As RSAs around the country prepare to mark Armistice Day on November 11, one 105-year-old with links to Te Awamutu will be sifting through her own wartime memories.
105-year-old Joan Daniel is something of a record-breaker in military terms. Photo: supplied
Armistice Day relates to the ending of World War 1. But it is Joan Daniel and her late husband Maurice’s World War 11 experiences that will likely play on her mind.
Joan is believed to the oldest surviving New Zealand army nurse who served in the Middle East during World War 11.
Her daughter is Te Awamutu’s Elizabeth Bayley-Jull, who grew up with her siblings in Auckland where their parents Joan and Maurice settled after the war, and where Maurice established his legal practice.
Joan was born in Auckland on April 1, 1919, and still lives there. Maurice died in 1983. Their daughter Elizabeth and one grandson live in Te Awamutu, while two other grandchildren and three great-granddaughters live in Cambridge.
A wartime photograph of Joan with her then fiancé, Maurice Daniel. Photo: supplied
Elizabeth received confirmation from the Kippenberger Research Centre at the National Army Museum Te Mata Toa in Wellington that Joan was the last known surviving Kiwi army nurse who served in the Middle East during WW2. They said although several women still alive also served in Africa and the Mediterranean, Joan is the only nurse.
“All my life I have heard mum’s story… and my father’s,” Elizabeth said. “Joan was involved with the RSA in Auckland for many years … mostly on the admin side, organising things like reunions, hospital visits and poppy sales.”
In 2017, Joan recorded an interview for the RSA’s Memories of Service series. In it, she told the story of meeting her husband-to-be Maurice Daniel when she was working at the Auckland law firm he then joined as a law clerk.
The couple were engaged before Maurice enlisted at the end of 1940. He was captured in Greece and spent most of the rest of the war in a German POW camp.
Joan, meanwhile, had joined the Red Cross. Although she nurtured no early thoughts of war service, she later applied with a friend. After a staggered start primarily linked to her age, she finally joined up, and with her friend trained at Trentham before embarking for Egypt on the hospital ship Maunganui.
She was initially based in Cairo working at 1NZ General Hospital at Helwan, near Maadi Camp, before being moved later to different centres in the region. There were many good times – one of them the marriage of the best friend who had been with Joan from the start.
The death of three fellow nurses in a vehicle accident was the biggest blight in those early days.
When Joan transferred to Italy, she nursed men with terrible injuries sustained in the Battle of Cassino. She remembers soldiers of the Māori Battalion being particularly good patients, always good natured no matter how serious their wounds.
At the end of three years’ service, Joan applied to come home; she did so and returned to her legal job in Auckland.
Maurice completed his outstanding two law papers while awaiting return to New Zealand following his release. He then went back to work and later started his own practice in Onehunga.
The pair married a month after Maurice’s return in 1945. They had three children. Joan now has nine grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
Joan Young in her WW2 uniform. Photo: supplied
