Royal Red Cross : Mrs M J W Armfield, Stafford House Committee, Zulu War 1879

Royal Red Cross (Queen Victoria pattern). Unnamed as issued.

Awarded to Sister Mary Jane West Armfield, a nurse sent to the Zulu Wars in 1879, together with two doctors and six other nurses, by the Stafford House South Africa Aid Committee.

Mrs Armfield, nee Briscoe, was born in Lambeth, London between 1849 and 1852 but migrated to New South Wales with her parents and two young brothers at an early age, possibly in 1852-53. In 1870 she married Alfred Watson Armfield in Sydney. She was then working as a governess, while Watson described himself as a journalist. He had been born in 1840 in England and had worked in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand, using journalism to promote mining and to support the adoption of new technical inventions.

The Armfields moved to Victoria after their marriage. On 2 June 1873 they left Melbourne for South Africa, where Alfred Armfield found work as a geologist and goldfields inspector. On 8 February 1879 he died of fever at Erstelling, Transvaal. It is not known whether Mrs Armfield was resident in South Africa at the time, or where she trained as a nurse, but she volunteered for service in South Africa during the Zulu War, and was selected as a civilian nurse by the Stafford House Committee in London.

The Stafford House doctors and nurses left England on 13 June 1879 and arrived at Cape Town in South Africa on 6 July. Sister Armfield, known to her colleagues and patients as Sister Mary, was initially posted to the Durban Base Hospital, arriving there on 11 July where she and another Stafford House nurse, Annette Hornor, were the only women helping to treat 190 patients. On 25 July Sister Armfield moved to the Base Hospital at Fort Napier, at Pietermaritzburg.

Mrs Armfield returned to England and was working at the London Fever Hospital at Islington in London when she was awarded the Royal Red Cross (RRC) in 1884 for 'the special devotion and competency [she] displayed in nursing duties with Her Majesty's troops' during her service in South Africa'. The RRC had been instituted in 1883 and Armfield was one of the first 35 women to receive it.

In 1888 Mrs Armfield married Captain John Rutherford Lumley, who had commanded D Troop, Lonsdale's Horse during the Zulu War. She bequeathed her RRC to the Australian War Memorial 'in memory of her Australian childhood'.