Alicia Mary Kelly: The Nurse Awarded the Military Medal for Courage Under Fire

Kate Wheeler

Sep 12

5 min read

Updated: Sep 29

Early life and training

Alicia Mary Kelly was born in Ireland in 1874, the daughter of Richard Kelly, a farmer, and his wife Bridget Jane, née Bell. Nothing verified survives of her childhood or of exactly when she migrated to Australia. What is established is that she settled in Melbourne and trained as a nurse at the (Royal) Melbourne Hospital, completing her training in 1910.

She then spent more than three years nursing at the Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, moving afterwards to a private hospital run by Dr Kent Hughes. This is where her nursing life actually began: not on a battlefield, but on ear, nose, throat and eye surgical lists, the same kind of specialty theatre work that scrub scout nurses in Australia and New Zealand still train into today.

War service: Gallipoli to France

Kelly enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service on 29 March 1915, aged in truth about 40, though records at the time gave her age as 29. She embarked from Sydney the following month with reinforcements for the 1st Australian General Hospital, reaching Egypt in time to help receive the thousands of wounded who arrived after the landing at Gallipoli.

Between August and the evacuation of Gallipoli, she made at least two return voyages on the troop transport HMAT Euripides, nursing severely wounded men on the journey home to Australia. It was aboard the Euripides that a merchant seaman and amateur photographer, Denver Wood Wansey, took the portrait of her that illustrates this article, one of seven photograph albums he made recording life aboard the ship.

In April 1916 she was posted to France with the 1st Australian General Hospital. Later that year, and through 1917, she moved between Casualty Clearing Stations close to the front, the small, forward surgical hospitals that received wounded soldiers directly from the battlefield and stabilised or operated on them before onward evacuation. By July 1917 she was serving at the 3rd Australian Casualty Clearing Station.

The bombing that earned the Military Medal

In July 1917, the 3rd Australian Casualty Clearing Station, then operating near Ypres in Belgium, came under sustained German shelling and bombing over several days. On the worst day, a shell struck a neighbouring British casualty clearing station, killing a nurse. Orders went out for the nursing staff to take shelter in the dug-outs.

Kelly refused to leave her patients. She ran to the wards and stayed with the wounded men through the bombardment, distributing enamel wash basins and bedpans for them to hold over their heads for a measure of protection, since there were no helmets to give them. A chaplain who found her sitting in one of the hospital tents holding a patient's hand later wrote that staff had "literally to drag her to a place of safety." When asked afterwards why she had not gone to shelter with the rest of the medical staff, she is recorded as answering simply, "I couldn't leave my patients."

Recognition: the Military Medal and the Royal Red Cross

For this conduct, Kelly was awarded the Military Medal, gazetted in the London Gazette on 17 October 1917, for "conspicuous gallantry under fire." She was one of only seven Australian nurses to receive the Military Medal during the First World War. She was invested with the medal at Buckingham Palace, and separately received the Royal Red Cross, 2nd Class, on 1 January 1918, in recognition of her broader nursing service.

After the war

Kelly continued at the 3rd Australian General Hospital before returning to England in March 1918 for transport duty, then sailed home to Australia, arriving in May 1918 as sister-in-charge of the wounded men aboard her ship. On arrival at Fremantle, the men she had cared for on the voyage presented her with a silver cup they had made for her themselves.

Soon after her discharge, she married Arthur Rupert Chipper, a corporal in the 10th Light Horse and a farmer at Bullaring, Western Australia, on 7 August 1918. The couple farmed at Bullaring and later at Narrogin before retiring for health reasons. They had no children.

Despite the lasting effects of her wartime service on her health, Kelly returned to nursing at the outbreak of the Second World War and was appointed matron of the Old Women's Home at Woodbridge, Guildford, Western Australia. She died of pneumonia on 16 April 1942 at Midland, Western Australia, and was buried with Anglican rites at Karrakatta Cemetery. Her medals are held today in the collection of the Army Museum of Western Australia.

Why we tell this one

Alicia Kelly's nursing life did not begin in a war. It began on eye, ear, nose and throat surgical lists in a Melbourne hospital, the unglamorous, exacting groundwork of learning to work fast, sterile and calm around a surgeon. That grounding is exactly what carried her through the Casualty Clearing Station: the ability to keep functioning, keep thinking, and keep a patient safe when everything around her had gone wrong.

Every scrub scout nurse and anaesthetic nurse working in an Australian or New Zealand operating theatre today draws on the same base skill set Kelly built at the Eye and Ear Hospital before the war ever touched her. Theatre nursing has always asked for composure under pressure. Kelly's story is simply the most extreme version of what that composure can look like.

Thank you, Alicia, for your service.

A note on the record

Sources on Alicia Kelly's early life genuinely disagree, and we have not tried to paper over that. The Australian Dictionary of Biography's current entry gives her birthplace as Galway and her birth year as 1874, daughter of Bridget Jane, née Bell. An earlier version of the same entry instead gives her birthplace as Mayo and queries her birth year as 1885, with her mother's name given simply as Jane. A separate biography hosted by the Virtual War Memorial Australia adds a further detail not found elsewhere, that she migrated to Victoria aboard the ship Oroya in October 1891, a claim we have not been able to verify against any other source and have therefore left out of the main narrative above.

Her nickname is recorded as "Loll" by the Australian War Memorial, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Virtual War Memorial, but a Wartime magazine account published by the Australian War Memorial itself instead opens by calling her "generally called Rachel." We have used "Loll" in this article as the better-supported version, while noting the conflict here.

Two further points are worth recording plainly. First, every source that states her age at enlistment says 29, which cannot be reconciled with a birth year of 1874 (she would have been about 40) or even with 1885 (she would have been about 30); this appears to be either a clerical error at the time of enlistment or a deliberate understatement of her age, and we cannot resolve which. Second, accounts differ on the precise unit movements between April and August 1917, with one source recording a transfer to the 29th Casualty Clearing Station and then the 3rd Australian Casualty Clearing Station, and another instead recording the 32nd Casualty Clearing Station and a later transfer to the 3rd Australian General Hospital. We have followed the Australian Dictionary of Biography's account in the main narrative, while flagging the discrepancy here for anyone tracing her service record further.