Rose Venn Brown was the first Australian woman to sign on for war work in France. She would also be the last to leave.

When war broke out, Rose was working as the Assistant Registrar at Sydney Hospital. Secretarial work was one of the few white-collar occupations open to women in the early twentieth century, even for a woman as well educated, articulate and capable as Rose. At ease with the smart set in Sydney, this woman from Lane Cove had a future. But Rose Venn Brown believed her duty lay elsewhere, and the war offered opportunities all of its own.

Rose procured a passage to London and was ‘immediately appointed to the [AIF’s] medical records [branch] at Horseferry road’.1 A month later, she was working for the Red Cross and YMCA, and found herself in France long before the AIF was sent there. Rose was the only Australian woman appointed to the Red Cross staff at Le Havre.

Described as an ‘ardent’ and ‘indefatigable’ war worker, she would serve five years in France, acting as a YMCA organiser, a Red Cross Commissioner, and a representative of the war chest. All these voluntary bodies distributed what were called ‘comforts’ to Allied soldiers: fresh fruit, warm clothing, newspapers and messages from home. Rose knew that every parcel told a story: a mother knitting socks for some other mother’s son, a housewife baking biscuits soaked in treacle, a school girl writing letters to a soldier she’d never meet. Every parcel was a package of love as much as it was a way of helping the war effort. They connected families with sons, husbands and lovers far from home.

Connecting families with sons, husbands and lovers far from home: The symbol of the Red Cross framed by a victory laurel. Courtesy Melbourne Museum.

Rose carried these parcels as close as she could to the battle zones. ‘During hostilities,’ one paper noted:

she went to areas where diggers were waiting to go into or coming out of action. These men were cut off from all possibility of comfort, and Miss Venn Brown [made] their conditions less distressful.

As close as she could to the battle zones: Dressed in her war workers' uniform Rose worked in close proximity to the front line. No other woman (except nurses and ambulances workers) went as far. Note her masculine attire and demeanour. Rose breached conventional expectations of womanhood in more ways than one. Sunday Times, 30 May 1920 courtesy National Library of Australia.

For days and sometimes weeks on end, the young woman intercepted trains of wounded men en route to hospitals behind the lines. She distributed hot coffee to soldiers frozen from the trenches, shared a yarn and perhaps a smoke with men longing for a voice from home.2

The creation and distribution of comforts during the war was an enormous physical and emotional labour. In Rose’s case, it was an act of courage and selflessness as well. Her willingness to share the dangers and discomforts of the Front won the hearts of Australians, New Zealanders and ‘Tommies’ alike. And, rather like the sex reformer Ettie Rout, who distributed prophylactic kits to soldiers, Rose ‘understood the wants’ of ordinary soldiers.

At a time when dry canteens were favoured by military authorities, Rose knew a little alcohol would not go astray. It blunted the memory of a brutal war and kept the cold at bay. In the midst of tragedy, she contrived at frivolity, organising films, acting troupes, and other lively entertainments, competing with the bars and brothels vying for the soldiers’ trade.3

At war’s end, Rose set up a digger’s club at Abbeville. She gave it the unlikely title of ‘Ye Old Gum Leaf’ and encouraged soldiers, anxious for repatriation, to treat it as a home away from home. She also became the first woman to join the War Graves Commission and work in what were called the ‘devastated areas’. Ever mindful of an opportunity to help, Rose set up her tent and marquee in the Australian cemetery at Villers-Bretonneux, dispensing tea and good cheer to the men who worked there. She must have been a welcome sight amidst the grim task of bringing in the war dead.

Rose stayed in a village that was not much more than a ruin, and daily walked through a landscape devastated by war. It was ‘like living in a grave-yard’, she wrote, ‘the terrible silence’ broken only by explosives ‘bursting’ deep beneath the earth. But her labours healed a grief even more desolate back in Australia. Miss Venn Brown, the British Australasian noted, ‘collected photographs of the graves of hundreds of our men buried over there, and sent them home to Australia’. On the graves themselves she planted roses, daisies and forget-me-nots, spreading warmth and colour across the moonscape of the Somme.

Not much more than a ruin: Evelyn Chapman paints the ruins of Villers-Bretonneux. Chapman arrived in the town some time after Rose Venn Brown had moved there. The town would not be rebuilt until the 1920s and was restored with funds raised in Australia. E05495 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

Having provided comforts to soldiers at war, Rose Venn Brown now offered comfort to families mourning their loss. ‘[T]here is nothing I would cherish more,’ one mother wrote, ‘as the photo of my Darling boy’s grave.’4

To this day, the Venn Brown’s family papers bulge with letters from the grateful and the grieving: ‘sorrowing aunts’, ‘sad lonely mothers’, those whose lives ‘can never be the same again’. A photo of the cemetery ‘brought [them] nearer to [their] loved ones’; ‘still as fresh in my mind as when he came to bid me goodbye’:

It is such a great comfort for us to know that someone has cared for my boy’s last resting place and . . .  pleasant to think that [she] is an Australian.5

Sadly, not all found comfort in Rose’s kindness. Hanna Fenwick could not find her brother’s name in the list Miss Venn Brown so carefully compiled:

[Does that mean] my darling brother is not killed and that he will return to us . . . do try and get some new[s] for me . . . I pray night and day.6

Many of the accolades of Rose Venn Brown’s work describe her as a dutiful daughter of Australia. But that description does not quite ring true. Rose had a sense of duty, yes, and a deep belief in the cause of the Empire. But she acted, as many Red Cross workers did, out of a sense of humanity. She provided comfort to anyone, certainly not just Australian or New Zealand troops, who suffered the deprivations of war.

Nor does ‘dutiful’ quite convey the vitality, independence and initiative of this remarkable woman. After peace was declared, she continued to travel, working for a petroleum company in China, exploring remote parts of Asia, and advocating the interests of Australian trade. She also organised a lecture tour by Captain Flora Sandes, a woman who served in the Serbian Army, was wounded in battle and decorated in the field.

Rose believed there was nothing a woman couldn’t do. Miss Venn Brown would never marry but she would work again for soldiers’ comforts throughout the Second World War. She died in 1950, back in the town she’d wandered so far from.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on the Venn Brown Papers held by the Australian War Memorial 2DRL/0598; and a systematic search of the British Australasian, and other contemporary newspaper reports in Australia. For an earlier appreciation of Rose Venn Brown's work see Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Bart Ziino, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2007).

1 Queenslander, 26 January 1933.

2 Daily Observer, 30 October 1920; Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 1933; Times, 30 May 1920.

3 The Globe and Sunday Times War Pictorial, 30 April 1917.

4 British Australasian, 11 March 1920; Rose Venn Brown, Letters dated 12 June, 3 September 1919; Catherine Boss to Miss Venn Brown, 24 June 1919, AWM 2DRL/0598.

5 Correspondence to Miss Venn Brown from C. Chasting, Ada McGregor, Ada Jurd, Elizabeth Macrea, June – September 1919, ibid.

6 Hannah Fenwick to Miss Venn Brown, 19 June 1919; ibid.