Journal of History, 50, 2 (2016)

Charity in Uniform

THE VOLUNTARY AID DETACHMENTS OF THE NEW ZEALAND RED CROSS

‘I HAVE WORN A UNIFORM ALL MY LIFE’, said Rachel Simpson, director of the New Zealand Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) in 1968. After wearing a school uniform she had dressed in uniforms representing various levels of the professional nursing hierarchy and, finally, as matron to the Royal New Zealand Air Force, nursing’s overlap with the military.1 Simpson was to die in office in 1972 as director of the uniformed branch of a voluntary organization, but not before overseeing the introduction of a new Red Cross uniform. Such was the resistance to change that a frustrated Simpson declared herself ‘fed up with the uniform’: ‘We should be bringing forward new and better ideas which show we are a bit more alive and not concerned only with what we look like …. I think it is high time we set our sights a little higher than we are at the moment’.2 Simpson may have spent a lifetime conforming to uniform codes, but her volunteers were proving less compliant. A generational divide between those loyal to a past uniform and all that it denoted and those who rejected uniforms altogether was played out within the Red Cross. The uniform change in the late 1960s preceded a wider transformation of New Zealand Red Cross structures, but also symbolized the diminishing presence of uniforms within New Zealand society more generally. The range of regulated clothing falls within a spectrum of highly prescriptive, required conformity, to the more informal, which may invoke, in Paul Fussell’s words, a ‘daily sartorial conflict’ around acceptability in particular social and employment settings.3 Discussions of uniforms which go beyond the minutiae of physical detail emphasize their role in the formation of identities, the enforcement of control and codes of behaviour, the mismatch between the intended meanings of uniforms and the actual experience of wearing them – and, by extension, uniform subversions.4 Much of the existing literature on uniforms focuses on authority contexts, such as the military, nursing and, to a lesser extent, schools.5 Where analysis moves beyond the descriptive, it is often to emphasize the loss of individuality that was involved in donning uniform, the sense of becoming, as a First World War soldier put it, ‘one small cog in the great machine’,6 with the delineation and

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enforcement of hierarchies another theme.7 Within the voluntary sector the adoption of uniforms was more commonly associated with youth groups such as boy scouts and girl guides,8 or with churches, especially – in the case of a religious denomination which quite deliberately adopted a military appearance and ranks – the Salvation Army.9 Uniforms have been integral to sports teams, though Charlotte Macdonald’s work on young women’s marching is one of the few with a New Zealand focus to link a particular genre of civilian uniforms with the social ethos of its time.10 Invented in New Zealand as a competitive sport, the ‘performance of order and highly orchestrated synchronicity’ associated with marching and its distinctive uniforms resonated reassuringly ‘with the predominant conservative and conventional strands in the mid- twentieth century’.11 The heyday of the Red Cross VADs closely overlapped with marching as a sport, and the VAD members, mostly women, shared a commitment to drill, participating in competitive public performances. But theirs was, in theory, a higher purpose: the acquisition of skills for impartial service under the emblem of a vast transnational humanitarian movement.12 This article uses uniforms as a lens onto the ways in which a voluntary organization presented itself externally, maintained internal recruitment and activity, and changed over time.13 The concern here is with a uniform that evolved to become highly prescribed, and which had forms that referenced on the one hand a female sphere, nursing, and on the other, male military domains. The role of the uniform within a voluntary context is a core element of the discussion. The uniformed ‘voluntary aids’ or ‘VAs’ (the term used within the Red Cross to describe individual members of its ‘VAD’ detachments) had a choice about their involvement in Red Cross activities, and were presented with competing outlets for their volunteering impulse.14 The uniform consequently played an important role within the Red Cross detachments, attracting some members and deterring others. It reinforced hierarchies while underscoring solidarity, for not all Red Cross volunteers worked within the VAD framework, adhering to its codes and disciplines; the uniform denoted an important internal demarcation between the VAs and others working for the Red Cross. And, while the rise and fall of the Red Cross VADs was a manifestation of the mid-twentieth-century uniform culture within a particular voluntary organization, it also symbolized the Red Cross’s changing external relationships with other voluntary agencies and professional groups, and with the New Zealand state.

The Red Cross Emblem Whatever the form of Red Cross uniforms, internationally one consistent component was the red cross emblem. Many uniforms sport insignia of

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various kinds, but the red cross shape of five equal-sized red squares, normally presented on a white background, has always had a particular potency, meaning and complexity. One of the struggles of the New Zealand Red Cross was to prevent the emblem’s misappropriation by other organizations and by commercial ventures, but also to justify its use on the uniforms of its own members. The Society’s relationship with the state began with its emblem, for permission to use the red cross was given by the government as signatory to the Geneva Conventions; it has never been ‘owned’ by the national body. The explanation lies in the origins of the Red Cross movement and the dual purposes, protective and indicative, of the emblem. Like many charities, the Red Cross has its treasured foundation story, this one dating back to the Battle of Solferino in northern Italy in 1859. A Swiss businessman, Henry Dunant, came across the carnage of the battlefield, where tens of thousands lay dead or injured, without medical aid. Appalled, he enlisted the aid of surrounding villagers and other helpers to assist the wounded. On his return to Switzerland he promoted the idea of an organization, voluntary and impartial, to assist the wounded in war. The result was the ‘International Committee for Aid to the Wounded in War’, later the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The easily recognizable red cross, the inverse of the Swiss flag with its white cross on a red flag, was adopted by the emerging Red Cross movement in 1863 as a compliment to the host country of the ICRC.15 Under the Geneva Conventions the red cross emblem signified that people, places, vehicles and equipment were not part of a battle and that those under it were either receiving medical assistance or giving it impartially to those on either side of the conflict. Although not always honoured, its protective meaning was ‘don’t shoot; don’t harm!’ Any dilution of this meaning is seen as potentially endangering those working under the red cross. The emblem has been safeguarded under New Zealand law since 1913, and any use of it beyond the New Zealand Red Cross and the religious and medical services of the armed forces is currently a breach of New Zealand’s 1958 Geneva Conventions Act, potentially subject to prosecution.16 The second, indicative role of the red cross as a signifier of organizational activity and affiliation rather than battlefield protection was contested from the first Red Cross presence in New Zealand. A loosely affiliated branch of the was established in New Zealand during the First World War, but its association with St John prevented the emergence of a distinct national society until the 1930s. Even though the government started prosecuting retailers who misused the symbol for commercial purposes during the First World War, the red cross was widely displayed by a whole range of individuals

