Ettie Annie Rout

Ettie Annie Rout (later "Ettie Annie Hornibrook") (24 February 1877-17 September 1936) was a Tasmanian-born New Zealander whose work among servicemen in Paris and the Somme during World War I made her a war hero among the French, yet through the same events became "persona non grata" in New Zealand. She married Fred Hornibrook on 3 May 1920 (no children, later separated). She died in the Cook Islands, and is buried there.

Ettie Rout arrived in Egypt in February 1916, and immediately became aware of the soldiers' high venereal disease rate. She saw this as a medical not a moral problem; one which should be approached like any other disease - with all available preventive measures. She recommended the issue of prophylactic kits and the establishment of inspected brothels, and tried to persuade the New Zealand Medical Corps officers to this view, with no success.By June 1917, having realised the venereal disease problem was still very bad and that the New Zealand Medical Corps had not adopted prophylactic measures, she went to London to push it into doing so. Researching among the foremost doctors in this new field, she combined the work of several to produce her own prophylactic kit, containing calomel ointment, condoms and Condy's crystals (potassium permanganate). She sold these at the New Zealand Medical Soldiers Club, which she set up at Hornchurch near the New Zealand Convalescent Hospital.At the end of 1917 the NZEF adopted her kit for free and compulsory distribution to soldiers going on leave. Ettie Rout received no credit for her role in the kit's development and adoption, and for the duration of the war the cabinet banned her from New Zealand newspapers under the War Regulations. Mention of her brought a possible £100 fine after one of her letters, suggesting kits and hygienic brothels, had been published in the New Zealand Times. Ironically, this letter had been instrumental in the decision of the defence minister, James Allen, to approve kit issue. Others, particularly women's groups, accused her of trying to make 'vice' safe. Lady Stout led a deputation of women to ask the prime minister, William Massey, to put an end to Rout's Hornchurch club.In April 1918 Ettie Rout went to Paris where she set up a one-woman social and sexual welfare service for soldiers. As troop trains arrived from the front, she stood on the platform of the Gare du Nord, greeted the New Zealanders - with her trademark kiss on the cheek - and handed out cards recommending the brothel of Madame Yvonne, who had agreed to run her establishment on hygienic lines. Rout regularly inspected it. For her work in Paris and in Villers Brettoneux, the ruined Somme town where she ran a Red Cross depot from 1919 to 1920, the French decorated her with the Reconnaissance française medal.

Similar ironies were found overseas -- her 1922 book, "", was banned in New Zealand, but published in both Australia and Britain. In the latter, it was a bestseller. However, in the House of Lords, a bishop called her 'the wickedest woman in Britain'. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/65866]

Rout died of as the result of a 'self-administered' quinine overdose following her sole postwar return to New Zealand in 1936, in the Cook Islands. She is interred at an Avarua church cemetery. In 1992, Jane Tolerton wrote her biography, and more recently, she has been more critically perceived as a "White Australasia" apologist in Phillippa Levine's recent account of contagious disease legislation within the late nineteenth century British Empire ("Prostitution, Race and Politics", 2003).

Bibliography

*Phillippa Levine: "Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire:" New York: Routledge: 2003: ISBN 0-415-94447-3

*Jane Tolerton: "Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout": Auckland: Penguin: 1992: ISBN 0-14-017216-5

Online Resources, References and Links

* [http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/default.asp?Find_Quick.asp?PersonEssay=3R31 "Dictionary of New Zealand Biography" entry]
* [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/65866 "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography": Rout, Ettie Annie] ( [http://www.oxforddnb.com/ oxforddnb.com; subscription required] )
* [http://www.ibiblio.org/ahkitj/section27/#rout-1922 "Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity" (1922) facsimile copy] , archived at ibiblio.org.
*gutenberg author|id=Ettie_Rout|name=Ettie Rout
**gutenberg|no=16135|name=Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity

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