Mabel Brookes

Brookes with her husband (ca.1910–1915)

Dame Mabel Brookes , DBE (born June 15, 1890 in Raveloe , Victoria , † April 30, 1975 in South Yarra , Victoria) was an Australian writer , activist and philanthropist .

Live and act

Mabel Brookes was born Mabel Balcombe Emmerton in the Australian state of Victoria in 1890. At the age of 18, she became engaged to tennis player Norman Brookes , who became the first Australian to win the Wimbledon tennis tournament . The two were married on April 19, 1911 in St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral in Melbourne . Mabel Brookes and her newborn daughter accompanied her husband on trips to tennis tournaments in Europe and the USA in 1914. During the First World War , she stayed in Cairo in 1915 , where her husband worked as an agent for the Australian branch of the British Red Cross. She helped set up a nurses' home. After her husband was transferred to Mesopotamia , she returned to Melbourne in 1917. At this point, she started writing three novels.

In 1918, Mabel Brookes served on the Royal Children's Hospital committee, became chairman of Children's Frankston Orthopedic Hospital, Anglican Babies' Home, and the Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse. She was best known for presiding over the Queen Victoria Hospital, which she held from 1923 to 1970. During her leadership, she managed to have the hospital expanded by three new wings within ten years.

During the Second World War , she made her Elm Tree House property available to the Red Cross as a convalescent home and looked after Australian and American officers, including the later US President Lyndon B. Johnson . She became the commandant of the Australian Women's Air Training Corps and worked in the ammunition factory in Maribyrnong .

Her endeavors to gain a foothold in politics ended less successfully. Two candidacies for a seat in the Australian Parliament failed. Her charitable work for hospitals and charities was recognized with the award of the title Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1933 and Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1955 .

Mabel Brookes' great-aunt was Betsy Balcombe , who made friends with the exiled Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte on the island of St. Helena as a 13-year-old teenager . Mabel Brookes donated the pavilion , which Napoleon lived in with the Balcombes for two months, to the French nation as a gift. In recognition of this, the French government awarded her the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1960 .

Dame Mabel Brookes published her memoir in 1974, in which she reported on events in her life and encounters with prominent and notable contemporaries. At the age of 84, the mother of three daughters died in South Yarra in 1975.

Web links

• JR Poynter: Brookes, Dame Mabel Balcombe (1890-1975). In: Australian Dictionary of Biography. Volume 13, Melbourne University Press, 1993, pp. 265-266.