From nurse education, clinical, or workforce issues through to healthy living, Nursing Review has it covered.

The Nurses Memorial Chapel, commemorating those lost on the Marquette, has been closed to the public since the Canterbury earthquakes. But restoration plans are being drawn up and a fundraising campaign is to be launched later this year for the estimated $1 million needed to reopen this unique memorial to nurses and women lost in war.

 

The 1915 Marquette tragedy hit South Island communities particularly hard – nine of the 10 nurses lost were from the south and three of those were from Christchurch.

A collection began for a chapel at a memorial service for the victims at St Michael and All Angels church in November 1915, but the idea lay dormant until revived by matron Rose Muir in 1924. The arts and crafts-style brick chapel, largely financed by public donations but on the Christchurch Hospital site, held its first service at Christmas 1927.

The chapel is a memorial not only to the three Christchurch nurses lost on the Marquette but also to the two nurses who died while working during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

The interdenominational chapel became an integral part of hospital life for trainee nurses, patients and relatives. It was the first hospital chapel in the country and is believed to be the only chapel in the world specially built to
commemorate nurses lost in the ‘Great War’.

It is the only chapel in New Zealand dedicated to remembering women who died in any war. Ray Wootton, a former nurse and Friends of the Chapel president, says nurses dominate the committee and chapel volunteers who formerly
kept the chapel open to the public, regularly did the flowers and raised funds by using the chapel as a popular wedding venue.

But all this came to a halt after the earthquake of 22 February 2011 and the chapel has only been entered since under engineering supervision to retrieve special chapel furniture, artefacts and records now in storage at the Air Force Museum at Wigram.

David Morrell, the former Christchurch City Missioner, chairs the chapel trust and says the chapel is undoubtedly of national significance to the nursing profession in the first instance but also to the Royal New Zealand Nursing Corp which, like the Marquette disaster, is also having its centenary this year.

“I think it’s a very significant building and think it is very important to nursing that it’s restored, and restored to an excellent state. And the trust is certainly committed to that.”

Wootton says the Friends of the Chapel committee meanwhile continues to sell cards of the chapel’s beautiful, nurse-inspired stained glass windows, and is very involved in organising special events to mark the centenary of the Marquette tragedy in late October.

A special memorial church service is to be held at St Michael and All Angels – where the first memorial service was held one hundred years Nurses Memorial Chapel ago – and a special Marquette exhibition sharing the stories of the nurses lost and the survivors is also to be mounted.

“We are hoping to have descendants of the nurses who lost their lives and the survivors
attend the service,” says Wootton. Meanwhile in May 2009 a Greek dive team located and identified the wreck of the Marquette. She rests in 87 metres of water off the Thermaikos Gulf (formerly known as the Gulf of Salonika).

Friends of the Chapel committee member Nanette Ainge says several Christchurch nurses will join a commemorative cruise in September that will sail in the wake of the ANZAC nursing sisters of 1915–1916; they will lay a wreath on the chapel’s behalf above the wreck where the 10 nurses lost their lives.

More information on the chapel and about cards and donations can be found at Friends of Christchurch Nurses Memorial Chapel www.cnmc.org.nz