Date of birth: 1882

Place of birth: Long Gully, Victoria

Link to Wagga: Settled here after the war

Date of enlistment: November 3, 1915

Age at enlistment: 29 years

Occupation: Nurse

Religion: Church of England

Next of kin: Sister, Mrs M. Jeffery, Middle Brighton, Vic

Battalion or Regiment: Australian Army Nursing Service

Battlefields: Egypt, India

Outcome: Returned to Australia, February 10, 1917

CECIL Imogen Keith Gordon, one of eight children born to James and Emily Gordon

(née Jennings), was born in 1882 at Longwarry in Victoria.

She completed her four years’ nurse’s training in Melbourne, at the Children’s Hospital and then the Women’s Hospital.

Cecil passed her final exam for the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses Association in  December, 1909.

She lived and practiced in Melbourne until March, 1915, when she took up the duties as the nurse in charge of the Bush Nursing Scheme in Ashford, north of Inverell, NSW.

She resigned this post five months later when she volunteered for the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS).

Her experience with the Bush Nursing Scheme would have stood Cecil in good stead for military nursing.

Bush nursing evolved in the opening years of the 20th Century, established on the premise that trained nurses be available in remote areas to assist with sickness and emergencies.

The bush nurse’s major activities were in midwifery and children’s health.

Bush nurses instructed rural women in the hygiene of pregnancy and in mothering.

They visited homes after childbirth, ran baby clinics and taught childcare and mothercraft in schools.

They also provided ‘first contact care’ in isolated communities which often had no access to a doctor.

Like the AIF, the AANS aimed to recruit older, more experienced nurses, single women without children, and of a temperate disposition.

The bush nurse was expected to be resourceful, be able to ride a horse and drive a buggy, have the physical strength to remain on duty for long hours, be well trained and endowed with ‘missionary spirit’.

Cecil was 30 when she enlisted with the AANS in November, 1915.

She landed in Egypt shortly before Christmas.

Once there, she served at the 1st Australian Stationary Hospital until October, 1916, when she was sent to London to work at No 2 Australian Auxiliary Hospital at Southall.

This hospital became a specialist hospital to care for amputees and the fitting of artificial limbs.

Nurse Gordon returned to Australia in April, 1917, re-enlisted and sailed from

Melbourne per SS ‘Karoola’, bound for Bombay.

There, she was posted to the Victoria War Hospital and promoted to Sister.

Nurse Gordon served in India until October, 1918, when she resigned her position to be married in the UK.

Cecil married Roger Horace Ansell, who was an Engineer Lieutenant Commander with the Royal Indian Marines.

In February, 1922, the couple left England, bound for Australia.

In June, 1922, Cecil gave birth to their only child, a son called John.

Roger retired from the Royal Navy in 1924 and worked for a time on the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In 1926 he became an Engineer at the Burrinjuck Power Station, where he remained until 1937, when he took up the position of Superintendent at the Yanco Power Station.

During World War II, Cecil was active with the Yanco Women’s Voluntary Service.

The group worked on comforts for the Allied troops, and in 1941 were reported to have handed in many pairs of socks to be sent overseas.

Roger retired in 1954, and by the early 1960s was living with Cecil in Turvey Park, Wagga.

It was here that Cecil died in 1968 at the age of 84.

Roger died six years later, at the age of 90.

Both Cecil and Roger are buried in the Wagga Monumental Cemetery.