Iris Latham: A Tui Leading the Way in the RSA

A Tui called Iris Latham has led the fight for women's rights in the New Zealand Returned Services Association (RSA). Not that Iris would describe herself as a feminist - just an ex-servicewoman with jobs to do.

This straight-shooting leader, in her 90s when interviewed in 2004, has held top positions in the RSA; written The WAAC Story, about the New Zealand Women's Army Auxiliary Corps; challenged RSA decision-makers and penned hundreds of news stories about the association's activities. She has also been honoured by the RSA.

This humble high-flyer was a Tui in World War Two. From her room in the Molly Ryan Lifecare Complex in New Plymouth, Iris talks quietly about her life. Born in Gisborne on 11 November 1912 and christened Marjorie Iris Somervell, she was just a girl during World War One. But in World War Two, Iris was 28 and ready to serve her country. "I was a buyer in a department store in Gisborne for 11 years - and then I wasn't" she says.

Instead, she was one of 30 New Zealand women chosen from hundreds of applicants to take part in a secret overseas assignment. Interviewers, Mrs Vida Jowett and Miss Amy Kane, told the chosen ones to keep ‘mum’ about the mission and not talk to newspapers. "The next weekend the Auckland Weekly News came out with a page full of photographs" Iris says.

All contact with the women was made through telegrams, which flew as fast as Owl Post in a Harry Potter book. A telegram was a short message tapped out on a Post Office telegraph machine and hand-delivered in written form to the person it was addressed to. Telegrams - for day-to-day communications - ceased in New Zealand on 31 August 1988.

In World War Two, the telegraph service was an essential communication tool. "We were sent about 40 telegrams, 'report to so and so', 'get your uniforms made locally if you can'. Then the next five minutes there'd be another one" Iris says. Each WAAC was given an allowance by the government to pay for her uniform. This consisted of a made-to-measure khaki tunic of soft wool, a matching greatcoat with leather buttons and a brown felt hat edged with a short brim turned up at the back. "The lisle stockings were a ghastly greenish-khaki colour that the girls called 'toheroa soup'," Iris says.

Outfitted in her patriotic garb, Iris was ready to serve her country. "We were the first girls inducted into the New Zealand Army as different, separate from the nursing corps." Unlike the Army nurses, the WAACs were unranked. "They called us a welfare unit" she says. "We had to report to Wellington and within a fortnight we were on a troop ship. The year was 1941 - it was before the Japs came in [to the war]. Our mothers came down to see us off before we sailed" Iris says.

When the 7th Reinforcements and new Army women boarded the Dutch ship, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the mission was still a mystery. "Nobody told us where we were going. There were 2000 [male] troops on board and it took us six weeks to get there" she says. The voyage had its ups and downs. One of the highlights was the boat - a passenger liner still decked out for comfortable journeys. "She had not been stripped for a troop ship and she was beautiful." For Iris, the major low was the roll of the waves. "I was seasick for the first week" she says. Stormy seas added to her churning stomach and the weather turning unbearably cold.

Next, many of the passengers were struck by measles and the women were blamed for the epidemic. "The Auckland crowd brought them on board - the men" she says. "No room for quarantine, so on the way down two or three decks for meals, the girls went down one side of the double staircase and the men the other. No matter that they all converged on the landings. Honour and the ship's Medical Officer were satisfied."

During most of the voyage, the sexes were segregated. "Once a week they had Troops Day when they could bring their mending" she says. More than 60 years on, Iris wonders aloud how the soldiers managed to damage their clothing on such a regular basis.

Finally, the ship arrived in Port Tewfik, at the southern end of the Suez Canal, where the women were greeted by Barbara Freyberg. "She was still a Mrs then" Iris says. As the wife of General Bernard Freyberg, Barbara later became Lady Freyberg.

Iris has fine memories of this kindly woman, who gave the WAACs an endearing label. "The General had his 'Kiwis' and Mrs Freyberg had her 'Tuis' - and the nickname stuck" Iris says. On a personal note, the leading lady knew all her charges by name, and never forgot them. "We used to get a Christmas card every year until she died - she sent them to us" Iris says.

From Tewfik, the WAACs went by train to Cairo and their new home in the New Zealand Forces Club. The 13-storey building had previously been the old Italian club. "There were flats furnished for us on the ninth floor."

Iris writes about the women sharing rooms in twos and threes, with little privacy and bed legs set upon kerosene tins to beat the bedbugs. This stilted plan didn't always work. "One girl went into hospital infected with bedbug bites. Her feet were swollen to the size of balloons - she was really allergic to them" she says.