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and patriotic organizations involved in raising funds for sick and wounded soldiers. At one point the Red Cross Record complained that the emblem was used to raise funds for combatants and even, in one instance, an aeroplane, both in contradiction of Red Cross ideals.17 In New Zealand, as elsewhere, the emblem was a more open motif than it was to become after the Second World War, and Red Cross ideals of neutrality and impartial world-wide humanitarianism came a poor second to nationalistic and patriotic feeling.18 The red cross was worn not only by members of the army medical services, but by women undertaking first aid training, carrying around collection boxes and working in soldiers’ convalescent homes, where they identified with St John or the Red Cross – or both, since St John claimed the red cross as part of its wartime livery. Soon after the formation of an independent Red Cross Society in 1931, it was given permission by the Minister of Defence to use the emblem and was recognized as the national Red Cross organization for New Zealand. Even so, this status was contested in wartime by St John, and the military appears not to have formally recognized the New Zealand Red Cross as an auxiliary to the armed forces until October 1945. It was not until 1948 that the International Red Cross Conference clarified that there could be only one Red Cross society in any country, and this society could not exclude any citizen on the grounds of race, religion, sex, class or political opinion – which finally stymied the claims of St John, as an avowedly Christian body.19 The point here is that the red cross on the Society’s uniforms was not any ordinary badge signifying affiliation. It was underwritten by New Zealand statutes, by association with a transnational ‘movement’ (the term used within the International Red Cross – and capitalized in its statutes) and by adherence to an increasingly formalized set of principles. Humanity, neutrality and impartiality were at their core. Where and when the red cross could be worn, and by whom, was frequently an issue as the emblem became, in modern terms, one of the most highly respected social ‘brands’ in the world. The emblem, an essential part of the uniform, had a power that went far beyond it.

Nominally Nurses? Jennifer Craik has noted that uniforms for women are of two main types: ‘quasi-masculine uniforms associated with instilling discipline, confidence, and particular skills to operate in the public sphere; and feminized uniforms that promote physical and emotional training in attributes of nurturing and helpmate.’20 The latter forms were the first to be associated with the Red Cross in New Zealand, as elsewhere. A feature of women working for the Red Cross – and for St John – was their appropriation of nurses’ uniforms, themselves a mixed derivative of attire worn by religious orders, and by

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domestic servants.21 From the late nineteenth century uniforms generally denoted service, distinguishing wearers as members of a profession, usually one that assisted others.22 Understandably, even those whose service role was part-time and voluntary wanted to share in the cachet of an increasingly esteemed uniform, but this had the potential to undermine the still-tenuous status of professional nurses. While most women involved in Red Cross work over 1914–1918 wore their usual fashionable apparel, photographs show that some patriotic women donned white or light-coloured dresses, voluminous aprons with a red cross on the bib and veils, even when fundraising, bandage-making or marching on occasions such as the Red Cross ‘Our Day’ parade. These early forms of uniform were as likely to signify working ‘for’ the Red Cross as association with it in any formal sense. Once voluntary aids (VAs) commenced work in hospitals and convalescent homes under military control, uniforms became more prescriptive. In these circumstances, even the title of ‘nurse’ was sometimes bestowed on VAs, informally at least. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, the status of the uniformed members of the Red Cross was a point of contestation between professionals and amateurs, and between competing voluntary organizations. New Zealand wartime understandings of the VA and her representation were shaped by the British example, which in turn was modelled upon the first Red Cross relief detachments in Japan and Germany. Originally intended to supplement the medical organization of the British territorial forces in the event of an internal invasion in the First World War, the British VAD scheme had some 80,000 members by the start of the war, and 120,000 by its end.23 During the war VAs served not only in British hospitals and convalescent homes, but with the medical services of the army expeditionary force. To the general public, the British volunteer nurses were more prominent than their professional counterparts, and they were seen as romantic, patriotic and self-sacrificing figures. In the historiography as well, they take centre stage, largely on account of the VA capture of the market in memoirs, as Christine Hallett has pointed out.24 There was tension between the volunteers, who saw themselves as involved in a form of patriotic national service, and the professional nurses, paid workers then engaged in a struggle for registration in Britain – and for higher pay as well as recognition.25 The situation was somewhat different in New Zealand, where the volunteer impulse to nurse sick and wounded war heroes was subordinated to the claims of trained nurses.26 By mid-1915 New Zealand’s registered nurses had a commitment from the Minister for Public Health that the government would send only fully trained nurses overseas to the front.27 Volunteers might be

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utilized where needed in New Zealand’s military hospitals and convalescent homes, but only if they were trained in first aid and home nursing by St John and the Red Cross (the latter restriction ruled out Ettie Rout’s Volunteer Sisterhood, which was urged to merge with these two bodies).28 The success of New Zealand’s trained nurses in limiting volunteers’ claim to war nursing was helped by three factors. First, New Zealand had become the first country to provide for the state registration of nurses in 1901, differentiating those trained to state-recognized standards from those who were not. The nursing register was maintained by the Assistant-Inspector of Hospitals, Hester Maclean, herself a trained nurse and an effective advocate for her profession within the Department of Health and Hospitals. Second, the distance from the battlefields and the logistics of getting to them put a brake on volunteer impulses – though this did not stop Ettie Rout and her Volunteer Sisterhood taking independent action, nor those who could afford it making their own way to London and the Continent to serve with the British Red Cross: some of the class pressures evident in Britain were diffused in this way. Third, the Red Cross did not have a strong organizational presence in New Zealand in the early stages of the war, and St John was placated by the prospect of its having priority in nursing convalescent soldiers, especially once men began returning from Gallipoli in mid-1915. While individual women volunteering for auxiliary nursing duties in New Zealand were often termed ‘VADs’, there were no formally recognized Red Cross detachments at this stage. The registered nurses remained protective of their territory and their title, a suspicion of VAs fuelled by reports from colleagues near the battlefronts. Many of those who served overseas commented extensively on ‘the usurpation of the title, uniform and work of trained nurses by the Society women who have rushed into it as into the excitement of a new fad’.29 The overseas volunteers were said to be dangerously unaware of their limitations; they were subject to less discipline than the regular nurses; they exercised less self-control; and this was manifest in a lack of propriety and excessive emotionalism and fraternization with their patients.30 Hester Maclean had similar concerns about their New Zealand-based counterparts who lacked the lengthy hospital training that was ‘necessarily military in its character’, and which was therefore conducive to discipline.31 The professional nurses had cause for disquiet, given their ongoing struggle for recognition. The presence of auxiliaries with minimal training helped reinforce perceptions of nursing as an activity natural to women, involving the transfer of maternal instincts from children to wounded soldiers, rather than the exercise of professional skills grounded in a lengthy preparation. One of the most prominent Red Cross posters used around the

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world showed a VA ‘nurse’ in pietà-like pose, cradling a diminutive soldier in her arms under the heading ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’.32 Even when they were termed ‘VADs’ or referred to as ‘Red Cross workers’, the auxiliaries certainly looked like nurses and were often addressed as such by their soldier patients. VAs working in New Zealand military hospitals appear to have worn blue dresses under their white aprons and were issued with a dark blue coat with pale blue piping and a navy straw hat as part of their outdoor uniform.33 Their counterparts in the New Zealand forces’ hospitals in England wore similar attire. In 1918 they were placed directly under the command of the New Zealand army matrons, rather than the British Red Cross, and were issued with a uniform modified by Caroline Richardson, wife of New Zealand’s military representative in London, General George Richardson. This comprised a blue dress and white apron with the red cross containing the letters ‘NZ’ embroidered on the bib.34 The white veil used for nursing duties differed from the triangular ‘floating’ veil worn by nursing sisters, instead being caught at the back of the neck, with a red cross above the brow. Photographs of VAs at ’s Montecillo Convalescent Home depict them wearing such a uniform, the Red Cross emblem prominently displayed on their aprons, but minus the distinguishing ‘NZ’ on the cross.35

Figure 1: Montecillo Home VAs having fun in nursing uniform, c.1919. Montecillo Home collection. This photograph may well have confirmed professional nurses’ ideas about VA tendencies to frivolity and fraternization.

