Treating Gallipoli’s wounded – Dr Agnes Bennett
The Australian-born and New Zealand-based doctor Agnes Bennett refused to let routine sexism keep her out of the war. She offered her services to the New Zealand Army as soon as war broke out but was turned down because she was a woman. Undeterred, she paid her own passage to Europe, intending to join the French Red Cross. In May 1915 she was sailing through the Red Sea when word reached the ship of the casualties arriving in Egypt from the Gallipoli campaign. She disembarked at the next opportunity and began working in the over-stretched military hospitals of Cairo, with the status and pay of an army captain. Dr Bennett recalls her wartime experiences in this recording, made in 1959.
Year:1915 (Recorded in 1959)
Location:Cairo, Egypt
Treating Gallipoli’s wounded – Dr Agnes Bennett
The Australian-born and New Zealand-based doctor Agnes Bennett refused to let routine sexism keep her out of the war. She offered her services to the New Zealand Army as soon as war broke out but was turned down because she was a woman. Undeterred, she paid her own passage to Europe, intending to join the French Red Cross. In May 1915 she was sailing through the Red Sea when word reached the ship of the casualties arriving in Egypt from the Gallipoli campaign. She disembarked at the next opportunity and began working in the over-stretched military hospitals of Cairo, with the status and pay of an army captain. Dr Bennett recalls her wartime experiences in this recording, made in 1959.
Year: 1915 (Recorded in 1959)
Length: 05:06
Source: Radio New Zealand Collection, Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision
Catalogue Reference: 27632 [Talk by Dr Agnes Bennett on her experiences in World War I]
People: Dr Agnes Bennett
Location: Cairo, Egypt
Tags: Doctors, Women, Hospitals, Invalids, Gallipoli, Egypt
Subject: World War, 1914-1918, Medical care, Casualties, Cairo, Egypt
Image Title: Cairo, Egypt. c. 1914. AIF patients lying on top of their beds in a ward of No 1 Australian Army General Hospital at the Heliopolis Palace Hotel.
Image Source: Courtesy Australian War Memorial https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/H18486/
Dr Agnes Elizabeth Lloyd Bennett (1887-1960) is regarded as the first female commissioned officer in the British Army. Born in Sydney, Australia, she graduated from medical school in Edinburgh in 1899 and from 1905 worked in Wellington, New Zealand as a GP and then as medical officer at St Helen’s maternity hospital.
After the Gallipoli campaign ended, Dr Agnes Bennett went to Britain and joined the newly formed Scottish Women’s Hospital for Foreign Service. Its medical units, staffed by female doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and orderlies, were sent to work in France, Belgium and Serbia.
In August 1916 Dr Agnes Bennett became head of a unit in the Balkans, supporting Serbian troops and many thousands of refugees. They battled an outbreak of malaria which Dr Bennett contracted, forcing her to return to England in late 1917. She ended her war service as medical officer on board troopships and fighting the 1918 influenza epidemic in British hospitals, before returning to New Zealand around 1920.
Dr Bennett retired from medical practice in 1936 but the outbreak of World War II saw her organising the New Zealand Women’s War Service Auxiliary before heading overseas to work as a medical officer in British hospitals.
After her second ‘retirement’, she continued working in diverse locations such as with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in northern Queensland and on the remote Chatham Islands, where the then-75 year old doctor visited her patients on horseback.