EXTRAORDINARY STORY

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3901, 11 June 1929, Page 7

EXTRAORDINARY STORY

WOMAN SERVES IN THE WAR MEMOIR FOUND AFTER DEATH. luquiiies which were made after the recovery from the Thames of the body of Minnie Drewett, aged fifty, born A Edinburgh, who was employed as a cook at Richmond and London hotels, elicited the fact that she had told friends she was wounded in the war while serving as a private with theAustralian forces! She had informed others that she was wounded while with the Women's Auxiliary Aid Corps. Miss Drewett left a memoir in which Bhe stated that she was the daughter of a bootmaker whom Queen Victoria frequently commanded to come to Balmoral. She quarrelled with her parents, and travelled the world. She then became a cook at Aldershot, but the officer married, and she again sought work. She was with her family at Fremantle when war was declared. She offered herself as a cook at " The Australian Recruiting Office, where the medical examination was perfunctory. T went in as a woman trembling m the unaccustomed male attire, and tame out, strutting in khaki -uniform, as 180,802, Private George Drewett. " I went to England on a troopship," the memoir continues, " and was suspected only by an ex-medical student, named Carl, who died in my arms at a French first-aid post, after T confessed that I was a woman. " Then 1 fell in love with n man, but did not disclose my sex. T wept like a woman when ho was killed. I wont to Tidworth camp (Wiltshire), and courted girls. One at Andovcr (■Hampshire) who wanted to marry me was ill-treated by an Irishman, whom 1 thrashed." Drewett's reminiscences cover her jvromotion to lance-corporal, her reduction to the ranks, her confinement to barracks, her shrapnel wound in tile mouth and head, and the discovery ot lier sex at Netley Hospital, which the Prince of Wales visited, and commended her on her pluck, afterwards recalling the incident when he saw her at the British Legion parade at Hastings. A woman similarly named was charted with drunkenness at Hastings in 1927. She said that she had been three! times wounded while serving as a cook in the Australian Forces, but the allegation was not investigated. Although Miss Drewett's memoir gave her number »s 180,802, the military authorities at the Base Records Office, Melbourne, state that there, was no such number in the Australian Fones.