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During the interwar years the uniforms worn by VAs of the New Zealand Red Cross evolved further, along with the emergence of formally organized ‘detachments’. With it came a degree of acceptance from the professional nursing sorority. Nursing auxiliaries from St John and the Red Cross had shown their usefulness during the 1918 influenza epidemic, when more than 500 of the registered nurse workforce were still overseas.36 Then, when the international Red Cross transferred its attention from the wartime care of sick and wounded soldiers to the peacetime fight against disease, another space emerged for VAs beyond the convalescent homes and beyond military contexts. In , Red Cross nurse Jessie Lewis (a ‘real’ nurse who had served with the New Zealand Army Nursing Service) started first aid and home nursing classes in 1922, forming Wellington women into an ‘emergency detachment’ in 1924. During a 1925 polio outbreak 67 of its members supplemented the overworked nursing staff at Wellington Hospital, and more than 200 first marched in an Anzac Day parade in 1928.37 The formation in 1931 of a national Red Cross Society for New Zealand was followed by an expansion of VADs and their adoption of military forms. The Hawera branch of the Red Cross seems to have produced the first detachment modelled on the rule book of the British Red Cross, with a ‘commandant’ and officers. It was closely followed by other centres. By the end of 1934 Wellington had four VA sections, with Sister Lewis as ‘Acting Commandant’, a quartermaster and four section leaders. In the same year Hawera, Napier and are recorded as having three detachments each, and , one.38 But the real expansion came with World War II. Here the uniform came to symbolize the way New Zealand society organized its volunteers as well as its professionals and military in time of crisis, allowing a degree of fluidity in appearance, as well as spheres of operation. Following the entry of Japan into the war, in early 1942 there were 370 Red Cross detachments in New Zealand, all of their members uniformed according to whether they were trained for nursing tasks, transport duties or hospital kitchen management. By far the largest number of trained VAs (2653, or 76% of the total in 1942) were ‘nursing’ personnel who had completed advanced certificates in first aid and home nursing and, after 1939, a required 60 hours’ experience in hospital wards.39 This training was as much to inculcate appropriate deference to the nursing hierarchy, its culture and ethos, as it was to learn skills.40 The Red Cross volunteers were allowed to work in spaces denied them during the First World War, but within clearly defined limits. One important position in the local VA pecking order was that of ‘lady superintendent’. These were registered nurses, some of them actual hospital

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matrons, who voluntarily assisted with the training of VAs, oversaw the syllabus and undertook examinations for certificates. Not only were registered nurses, active and retired, involved in these activities, providing an important skills base to the volunteer workforce, but the Red Cross VAD structure was overseen by a national director who had to be a registered nurse, and the first incumbent of the position was none other than a former Director of Nursing in the Department of Health, Jessie Bicknell. The nursing hierarchy, once opposed to VAs as ‘pretend’ nurses, was now directly involved in their oversight within the Red Cross – or, more accurately, their control and containment. The Department of Health’s Director of Nursing chaired a government-appointed wartime VAD Council, was represented on the Red Cross’s own VAD Council and had considerable say in VA activity.

Figure 2: Red Cross VAD Dorothy Cooper wearing her nursing uniform, late 1930s. The badges represent attainment of Red Cross certificates in first aid and home nursing. Red Cross Archive.

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This extended to the uniform, which had evolved by the start of World War II into a white dress or ‘overall’ (as it was termed), but with the existing pinned-back veil long associated with VAs. A VAD rulebook issued in 1942 was based upon that of the British Red Cross, as were the New Zealand Red Cross VA uniforms. The rulebook shows how tightly prescribed uniforms had become: over some ten pages the nursing uniform, outdoor uniform and uniforms to be worn by commandants, assistant commandants, lady superintendents, sergeants major and section leaders were laid out in minute detail, along with specifics of where particular variations of indoor and outdoor uniform might be worn. For example, the overall worn for VA nursing duties was to be of white linen, with seven buttons down the front, the last to be 7 inches above the hem, which itself was to be 13 inches above the ground with a 2-inch hem. The depth of pockets and their facings, the length of sleeves, the width of belt and placement of its button, and the directions in which the different squares of the red cross emblem should be embroidered were all carefully explained, as was the hemming, folding and arrangement of the organdie veil (‘the safety pin must not show, nor must hair slides be seen’). The Red Cross paralleled the military in having utility and dress uniforms. For outdoor wear there was a navy serge coat lined in grey, worn in the 1940s with a felt hat. Black Oxford shoes, the band and colour of stockings and grey fabric gloves were stipulated. For parades the nursing VAs wore their white uniform with a dark blue cape dramatically lined in scarlet, available from Red Cross headquarters for 30 shillings, and a white headdress with a blue crepe-de-chine veil.41 Those who could not afford the relatively expensive cape appear to have paraded in a scarlet cardigan, which was also part of the uniform, but which could be hand-knitted. The instructional detail acknowledged the home sewing and knitting culture of the time; many women would have been making parts of their uniforms from patterns supplied via the British Red Cross. Significantly, there was no apron specified for the nursing uniform, despite its ubiquity in Red Cross parades of the First World War. The easily bleached white apron, the starched, pre-plastic barrier between a nurse’s overall and dirt and bodily fluids, was not a universal element of hospital uniforms by the 1930s, but it did send out signals about caring tasks and the practical interface with sickness. When the Red Cross VAD committee proposed an apron as part of its uniform in 1940 its members were firmly reminded that Mary Lambie, the Director of Nursing, had ‘definitely stated her disapproval of aprons’, and ‘we must abide by the authority which is over us’.42 The alternative was the constant washing of uniforms, or the purchase of at least five by those working in hospital wards. Since the VAs generally had to pay

