Mary Emma Webster (1868-1949)

Mary Emma Webster (1868-1949) Teacher, nurse, World War One army matron, librarian. First woman Historical Society of Victoria Councillor (1932-1946)

Mary Webster was the daughter of Irishman George Webster and his English wife Emily Hickling. They married in Melbourne in 1860 and settled in Geelong where two children were born. In 1867 the Websters moved to the South Island of New Zealand where three more children were born, including Mary, in 1868. George Webster, a squatter and member of the New Zealand Parliament, died in 1875 and his widow and children returned to Victoria.

In June 1876, a few months after the family’s return, Emily Webster and four of her children sailed for Europe, their destination Dresden, Germany where they remained for a decade while the girls completed their education. Mary was only eight when she left for the Continent, so her formative educational years were very different from other girls of her class brought up in Australia or those sent to England for their education.

The family returned to Victoria in May 1886 when Mary was eighteen. Her mother then opened Shipley House School in Shipley Street, South Yarra where Mary and her sister Enid worked as their mother’s assistants and youngest sister Dorothea was a pupil. Their brother George, who had gone to Europe with his mother and sisters, moved to Western Australia where older brother Joseph had settled, so it was the women of the family who made a life for themselves in Melbourne. Although they had to work to support themselves, they lived a genteel life in their gracious home set on two acres in one of Melbourne’s more prestigious suburbs. They offered a classic ‘ladies’ education – modern languages, painting and dancing, as well as the traditional curriculum, Mrs Webster emphasising in her advertising that her daughters were educated in Germany and ‘are thoroughly acquainted with the modern languages and the German method of teaching.’

For a decade Mary worked as a teacher, but her mother’s school closed in the mid-1890s so she worked for a while as governess. In 1897 Mary, now 29, changed career paths when she began three years nursing training at the Melbourne Hospital. Training complete, she remained on the hospital staff until 1904, gaining experience on the medical and surgical wards and as a night sister.

In 1904, when Mary was thirty-six, her life veered away from the conventional once more. She resigned from her position at Melbourne Hospital and set off for London where she entered the service of the Colonial Office and was appointed to the Government Hospital at Lokoja in Nigeria. Blackwater fever, a complication of malaria, was to be her downfall, forcing her to spend time in a more temperate climate. She lost the sight of one eye as a result of the fever. Ever resourceful, Mary headed to London where she gained a maternity certificate and did some relieving work for the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute (now Queen’s Nursing Institute), a London-based organisation that trained district nurses.

In 1907, health restored, Mary took up an appointment as matron of the Colonial Hospital at Kingstown on the island of St Vincent in the British West Indies where she worked until the outbreak of World War One.

At the start of the war, now aged 46, Mary spent six months working for the Red Cross on a hospital ship in Dunkirk Harbour then at a village near Poperinghe, a Belgium town just west of Ypres that was used as a forward base for UK troops bound for the Ypres Salient from autumn 1914. The following year, now a member of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve, she went to the Gallipoli front on the hospital ship Gloucester Castle. After the evacuation from Gallipoli in late 1915, she served in Egypt until 1917 then was matron of the hospital ship Glengorm Castle on the Mediterranean run.

Image: Sisters, officers and medical staff on the desk of the Glengorm Castle hospital ship. Image H2011.37/11. State Library of Victoria picture collection.

Even after the war had ended, her war duties continued. The Glengorm Castle became a hospital transport and one of its more unusual tasks was to sail to Odessa to evacuate sick and wounded members of Russia’s Volunteer Army, a White Army that had fought against the Bolsheviks during that country’s civil war.

In 1919, in recognition of her war service, Matron Mary Emma Webster QAIMNSR was awarded the Royal Red Cross, 1^st class. It was a fitting tribute to a distinguished career.

In June 1920, Mary Webster, now fifty-three, decided on another change in direction and spent a year studying at the School of Librarianship at University College, London. She returned to Melbourne, the city she had called ‘home’ since the 1880s, although she had rarely lived there over the previous twenty years, to provide full time care for her elderly mother.

Mary’s mother died in 1930 and RHSV membership records show that in December 1930 Mary became a life member of the Historical Society of Victoria. In October 1931 she was appointed assistant to the librarian, A.LG. (Arthur) Macdonald at the Society’s rooms at Latham House, 234 Swanston Street. On 9 September 1932 she took over from Macdonald as honorary librarian.

As the Society’s librarian, she was the first woman to serve on its Council (from 1932 until her retirement due to ill health in 1946 aged seventy-nine). One of her major undertakings during her fourteen year tenure was to catalogue the Society’s growing collection, a task she was well placed to do as a graduate of the School of Librarianship at University College London, where she had studied four core areas of library work – bibliography, classification, cataloguing, and organisation and routine. As the December 1934 issue of the Victorian Historical Magazine put it, ‘Miss Webster has brought special knowledge and much diligence to the task.’ A.W. Greig supported this view when he wrote in 1939 that ‘Miss M.E. Webster, the Honorary Librarian of the Society, has introduced an orderly arrangement into a very miscellaneous assemblage of relics.’ She also prepared historical displays and opened the library for members and researchers three times a week – Wednesday and Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings.

