Mary Looney

Mary Frances Looney was a New Zealand civilian and wartime nurse, born in Winton, Southland, on 6 August 1886 and dead in Dunedin on 29 August 1961. The second of eleven children of a farming family, she was educated at St Catherine's College in Invercargill and trained as a nurse at Southland Hospital, where she became acting matron in 1913. In 1914 she was appointed matron at Gore Hospital and later that year joined the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, serving on the hospital ship Maheno and at the New Zealand Stationary Hospital in Cairo. In October 1915 she was aboard the troop ship SS Marquette when it was torpedoed and sunk in the Aegean; she survived by clinging to the tail of a mule for eight hours, and her hair, lost through scalp injuries, grew back white. She went on nursing in France and England until the war ended and was made an Associate of the Royal Red Cross by King George V. Afterwards she was matron at Hanmer Springs and Invercargill and ran her own private hospital until she married in 1921.