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for their own uniforms, there was a constant worry about their cost and the number of components.43 ‘The authority which is over us’ was clearly by this time the Nursing Division of the Department of Health. However appropriate or otherwise the influence wielded by the director of a government agency over a voluntary organization, the Red Cross leadership considered it infinitely preferable to the authority given a wartime newcomer, the Women’s War Service Auxiliary (WWSA). The leaders of the New Zealand Red Cross were furious when the National Service Department charged the WWSA (a body once described by Peter Fraser as having ‘a uniform complex’44) with coordinating women’s voluntary work in New Zealand. It was ‘repugnant in the extreme’ for the Red Cross, a body comprising men and women, to be coordinated by a women’s organization, complained the Red Cross chairman, Dr J. Leslie Will; the only agencies which should in any way direct the ‘trained personnel’ of the Red Cross were the civil and military medical authorities, for ‘Medicine is international, Nursing is international, and Red Cross is international’, with a common purpose of assisting those who had suffered hurt by ‘injury, disease, anguish or panic’.45 The deference to nursing and to nursing leaders was tempered by a shared internationalism; the Red Cross was not simply riding on the coat-tail of a rising profession, but its leaders, at least, saw a commonality of humanitarian purpose which entitled its members to share in nursing’s prestige. Military nurses and doctors in turn were entitled to the protection of the universally recognized Red Cross emblem when assisting in times of war and disaster. On this occasion the Red Cross successfully retained control over the training of its own VAs, and shared their eventual selection for overseas service with St John. The New Zealand Red Cross remained exercised about government’s prioritizing of the WWSA, especially since Red Cross leaders were aware of the privileged voluntary status accorded the organization in other allied countries. Uniforms became the focus of a bitter struggle over status, identity and control in late 1941. An elite group of Red Cross and St John VAs, selected to travel to war zones to assist with nursing and other duties, was sent in uniforms which originated with the WWSA, without even the insignia of the bodies which had trained and claimed them. The uniforms were khaki and lacked the protective red cross emblem, leading the Red Cross to claim that by being dressed in khaki, ‘the girls lost their status as members of a neutral organisation and became practically combatants’, subject to internment on capture.46 The women wearing the uniforms had more immediate concerns. Made of rough cotton twill, their attire reflected wartime shortages. They were

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hurriedly produced, badly cut and ill-fitting, too hot and smelly for the tropics and, worst of all, they soon shrank when washed. In a ‘strong’ report, the matron of the hospital ship transporting the VAs dubbed the uniforms ‘a tragedy’.47 One of the VAs, Janet Studholme, recalled the women looking so disreputable on arrival in Egypt that the commanding officer promptly put them into regular nursing uniforms and veils.48 Later, and partly in response to protests from St John and the Red Cross, the nursing VAs were placed under the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, a more acceptable white linen ward uniform was adopted, and the women were allowed to wear the Geneva cross to signify their neutral status as carers for the sick and wounded.49 The episode suggests the power of association derived from uniforms and the ways in which they could become a focus of inter-organizational struggle over status and recognition by government. It also shows how the core Red Cross principle of neutrality, symbolized by the emblem, connected Red Cross VAs with professional caregivers in war situations. The oversight of Red Cross VAs by army nursing personnel wearing a shared protective symbol was very different from their subordination to the newly formed WWSA.

Figure 3: Wellington VADs on parade in veils and capes, probably during the early 1940s. Red Cross Archive.

VAs continued to be accepted by the nursing profession so long as nursing shortages were a problem. They were encouraged to join the Civil

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Nursing Reserve and helped out with soldier convalescence, and, in the later 1940s, some were specially trained to assist in overworked maternity units. Photographs suggest that the uniforms worn mirrored those of trained or probationer nurses even more closely: the folded ‘Lambie’ cap, named after the Director of Nursing and worn on top of the head, gradually replaced the veil; and when employed in hospitals the VAs often wore a uniform prescribed by the hospital, but with a red cross on the cap to show affiliation with the Red Cross Society. Nursing leaders endorsed the VADs as an ideal recruiting ground for full nursing training, a testing ground for the ‘right sort of girl’.50 But nursing itself moved on in what has been termed its ‘professional project’.51 Spaces for VA assistance in hospitals became more restricted as formalized categories of second-tier nurse (‘community’ and later ‘enrolled’ nurse) expanded within the state system.52 Issues such as liability, risk awareness and workers’ compensation began to limit the spheres where VAs could work, and thwarted a proposed Red Cross home nursing scheme in the late 1940s. In 1961 a visitor from the League of Red Cross Societies noted that there was little use for VAs in New Zealand hospitals beyond the children’s wards.53 Within the Red Cross itself, the divide between VA volunteers and un-uniformed ‘others’ with first aid training began to break down, as noted below. It was not enough to look like nurses: professional lines had been drawn in the sand by the 1970s, and the ‘amateur’ nurse was largely vanquished.

Mimicking the Military Not all VAs associated themselves with nursing. There were a small number assisting with clerical tasks, as well as domestic VAs who mostly helped out in hospital laundries and kitchens. There were female transport VAs, who donned the ‘quasi-masculine’ uniforms which, Craik suggests, were partly intended to instil confidence and partly to allow particular skills to operate in the public sphere.54 There were also the Red Cross Men’s VADs. While all the VADs were subject to military-style command, to drills and rules about conduct and appearance, the last two groups were the most military in appearance. The detachments were ‘the Field Troops of the Society’, Charles Harkness, national commandant of the Men’s VADs, told the 1940 New Zealand Red Cross conference. Harkness went on to emphasize how the wearing of uniforms by all ranks when on duty added immensely to the standard of efficiency, giving the volunteers a greater feeling of responsibility in their work and pride in their unit: ‘They are a Detachment – not merely a group of citizens collected together for a bit of training.’ Furthermore, uniforms added distinction to the ranks and helped maintain discipline, while in a crowd they

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helped the units stand out. He carefully outlined the components of the men’s navy blue uniform, made of the same pattern as regulation military uniforms, and the various accoutrements of rank: badges, stripes, stars, medallions, lanyards. Officers had their distinctive embellishments of white shirt, black tie and ‘Sam Browne’ belt, while parades invited the full glory of white gloves and ‘straight military-style walking sticks’.55 The referencing of the military in dress, drill and language was widespread in the war years and beyond, and the Red Cross was no exception.

Figure 4: VAD leaders wearing, from right, the military-styled dress uniforms of the Women’s Transport Corps, the Nursing VADs and the Men’s VADs in 1946. Iris Crooke (centre) also wears her registered nurse’s medal. Red Cross Archive.

On a personal level, Red Cross uniforms provided a scaffold for badges of rank and a buttress to many forms of individual aspiration, not least the desire to exercise command over others. But they also sent important institutional signals. In wartime the elaboration of military-style uniforms within the Red Cross was especially important to public perceptions, for during the early stages of World War II the New Zealand Society had made itself unpopular with the government-appointed Patriotic Fund Board by refusing to raise funds towards ‘comforts’ for combatant troops – it would lend its name only to efforts on behalf of the sick and wounded and others out of combat.56 The wearing of uniforms in public gave a useful and countervailing message of

