Sister Thora McLENNAN
Western Front Association Central Victoria BranchBorn in Dimboola in 1883, Thora was one of six daughters and four sons of Sophia Margarethe (nee Meincke) and Donald Ferguson McLENNAN.
She completed her three years of training at the Nhill Hospital and later worked there and at Cohuna and Nathalia.
Thora enlisted into the Australian Imperial Force on 29 May 1917, understating her age as 32.
She was in the first contingent of Australian nurses - mainly Victorian - sent to the British Salonika Force (BSF)[1], leaving Melbourne on 12 June 1917. She arrived on 14 August 1917 and worked at the 66th British General Hospital (BGH) - a tent hospital - at Exochi (formerly Hortokopi) until it was evacuated in November 1917, when she was posted to the 42nd BGH - a dysentery hospital - at Kalamaria on the southern outskirts of Thessaloniki.
On 22 March 1918 she was admitted to the Red Cross Convalescent Home for three weeks, but after six weeks back at nursing she was admitted to the 43rd BGH with malaria.
By June the decision was made to send her home, arriving there in late August. Sometime between that and early January 1920 Thora spent some time recuperating at Osborne House in Swinburne Street, North Geelong, before being discharged later that month.
On 3 December 1920, Thora married Jack MILLSON who was later appointed the Caretaker at Berembed Weir on the Murrumbidgee River, 70km north west of Wagga Wagga, NSW, where they lived until at least 1930. They later lived at Umina and Penshurst in NSW.
Thorna died 26 July 1963 at Rockdale NSW.
Abridged from: Cheryl SCOTT and Margaret PHELAN War Worn & Weary The Convalescent Nurses of Osborne House Geelong 1917-1919, Osborne Park Association Inc, 2018.
[1] The British Salonika Force (BSF) was formed in in October 1915 when Greek Prime Minister Eleftheros Venizelo invited the Allies into Greece to confront the German-backed Bulgarians. King Constantine I of Greece, who supported the Germans, later fled into exile. It was considered safer to send Australian nurses via Egypt to Greece rather than British nurses through the German submarine-infested Mediterranean Sea. The force was named after Greece’s second city on the Thermaic Gulf, although that had officially been named Thessaloniki in 1912.
