Patricia Cashmore
RSL (Port Pirie Sub Branch) Inc.¹Patricia Cashmore (Patty) was born on the 23rd of July in 1905 at Port Pirie, South Australia. She was the eldest daughter of Arthur Brook Cashmore, manager of Elder, Smith, & Company, Limited for some years in Port Pirie and Annie Amelia Cashmore, nee Whallin of Northcote, Victoria, Australia. Her schooling in Port Pirie included attending the Port Pirie High School and her early training in medical nursing began at the Port Pirie Hospital.
Patricia graduated in Surgical Nursing at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in August 1930 before moving interstate to a position with the Melbourne Women’s Hospital. In 1939 she left Australia for England to do a special course, but while she was on her way war broke out, and she enlisted in the East African Military Nursing Service and spent time nursing in Italian Somaliland and Kenya.
On the 5th February 1944 Khedive Ismail, a troopship, left Mombasa bound for Colombo carrying 1,324 passengers including 996 members of the East African Artillery's 301st Field Regiment, 271 Royal Navy personnel, 19 WRNS, 53 nursing sisters (including Patricia) and their matron, nine members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry and a war correspondent, Kenneth Gandar-Dower. She was part of Convoy KR 8 and it was her fifth convoy on that route.
The convoy was escorted by the Hawkins-class heavy cruiser HMS Hawkins and P-class destroyers HMS Paladin and HMS Petard. Khedive Ismail was carrying the Convoy Commodore.
Early in the afternoon of Saturday 12th February, after a week at sea, KR 8 was in the One and a Half Degree Channel south-west of the Maldives. After lunch many of the passengers were below watching an ENSA concert, while others sunbathed on deck. ³There was a meeting of passengers in the saloon and Patty had offered to go down to her cabin on the waterline and fetch some photographs of interest.
The explosion happened while she was in her cabin and she would have been killed instantly. At 1430 hrs the Japanese submarine I-27 had taken position off Khedive Ismail's port side to attack. A lookout sighted I-27's periscope and raised the alarm; Khedive Ismail's DEMS gunners opened fire on the submarine. At the same time I-27's commander, CDR Toshiaki Fukumura, fired a spread of four torpedoes, two of which hit Khedive Ismail.
The troop ship's stern was engulfed in flame and smoke and she sank in three minutes. Of 1,511 people aboard Khedive Ismail, only 208 men and 6 women survived the sinking and subsequent battle. 1,220 men and 77 women were killed. The sinking was the third largest loss of life from Allied shipping in World War II and the largest loss of servicewomen in the history of the Commonwealth of Nations.
Nursing Sister Patricia Cashmore, 38 years of age, missing believed drowned, has no known grave – she is Known unto God and commemorated on the WW2 Memorial Gates in Port Pirie, South Australia with 91 others who made the supreme sacrifice.
- Military Images https://www.militaryimages.net/media/patricia-cashmore.140211/
