Black Watch’s Heart Won By Woman Doctor

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30364, 13 February 1964, Page 2

Black Watch’s Heart Won By Woman Doctor

An Australian woman doctor who had been sent to the Black Watch as a “leg-pull” became a very important member of the regiment; and in front of her countrymen of the same profession he was proud to pay tribute to her memory, said the Governor-General (Sir Bernard Fergusson) last evening during the Arthur E. Mills Memorial Oration to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians.

When he was posted to the Ruhr in 1948 to command a regiment he was told he would find his regimental medical officer was a woman, Sir Bernard Fergusson said.

“ ‘Utterly impossible,’ I said to myself and I promised myself that one of my first acts on assuming command would be to send her packing," his Excellency said. “I was wrong. I had wholly under-estimated Captain ‘Mick’ Prendergast, an Australian woman doctor serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps. I quickly found that it was far more likely that she would send me packing than I her.” His predecessor, “a very wild Highlander whose father had commanded the Black Watch before him, and whose

son is serving in it now,” had taken a dislike to his medical officer and sacked him, Sir Bernard Fergusson continued. He had taken an equal dislike to his successor and sacked him. Wait in Vain

To pull his leg, the authorities had sent the woman doctor and sat back for the telephone to ring in further protest. After a week without a call, they had asked how the colonel liked his new M.O. He had replied: “She’s splendid. Why didn’t you send her before instead of all that riff-raff?” Sir Bernard Fergusson described her as: “Solid and square, with huge spectacles. She smoked like a chimney, she had a most biting tongue. The Jocks were terrified of her, and so to some. degree was I. She was a thundering good doctor and a thundering good and very loyal officer.”

Captain Prendergast stayed with the regiment for six years, becoming more and more Black Watch, adopting first a Black Watch tartan skirt then a Balmoral, and then by special permission of

Field-Marshal Lord Wavell, Colonel of the Regiment, the red hackle worn in the soldiers’ bonnets. When the regiment was sent to active service in Korea Captain Prendergast, “to her fury,” was forbidden to accompany it. the Gover-nor-General continued. She was sent instead to a military hospital in Glasgow. There it was decreed that all the wounded from Korea, of whom there were more than 200, should be sent to the hospital, so she had the joy and delight of tending them, and she knew them all. There, too, she found she was dying wih cancer, and she died among her Black Watch friends.

Captain Prendergast was given a full regimental funeral, with the Pipes and Drums, in whom she had always taken a special interest, playing her to her grave. His Excellency said the woman doctors’ anteroom at the depot of. the Royal Army Medical Corps in England was now known in her memory as the Prendergast room, and her portrait was on its wall.