EXTRAORDINARY STORY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 16949, 13 May 1929, Page 2

EXTRAORDINARY STORY

WOMAN SERVES IN WAR MEMOIR POUND AFTER DEATH LONDON, May 1. Inquiries which were made after the recovery from t,Le Thames of the body of Minnie Drewett, aged 50, born at Edinburgh, who was employed as a cook at Richmond am] London hotels, elicited the fact that she had told friends she was wounded in the war while serving as a private with the Australian forces. She had informed others that she was wounded while with the Women’s Auxiliary Aid Corps. Aliks Drewett left a memoir in which she stated that she was the daughter of a bootmaker whom Queen Victoria frequently commanded to come to Balmoral. She quarrelled 1 with her parents, and travelled the world. She then became a cook at Aldershot, hut 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. I went in as a woman trembling in the unaccustomed male attire, and came out, strutting in khaki uniform, as ISOBO2, 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 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 Tidvvorth 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 promotion to lance-corporal, her reduction to the ranks, her confinement to barracks, her shrapnel wound in the mouth and head, and the discovery oT her 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 charged with drunkenness at Hastings .in 1927. She said that she had boon three times wounded while serving as n cook in the Australian Forces, but the allegation was not investigated.

Although Aliss Drewett’s memoir gave,her number as 180802, the military authorities at the Base Records Office, Alelbourne, state that there was no such number in the Australian Forces.