CADWALLADER Daphne Aletha

Staff Nurse, Australian Army Nursing Service

Daphne was born at Creswick on 12 May 1884, the daughter of Sydney Oliver and Frances Carol (née Colombo) Cadwallader.
Daphne and her elder sister Claudine had both left the family home at McKenzie River in East Gippsland to join the nursing profession in the years prior to the outbreak of war. The Cadwallader sisters joined the AANS at about the same time and both embarked for India on the SS Mooltan on 26 December 1916.

In Bombay, both sisters served at a number of military hospitals. Daphne was Sister in Charge at the Prince of Wales Hospital at Calcutta and was also sent to Deolali, where she nursed wounded British soldiers and Turkish prisoners of war.

Deolali was a British army transit camp in India and in army slang, is the origin of the term ‘doolally’ meaning mad, crazy or suffering from camp fever.

The sisters both boarded HT Nile for Egypt on 6 October 1918—but then their paths diverged.

At Abbassia in Cairo, Daphne was ill for several months and was diagnosed with Scarlet Fever in December 1918 and admitted to the Choubra Infectious Diseases Hospital. While in hospital, Daphne began negotiating a passage to India, as she intended to leave the AANS and marry a Captain McGavin of the Indian Army Reserve.

While the service had no authority to approve an ‘indulgence’ passage, it was arranged that Staff Nurse Cadwallader travel to Colombo on HT Sardinia on duty, and that her discharge become effective there from 15 May 1919. The ship left Cairo on 28 April 1919 and Daphne disembarked at Colombo. However, there is no record of the marriage having taken place and, on 14 November 1919 she was taken on strength with the AANS in India.

Daphne departed Bombay for return to Australia on the Medic on 1 December 1919, disembarking at Melbourne on 27 December.

Six years later she married Robert John Morgan, a grazier at Bemm River. She died, aged eighty-nine, at the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in 1973 and was cremated at the Springvale Crematorium.