How did Canterbury woman Dr Jessie Scott end up with a World War One bayonet?
The bayonet, which Jessie donated to Canterbury Museum in 1944, tells the story of her extraordinary career and life. Bayonets are sharp weapons of war attached to the barrel of a rifle for close quarter fighting. Weapons often tell stories of men at war. But this bayonet tells a different story.
It is the story of a woman who broke through many barriers to pursue a medical career, campaigned for women’s rights, endured great hardship to treat wounded soldiers on the frontlines of World War One (WWI) and refused evacuation to stay behind and help those soldiers when troops invaded Serbia.
Jessie Scott was born on 9 August 1883 in Brookside, about 40 km southwest of Christchurch. She studied medicine at University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1909 when medicine was still a very male-dominated field. Women medical students remained rare in New Zealand until the 1970s. After graduation, Jessie returned to New Zealand and led an isolation hospital in Auckland during the smallpox epidemic of 1913.
Following the outbreak of WWI, Jessie volunteered as a doctor for the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service, a group of volunteers offering medical support for the war. The British government did not want the services of women doctors and New Zealand was also reluctant to take them on. A proposal of support from a group of women doctors to the British War Office was reportedly met with the much-quoted response: "My good lady, go home and sit still." Jessie ended up serving in a unit in Serbia from late 1915.
New Zealand newspapers took an interest in her story and reported on what happened to Jessie. One article quoted from a postcard she wrote to a friend on 24 September 1915. Jessie had arrived in Lazarevac, south of Belgrade and was stationed in a small hospital. At first, there were few war casualties, and she enjoyed the rural setting.
“The country is beautiful with its undulating fields and soft wooded hills. The vineyards are full of grapes,’’ she wrote in the postcard.
But the war was close.
“Big guns were heard in the distance all last Sunday.”
The peace did not last long. In October, German, Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian troops invaded Serbia and Jessie’s hospital quickly became overwhelmed with casualties. On 19 October, the medical team were ordered to evacuate with the Serbian Army to the town of Kruševac, about 170 km to the southeast. Months later, she told a reporter from The Press about this “uncomfortable journey”.
"We had a very adventurous journey to that town. We started in a cattle truck, with as many of our things as we could take and crowded in with other refugees. The journey, which should have lasted one day, occupied three days, and when we got to [Kruševac] we found it so absolutely crowded that there appeared nowhere for us to go. Finally, we asked if the 22 persons comprising our unit could not have one room in the hospital. The Serbian authorities gave us the necessary permission, and so for about two weeks we lived the best way we could in that one room, at night having to sleep on straw mattresses on the floor.”
Soon after their arrival there was a “rush of wounded”.
“An enormous number of wounded came in. The beds were just jammed tightly together, absolutely as many as could possibly be got in.”
The German Army soon encroached again, shelling the town for 2 or 3 hours.
“We began to hear the Germans coming closer and closer and we were given the opportunity of retreating … but half of us remained in order to look after the wounded soldiers in our charge.
“They came in on Sunday morning very quietly. I had gone to the hospital as usual to dress our patients. I was attending to a wounded man when he told me the Germans had come, and, looking through the window I saw them coming down the road.”
They were held by the German army for about a month.
“Food had become frightfully scarce, and there was a great deal of looting …. So short was the supply of food that we only had two meals a day, mainly of haricot beans. The bread was black, and very bad.
“The Germans allowed us to remain, and we went on with our work as if nothing had happened.”
On 13 February 1916, they were evacuated again. Jessie eventually made it to Switzerland, after another long and arduous journey. She went on to serve in Russia, France and Thessaloniki in Greece.
For her contribution to the efforts of the Serbian Army she was awarded the Order of St Sava, third class, by the Serbian government. Exactly how she came to be in possession of the bayonet she donated to Canterbury Museum, produced in Bulgaria in the nineteenth century, remains a mystery. But it is highly likely she acquired it during this eventful period as a battlefront medic.
She returned to New Zealand in 1924 and worked as an obstetrician and gynaecologist, first at Christchurch Hospital and then in her private practice. Jessie was also an honorary gynaecologist to the hospital for 10 years and Lady District Superintendent for the Canterbury and West Coast District of the St John Ambulance Brigade.
After the war, Jessie was heavily involved in women’s organisations and continued to be passionate about women’s rights and education. She was a member of the National Council of Women of New Zealand and president of the Canterbury branch of the Federation of University Women.
When war engulfed the world once again, Jessie stepped up for a second time. She became Deputy Chairwoman of the Women’s War Service Auxiliary. Minutes from a 1942 meeting noted the “members present thought that a woman should be appointed to the Man-Power Committee now that the Committee was placing women in industry”.
The war made women’s work more visible, with many women at home taking on work traditionally done by men. Like many women, Jessie wanted to hold on to the momentum for women’s rights provided by World War Two. She continued to campaign for women's rights for the rest of her life and pursued her medical interest even in retirement. She died in Christchurch in 1959.
In 1945, she gave a speech in Christchurch, parts of which were published in the newspaper:
“We all want a democratic world. Men seem to think that democracy is theirs alone, and when we women try to apply democratic principles in our work they do not always see eye to eye with us.”
She encouraged women to enter public life “so that men and women between them can run the world”.
