On 2 May 1919 in The Rosewood Register and Marburg Mail and then on the 9 May in another local paper, an advertisement was placed announcing the opening of St Kilda Hospital in Rosewood. Just beneath the Rosewood Register notice was another saying ‘Motor Car for hire at any time day or night. A. H. Stubbs c.o. St. Kilda Hospital Rosewood. Arthur Herbert Stubbs was the husband of Nurse Stubbs and continued to drive the local ‘taxi’ as one of his many jobs including a cream run, sharpening lawn mowers and mending bicycles, tasks which were continued by his son Henry.
St. Kilda’s Private
Hospital.
Nurse Stubbs (nee Fullekrug),
certificated, begs to announce
that she has opened a private hospital
and nursing home on the premises
in John Street, opposite Dr. Wallace’s
(formerly known as St. Florence’s).
Maternity patients received and
morning cases attended.’
Records of the Rosewood Shire Council 16/7/19 show Augusta Phyllis Stubbs paying rates and taking over from Catherine Kucks, also a nurse. Nurse Kucks generally known as Kate, had run a nursing home in Brisbane Street Ipswich until she sold it 1911. She then advertised starting a Nursing Home at John St. Rosewood in September 1911. A family descendent of Nurse Kucks indicated that her brothers had helped to build the hospital. Newspaper records show her working with Dr Wallace who was opposite the nursing home which was known as St Florence’s. There are records of births at St Florence’s in 1917 with the doctor named as Dr Wallace and the nurse listed as Nurse K. Kucks. Nurse Kucks died 29 December 1917.
After going through probate the property was ready to be sold.
Then from 1918 to 1924 records of births at St Florence’s showed the doctor named as Dr Wallace and the nurse listed as Annie Hines who was the daughter of Nurse Kucks.
This provides a bit of a mystery as to what happened to St Kilda after it opened in May 1919, at the same time as the Spanish Flu was just starting to spread into Queensland, and the first lot of birth records showing it as St Kilda on the birth certificates with Nurse Stubbs in attendance in December 1924. There are also a number of obituaries and accident reports referring to St Florence’s between March 1920 and May1922.
So let’s look at the background to Nurse Stubbs.
Augusta Phyllis Füllekrug was born in October 1882 at Mt Walker though there is no registration of the birth of a child by that name. She grew up on farms around Rosevale and Mr Mort where her German immigrant parents raised 5 children and lost 5 other children in those difficult early days of settlement. Her father Heinrich Füllekrug had arrived in Australia in May 1859 just before Queensland became a state. He tried his hand at the Taloom gold diggings, worked at Peak Mountain Station and Fassifern Station, drove cattle into Victoria and finally selected land around Rosevale to farm and later in the Franklyn Vale and Merryvale areas. He married Maria Weber in 1869. She had arrived in 1866 and joined her sister Catherine who had arrived earlier. She worked as a seamstress at Cribb’s.
Augusta Phyllis was enrolled at Rosevale State School in 1888 and then grew up in the Mt Mort/Merryvale area. In 1902 she began her training as a nurse at the Ipswich General Hospital. She was one of the youngest nurses there and was there during an outbreak of typhoid. She resigned in 1904 to take up a position at the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum, Goodna. By 1910 she was working in Toowoomba at Willowburn Mental Hospital before working at Matron Morell’s ‘St Kilda Private Hospital’ Toowoomba which opened in 1912. She admired Matron Morell and later modelled her own hospital on hers.
APA citation – KILDA PRIVATE HOSPITAL. (1912, June 29). Darling Downs Gazette (Qld. : 1881 – 1922), p. 5. Retrieved April 14, 2019, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article179976398
She married Arthur Herbert Stubbs in March 1914. The Stubbs family were half share or managing on Mort’s property. Arthur had a partner in a bike shop in Toowoomba and the business was taken over in January 1914 just before he married. Augusta Phyllis was about 32 when she married him. They started on the family farm and were half shares on a second farm. She had a still born breach baby boy before the twins Eric and Henry were born in April 1916. They were delivered by her mother at the family property at Grey’s Plains, Mt Mort area. Her first daughter Corinna (Corrie) was born January 1918 and she was pregnant with her second daughter Vera (due in May 1919) when she visited a bank to get a loan to buy her own hospital.
The bank asked her what security she had. She said she had a hard working husband and was hard working herself, with three children and another on the way. But the best security was probably that they knew her father who was a big property owner. Her father died 21 January 1919.
According to a family story she established St Kilda in John Street Rosewood. Then she had a breakdown through overwork. We assume someone took it over while she went back to the farm based on the record of births. This was most likely Nurse Hines, whose name appears on birth certificates during that period. We also know Nurse Stubbs’ mother came to live with her for a few years at St Kilda until she died in 1929. So a possible timeline is 1919 the hospital opened under the name St Kilda but reverted back to the name St Florence’s from 1921 until 1924.
A notice was placed in The Rosewood Register and Marburg Mail each week from January 1921 until the end of the year saying: Nurse Hines (certificated) wishes to notify the public that she has moved to the premises lately known as St Kilda Hospital (opposite Dr Wallace), which will be known in the future as St Florence Hospital. Terms on application. Morning cases attended to.
The Stubbs family were most likely there 1919 – 1920 when newspaper records refer to St Kilda. There was a QT newspaper reference to sale of Nurse Stubbs’ furniture in November 1920, plus the notices in 1921 showing the change in the name of the hospital. They most likely returned to the family farm 1921-1923, then came back to Rosewood in 1924. (The twins, Henry and Eric, enrolled at Merryvale School in 1922, and sister Corrie in 1923, then they all enrolled at Rosewood State School in February 1924 and Vera in July 1924.) The story goes that at the farm the guinea fowls were calling and the kids said even they were saying “Go back, go back, go back to Rosewood,” so they all moved back to the hospital. The nursing registration records show a name change from Füllekrug to Stubbs in July 1924 which is further proof of the move back to St Kilda by the family. She had first registered under the name of Füllekrug in 1912 when the Queensland Nurses Registration Board was established.
There were very few nurses in the country districts. They called on Nurse Stubbs a lot to come for confinement cases or other problems when a doctor was not available. When a boy from Rosevale cut his foot on an adze, she stitched it up. Her sister Annie lived at Mt Walker and during the time they were back at the farm, she helped to deliver as a home birth her niece Jill Gough in 1922. Prior to setting up St Kilda, she had also assisted in the birth of Gough siblings Iris in 1915 and Paddy 1917 at their Mt Walker farm.
Arthur Stubbs, who was not involved in the daily affairs of the hospital, had a small farm behind the hospital and grew sorghum and vegetables and had a few cows and chickens. The property next door, 47 John St., until recently owned by the Ludlow family, was owned by Henry Füllekrug, Phyllis’ brother, so they also grew crops on that land to service the hospital. Arthur also ran a milk and cream transport business from 1933 which served the local dairy farmers of the Rosewood District and people could hire him to drive them in his car.
St Kilda Hospital held a maximum of 12 patients. It closed at the end of 1947 after changes to hospital regulations. Unfortunately all the records that had been stored under the house for many years disappeared, possibly into an incinerator. Grandchildren recall seeing the record books under the house in a storage room and noted that some told what was given in payment, frequently farm produce, probably common during the depression years.
Although the hospital is most remembered for the number of births that occurred there, it is also a place where many people were taken due to illness of accidents. Unfortunately these are the ones most reported in the newspapers of the time. From the influenza epidemic in 1919 to the tragic rail accident in 1946, St Kilda and Nurse Stubbs feature in a number of reports.
Copyright 2020 Jenny Stubbs
