Rachel, Countess of Dudley

All right, I admit it, I’m a nob. As in toff, blue blood, aristocrat. Yes, God forbid, I’m a member of the British ruling class. I have Marquises, Earls, Lords, and Right bloody Honourables scribbled all over my pedigree. Pop even has a little gold crown embossed above the initials on his velvet slippers and some how Princess Margaret has snuck into his wedding photo. Now this is not an easy thing to admit in these post colonial, pre-Republic days and especially in a country whose mythology is built on the survival of the underdog over bastards like me; a country which still delights in giving the big fat finger to those who might represent any real or imagined authority.

Now I hasten to add that due to the ignominious eclipse of the British Empire and to the antics of it’s toe sucked and tampon transferring senior representatives, most of the relos, and certainly myself, have little, if no authority left. In fact years of bad press and no heroes have given us an identity more subject to derision and suspicion than the respect or emulation of old.

For any one born into this elite world the safest tactic would be to remain cosily ensconced within its circles. The world described by Jane Austin of parties, cads and gossip have, for centuries, satisfied its idle elite, and apart from the progress of the needle, now more likely puncturing veins than pulling thread, precious little has changed. Men still guffawe, smoke cigars and shoot little birds and women still get moved down the table the less pretty and amusing they become. But for those of us with greater ambitions than to end up on the far side of the golden retriever’s bowl, the unimaginable option of peddling God given assets and joining the real world can become increasingly attractive.

It was a rude awakening. My working days as a model were populated with taunting Eastend photographers who jibbed, “Oh, ‘ow nice, we’ve got the posh one today….how’s Mummy?” And when I ventured later into acting, my visibility inspired hate mail, one of which I remember, cursed, “ You bastard blue bloods who think the world owes you a living, I would have you on your hands and knees scrubbing floors in an old people’s home to show you bastards what life is all about.” Ouch!

Perhaps wrongly, I took all this vitriol to heart. Seeking anonymity overseas, I married a working class boy, spat out the plums and kept mum. It is said that to be permanently in exile is to be permanently in disguise, living in an extreme form of self-protection. You can imagine, then, my response earlier this year, to the NSW Polo association who took it upon themselves to shake the family tree and expose my cover. A letter arrived asking if I would present the Countess of Dudley Cup, awarded to the winner of one of Australia’s major polo tournaments. A cup named after my great grandmother, Rachel, I declined. Undeterred, the association tried again, this time also sending a short profile of her, it got my attention.

My great grandfather, William Dudley, was Australia’s fourth Governor General and true to ancestral form, his term here, 1908-1911, was far from distinguished. Prime Minister Deakin summed up his failures,
“…. He did nothing really important, nothing thoroughly, nothing consistently….He remained to the last a very ineffective and not very popular figurehead.” The one notable thing about him, however, was that, until she divorced him on returning to England, he was the husband of Rachel, Countess of Dudley.

A portrait of my great grandmother by the society artist John Singer Sargent hung above my father’s mantelpiece. I never paid much attention to it. She seemed like all ancestral portraits, remote and irrelevant. She hadn’t inspired long fireside eulogies and so I imagined, like most other women of her class and time, there wasn’t much to tell. She was my namesake that was all.

Ada Holman, wife of the Premier of NSW was not much more expansive. In her memoirs she unkindly dismissed her as ‘as beautiful as a marble statue, expressionless and almost dumb, keeping her long white gloves on as was her wont even at dinners.” But she also frequently accompanied the Governor General on his official travels, sometimes well off the beaten track, to places she described as ‘those outback regions where each distant homestead represented a lonely post of civilisation.”

It was during these outback trips that my great grandmother found her calling. She became intensely interested in the plight of the outback settler, their wives and children. She met expectant mothers, alone and frightened, with no one to see them through their crisis. She met mothers with ailing children, anxious and unable to get assistance or advice. She met men who cried upon God to take their agony with their lives and as she later wrote she was so “impressed by the sense of what Australia owed to her bush population,” that she resolved to commit her term in Australia to establishing an Order of District Nursing. Her intention was to establish a service that stationed well-trained nurses all over Australia. Her vision of the scheme lay, she wrote, “ in the great principle of corporate responsibility, mercy and comradeship but not of charity.” The service would be controlled from a central office but each district would retain responsibility for raising its own funds. Still, it all entailed a great deal more than throwing a garden party.

A foundation fund and a national consensus was needed before anyone was stationed anywhere. Rachel Dudley tossed away her long white gloves and got to work. She petitioned ministers, drafted constitutions, addressed National Councils. She appealed to the public to recognise their responsibility for the welfare of the individual which was, she impressed upon then “ the corner stone of social progress and development”. She brought the top district nursing professional from England and gathered the support of various identities.

