A dedicated WWII nurse and cricket lover
In the land of pyramids and swirling sands, Muriel Anderson and a team of fellow nurses picked up hockey sticks and put a group of male doctors to shame.
The world was at war, and the keen sportswoman was in Egypt – a far cry and thousands of kilometres away from her first wartime role in a Dunedin factory.
At the onset of World War II, Muriel was working as a seamstress and was put to work sewing neck bands on army jerseys for the war effort.
The St John volunteer later told family she found it boring and, as was her wont, she needed to help. She enrolled as an army nurse and shipped out of Wellington in December 1941.
Serving with the New Zealand Women’s Army Auxilliary Corps, Muriel cared for wounded and dying soldiers in Egypt, Libya and Italy, and had a stint seconded to the British Army in England and Scotland.
She cared for German prisoners of war and at one point encountered a first cousin from New Zealand who she had never met before. The next day he was dead.
Muriel was decorated for her service with multiple medals and once told her daughter Deni Anderson, ‘‘Lizzie’s sent me a brooch’’, in reference to an award she received in later years on behalf of Queen Elizabeth.
‘‘She had a very, very strong sense of helping other people – and there would have been a sense of duty for her country,’’ son Peter Anderson said.
Muriel Isabella Moss Anderson was born on November 29, 1916, in Otago. She died two days short of her 101st birthday.
Peter, Deni and their sister, Isabel Wyatt, remember their mother as resilient and creative, hard-working and always striving to learn.
‘‘She always put the other people in her life before herself, her family and her husband. Especially for us children, she always put our needs before her own,’’ Peter said.
Muriel had a tough childhood. Her parents, Walter and Ada Borthwick, lost their farm in the Great Depression and she was raised in part by her aunt and uncle, Elsie and Graham Neil.
The couple ran a hotel in the small Otago town of Ettrick. Muriel worked as a cleaner and a waitress and played piano for the dances held in the hall next door.
She had several jobs as a teenager and later drove ambulances for St John. Before feminism was widely known, her mother was pushing boundaries, Deni said.
Muriel was a keen hockey player, but it was cricket where she really made her mark. Before and after the war she captained the Otago women’s team as a wicket keeper and opening batswoman.
In her later years, despite the macular degeneration that ruined her vision, Muriel loved watching cricket and rugby and was looking forward to a test match between New Zealand and the West Indies when she died.
As acknowledgment of her enthusiasm for the sport, her family held her funeral at 11am on Friday, December 1 – the time the Black Caps took to the field at the Basin Reserve.
During her war years, Muriel befriended a young woman from Westport, Joan Anderson. She met Joan’s brother, Gib, in Egypt.
They were married in Dunedin in 1947 before moving to Westport. The couple had their three children in the West Coast town before moving to Christchurch in 1959.
Isabel remembers her mother as always busy; she was a keen gardner, one of the first people in Christchurch to own a microwave oven, and a renowned and imaginative cook.
‘‘That was the thing she was most known for, just feeding the millions. She’d be able to take a can of salmon and feed 10 people out of it,’’ Deni said.
Muriel was a fulltime mother but went back to work when Peter was in his last year of high school in order to afford any university fees if he chose to go – something he was painfully aware of.
She later managed a dry cleaning business, not far from the house she and Gib moved to in 1974 in the suburb of St Martins.
In the mid-1980s, Muriel joined the Mt Pleasant Pottery Club. She had a home workshop with a kiln and a potter’s wheel, and became so proficient in the art she ended up teaching others.
After Gib died in 2000, she lived alone in the house save for the company of a cat – she was a great lover of the animals and always had one.
When the Canterbury earthquakes struck, Muriel was scared but told family she had seen worse when she was in London during the war.
‘‘Every one of the big earthquakes she would say, ‘I survived the blitz, I can get through this. This isn’t as bad as the blitz’,’’ Peter said.
Aged 100, she continued to find ways to help others. After a birthday bash to mark her centenary, Muriel donated all the leftover food to an organisation helping the homeless.
‘‘She has been a role model for us all of our lives and now we have to go on without her, but she will always be alive in our memories and in our hearts every day of our lives,’’ Peter said in his eulogy to his mother.
Muriel is survived by Peter, Deni and Isabel, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.