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identification with the national war effort, and with the military, at a time when the Red Cross was asserting its neutrality and impartiality as part of an international movement. It gave opportunities to participate in the spectacle of parades and public occasions, and to attract new members. During and after the war, the wearing of Red Cross uniforms in public was described as useful ‘propaganda’ for the Society.57 The uniform had appeal for volunteers who wanted to publicly associate themselves with an international body gaining kudos through its efforts on behalf of the sick and wounded and, increasingly, prisoners of war, and it was seen as more stylish than that of St John, for example.58 Style was important. The women members of the Red Cross transport VADs were first issued with dark blue boiler suits topped by navy berets, a combination deemed most suitable for manoeuvring and working on vehicles. In gender terms, these VAs were already involved in one of the more masculine spheres of Red Cross activity, learning to drive cars and trucks in formation and studying the theory and practice of vehicle maintenance at a relatively advanced level. But there were protests which suggested that boiler suits were neither ‘smart’ nor suited to all body shapes: ‘We paraded with the Army, Red Cross and their voluntary units through the square in Palmerston North. A friend of mine who was standing on the curb watching us marching by, doing our best to keep in step and hold our heads up proudly, heard a small child near her say, “Mummy, what are those?” I don’t wonder she asked – my friend said we looked like large panda bears on hind legs.’59 Deborah Montgomerie has noted the paradoxes between women’s wartime aspirations to wear uniform and the normal expectations that women would express individuality and allure through dress; the delicate balance between looking excessively glamorous in uniform, and looking too dowdy and masculine.60 The Red Cross boiler suits were clearly a step too far in the latter direction, and in 1941 the transport VAs’ uniform was calibrated by the addition of a ‘smarter’ and more feminine blue-grey dress uniform with peaked forage cap, jacket and the all-important skirt.61 (An attempt to impose the wearing of black bloomers with skirts appears to have reflected concerns about the wearing of skirts rather than boiler suits while bending over car bonnets. It got short shrift from within the ranks.)62 Smartness came at a price, and depended upon position. Red Cross VAs had to pay for their own uniforms, and its leaders noted the struggle of many to pay for the dress uniforms, in particular. This was a special concern since the developing branches of the women’s armed services had uniforms supplied.63 Social hierarchies frequently underwrote the Red Cross pseudo-military command structures, and well-heeled women commandants were more likely

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than their troops to be able to afford individually tailored uniforms; although touted as promoting a standardized appearance, uniforms were never created equal. This was shown most clearly in 1946 when Lady Mountbatten and Lady Park visited Otago wearing, respectively, the uniforms of the British St John and Red Cross organizations. Lady Park, ‘with her trim air force blue battle dress, with her hat set at a jaunty angle, looked the essence of dainty femininity’, the Star newspaper noted approvingly, while Dunedin women were intrigued by the trend-setting violet rinse in her hair. Edwina Mountbatten also ‘wore her cap with an air’, complementing her uniform with high heels and nylon stockings (which, she felt obliged to explain, were a gift, and only worn on special occasions). By way of contrast, the Star went on to comment, ‘To the casual onlooker it sometimes appears as if some Red Cross and St. John workers must take pleasure in making themselves look as dowdy as possible, with skirts that are just too long, and hats that are worn at just the wrong angle or no angle at all’.64 Red Cross workers in mass-produced uniforms of prescribed length, worn with thick grey stockings and sturdy shoes, the tilt of their hats subject to parade-ground scrutiny, may well have felt aggrieved at the comparison. When hats were eventually replaced by berets within the Red Cross, opportunities increased for ‘jauntiness’ – or ‘vulgarity’, depending upon perspective. As late as 1970 Rachel Simpson, Director of Red Cross VADs and former air force matron, professed herself ‘shocked and disgusted at the angles at which some of the berets were hung on [Red Cross] people’s heads when they were wearing a uniform’.65 Uniform transgressions, always part of uniform wearing, were less tolerated among the lower ranks, but there were limits to the penalties which could be imposed upon volunteers. The men’s VADs were far fewer in number than the women’s corps, and in wartime their ranks were constantly depleted by call-ups for military service. Men were, however, particularly enthusiastic, and even more exercised about matters of uniform and rank than their female counterparts. This was probably because many had past military experience, or were conscious of comparison with serving men in uniform. During the Second World War these Red Cross men found a particular niche training other men in first aid as part of the Emergency Precautions Scheme, providing clerical support to army medical boards and working at casualty clearing stations once sick and wounded troops returned. After the war they provided first aid at sporting events and assisted the Fire Brigade and other emergency services. Men of the Wellington and Wanganui detachments assisted with body recovery after the 1953 Tangiwai disaster, for example, while others became involved in search and rescue activities. They were dogged by post-war assumptions that

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the Red Cross was ‘little more than a sewing circle’, and by confusion over their uniform. As one of their leaders reported to the Red Cross council in 1949: ‘In Wellington a man comes up and says, “What band are you in?”, and you reply, “I’m in the Red Cross.” He says “Oh, St. John?” and you reiterate, “No. Red Cross,” and he replies, “But that’s a women’s outfit, isn’t it?”’66 The men’s uniforms were not only indistinguishable from those of many other bodies, but they appear to have failed as a public signifier of masculinity within the Red Cross itself. By the 1960s there were competing outlets for men’s associational energies, and many, like the service clubs which proliferated in the post- war era, shared the Red Cross’s mix of service and internationalism, but did so in more attractively social settings. As the Wanganui men’s detachment somewhat primly, and self-defeatingly, noted in 1953, other organizations had less difficulty recruiting ‘where the social aspect is cultivated to a greater extent and coupled with a glass of beer. We are not prepared to offer these inducements.’67

The Decline of Uniformed Corps With the end of the Second World War it was increasingly difficult to find activities for VAs which would differentiate them from the wider constituency of Red Cross volunteers. It was no coincidence that competitions became more important for the maintenance of skills and esprit de corps in the 1950s and 1960s. Church parades, with the presentation and blessing of colours, were carried out with great solemnity. Such activities were not unique to the Red Cross; a great deal of civilian marching went on as the militarization of society bled into the post-war era. Former army sergeants were all too keen to instil the requisite level of precision, and Red Cross VAD rule books, formulated in wartime, continued to provide precise templates for the ordering of well-drilled bodies. Numbers continued to fall away. Red Cross reports were reticent about total numbers in a situation of overall decline, but from the 370 detachments claimed in 1942, with at least 8400 members, by 1970 only 13 centres out of a total of 39 had any VAs, and national membership stood at 445 (only 49 of them men).68 Uniforms provided a parallel chronicle of decline, and also signalled a generational shift within the Red Cross. The sorry tale of national cadet leader Albert Dunnings and his disintegrating trousers provides a trope for the parlous state of the men’s detachments by the late 1950s. After trying to source a replacement uniform from the army, air force, Traffic Department and army stores at Trentham, Dunnings sought permission from Red Cross headquarters to have a new one made. The Red Cross Secretary-General