Other tricks to make life more bearable worked a treat. "One lesson soon learned was to close the Venetian blinds to foil the neighbours with their field glasses trained on bedroom windows" she says.

The club itself was initially an uninviting place. "General Freyberg had sent a letter to [Prime Minister] Peter Fraser asking if some young women could be sent from New Zealand to give the club a homely touch." That was the WAACs' “secret mission”. Iris says their job was to staff the club and make the troops feel welcome. "Mainly they wanted a cup of tea and, if they wanted to talk, they talked. Out came their paybook. Photographs - all the precious ones - were buried in there. Girlfriends, wives, children; we had to admire them all."

The club was open to all troops from the 8th Army, made up of New Zealanders, Australians, British Army Regiments and Airforce, the Highland Division, Poles, South Africans and Greeks. "They were all missing home." Iris says the conversations with the men were all the same: "We'd say, 'Hello, how are you, what's your name' and the next day they would be gone up the blue and you wouldn't see them again." She explains that “gone up the blue” was an Australian term for “gone where the action is”.

The women followed a two-week roster with alternating shifts. Each WAAC was supposed to get one half-day off per week, but sickness often ruined that plan. Two girls worked in the library, one in the club office, and the rest were spread out in the preparation room and the club lounge, where there was an ice-cream counter. Fresh ice-cream was made at the Maadi Army Camp and was served with fruit salad, made in a baby's bathtub. It included tins of pears, peaches and pineapples. Iris says the pineapple came from Singapore and must have been in stock for a long time. "Because if it was light and rattled, it probably contained the biggest cockroach you could find in a day's march; only the one, it having eaten all its companions and the pineapple too!"

Fresh orange juice was also served at the club. The Tui on juice duty ended up covered in pithy fallout. "She usually went off the counter with squelching shoes, juice and pips in her hair and all over her working smock, soaked right through to her skin" Iris writes. This juice was a necessity to cure troops suffering from scurvy-induced desert sores, caused by a lack of fruit and vegetables.

The club also served the next best thing - sliced bread. White loaves were made daily at the Maadi Camp and delivered to the club. "Right at the doorway was the General's gift, pride and joy, the bread-cutting machine, which was the first thing he showed to every VIP who visited the club" Iris writes.

When the girls did their own visiting - shopping or having a night out in Cairo - they had to have escorts. These ranged from privates to full colonels, who accompanied the Tuis to their destinations and then went their own ways. Iris says protection of the Tuis wasn't just a whim of General Freyberg. "...in those uncertain days there was quite a lot of resentment against British troops in the city and consequently some danger for the girls had they gone singly..."

Sometimes the Tuis took troops on tours to the pyramids. "They had been in the desert for about three years and never been near Giza - it was foreign country still." Other duties included packing parcels for prisoners of war, visiting the Canal (tented) hospital, writing letters for blinded troops and helping Kiwi soldiers shop for gifts to send home.

Iris spent little more than a year in Cairo. "I was there for 372 days, but I finished with 10 weeks in and out of hospital," she says. The problem was her throat, which kept becoming infected. Iris got sicker and sicker, until finally she was put on a hospital ship bound for New Zealand. "And I was seasick again. When I returned home I was 7 stone (44.4 kilograms) - I had been 9 stone (57kgs) when I went away. It took me four years to get myself together again."

After a few months recuperating, Iris was ready for more adventure. She crossed the Tasman, where she worked as a civilian for the Australian military at the Bandiana Army Base near the border of New South Wales and Victoria. But she kept her Tui uniform. "You didn't want to part with that because that was ours - we paid for that, and you never knew what you'd want it for."

When a Manpower officer asked Iris if she would like another, better-paid job, she jumped at the chance. "So I went to work for the United States Army rail transport office. And there was a tech Sergeant, six-foot something tall; the meanest so-and-so I have ever struck" Iris says. "He used to sell his issue cigarettes to his Aussie girlfriend. He was saving up for a chicken farm in Kentucky."

Iris's railway job involved writing up shipping changes of items like belly tanks, orange juice and stores, which were transported between military camps in Australia. At the time, the Japanese were in Papua New Guinea, just above the north-east coast of Australia, within striking distance of Darwin and Cairns.

But the southern Allies fended off the Japanese and Iris's work dwindled. Next, she moved to Melbourne to be near her boyfriend.

