Betty Jeffrey

Agnes Betty Jeffrey, OAM was a nurse in the 2/10th Australian General Hospital during World War II, who was captured by the Japanese and interned. She later wrote about her experiences in the book White Coolies.

On 12 February 1942, just prior to the fall of Singapore, a ship called the Vyner Brooke left Singapore bound for Australia, carrying sixty-five nurses among the passengers. The ship was bombed and sunk by the Japanese navy two days later. Fifty-three of the nurses survived the bombing and swam ashore to Banka Island, where twenty-one were machine-gunned in the surf by the Japanese, with only one surviving, Nurse Vivian Bullwinkel. The remainder were taken prisoner and imprisoned for the remaining three and half years.