| Brief Description |
This New Zealand Army Nursing Service nurse's cape (a) in red felt was worn by Sister Vida Mary Katie MacLean, who served in Samoa, Cairo and England from 1914-1918.
Attached to the cape is a New Zealand Army Nursing Service badge (b) comprising a silver pin with a blue wavy bar with the initials N.Z.A.N.S. (New Zealand Army Nursing Service) surmounted by a red cross flanked by two ferns. The cross is surmounted by a crown.
At the outbreak of war, hundreds of nurses from all over New Zealand volunteered for the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, keen to go to war and “do their bit for New Zealand” and “home” which is how Britain was still viewed by settler descendants in New Zealand at the time.
From August 1914 to March 1915 Sister MacLean was attached to the New Zealand Expeditionary Force and served in Samoa. She then joined the first 50 nurses leaving for the northern hemisphere. She served in Cairo and then in the No. 1 New Zealand General Hospital at Brockenhurst in England where she rose to be Matron.
Vida was mentioned in dispatches twice, in 1916 and 1918. Nurses proved their worth at the front and in the large hospitals that cared for the thousands and thousands of wounded and ill.
By the end of the war, 13 New Zealand Army nurses had died and five died later as a result of their war service. Sister MacLean returned to New Zealand and held many different senior nursing and teaching posts. She spent 1938-1955 in Calcutta, developing and running a mother craft clinic. She retired to Whanganui, dying in 1964.
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