A few months before her shift, Iris had a chance encounter with a New Zealand soldier called Laurie Latham. "I met him on a railway station in the middle of Australia, outside a bar." She chose him by the cut of his cloth. "He was the only Kiwi to get off the train. He says 'How the hell did you know I was a Kiwi?' I said 'Well, look at your uniform'." Iris says she could pick out the home-grown material at a glance. "Because our uniform was the best of the whole forces."

After a couple of months at the New Zealand High Commission in Melbourne, where she was useful spelling Māori names, Iris and her beau went to Sydney. The liaison officer at the Victoria Barracks proved to be a good cobber to the ex-Tui. He asked "Have you still got your uniform Iris? Climb back into it and I will give you a leave pass to swan around Sydney."

He also organised her air transport back to New Zealand. Iris and Laurie were married at Gisborne in April 1946.

"Four children and ten years later I joined the RSA" she says. She first signed up at Gisborne but the Latham family moved to Lower Hutt, so Iris became a member of the Hutt Valley Branch of the Wellington RSA.

At Wellington's annual meeting, Iris found herself in the hot seat. Army Matron MacKay and most of her committee were retiring, leaving places to fill. But no members put their hands up. "So it went around the room like a rattle and I got indignant over this and I said it was an honour to be a president of an ex-services branch. And they said 'Right, if you can talk like that, you can be our president'," she says. "There was a bit of humming and haahing from some of the sisters [nurses], because I was only a Tui - never had any rank - and they were matrons."

But Iris got the top job, and found herself on the way to the annual meeting of the New Zealand RSA. "There was a rather hot potato of a remit going up from Wellington and none of the men wanted to touch it" she says. Iris was given the job of speaking against the contentious issue. "The remit was to buy a brand new veterans' home out at MacKay's Crossing, way out in the wop-wops," she says.

Iris researched the proposed site, discovering there were no shops there and a train ran twice a day. She also spoke to nursing director Mary Lambie, who believed a new home should be built somewhere down town in Wellington. "So they could see a bit of life going past."

When Iris presented the facts to the annual meeting, she caused an uproar. "All hell broke loose. There were men climbing over the backs of seats shouting at me, waving fingers at me. I was surrounded by irate men. "I was the only women in the place with 300-odd delegates, but if you have got something to say and you have done your homework, you say it. I discovered afterwards that the original remit, against which I was talking, was supported by General Freyberg, who was the governor-general, and Sir Howard Kippenberger, was the retiring RSA president" Iris says. "And so I was accused of practically putting up a vote of no-confidence in DEC - I didn't even know what DEC was." DEC stands for Dominion Executive Committee. "I was quite innocent. I had no idea I had put my foot into it up to my neck."

The hullabaloo was put on hold, while incoming RSA president Ken Fraser was fetched to calm the commotion. He did so, and the remit against the site of the veterans' home was passed and was taken to the full conference. Iris spoke again, causing another rumpus. "By this time the word had gone around the whole conference, 'Come and listen to this women'." In the end, Iris's remit was passed.

Not only did she speak up on RSA matters, she also wrote about them. For more than 10 years, she wrote a weekly news column on association events and activities for the Hutt Valley newspaper. "If I couldn't find any news, I dug into the history books."

Eventually, she wrote her own. When she learnt that the Sir Howard Kippenberger, the RSA's official historian, didn't consider the WAACs important enough to cover, Iris was outraged. "Of course that led to me assembling what we have got in the WAAC Story. (It was) sheer bloody mindedness, that's all" she says.

Before the book was published in 1986, it received praise from on high. Beside the contents page is a letter from then Minister of Defence, Frank O'Flynn, saying: "Iris Latham has done a National service with the preparation and publication of this book..."

In 1970, Iris herself made the history books. As a Hutt Valley delegate to the dominion conference held in the Wellington Town Hall, she once more found herself in the spotlight. "From the floor they elected their top committee" she says. "I was the first women to be elected to the Dominion Executive Committee in 62 years."

On 6 October that same year, Iris received an RSA Certificate and Gold Star Badge. Then her name was added to the association's Special Honours List. The book, containing the list and such famous signatures as Earl Mount Batten and King George VI, was stolen from Wellington RSA headquarters on 31 August 2002. It is still missing.

But Iris has her own memories and a certificate on the wall. Above that are two black and white pictures. One shows a man in a New Zealand Army uniform; a down-to-earth Kiwi. The other is of a smiling WAAC - a Tui ready to soar...

Cooper, A. (1992). Cairo in the War 1939-1945. London: Hamilton.

Latham, I. (1986). The WAAC Story. Lower Hutt: I Latham.

Smith, R, (2000). Up the Blue: a Kiwi private's view of the Second World War. Wellington: Ngaio Press.