1892 - 1985

Bondi’s Beatrice “Maud” Beetham was one of the Australian “women who knew thunders of war” nursing wounded soldiers across the globe during World War I. In a retrospective on their service in 1934, The Australian Women’s Weekly lamented that “from the four corners of the Commonwealth comes an occasional word of the women of whom we hear so little and of whom the world should hear a good deal more”.

The Weekly said: “These women of the [Australian Imperial Force care for] these battered warriors … with all the sympathetic care that immortalised them in the hospitals abroad. On their return from active service some of them married their soldier patients, others continued in their lives of sacrifice with the wounded …”

On her return to Australia, Beetham married Lieutenant Colonel Ross Jacob, whom she met on the ship home. She was named in the Weekly’s story: “Few … have excelled Sister Beetham for a sturdy bit of pioneering. She took unto herself a husband and was last seen trekking into the Nullabor Plain with her household effects stacked mountains high on a camel caravan.”

Maud was the third child born to Albert and Mary Beetham, in 1892. She trained as a nurse and, aged 24, enlisted for war service in 1916, while her family lived at 213 Birrell St, Bondi.

In September 1918 she returned to Sydney on the same ship as a Jacob, a veteran of the Gallipoli campaign. They married in March 1919 and had one son, Kenneth Reginald, in 1920. The couple went to South Australia to live on the “good deal of property” Jacob’s family owned. He became a successful pastoralist listed in Who's Who in Australia in 1929 and 1936.

Their son fought on the Kokoda trail in World War II, while Maud worked for the Red Cross Society and the Fighting Forces Comforts Fund.

Maud became a good friend of Eileen Hardy (1893-1980) of Hardys wines. They shared a taste for 11 o'clock champagne.

Courtesy the Australian War Memorial.