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suggested Dunnings advertise for an army officer’s uniform and dye it, ‘he himself bearing the expense’. Dunnings eventually reported that despite his wife’s ‘sterling work with needle and thread, emulating the theme that “Old Soldiers never die, they only fade away” [my trousers] did so, to my embarrassment at the Youth Officers’ Training Camp…. In fact, “my end was in sight”, well and truly.’ At this point the Secretary-General relented, and allowed him to have a uniform made.69 Faced with a paucity of uniforms for its remaining men’s VADs, the Red Cross decided to make a change from the dark blue uniform to khaki battledress in 1972. While ex-military supplies of battledress were apparently obtainable, some detachments threatened to resign en masse if not permitted their familiar dark uniform – not that they in any way constituted a ‘mass’. Wives were drawn into the controversy, with Mrs Burridge of Palmerston North explaining the impracticalities of a khaki uniform for men’s first aid duty: ‘[With the existing] dark uniform you can go out into the Race meetings and get blood on them and they will not show this mess. They do retain their clean appearance throughout the whole first aid duty.’ But, more revealingly, she went on: ‘as people can be elderly, more mature, I am sorry to say [that] men – they do spread as much as the ladies do and with this [short] battledress tunic nothing does look more untidy, unsightly, than a paunch protruding’.70 Smartness and physical presentation of the self were ever important to the acceptability of uniforms. If changes to the men’s uniform referenced wartime battledress (and, unhelpfully, the Dad’s Army image from a popular television series of the time), changes to the women’s uniform invoked newness, modernity and the increasingly permeable boundaries between uniforms and fashion. The 1968 NZRC annual report noted that the old dark blue military-style uniform and beret, ‘in no way feminine’, had been banished and replaced by a green semi-fitted uniform, with a modish hat that could be worn only one way – ‘straight’! There was soon a backlash from the older VAs, to whom the military associations of the old uniform had been part of their rationale. For them, established associations trumped fashion. Many sought exemption from the requirement to change on the basis that the expensive new (and unacceptably green) uniform was not worth the investment, given their age. Uniforms were starting to represent a generational divide within the organization; younger members, it was increasingly noted, sometimes had an antipathy to uniforms, or at least those of an official variety.71 The new women’s uniform sent out even more significant messages for the Society and its structures. It was a New Zealand Red Cross uniform, not one based on a British model. It could be worn by the wider membership,

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not just VAs. Although VAs soon devised insignia of rank to wear on hats and jackets, the less exclusive nature of the new uniform denoted the end of a longstanding divide within the Society – between VADs, with their own director, separate vertical reporting lines and sense of superior commitment; and other volunteers. By 1970 these other volunteers were also likely to have first aid certificates, and to be undertaking very similar activities, without sharing an inclination for parades and public display – even if they had the time to do so as more women entered the paid workforce. Once-venerated titles such as ‘commandant’ were now regarded as an embarrassment, invoking, as the North Canterbury VADs pointed out, images of Hogan’s Heroes (a television POW comedy).72 The Red Cross VADs were finally disbanded in 1974, being replaced by a ‘Health and Welfare’ section to which all could contribute. They increasingly did so minus uniform.

Conclusion Uniforms may be, as Craik has suggested, ‘a leitmotif of [an individual’s] clothed self’, but they also tell us much about the social body and its changing contexts.73 New Zealand during and after the world wars was a much-uniformed society; uniforms were the manifestation of a wider social conformity. There were those who dressed daily in uniforms as a matter of dictate, and those who wore them proudly from choice and on special occasions, as did those joining the Red Cross VADs. Within the New Zealand Red Cross, uniforms acknowledged the many hours of training and skills acquired by their wearers, the VAs’ acceptance of military-style discipline when wearing the uniform, and a divide between these volunteers and others within the Society. When this divide was no longer sustainable, partly because of a decline in the number of VAs and partly because the tasks available to them became less specialized, uniforms lost their role as a signifier of internal difference, and thereby lost much of their point. Modes of volunteering within the Red Cross and other organizations became more diffuse and often short- term as the twentieth century ended. They no longer justified investment in a uniform or participation in such extraneous activities as marching. Uniforms were important externally, differentiating the Red Cross from competing organizations, ensuring a public presence and affirming Red Cross patriotism as well as its caring role. But from the late 1940s the two domains most closely referenced by the Red Cross in uniform started to redraw their lines of engagement with the Society. From a limited acceptance of the volunteers’ usefulness in wartime, the professionals within nursing and the military reduced the spaces available to ‘amateurs’. At the same time, the wearing of uniforms lost appeal nationally and internationally, signalling

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a generational divide between elderly, mostly female members of the Red Cross who were proud of their uniform’s past associations, and a younger demographic who had not experienced war and who questioned authority – especially as exercised by elders in uniform. Prospective recruits were assured in 1977 that ‘most Red Cross youth members wear their favourite uniform – a pair of jeans with the Red Cross t-shirt’.74 Photographs suggest that most dispensed even with the Red Cross t-shirt. Uniforms did not disappear altogether within the Red Cross, but they were mostly used by its emergency response teams. In emergencies, functional uniforms remain a necessity; a matter of visibility in extreme situations. But even in these circumstances the red cross emblem retains a power independent of elaborate uniforms, and it can be displayed as necessary on armbands, badges and tabards, as well as the highly visible red boiler suits worn by Red Cross personnel during the Canterbury earthquakes, for example. The other Red Cross constituency which sometimes appears in a collared t-shirt uniform with the emblem is its paid staff, since the Red Cross, like other non- profit organizations, no longer depends only on its voluntary workforce. The organization’s 2010 Annual Report noted that a comfortable new uniform approved for its first aid instructors projected an image which was at once ‘professional and relaxed’.75 It was a pairing of effects that would have been inconceivable 60 years earlier, when a relaxed uniform was a sloppy uniform, a sign of poor discipline and suspect attitude.

MARGARET TENNANT Massey University – Palmerston North

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NOTES

This article expands upon material first used in different sections of my overview history of the New Zealand Red Cross, Across the Street, Across the World: A History of the New Zealand Red Cross 1915–2015, New Zealand Red Cross, Wellington, 2015. I would especially like to thank Charlotte Macdonald, Geoff Watson and the anonymous reviewers of the article for suggestions which helped its further development.

