‘Let women enlist to help in war effort’

WITH more than 40,000 Australians killed or wounded on the Western Front, Dr Phoebe Chapple was increasingly frustrated the Australian army refused to enlist women doctors.

Dr Phoebe Chapple won the Military Medal for her work in World War I.

MORE than 40,000 Australians had been killed or wounded on the Western Front by February, 1917, and Dr Phoebe Chapple was increasingly frustrated that the Australian army refused to enlist women doctors.

The Adelaide doctor had been practising at Prince Alfred College – looking after the boarders, mostly – where her father was headmaster.

In 1917 she left for England to enlist in the Royal Army Medical Corps where she was a surgeon at the Cambridge Hospital in Aldershot.

Chapple was later assigned to Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps and moved to France and was given the honorary rank of Captain.

In May, 1918, a German plane dropped three bombs on her hospital, destroying two huts and killing nine women and wounding six.

Chapple worked in the dark for hours to tend to the wounded, ignoring her own safety.

“I think when there are suffering and death at hand, fear absents itself,” Chapple of that night in France.

“There was much work to be done then, with limited means, to relieve the sufferers.”

For her actions in the raid, she was awarded a Military Medal.

She was known as Auntie Doc by her family and according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography was “blunt, confident, dominating” and a “tall strong woman”.

When she returned to Australia in 1919 she resumed practice and was an honorary medical officer for women patients at the Adelaide hospital.

She was also an honorary doctor at the Salvation Army maternity hospital for unmarried mothers in Carrington St then at the former McBride hospital in Medindie.

She continued to practice from her Norwood home until she was 85.

Chapple died on March 24, 1967, aged 87, and was cremated with full military honours at Centennial Park Cemetery.

Her estate was sold to the state for $93,910 and the proceeds went to St Ann’s College in North Adelaide and the University of Adelaide, which used it to build a bursary in her name.

THIS story is part of Messenger’s 100 Years, 100 Days, 100 Stories project, which will profile 100 South Australian World War I heroes as the nation builds up to the centenary of the Allied landing on Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. If you have the details and war record of a family member who served during World War I, let us know. Please go to your local Messenger’s Facebook page and send us the details.