War service organiser dies

Press, 15 September 1976, Page 16

War service organiser dies

NZPA New Plymouth Mrs Dorothy Ann Atmore, who was New Zealand organiser for the Women’s War Service Auxiliary throughout the Second World War and was awarded the M.B.E. in 1946 for that and other services, has died in Hawera. She was 82. Bom in Hawera in 1894, one of three children of the late Mr J. R. M. Corrigan, MP, and Mrs Corrigan, Mrs Atmore led a very full life of service to the communities in which she lived. She travelled extensively during her long life. Tn 1936 she married Mr Harry Atmore, MP for Nelson, the last of the Independent members of Parliament in New Zealand. She was |New Zealand organiser for the Women’s War Service Auxiliary throughout the Second World War, and did other war work. She was awarded the M.B.E. in 1946.

Later that year, she went to the United States at the request of the New Zealand Government, to represent her country at a world-wide conference of women. While she was overseas, her husband died at Nelson, having represented that electorate from

1911 to 1914, and from 1922 to his death in 1946. Mrs Atmore returned to Hawera to look after her mother until Mrs Corrigan’s death in 1957. During that time she served on the then Hawera Hospital Board for six years, and was largely instrumental in getting a women’s wing built at Ngahuru Home for the Elderly, then under hospital board control. WELFARE WORK

Mrs Atmore was field officer for the Crippled Children Society in Hawera, welfare officer for Heritage, and editor on the St John’s Parish magazine "The Messenger.”

Mrs Atmore returned to Nelson, where she was president of the Nelson branch of the Pan-Pacific and SouthEast Asia Womens’ Association. She became Dominion president of that organisation for three years arid was made a life member. She attended the association’s conferences in Canberra in 1961, and Honolulu in 1968, and several others, the last in Auckland last March.