1 Cutting, Marlborough Express, 1 October 1968, IA1 3404 185/26/1, Archives New Zealand (ANZ); Who’s Who in New Zealand, 10th ed., Wellington, 1971, p.304. 2 New Zealand Red Cross (NZRC) Voluntary Auxiliary Detachment Advisory Committee, 12 June 1970, E07-4/2, Box 1058, New Zealand Red Cross Archive, Wellington (RCA). 3 Paul Fussell, Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2002, p.6. 4 Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression, Berg, Oxford/ New York, 2005, p.12; J. Craik, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Uniform’, Fashion Theory, 7, 2 (2003), pp.127–48. Craik discusses uniforms for work and leisure and the influence of uniforms on design and culture, as well as their role in authority contexts. See also Artemis Yagou, ‘Foreword: Uniforms in Design – Historical Perspective’, Journal of Design History, 24 (2011), pp.101–4. This special issue of the journal contains discussions of uniforms in different national contexts and of the boundaries between uniforms and civilian dress. 5 Craik’s work discusses the emergence of school uniforms, but for a New Zealand-based article which sees school uniforms as an adjunct of democratic ideals embedded in the national education system, see Elaine Webster, ‘New Zealand School Uniforms in the Era of Democracy: 1965 to 1975’, Costume, 42 (2008), pp.169–83. Katie Pickles touches upon the adoption of the kilt, a traditionally male garment worn for fighting, for girls’ school uniforms in ‘Kilts as Costumes: Identity, Resistance and Tradition’, in Bronwyn Labrum, Fiona McKergow and Stephanie Gibson, eds, Looking Flash: Clothing in Aotearoa New Zealand, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2007, pp.41–58. 6 Quoted in Glyn Harper, Johnny Enzed: The New Zealand Soldier in the First World War 1914–1918, Exisle Publishing, Auckland, 2015, p.81. Johnny Enzed makes passing reference to uniforms, especially the practical aspects of boots, but Richard Holmes’s Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914–1918, Harper Perennial, London, 2004, devotes greater space to the psychological symbolism of the uniform. For a more analytical approach to the various meanings of uniforms during the Great War see L. Ugolini, ‘Consumers to Combatants? British Uniforms and Identities, 1914–18’, Fashion Theory, 14, 2 (2010), pp.159–82. Ugolini argues that the men donning uniform did not always jettison their identities as consumers, attempting modifications to the uniform which ‘were not always designed to please the military authorities’ (p.177). See also Laura Ugolini, ‘War-stained: British Combatants and Uniforms, 1914–18’, War and Society, 33, 3 (2014), pp.155–71. Also on the Great War, but with a focus on women’s citizenship and patriotism and their wearing of khaki, see Susan R. Grayzel, ‘“The Outward and Visible Sign of Her Patriotism”: Women, Uniforms, and National Service During the First World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 8, 2 (1997), pp.145–64. Craik, Uniforms Exposed, ch.2 covers the development of military uniforms more broadly. 7 For nursing examples, see Jane Brooks and Anne Marie Rafferty, ‘“Dress and Distinction in Nursing, 1860–1939”: A corporate (as well as corporeal) armour of probity and purity’, Women’s History Review, 16, 1 (2007), pp.41–57; Christina Bates, A Cultural History of the Nurse’s Uniform, CMCC, Gaineau, Quebec, 2012. Deborah Montgomerie discusses attitudes towards New Zealand women in uniform in ‘Dressing for War: Glamour and Duty in Women’s Lives During the Second World War’, in Labrum, McKergow and Gibson, eds, pp.177–83.

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8 Helen Dollery, ‘“Making Happy, Healthy, Helpful Citizens”: The New Zealand Scouting and Guiding Movements as Promulgators of Active Citizenship, c.1908–80’, PhD thesis, Massey University, 2012, pp.213–20. 9 Craik, Uniforms Exposed, pp.44–45. See Diane Winston, Red Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, pp.84–94 for a discussion of the personal and ideological meanings of the Salvation Army uniform. The uniform, she suggests, was a ‘second skin’ that signalled in the nineteenth century commitment to God and a repudiation of social norms, inviting ridicule and even attack, but later becoming a marker of respectability. 10 Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Putting Bodies on the Line: Marching Spaces in Cold War Culture’, in Patricia Vertinsky and John Bale, eds, Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience, Routledge, London, 2005, pp.85–100. 11 Charlotte Macdonald, Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935–1960, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2011. For more specific commentary on marching uniforms see Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Moving in Unison, Dressing in Uniform: Stepping Out in Style in Marching Teams’, in Labrum, McKergow and Gibson, eds, pp.186–205. 12 On Red Cross humanitarianism and the principles underlying the movement, see David Forsythe, The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross, HarperCollins, London, 1998, gives an overview of the development of the Red Cross movement. Tennant, Across the Street, discusses NZRC relationships with the state, and with the British Red Cross – see, especially, chapters two and four. 13 The focus is on uniforms worn by adult VAD members, but girls in the Junior Red Cross often wore a nurse’s veil with a gym slip, and the boys, Red Cross armbands, while the formation of cadet corps was encouraged, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. These groups also wore uniforms which referenced those of nurses, in the case of girls, or in the case of boys, usually comprised dark pants and white shirt and beret. 14 Although individuals were often referred to as ‘VADs’, I will follow the Red Cross practice of using ‘VA’ for individual volunteers and ‘VAD’ for the detachments. 15 It was later supplemented by the red crescent, first used by Muslim forces in the Russo– Turkish war of 1876–1878, and in 2005 by the red crystal, as a gesture to the Jewish state of Israel, but today around 80% of national Red Cross societies use the red cross as their emblem. 16 The significance and legal standing of the red cross emblem is outlined in New Zealand Red Cross, A Guide for New Zealand MPs and Government to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, NZRC, Wellington, 2013 and New Zealand Red Cross, Wars, Laws and Humanity New Zealand’s Engagement with International Humanitarian Law, Wellington, 2015. 17 Canterbury Red Cross Record, April 1916, p.13; July 1916, p.7. 18 On this, in a European context, see Heather Jones, ‘International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action During the First World War’, European Review of History, October 2009, pp.698–9. 19 These developments are covered in more detail in Tennant, pp.64–71, 151. 20 Craik, ‘Cultural Politics of the Uniform’, p.139. 21 Craik, Uniforms Exposed, p.81; Bates, pp.14, 21, 34. 22 Winston, p.87. 23 Christine Hallett has written most extensively about the British VADs and their relationships with professional nurses. See, ‘“Emotional Nursing”: Involvement, Engagement, and Detachment in the Writings of First World War Nurses and VADs’, in Alison S. Fell and Christine E. Hallett, First World War Nursing: New Perspectives, Routledge, New York, 2015,

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p.92; ‘“A Very Valuable Fusion of Classes”: British professional and volunteer nurses of the First World War’, Endeavour, 38, 2 (2014), pp.101–10. Hallett’s Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, includes coverage of nurses from a range of allied forces. On the origins of the VAD Nursing Reserves, see Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854–1914, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1988, ch.9. 24 Hallett, ‘Emotional Nursing’, p.87. See also Janet S.K. Wilson, ‘Khaki Girls, VADs and Tommy’s Sisters: Gender and Class in First World War Britain’, International History Review, 19, 1 (February 1997), pp.32–51. Henriette Donner, ‘Under the Cross – Why V.A.D.s Performed the Filthiest Task in the Dirtiest War: Red Cross Women Volunteers, 1914–1918’, Journal of Social History, 30, 3 (1997), pp.687–704 focuses on volunteers’ motivations. 25 For a Canadian perspective see Linda J. Quincey, ‘“Sharing the Halo”: Social and Professional Tensions in the Work of World War I Canadian Volunteer Nurses’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 9, 1 (1998), pp.105–24; Cynthia Toman, ‘“Help Us, Serve England”: First World War Military Nursing and National Identities’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 30, 1 (2013), pp.143–66. Melanie Oppenheimer has written about the establishment of the VADs in The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross 1914–2014, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2014, pp.31–32. 26 Jan Rodgers, ‘“A Paradox of Power and Marginality”: New Zealand Nurses’ Professional Campaign During War 1900–1920’, PhD thesis, Massey University, 1994. See, especially, ch.6. Anna Rogers, While You’re Away: New Zealand Nurses At War 1899–1948, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2003, pp.145–50 also discusses the New Zealand VAs. 27 Rodgers, pp.156–7. 28 Kai Tiaki, 8, 4, October 1915, p.163. See also, Jane Tolerton, Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout, Penguin, Auckland, 1992, ch.7. 29 Kai Tiaki, 8, 2, April 1915, p.73. 30 Kai Tiaki, 8, 1, January 1915, p.52; 9, 4, October 1916, p.211. 31 Kai Tiaki, 9, 2, April 1919, p.80. 32 A version of this formed the basis of a fundraising poster in New Zealand Red Cross Record, 27 August 1918, p.7. 33 Sherayl Kendall and David Corbett, New Zealand Military Nursing: A History of the Royal New Zealand Nursing Corps Boer War to Present Day, Sherayl Kendall and David Corbett, Auckland, 1990, p.44. 34 Auckland Star, 26 October 1918, p.16; Dominion, 11 December 1918, p.2. Note that nurses’ uniforms around the world were as often blue as white at this time, with a range of colours, stripes and patterns used within the different hospitals, although New Zealand army nurses wore white duty uniforms (grey for outdoor and mess duties, as well as the scarlet cape). 35 Montecillo Home Collection, Dunedin. For an example see Tennant, p.80. 36 Kai Tiaki, 9, 2, April 1919, p.80. 37 Evening Post, 8 May 1925, p.3; New Zealand Red Cross Society (Inc.), Wellington Centre Voluntary Aids 1922–1945, Wellington 1945. 38 Junior Red Cross Journal, December 1934, p.19. 39 ‘New Zealand Red Cross Society Inc. Scope and Nature of Activities’, 1942, A13-3/12, Box 933, RCA. 40 For the nature of this training, and the rationale behind it, see addresses by Mary Lambie, Director of Nursing, and Elizabeth Bridges, of the Postgraduate School of Nursing, to Red Cross Conference, 1940, New Zealand Red Cross Society, National Conference March 12–13 1940 Summary of Proceedings, 1940, pp.45–50, RCA. 41 New Zealand Red Cross Society, Regulations for the Organisation of Detachments, 2nd ed., , Auckland [1942].

