Sister Eileen EGAN
Western Front Association Central Victoria BranchEileen EGAN was born in Echuca in 1889, the sixth of eight children of Bridget Kate (nee Kiernan) and her father, Patrick Egan, a produce and grain merchant.
Sometime after her father’s death in 1896, Eileen and her mother moved to 328 Danks Street, Middle Park in Melbourne. They lived there between 1903-1909.
She trained and worked as a nurse at the Alfred Hospital, Prahan between May 1912 and February 1917.
Two bothers enlisted - Charles in May 1915 and Frank in September 1916 - before Eileen enlisted on 23 May 1917. 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 initially working at the 43rd British General Hospital (BGH) and 52nd BGH - a tent hospital - at Kalamaria on the southern outskirts of Thessaloniki.
After eight months, Eileen was admitted to the Sisters Convalescent Camp for two weeks in April 1918 suffering ‘debility’. She returned to nursing, including at the 42nd BGH, a specialist dysentery hospital.
She became seriously ill with pneumonia and was ordered home, leaving Greece in early February 1918, with a stop in Cairo for treatment at the 14th Australian General Hospital.
She left Egypt in late February 1919, but the night before she was due in Melbourne, her ship docked in Geelong to offload a nurse desperately ill with malaria. May Hennessy of Bendigo, like Eileen, was a nurse in the first 1917 contingent sent to the BSF. She was admitted to the Riviera Private Hospital (now St John of God) but died nine days later.
Eileen also disembarked in Geelong and probably spent three weeks at Osborne House, the Nurses Convalescent Home in Swinburne Street, North Geelong. She returned to nursing duties after that, but did take further rest at Osborne House around mid-September 1919 before being discharged in February 1920.
By 1923 she was nursing at St Benedict’s Private Hospital, Malvern: the later Cabrini Hospital. Here she met the journalist and playwright, Erskine Crawford, who had contracted malaria in Rabaul, worked in AIF HQ in London, and worked with C E W Bean’s staff in France. Crawford, who died in 1925, named Eileen as his beneficiary in his will.
Eileen Egan died 11 January 1975.
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.
