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Occupational Therapy
Video
Returned Australian soldiers in convalescence are shown to be in good spirits as they hand-craft objects from wooden materials.
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The Blue Boys
Audio
The impact of wounds, gas, disease and post-traumatic stress or shellshock, meant many returned war veterans would spend a long time in hospital for years after the war – sometimes well into the 1920s.
In the era before antibiotics, people could spend many months recovering from injuries and illness. Dedicated veterans’ hospitals were set up throughout Australia and New Zealand during the war.
In a 1957 radio interview, two New Zealanders, Frank Broad and Alan Kernohan – who were in the King George V Hospital in Rotorua – remembered the restrictions placed on the recovering soldiers.
Throughout the British Empire, men who were able to get out of bed, were known as “Blue Boys” because of their “hospital blues” – a uniform worn by the convalescing soldiers. This marked them out and was supposed to prevent the invalids sneaking off to local hotels for a drink, as civilians were prohibited from supplying alcohol to the men in blue… but there were ways around this, as the men recall.
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Back to Blighty
Video
An ambulance arrives at a New Zealand General Hospital and medical orderlies unload wounded soldiers. Around them are wounded men in various states of recovery – note the number of walking sticks and amputees. All of the patients are dressed in “hospital blues” – a uniform worn by all hospital soldiers in the United Kingdom. Under the Defence of the Realm Act it was forbidden for Public Houses to sell liquor to a soldier in hospital blues.
Can you help us identify the hospital? We know it is a New Zealand General Hospital, so it is either Brockenhurst or Walton-on-Thames. Please contact us if can you help us.
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A Case of shell shock
Audio
George Lee recounts a story of a Sergeant who after being caught in a salvo on patrol came back “absolutely useless” and unable to function. He talks about the men who, after realising his condition, concealed it from the commander – because even at that late stage of the war there was little sympathy for those suffering from shell shock.
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With the Aid of the Red Cross
Video
Veterans returning in wheelchairs and with missing limbs gave Australians at home their first sight of the true cost of modern warfare.
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Anzac Hospitals at Home
Video
Returned servicemen engage in handicrafts, music-making and a degree of flirting with nurses while convalescing in an Anzac hospital.
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Caring for our Wounded
Video
Over 3,000 Australian nurses volunteered during the First World War, working in hospitals, including hospital ships and trains, and in field stations closer to the front line. This film shows scenes of Allied forces medical staff and stations taken throughout the Western Front, 1916-1918: “No words can describe the awfulness of the wounds. Bullets are nothing. It is the shrapnel that tears through the flesh and cuts off limbs”
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He waiata mā te hoia kāinga ngākau koingō
Audio
I Runga o ngā Puke (From the Top of the Hills) is a waiata Māori written by Paraire Tomoana. He composed it at the request of a cousin, Ngahiwi Petiha, who wrote to Paraire while recuperating from a gunshot wound in an English hospital.
Paraire’s son, Taanga Tomoana, explains the story behind the lyrics and sings the waiata himself, in this radio interview in 1970.
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Marking the first Anzac Day in London
Audio
In April 1916, a year after the Anzac landings at Gallipoli, the first anniversary of the battle was observed in Australia, New Zealand and Britain. A grand memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey in London, attended by King George V and Queen Mary. Hundreds of New Zealand and Australian military personnel marched through the streets to the Abbey to attend the service.
Among them was Sydney-born Dr Agnes Bennett, who had been working in Egyptian hospitals treating the wounded from Gallipoli. Some 40 years later she recalled the experience in this excerpt from a radio ‘talk.’
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Maggots and brandy – evacuating wounded men
Audio
Facilities for evacuating and treating men wounded on Gallipoli were woefully inadequate. The British military command had not anticipated such large numbers of casualties, who often waited for days unattended on the narrow beach before they could be transported by ship to a hospital. Alexander McLachlan, a Scots officer on board the transport ship Saturnia, recalls in this 1969 interview how he and his colleagues were unable to cope with the vast numbers of sick and wounded.
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The walking wounded return home
Video
New Zealand soldiers board a ship. It may be a hospital ship returning them to New Zealand, as some of the men are visibly wounded, using crutches and walking sticks. A civilian woman can be seen in the opening frames, indicating that this scene may have been shot in England.
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New Zealand soldiers recover from battle wounds
Video
After being wounded in battle, many Anzac soldiers were shipped to England to recover. Once their injuries healed, they were sent to convalescent camps around the country to restore them to fighting fitness. This short film shows New Zealanders at a convalescent camp taking part in training exercises to improve their fitness. As the film shows, training was not all hard work, and they certainly had some fun at the camps.
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The last month I was there, I never wore trousers
Audio
The Anzac troops on Gallipoli faced many discomforts in addition to the Turkish soldiers shooting at them from over the hill. They lacked food and drinking water, suffered from sicknesses like dysentery and typhoid, and were surrounded by bodies decomposing in the heat. Life on the peninsula was all about survival, and it changed the men’s priorities. Here two New Zealand veterans talk about the highs and lows, including eating a dead sheep they found, squabbling over fresh bread and being evacuated due to dysentery.
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Mrs Barnard’s gingernuts
Audio
Six of Helena Barnard’s eight sons went away to fight, and she sent them care packages that included the gingernut biscuits she used to bake for them to take on tramping trips. The gingernuts were a welcome change from the notorious Gallipoli diet of tinned bully beef and ship’s biscuits. They lasted well and quickly became favourites with the boys at the front. Many wrote to Mrs Barnard asking her to provide their own mums with her recipe. Her gingernuts became famous and are quite possibly the original ANZAC biscuit. This interview was recorded around the time of Helena Barnard’s 100th birthday.
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Treating Gallipoli’s wounded – Dr Agnes Bennett
Audio
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.
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Household pets join the forces
Audio
Ena Ryan of Wellington was a young girl when war was declared in August 1914, but she vividly recalled the excitement of those days. In this 1985 interview she describes watching the Main Body marching through the streets of Wellington to the departing ships. She noticed that one of the men had a kitten buttoned into his tunic. Once they arrived at the battlefront the men adopted other pets, including dogs, donkeys and goats found in and around battlefields. These animals helped to keep up the mens’ spirits, and some became official mascots.