Ross-King, Alice

Alice Ross King was born on August 5, 1887 in Ballarat and was the only daughter of three children in the family of Archibald Ross King and his wife Henrietta, nee Ward. The girl was baptized under the name Alice Ross ( eng. Alys Ross ), but all her life she used a more familiar version of the first name - Alice. A few years after Alice was born, her family moved to Perth in Australia; here Alice’s father and brothers died in an accident on the Swan River . Shortly after the death of her husband and sons, Henrietta and her daughter moved to Melbourne. ^[1]

Although Alice was Protestant, she studied consistently at the Catholic in , Victoria , and the in Melbourne. After graduating from college, Alice, who had not yet reached the age of admission to nursing courses, worked for some time as an assistant Melbourne . In addition, during the typhoid epidemic, Alice helped the staff of ; At the same time, she began studying nursing courses. After receiving the appropriate certificate, Alice worked in Melbourne until the beginning of World War I; she combined the duties of a nurse, a night caretaker, and a senior nurse. Just before the start of the war, Alice qualified as an operating sister ^[2] and worked in a private hospital on Collins Street ^[1] .

Since the beginning of World War I, Alice was enlisted in the nursing staff of the Australian Army Nursing Service (AACS) of the Australian Imperial Forces (AIS); in the AACS documents, Alice's middle name was turned into a part of a surname to distinguish it from another Alice King, who served there. The official start of Alice's service is November 21, when she left Brisbane for the First Australian General Hospital in , Cairo . Shortly thereafter, Ross-King, among the small group of nurses, was sent to Suez to assist in evacuating the French monastery orphanage and cleaning his building under the hospital for victims from Gallipoli . Then in 1915, Alice was appointed a nurse with the wounded, transported back to Australia, and in the same year she returned to Egypt with reinforcements ^[1] .

In April 1916, the First Australian General Hospital was located in Rouen . Sister Ross-King remained at the hospital during the Battle of the Somme , and then, on June 7, 1917, joined the Tenth Inpatient Hospital in Saint-Omer . On July 17, Alice found herself on the front line at the Second Australian Tent Evacuation Hospital, located at Trois-Arbres near Armantier . On the night of July 22, the hospital, which was near the railway, was bombed. Five bombs hit the territory of the hospital itself, the rest fell in its vicinity. One of the bombs exploded in front of sister Ross-King; Alice later described in her diary the horror and bloody chaos that prevailed around and demanded great courage from her. Four people were killed, fifteen seriously injured. Despite the fact that Alice’s shift ended a few hours earlier, she returned to work and helped the wounded out of the collapsed tents ^[3] . She became one of seven Australian nurses who were awarded for their bravery and loyalty to their duty with the Military Medal during the First World War. The award was presented to Alice a month later by General Bidwood ^[1] .

The raids on the hospital continued for the next few weeks. Up to November 1917, the entire hospital, which received people wounded in the third battle of Ypres , was in suspense. Alice wrote in her diary: “The Last Post [a military funeral hymn] plays almost all day in the cemetery next to the hospital. So many deaths. On November 18, Alice returned to Rouen and on Christmas was , and on May 31 of the following year she was awarded the Allied . On January 9, 1919, the hospital returned to England and in the same month Alice went home to Australia. The last day of Alice’s service in the AIS is September 17, 1919 ^[1] .

During the war, Alice met Harry Moffitt, an officer of the 53rd AIS battalion. They got engaged in 1915, but Harry was killed in the in July 1916 ^[4] .

During her return home after the war, Alice met Dr. Sydney Theodore Appleford. They were married on August 20, 1919 in Melbourne and settled in , Victoria, where they lived until 1940. After the wedding, Alice returned the middle name. Alice and Sydney became parents of four children - two sons and two daughters. As one of Alice’s daughters later recalled, she was a very secretive person and never told about her service during the war ^[1] .

In the late 1930s, Alice was engaged in training volunteer detachments in Jeepland. In early 1940, Alice and her family returned to Melbourne, where she continued to train volunteers, and her spouse was appointed as a full-time doctor in the army. In 1942, the volunteer service became part of the Australian Army Medical Women's Service (AAMZHS), and Alice herself received the rank of major and was appointed to the post of senior assistant in Victoria ^[5] . The tireless dedication and hard work, responsibility for two thousand military personnel and her organizational skills had a great influence on fund-raising activities during the Second World War. Alice assisted the Red Cross and charitable organizations that were engaged in supporting widows and orphans, and also cared for the welfare of AAMZHS members ^[1] .

In 1949, Alice Appleford was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal - the highest award of the International Committee of the Red Cross - for "a sense of duty, impeccable strength of character, humanity, sincerity and a kind heart" ^[1] . She became one of two Australian sisters who won this award. ^[6]

Alice continued to serve in AAMZHS until 1951 ^[5] . After the war, Alice and her family remained in Melbourne. Shortly after her husband died in 1958, she moved to live in Cronulla, Sydney , where she died on August 17, 1968. Alice was buried next to her husband in the Presbyterian section of the Fawkner Cemetery in Melbourne ^[1] .

Since 1970, the former AAMZH has been presenting an annual award to members of the , named after Alice Appleford ^{[5] [1]} .

In 2008, Peter Reese's book The Other ANZAC ( English The Other Anzacs ; reprinted under the title Girls from the ANZAC) was published, telling about the service of Alice Ross-King in the First World War ^[7] . In 2014, the book was ^[8] ; Alice was played by Australian actress ^{[7] [9]} .

• Bassett, Jan. Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War . - Oxford, 1997. - 261 p. - ISBN 0195540840 , 9780195540840.
• Finnie, Lorna M. Ross-King, Alice (1887–1968) // Australian Dictionary of Biography. - Australian National University Press, 1988. - Vol. eleven.
• Kelly, Darryl. Australian Doing Extraordinary Things in Time of War . - ANZAC Day Commemoration (Quieensland) Incorporated, 2004. - P. 181-188. - 276 p. - ISBN 0958162549 , 9780958162548.

• Transcript of diaries of Alice Ross-King, 1915-1919 (English) . Australian War Memorial. The date of circulation is July 10, 2016.