ended up sharing residences in a few places in Melbourne from the 1930s, where they both seem to have lived unmarried until they died. This was often the case for nurses in that era, who had to leave their careers and financial independence upon marriage. Elizabeth was still listed as a nurse during the 1960s, so her nursing registration had apparently not been impacted by Alice’s death.
There is much to admire about the tenacity of Warley’s committee, staff, subscribers and the general community that supported them through thick and thin for so long. But by 1929 a woman contracting puerperal sepsis during childbirth was unusual, indeed scandalous, as the cause was very well known by then. Just who was to blame for Alice Grayden’s horrible death I cannot say. But although very nearly also the cause of Warley Hospital’s demise within a decade of starting, it did bring much-needed change in the running of the hospital, and possibly of other Bush Nursing Hospitals as well.
RIP Alice. You are so much more than just a photo to me now.
From what I can read in the minutes there seems to have been major efforts to try to firstly cover up the true cause of Alice’s death, then some slick fast-talking by the doctor (Dr Burgess) to squash the family’s request for an enquiry. There were even rumours spread ostensibly by the housemaid and a relative of Alice, that Charles’s family had TB and/or VD, which were the causes of her death. These causes were flatly denied by Dr Burgess at a special meeting called to placate Grayden family representatives, but the true cause was not minuted there either.
The whole situation was opaque, to say the least. However, randomly inserted loose later in the minutes book, I came across the draft annual report written in the secretary’s writing. This clearly states that the cause of death was ‘puerperal septicaemia’, of which I knew nothing until reading Professor de Costa’s article.
This cause of death had not appeared in the official typed annual report presented to the AGM, only that the case involved ‘sepsis’ and resulted in the nurse and housemaid being exhausted after seven weeks of constant care of Alice, and so requiring leave, while the hospital was closed, fumigated, repainted, new screens fitted to windows and doors, drainage work done, all linen replaced, etc. This was required by the Health Department after any case of infectious disease had been present in the hospital.
The nurse, Sister Becker, had been there for several years and rendered excellent service. But she tendered her resignation via the Bush Nursing Association and was gone by February 1930. The housemaid had been dismissed. Within six months of Alice’s death, Dr Burgess had sold his practice to Dr L Davies and moved to Melbourne. The hospital had also called in voluntary labour to construct a morgue with concrete floor, after pleading in vain for some years with both the Health Department and the local council for funding assistance for a separate morgue building, stating “A hospital is not a suitable place for a morgue”.
After Alice died, the hospital suffered major financial loss because of having had no patients for over 10 weeks of expensive fumigation and refit, and deep distrust among the community. Fortunately they had recovered by the next AGM, which was attended by several Grayden family members, including Charles’s brother; recently elected onto the local council.
Charles married again and fathered two daughters, one of whom (now aged in her 90s) told me: “The nurse had come straight from a dead body to deliver the baby”. An older local resident told me they thought Alice had died in childbirth, and was surprised to hear her real fate. She also told me that there was at least one independent midwife active on the island at the time; but midwives rarely dealt with corpses – the source of puerperal sepsis.
Alice more likely contracted the infection in Warley hospital. This would certainly have been a blow for the doctor and the nurse – Sr Becker, no other names given, who I have traced as Elizabeth Catherine; the sister of Caroline Louise Becker who is listed as serving in India in Ruth Rae’s Nominal Roll of Australian Nurses who Served in the First World War. The sisters ended up sharing residences in a few places in Melbourne from the 1930s, where they both seem to have lived unmarried until they died. This was often the case for nurses in that era, who had to leave their careers and financial independence upon marriage. Elizabeth was still listed as a nurse during the 1960s, so her nursing registration had apparently not been impacted by Alice’s death.
There is much to admire about the tenacity of Warley’s committee, staff, subscribers and the general community that supported them through thick and thin for so long. But by 1929 a woman contracting puerperal sepsis during childbirth was unusual, indeed scandalous, as the cause was very well known by then. Just who was to blame for Alice Grayden’s horrible death I cannot say. But although very nearly also the cause of Warley Hospital’s demise within a decade of starting, it did bring much-needed change in the running of the hospital, and possibly of other Bush Nursing Hospitals as well.
RIP Alice. You are so much more than just a photo to me now.