Sister Reidy: saviour of Kawhia hospital
HISTORY
A little cottage on a hill overlooking Kawhia Harbour is a constant reminder of a tough and compassionate Irishwoman who defied officialdom and refused to desert the people of the town.
She was Mary Reidy, known by the respectful title Sister Reidy, and she typified the determination and resilience of pioneer women who gave so much of themselves and asked so little during a lifetime of service to their communities.
She was born into a Catholic family in County Clare, Ireland, in 1880.
Her parents met and married as Irish immigrants in New Zealand before returning to Ireland.
Mary’s mother died when she was 16 and the family returned to New Zealand.
For Mary, that meant ‘‘going into service’’ and she started work as a domestic at Mater Hospital in Auckland in 1902. In 1911, she moved to Hamilton to begin formal training as a nurse, completing the course two years later, at the outbreak of World War I.
She served with the New Zealand Army Nursing Service in France during that war. The wounded men she nursed back to life and the traumatic effect of war on them gave her a lifelong admiration and affection for servicemen.
Although she never married, she dedicated her life to caring for them and going into battle for them when they were treated unfairly by authorities.
There were few comforts for wounded soldiers and she would often ‘‘borrow’’ money from other medical staff to buy ‘‘her boys’’ beer and tobacco, winning their undying affection. After the war she returned to New Zealand and in 1921 was sent by the Waikato Hospital Board to Kawhia, then a township of about 300 Maori and Pakeha people, to close the uneconomic local hospital.
Few people realised the hospital was on the site of the Karere Atua Pa, which had seen many battles in ancient times.
Sister Reidy fought another battle over the site, using her gentle Irish charm, hard work and selfless dedication to people in need, rather than weapons of war. For the following 26 years, she refused to close the hospital and the campaign cost her all the little money she ever earned. She never used conventional drugs; her only medicines were brandy, aspirin and motherly care.
To raise money to keep the hospital open, she established an annual ball in the township.
When there was no resident doctor in Kawhia, Sister Reidy and her trainee nurses provided the only medical service for a vast area of the west coast, which stretched from Aotea Harbour in the north to beyond Taharoa in the south and many miles inland.
Many of her elderly patients spoke little English, there were few roads, and most people travelled by horse, boat or on foot.
In her little hospital, the nurses delivered ‘‘difficult’’ babies, set broken bones, stitched wounds and nursed the dying. One of Sister Reidy’s many claims to fame was her ability to cure pneumonia, a common and often fatal, condition when men worked in all weathers often wet and cold for hours on end. She is reputed to have never lost a case, relying on home cooking, brandy, fresh air, and lots of laughter and fun.
While she would forgive an old soldier almost anything, she was a strict chaperone for the young women on her staff, enforcing curfews and safeguards in their romantic ventures.
She kept scanty records of patients and their treatments, to the horror of the hospital board’s senior staff, but few tried to make her conform and those who did never tried again. Her Irish eyes would snap and, although she never used coarse language in public, she could blister the ears off anyone unfortunate enough to cross her.
Sister Reidy was the first member to enrol in the Kawhia sub-branch of the Te Kuiti RSA in 1932. The Kawhia Hospital grounds were used for reunions of old soldiers, where she fed them and looked after them until they were fit to go home.
When she was 72, Sister Reidy retired and the hospital was finally closed.
For all her dedication and service to soldiers and the Kawhia community, she had nowhere to live and no money but ‘‘her RSA boys’’ got together and built her a little cottage overlooking the town and harbour, which she shared with a disabled brother.
In 1956, she was awarded the MBE for her services to nursing in remote communities and the welfare of returned servicemen. Then, in 1969, at almost 90 years old, she fell and broke her hip and she was taken to Waikato Hospital, where she died five years later.
After a requiem mass in Hamilton, her old soldiers took her back to Kawhia and buried her in the RSA section of their cemetery.
The beer provided for the old soldiers after the burial was reputed to have been provided by Sister Reidy sometime before her death as her ‘‘last shout for her boys’’. It is one of many legends about a remarkable pioneer woman of Waikato.
(I knew this wonderful lady when I was a kid and I remember her cottage being built. I attended her funeral in 1974 – I’ve never seen so many singing drunk old soldiers before or since.)
Want to get in touch with Tom? Email him on tomoc@clear.net.nz.