WARKWORTH’S DODGY MATRON

By Bryan Jackson

In late 1924, Nurse Nora Bennett left her position as matron at Warkworth Cottage Hospital and was replaced by Victorian-born Margaret Brodie, aged 34. Brodie had recently arrived in Auckland and was interviewed for the position by a representative of the Auckland Hospital Board.

Brodie provided her original nursing certificates and gave the name of her colleague Dr Brown as a referee. Contact was made with Dr Brown, who happened to be in Auckland at the time, who highly recommended Brodie for the position. She was duly appointed and began work at Warkworth in October.

However, within a month she fled, leaving a trail of fraud, false pretences and theft in her wake, not to mention a charge that she used morphine prescribed for patients for herself. The police issued a warrant for her arrest on November 26, stating that she was using a number of aliases.

After leaving Warkworth, Brodie travelled to Wellington and Hawkes Bay, where she worked using the name of Nurse Bennett, her predecessor at Warkworth. Brodie was arrested at Takapau in Hawkes Bay in December and appeared in the Auckland Magistrate’s Court. She pleaded not guilty to two charges of fraud, involving goods valued at £54 1s 9d, using two cheques to the value of £8, attempting to obtain goods valued at £16 9s 8d, having obtained a frock valued at £12 12s by false pretences and the theft of £3 12s. Warkworth businessmen, draper Benjamin Hamilton and grocer Alfred Hopewell, stated that Brodie had given them two cheques that bounced. Mrs Hamilton claimed that

Brodie had gone to Smith and Caughey in Auckland where she bought a frock worth £12 12s and charged it to her account. The theft of £3 12s was from a patient. Defence counsel claimed that Brodie did not know what she was doing at the time as she was full of morphia. Brodie stated in court that she had been addicted to morphia for some considerable time. She was found guilty on seven charges and was later sentenced to three months imprisonment and if she was not deported by that time, then she would serve a full three year term.

The NZ Truth of 10 January 1925 stated: “Margaret Beatrice Brodie is a larcenist, thief, pretender, forger and imposter, a gaol-bird of the first feather and over and above an almost unclaimable drug fiend.”

Upon her release from jail in April, Brodie was deported to Australia. If only the Auckland Hospital Board interviewer had checked her background, he would have discovered that between 1916 and 1923, Brodie had appeared in courts in Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney seven times, and had been imprisoned for a total of 45 months and bound over to the Salvation Army for six months. This finding would certainly have precluded Brodie from becoming matron of the Warkworth Cottage Hospital.

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