Dame Nellie Melba gave a benefit concert. Banjo Paterson was asked to help organise a fund raising trip for her through the back block towns. Banjo was impressed.
“…such was my admiration for her pluck that I would have gone with her had it been in anyway possible. It was hard to imagine a more feminie woman than Rachel – Lady Dudley. But when it came to getting her way, she displayed a single minded determination that marked her out as one far above the ordinary level of female humanity.”

As it turned out, Rachel Dudley didn’t get her way. Although she eventually got government support and the required funding, the proposal was successfully blocked by the medical profession, which thought that people would consult the bush nurse and so be lost as patients. “ We can kill plenty of people ourselves”, protested one doctor, “without having to step in and finish off the nurse’s mistakes.”

The doctors would only withdraw their opposition provided the nurses reported to them first and then worked under their direction. Rachel Dudley dismissed the proposition as unworkable. She refused to budge an inch. Where upon the big subscribers held off.

Rachel Dudley conceded defeat of her movement on a National level, but before her husband’s term of office ended, she reconstituted her idea on a state level as the ‘ Bush Nursing Scheme’. She established trusts in both NSW and Victoria where she became Life Patroness, but apart from the deployment of a few nurses she was not around to witness the fruition of her work. On the eve of her departure, “as a private individual sincerely loving Australia and admiring the straight forward simplicity of the Australian character”, she made one last appeal to the country’s humanitarianism.

“To the pioneers, to the faithful ones, women and children, who follow in their footsteps; it is to these; Australia owes her greatness of yesterday and today. To such as these she looks for the glory of her tomorrow. They are her strength, they are her pride. In sickness and in health they are also her responsibility and care”

Her scheme was quickly accepted in state. By 1926 there were 35 centres scattered throughout NSW. One nurse, during that year, attended 59 maternity cases, paid 1,178 visits to patients in their homes, made 21 prenatal visits, instructed five schools on basic first aid, personal hygiene, dental work etc and travelled 2123 miles, (3,538 Kilometres) more than half of which was on horseback.

The Bush Nursing scheme flourished for 64 years. While teaching in the “tiny, crude school” at Beech Forest, the birthplace of Bush Nursing, John Flynn received the first inspiration from which developed his Australian Inland Mission Nursing Homes and the Flying Doctor Service. Rachel Dudley’s scheme was the precursor to one of Australia’s most internationally recognised social services. Dr George Simpson the last secretary of the Bush Nurses Association championed what he termed “a truly remarkable achievement” and in an address to Melbourne’s nursing fraternity said, “ Her name must be remembered in nursing history.”

World War One broke out shortly after the Dudleys returned to England and Rachel Dudley established a private hospital on the front line. Manned and funded almost exclusively by Australians, it became known as the ‘Australian Hospital’. Once again she had to take on the patriarchy, this time the War Office, which argued there were enough military hospitals on the frontline. Finally, sweet-talking the right bath-chair general she got the order approved for the first Australian hospital in Boulogne. Not content with that, she wanted to open a branch hospital in Paris, which she did, again over official objections.

The Australian hospital became the busiest and most important private hospital on the Boulogne front. Tommies passed the word back up the line that if there was a home away from home in France it was at the Australian hospital. Rachel Dudley walked the wards followed by an orderly with a bucket of water and insisted on washing the faces of the dirtiest men until this provoked a stand up fight with the Matron, who insisted that the men were at the last stages of exhaustion and weren’t to be touched.

Banjo Paterson, hiding his journalistic dispatches under the guise of Ambulance driver for the hospital, was as impressed with Rachel as he had been in Australia. “A wonderful woman”, he wrote. “ She could have been a general, for no doubts assailed her and no difficulties appalled her.”

In 1918, she became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and was also decorated with the Royal Red Cross. Two years later at the age of 59, she drowned while swimming off the coast of Ireland. Her obituary in the London Times stated:

“ She was, indeed, one of those rare combinations - a woman who joined the deepest domestic affections with wide unselfish sympathies for every kind of suffering. It has been said of her that she had a ‘genius for kindness.”

I’m not suggesting that one Duchess with a face flannel validates or dignifies the entire British Aristocracy but it certainly goes a long way towards dignifying my part in it. Neither am I suggesting that a namesake entitles one to assume the glory but I do assume the connection she had with Australia. Where before there was alienation and dislocation now there is entitlement and belonging.

Rachel Dudley, I feel quite sure, would be thrilled to know that her great great grandchildren are Australians. One more speculation. I have borne many jokes that it was one of my wicked ancestors who caused the banishment of my husband’s forefathers to the other side of the earth. I prefer an alternative possibility; that one of my great-grandmother’s bush nurses, administered to a gravely wounded Mr Brown of Pig’s Breath Creek and subsequently saved the entire Brown lineage.