Alice Ross-King: The Theatre Sister Who Won the Military Medal at a Casualty Clearing Station
- Kate Wheeler
- 23 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Alice Ross-King was a theatre sister before she was anything else. By 1914 she was in charge of a private hospital in Melbourne, having trained at the Alfred Hospital and worked as a ward sister, night superintendent and acting matron. Four years later she was one of the first Australian nurses to be awarded the Military Medal, for what she did in a canvas ward that had just been bombed. Every fact below is drawn from her service record, her diaries and the official record.
Before the war
She was born on 5 August 1887 at Ballarat, Victoria, and baptised Alys Ross King. She hyphenated her surname on enlistment to distinguish herself from another Alice King in the Australian Army Nursing Service.
Her early life was not gentle. Her father and two brothers drowned in the Swan River after the family moved to Perth, and she and her mother returned to Melbourne. She helped the matron of the Austin Hospital before she was old enough to train, worked at the Alfred Hospital during a typhoid epidemic, and stayed to complete a three year training there.
Egypt, and the ships home
She enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service in November 1914 and sailed with the 1st Australian General Hospital, which was established at Heliopolis in Cairo. She was later sent to Suez, to an evacuated French convent orphanage pressed into service as a clearing hospital for casualties coming off Gallipoli.
In July 1915 she sailed home to Australia with Gallipoli wounded aboard the hospital transport Ballarat, then returned to Egypt on a troopship carrying reinforcements. It was on one of those voyages that she met Lieutenant Harry Lowry Moffitt of the 53rd Battalion, to whom she became engaged.
France, and Fromelles
In April 1916 she disembarked at Marseilles and joined the 1st Australian General Hospital at Rouen, where she worked through the Somme fighting.
On 19 July 1916 Harry Moffitt was killed at Fromelles. He has no known grave and is commemorated at V.C. Corner. The Australian War Memorial's own catalogue note on her 1916 diary records that the tone and frequency of her entries changed decidedly after his death. She learned two days before Christmas that his name had appeared on a German death list.
She kept working. In November 1916 she wrote: "I am suffering very much ... My God! How can I bear it? My ward is full of very heavy cases."
Trois Arbres, 22 July 1917
In June 1917 she was detached to No. 10 Stationary Hospital at St Omer. On 17 July she was attached to No. 2 Australian Casualty Clearing Station at Trois Arbres, near Armentieres.
Casualty clearing stations were the closest hospital facilities to the front line. Wounded men came to them after initial treatment at dressing stations. They were built of canvas, sited on railway lines, and often placed close to ammunition stores or observation posts, which made them extremely vulnerable to attack. No. 2 had been moved forward to cope with the wounded expected from the Third Battle of Ypres.
At 10.25pm on 22 July 1917, five days after she arrived, an enemy aircraft flew low over the station and dropped two bombs. The unit war diary records that the first fell at the rear of the pneumonia ward, a square of four small marquees. It blew a large crater, destroyed one marquee and made the other three unusable. Two patients and two orderlies were killed. The second bomb fell just outside the boundary, near the cemetery, wounding more patients and staff.
Ross-King had been called to a patient in that ward and was following an orderly carrying a lamp when the first bomb landed in front of her. She was thrown down, got up, fell headfirst into the crater, and climbed out.
She wrote afterwards: "I shall never forget the awful climb on hands and feet out of that hole about five feet deep, greasy clay and blood (although I did not then know that it was blood)."
She went on into the ward. Trying to lift a patient back into bed, she found she was holding a severed leg, boot and puttee still on. It belonged to Wilson, the orderly she had been calling for. "Though I shouted nobody answered me," she wrote. "I seemed to be the only living thing about ... I kept calling for Wilson to help me and thought he was funking, but the poor boy had been blown to bits."
By her own account she "apparently carried on with the job".
The Military Medal
Three other nurses on duty that night, Dorothy Cawood, Mary Jane Derrer and Clare Deacon, ran to the shattered tents, carried patients clear, and for those who could not be moved put basins in their hands and tables over their beds. They ignored orders to take cover.
All four were awarded the Military Medal, which had been extended to women only in June 1916, for bravery and devotion under fire. The recommendation praised Ross-King's "great coolness and devotion to duty". The award was gazetted in the London Gazette on 25 September 1917. General Sir William Birdwood wrote to the four a month after the raid to tell them, and presented the ribbon himself.
Eight Australian nurses received the Military Medal in the First World War, seven of them from the Australian Army Nursing Service. Alice Ross-King was among the first.
She was also Mentioned in Despatches in Haig's despatch of 7 November 1917, and awarded the Royal Red Cross, second class, gazetted on 31 May 1918. Of that period she wrote simply: "The Last Post is being played nearly all day at the cemetery next door to the hospital. So many deaths."
After the war
She returned to the 1st Australian General Hospital at Rouen in November 1917 and was appointed Temporary Head Sister in September 1918. She came home in January 1919, and her AIF appointment was terminated that September.
On the voyage home she met Dr Sydney Theodore Appleford. They married on 20 August 1919 at Wesley Church, Melbourne, settled at Lang Lang in South Gippsland and had four children.
In the late 1930s she trained Voluntary Aid Detachments across Gippsland. She enlisted again in November 1941, was commissioned Major, and served as Senior Assistant Controller for Victoria in the Australian Army Medical Women's Service, responsible for roughly two thousand servicewomen. In 1949 she received the Florence Nightingale Medal from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Her husband died in 1958. She died on 17 August 1968 at Cronulla, New South Wales. Her three diaries are held by the Australian War Memorial as Private Record PR02082, and the Ex-AAMWS Association still presents an annual award in her memory to a serving member of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps.
Why we tell this one
It would be easy, and wrong, to describe her as an operating theatre nurse at the front. The record does not support it. She was a theatre sister in Melbourne, and at Trois Arbres she was a clearing station nurse. We say so because the point of this series is the verified account, not the tidier one.
What does carry across is the thing every perioperative nurse will recognise. A room she knew went dark and loud, the person she relied on was gone, and she kept working, because the patients in front of her needed someone to. That is not a historical virtue. It is the same instinct that runs a theatre on a bad day, and it is worth naming in the people who go on holding teams together now.
If you have not read it, our earlier piece on Vivian Bullwinkel covers another Australian nurse whose record was tested well past what anyone should be asked to bear.
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Thank you, Alice, for your service.