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42 Minutes, NZRC South Island VAD Committee, 18 July 1940, E07-1/1, Box 942, RCA. 43 Minutes, NZRC South Island VAD Committee, 9 July 1941, E07-1/1, Box 942, RCA. 44 Deborah Montgomerie, The Women’s War: New Zealand Women 1939–45, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2001, p.48. 45 J. Leslie Will to Hon. R. Semple, Minister of National Service, 21 Jan 1942, E07-1/1, Box 942, RCA; Minutes, Dominion Council NZRC, 26 Feb 1942, 83-243-Q0968, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL). 46 President of Waimate Red Cross N.A. Grant, quoted in unidentified press cutting, loose in E07-1/3, Box 922, RCA. 47 NZRC VAD Council minutes, 18–19 April 1945, 83-243-Q0950, ATL. The practicalities of uniform supply and the quality of materials available were constant concerns for most organizations, especially in wartime. 48 Janet Studholme, interviewed by Joanna Woods, 9 December 1991, OHA-821, tape 2, side 2, ATL. 49 For more on the experiences of wartime VAs, see Alice McJannet (compiler), The VAD Years 1939–72: Recollections of Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) of the North Canterbury Centre of the New Zealand Red Cross Society (Inc.), Pandemonium Press, Christchurch 1993; M. MacPherson, War Time Activities: Auckland Red Cross Transport Corps, L.R. Unwin and Co. Printer, Auckland, 1946; Rogers, pp.250–65; Tennant, pp.164–70. 50 ‘The Nurse and the Voluntary Aid’, New Zealand Nursing Journal, 15 August 1941, 34, 8, pp.255–6; Edith Tennent, ‘N.Z. Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment’, New Zealand Nursing Journal, 15 August 1941, 34, 8, p.272. 51 See Susan Jacobs, ‘Advanced Nursing Practice and the Nurse Practitioner: New Zealand Nursing’s Professional Project in the Late 20th Century’, PhD thesis, Massey University, 2005. Mary Ellen O’Connor, Freed to Care, Proud to Nurse: 100 Years of the New Zealand Nurses’ Organisation, Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2010, also records the process by which nursing leaders gained control over nursing’s knowledge base and professional accountabilities, with the regulatory basis outlined in Patricia French, A Study of the Regulation of Nursing in New Zealand 1901–1997, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2001. 52 O’Connor, pp.136, 179. 53 Yvonne Hentsch, Director of League of Red Cross Societies Nursing Bureau, ‘Visit to the New Zealand Red Cross Society’, 26 April–2 May 1961, Folder 2/4 A0859/8, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Archive, Geneva. 54 Craik, ‘Cultural Politics of the Uniform’, p.139. 55 New Zealand Red Cross Society, National Conference March 12–13 1940 Summary of Proceedings, 1940, pp.57–59. 56 This is outlined in Tennant, pp.128–30. 57 See, for example, Minutes, NZRC Transport Committee, 20 December 1940, A11-1/3, RCA. For a sense of the range of women’s uniforms during wartime, public perceptions of them and an argument for the contribution of un-uniformed women, see ‘Women in Uniforms and Women in Aprons – All Are Helping’, Auckland Star, 6 January 1942, p.2. 58 Graeme Hunt, First to Care: 125 Years of the Order of St John in New Zealand 1885– 2010, Libro International, Auckland, 2009, p.164. 59 Lauris Edmond, ed., Women in Wartime: New Zealand Women Tell Their Story, Government Printing Office, Wellington, 1986, p.36. See also Minutes, NZRC VAD Council 16 February 1941, 81-243/9, ATL. 60 Montgomerie, pp.180–2. 61 MacPherson, pp.13–14. 62 MacPherson, p.46. 63 See, for example, Minutes, NZRC VAD Council, 16 February 1941, 83-243-Q0950; 23-4 March 1960, 83-243-Q0951, ATL.

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64 Cutting, Star, 9 June 1946, NZRC Dunedin Records, 96-113/38, Hocken Library, Dunedin. 65 Report of Proceedings, Annual Meeting of VAD Council, 13 June 1970, E07-4/3, Box 1058, RCA. 66 Red Cross Magazine, August 1949, p.9. 67 Annual Report, Wanganui Men’s Detachments 1953, with Wanganui Red Cross Minutes Book 14 March 1946–2 December 1953, Wanganui Red Cross Centre. 68 NZRC Annual Report 1946, p.17; NZRC Annual Report 1970, p.37. 69 Correspondence A.C. Dunnings and Malcolm Galloway, November 1957, Box 920, RCA. 70 Minutes, NZRC VAD Council Meeting, 1972, E07-5/6, Box 1059, RCA. 71 See, for example, Youth Organisers’ and Leaders’ Meeting, 14 May 1968; Annual Meeting of Youth Organisers, 12 July 1973, MSY 7897, ATL. 72 Report of Proceedings, VAD Council AGM, 12 June 1971, E07-4/3, Box 1058, RCA. The Red Cross national office was by this time moving towards the disbanding ofVADs, supporting instead new emergency response teams based upon secondary school students and young people in their twenties. 73 Craik, ‘Cultural Politics of the Uniform’, p.127. 74 Red Cross News, 1977, pp.3–4. 75 NZRC Annual Report, 2010, p.26.

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