Betty Jeffrey

Agnes Betty Jeffrey (1908 to 2000) was an Australian nurse, prisoner of war and writer. During the Second World War she served as a nurse with the 2/10th Australian General Hospital and was among the military nurses evacuated from Singapore just before it fell to the Japanese Army. Her ship, the SS Vyner Brooke, was bombed from the air and sunk, and the survivors of her group were taken prisoner and interned with civilian women and children in the Dutch East Indies. In the camp she joined the Women's Vocal Orchestra of Sumatra, which helped hold up morale, and after the war she returned home on 24 October 1945. She and Vivian Bullwinkel then visited hospitals across Victoria to raise the money for the Australian Nurses Memorial Centre in Melbourne, which opened in 1949, and she is noted as one of its founders. Her 1954 memoir White Coolies recounts the internment and was serialised as a radio series the following year.