BETTY JEFFREY was the principal chronicler of the gallant band of British, Dutch and Australian women who for four years faced every known deprivation and humiliation as prisoners in Japanese camps in Sumatra. The British women — 15 of them — were evacuees from Malaya, China and Singapore, and were teachers and missionaries. Margaret Dryburgh, a woman then in her late fifties, matched Jeffrey in her efforts to raise morale, and many women testify to their indomitable courage. Jeffrey’s daily food and water rations consisted of a tablespoon of boiled rice and a tiny pannikin of foetid water. She suffered food poisoning, tropical fever, beri-beri, dengue, cerebral malaria and constant, painful dermatitis. Despite this catalogue of adversities she never once succumbed to inertia, depression or despair.

She nursed women of all nationalities, and when they died she dug their graves. She fought off predatory animals intent on digging up the remains and, if necessary, reburied her friends. She defied her captors; she stole from them and she mocked them when forced to bow at Tenko (roll-call) to the Japanese Emperor.

Her entire nursing career was spent in the context of war. In 1941 she set up the Darley military camp, west of Melbourne. That November she sailed for Malaya and set up an Australian army camp at Malacca on the west coast. The Japanese moved into Malaya on December 19 and the Australians found themselves in the most vulnerable battle-zone of South-East Asia.

Jeffrey’s hospital was evacuated to Singapore in January 1942. On Friday, February 13, she and a party of 50 Australian nurses, were ordered to board the hospital ship Vyner Brooke. On the second day out the ship was bombed, and those who were able swam ashore to Banka Island. Of 53 people shipwrecked, most of them women, 22 were butchered on the beach. They were shot, clubbed to death or bayoneted. This was the manner in which Jeffrey, as one of the survivors, began her imprisonment at Palembang and the various neighbouring hell camps of Sumatra.

At Palembang, she befriended an Englishwoman, the composer and singer Norah Chambers, who conducted an “orchestra” of human voices in music written from memory by Margaret Dryborough. There were no instruments, but about 20 women hummed or crooned. The choir rehearsed with the assiduous zeal of professional musicians, and gave regular concerts for several years. The repertoire included Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Mendelssohn’s Song without Words. There was one professional singer, a British woman known as Mrs Murray, who, Jeffrey reported, “with her glorious soprano voice sang the Fairy Song from The Immortal Hour”.

Jeffrey was liberated late in 1945 by a rescue mission headed by a South African, Major Jake Jacobs. She weighed four stone and four pounds.

She found it difficulty to understand the mentality of her captors. After her release she learnt that Red Cross medicines and food and mail supplies had been withheld from the prisoners. Fresh food, locally supplied, had consistently been allowed to rot in the sun and rain. She called her captors beasts and questioned the very basis of their civilisation. However, two decades later, after visiting Japan, she modified these views and said that much of the old hatred had left her. Nevertheless, she told her biographer, Patsy Adam Smith, “You forget nothing, not a thing, from years like those.”

After her return to Melbourne, Jeffrey spent two years in hospital. On her dis- charge in 1949 she and her close friend Vivienne Bullwinkel (the sole survivor of one Banka Island massacre of 25 Australian nurses) barnstormed the countryside to raise money for the establishment of the Nurses Memorial Centre in St Kilda Road, Mel- bourne. Jeffrey was its first director.

In 1951 she visited London, where she was received by King George V1 and Queen Elizabeth, by Queen Mary (the patron of various Commonwealth nursing associations) and by the Duchess of Gloucestor, wife of the Royal Duke who was wartime Governor-General of Australia.

In 1954 Jeffrey published an account of her wartime experience in White Collies. The book became a bestseller in Australia and in Britain after the screening of the BBC’s series Tenko in the early 1980s. The 1996 film Paradise Road was based on the book.

Jeffrey did not nurse after the war, but instead became a caddy to her friend, the singer and champion golfer Dame Joan Hammond. She was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1987 but, incredibly, was honoured neither by the monarch or by the armed services. The Returned Services League made her a life member two months before her death.

She is survived by a sister.

Betty Jeffrey, OAM, Australian nursing sister and war hero, was born in Melbourne on May 14, 1908. She died there on September 13 aged 92.