Mary Webster was used to being in charge and was not afraid to speak her mind. For example, in 1937 when confronted with a proposed set of rules for the Library that she considered untenable, she did not hesitate to speak her mind. ‘I have too much to do here still before the library is in order’, she wrote. ‘I couldn’t waste my time writing reminders to borrowers… I keep my eye on things – the great thing is to keep any rules that are made.’ She continued: ‘Rules that are not kept bring contempt. I think it better … to have as few rules as possible and to keep those rules carefully. The borrowers are not many and should be encouraged.’

In an article in the centenary edition of the Victorian Historical Journal, Judith Bilszta noted

Miss Webster’s particular interest was in the loose news cuttings collections, particularly those relating to regional history, with which she created the news cuttings book collection. A particular idiosyncrasy was her propensity to “wall paper” her private collection of 15 books with up to six levels of paper on each page. During her term as librarian, more than 40 cuttings books were received, covering a multitude of subjects – particularly fire, theatre, ships and shipping, historic buildings and finance.

The cuttings books, known as The Webster Collection, are still in the RHSV collection, many superseded now by the TROVE online collection of newspapers, but all testimony to Mary Webster’s meticulous collecting at a time when online resources such as TROVE were decades in the future.

After ten years working from Latham House, she must have found it challenging when, towards the end of 1941, the Society moved to Broken Hill Chambers, 31 Queen Street, described by Judith Bilszta as ‘two cramped rooms on the fifth floor serviced by a dubious elevator and lit with gas.’ The library collection went into storage in the basement. It was, said Bilszta, the beginning of ‘a period of nearly 20 years when access to material was, at best, limited and cataloguing difficult’. Mary Webster oversaw five of those years.

In 1946 Mary, whose eyesight was failing, retired as HSV librarian and Bernard Street, newly retired from the Public Library, took up the position. She was 78 and in poor health. She could no longer live alone and moved to the Western District, to ‘The Gums’ sheep station at Caramut, Penshurst, to live with her younger sister Dorothea Ross.

Mary E. Webster RRC died aged 82 at ‘The Gums’ on 21 December 1949 and was buried at Caramut Cemetery. After her death her personal collection of books of newspaper cuttings was donated to the Historical Society by her niece Rosemary Agar (nee Ross).

Cheryl Griffin  February 2021

Sources

Membership records (RHSV archives)

Victorian History Magazine (VHM), Vol XIV, #4, December 1932, p198.

VHM, Vol XV, #2, December 1934, p.59.

VHM, Vol XV, #2, May 1935, p116.

Victorian Historical Journal (VHJ), Vol 19, issue 76, 1942, p.132

VHJ, Vol 21, issue 84, 1946, p.55

VHJ, vol, 22, 1950, issue 88, p.179.

VHJ, Vol 40, 1969, issue 155-56, p.18.

VHJ vol 80, Nov 2009, pp 247-48

VHJ, vol 80 (2), Nov 2009, p.165.

Bilszta, Judith, paper delivered to Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies (AIGS) on RHSV’s holdings, 1993.

Webster, Mary E., ‘James Harrison 1815-1893’. Paper read to RHSV, 1944-45 (published in VHM Vol XXI, no 2, June 1945). Manuscripts Collection, MS 000412 (Box 121-4).

RHSV Pioneer Registers for Webster family (and accompanying notes).

RHSV images collection. Image P-681-Pi.

Victorian birth, death, marriage indexes

Monumental Inscription for Mary Emma Webster, Caramut Cemetery, Hamilton Highway, Caramut

Probate for Mary E. Webster, PROV, VPRS 28/P3 unit 5032 file 422/060.

New Zealand birth, death, marriage indexes

Victorian electoral rolls

Victorian Outward Shipping records

Victorian Unassisted Shipping arrivals

UK Outward Shipping records

Ancestry family trees

Age, 12 June 1876

Argus, 13 July 1886, 15 May 1894, 23 December 1949

Australasian, 5 August 1893, 6 January 1894, 25 May 1895

Geelong Advertiser, 29 May 1889, 3 February 1892

London Gazette, 16 May 1919

Register of Royal Red Cross (accessed via Ancestry)

British Army Medal Index Cards. WO 372/23, UK Archives

University College London website https://www.ucl.ac.uk/information-studies/note-institution-school-training-librarians-university-college-london accessed 21 January 2020.

State Library of Victoria picture collection. H2011.37/11. Sisters, officers and medical staff on the desk of the Glengorm Castle hospital ship.