Maud Butler was a 16-year-old girl living in NSW’s Blue Mountains when World War I broke out.
The teenaged waitress didn’t want to stay at home while the young men around her went to the front line– so she took radical action.
“I had a terrible desire to help in some way, but I was only a girl,” Maud later told reporters. “I decided to do something for myself.”
Maud’s crafty plan was so remarkable, it’s now being researched by historian Professor Victoria Haskins, who has received a grant to research women and war.
Writing for the ABC along with an ABC journalist, Haskins recounts how the fiesty teenager visited the dock at Sydney’s Woolloomooloo Bay in December 1915 to see the troopships there, then resolved to return dressed the next day disguised as a male officer.
She then had her hair chopped off and set about obtaining an Australian Imperial Force uniform.
“I bought the tunic and breeches from a soldier and the puttees [cloth wound around the leg for protection] in George Street and the cap in Bathurst Street,” she said.
“I could get no regulation tan boots that I could wear. I tried everywhere, but it was of no use,” she said. “So I had to chance it.”
Dressed as a male soldier, Maud returned to the dock and stowed away on a troopship — hiding overnight before creeping out to mingle with the soldiers, as the ABC reports.
Maud played cards with the real officers and subsisted on lollies she’d brought with her, hatching a plan to break into the ship’s kitchen.
But her game was up when a suspicious officer spotted her non-regulation boots and demanded identification.
“It was these wretched black boots,” Maud said. “I could kick these boots round the room for vexation.”
The officer hadn’t worked out she was female — but Maud confessed the whole story when he requested she undergo a doctor’s examination.
The captain said she would have to board the next passenger liner home.
“Then I cried for the first time. It was hard luck, wasn’t it, now?” Maud said. “The captain was a jolly fellow. He asked me why I didn’t get tan boots and that made me cry more.”
Speaking to reporters after she was returned to land, Maud said she aspired to work as a nurse at the front line.
She said she intended to return to Sydney and “find some way of learning the work and joining the Red Cross service”.
“It is a pity if they cannot find a way for me to be of some service to the poor wounded men,” she said. “I learned first aid and was reckoned very good at it,” she said.
“I shall be at the front yet, you’ll see.”
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Maud Butler (married name was Hulme (divorced in the 1930s) then married again as Rutherford (1940s) went to night school to get her required high school qualification in mathematics so she could study to become a midwife. She then studied in the early 1930s at midwifery training for a year at South Sydney Hospital and became a registered nurse. She worked in maternity wards in hospitals and then ran her own small private hospital in South Parade Campsie for mothers and babies. She lived for many years in Oswald St Campsie and then in Hill St Campsie. She was a very capable, opinionated, focussed and independent woman and greatly respected in the Canterbury-Bankstown area. She mothered three children Thomas (Rocky), Cliff and Paula who have now all sadly passed away. All greatly missed.
This was not an incident Maud Butler related to her children and grand children. After this episode, Maud settled down and moved past the derision that inevitabley followed such an action. Maud lived for many years in Campsie, Sydney where she ran a private hospital until retiring. She died in 1987 aged 88 and was buried at the Rookwood cemetery.