WOMAN’S STORY

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIX, Issue 141, 16 May 1929, Page 8

WOMAN’S STORY

SERVED DURING WAR. REVELATIONS AFTER DEATH. Inquiries following the recovery from the Thames (England) of the body of Minnie Drewett, aged 50, bom at Edinburgh, who was employed as a cook at Richmond and London hotels, elicited the fact that she told friends that she was wounded during tlio war while serving as a private with the Australian forces, although she informed others that she was wounded while with the Women’s Auxiliary Aid Corps. She left a memoir how she enlisted at Fremantle, loved a soldier, who was killed, courted girls, thrashed an Irishman, and was commended by the Prince of Wales for her pluck, having been wounded. Drewott’s memoir stated that she was the daughter of a bootmaker, whom Queen Victoria frequently commanded to go 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 (W.A.), when war was declared, She offered herself as a cook at “the Australian Recruiting Office, where the medical examination was perfunctory. I went as a woman trembling in the unaccustomed male attire, and came out, strutting in khaki uniform, as 180802, private Georgre 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 I confessed that I was a woman.

“Then I fell in love with a man, but did not disclose my sex. I wept like a woman when he was killed. I went to Tidwortli Camp (Wiltshire) and courted girls. One at Andover (Hampshire), who wanted to marry me, was ill-treated by an Irishman whom I thrashed.” Drewett’s reminiscences cover her Sromotion to lance-corporal, her reuetion to the ranks, lier confinement to barracks, her shrapnel wound in the mouth and head, and the discovery of her sex at Netley Hospital, which the Prince of Wales visited, and commended her on her pluck, afterwnrds recalling the incident when he saw her at the British Legation . parade at Hastings. A woman similarly named was charged 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.

Though Dewett’s memoirs give her regimental number as 180802, military base records, Melbourne, state that there was no such number in the A.I.F. If tlie medical examination was as perfunctory as sho stated, there must have been an avoidance of duty by the medical officer because these examinations as a rule were most complete.