Jessie Mary Vasey (1897 – 1966), founder of the War Widow’s Guild of Australia, was born on 19 October 1987 at in Roma Queensland. She was the eldest of three daughters to Australian-born parents Joseph Halbert, farmer and grazier and his wife Jessie (nee Dobbin). Young Jessie attended Moreton Bay Girls’ High School, Brisbane. After the family moved to Melbourne in 1911, she was sent to Lauriston Girls’ school and Methodist Ladies’ College.
While studying at the University of Melbourne (B.A. Hons, 1921), she lived at Trinity College Hostel (later Janet Clarke Hall). On 17 May 1921 at St Matthew’s Church of England, Glenroy, Jessie married George Alan Vasey, an army officer; they were to have two sons.
An outspoken woman, she loved literature and archeology, an earned a reputation as a bluestocking. She assumed her role as a solider’s wife with confidence and ease, and became an accomplished hostess. George’s service entailed frequent moves – between 1928 – 29 and 1934 – 37 the family was based in India. By the eve of World War II they were back in Victoria, where they bought a property at Wantirna, in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges.
When George sailed for the Middle East in December 1939, Jessie threw her energies into the war effort. Having become involved in the Australian Comforts Fund, she served as a secretary of the Australian Imperial Force Women’s Association, a body which sought to help soldiers’ wives and widows. Her work made her familiar with war widows’ financial and emotional burders and moved her to ameliorate their plight.
She had a keen sense of the particular anguish of women whose husbands had been killed accidentally rather than in action. In a twist of cruel irony, her own husband was killed in an aeroplane crash in March 1945. On their last evening together, he had told her to “stick to the war widows and when I come back you shall have every atom of help I can give”.
In October 1945 Mrs Vasey wrote to all Victorian war widows, urging them to attend a meeting to form a craft guild. About 300 women did so. On 22 May 1946 the War Widows’ Craft Guild help its first meeting, with Vasey as president. She set about making the guild a national organisation and traveled extensively. Branches were formed in New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia in 1946, in Tasmania and Queensland in 1947 and in the Australian Capital Territory in 1951.
In November 1951 Vasey had convened a national conference which adopted a federal constitution and formed the War Widows’ Guild of Australia.
Please stay tuned for the next part of Jessie Vasey’s story.