Our Little Sister

Ethel Mary Lewis was a tiny force of nature, so much so that she earned a nickname that is now inscribed on her grave.
Born in 1880, and called Mary, she was the daughter of clergyman Reverend Thomas Lewis of Monmouthshire and Emma Watson of Over Whitacre, Warwickshire. Her maternal grandfather was an architect.
In 1901 Mary was away from home training to be a nurse at Bristol General Hospital.
The year her father died in 1912 , she emigrated from England to New Zealand and was employed by the Native Nursing Service. There she gained experience nursing in Otaki amongst the Maori population, where she was known as 'The Little Nurse' since she was only 4 ft 11 in tall.
In 1914, she had returned to England and when war broke out she joined the Queen Alexandra nursing service and volunteered to go overseas.
Lewis began nursing at a Belgian field hospital then went on to an Antwerp hospital which had to be evacuated when the Germans arrived.
After a short stint back in England she went to Serbia - right in the trenches on the Bulgarian frontier where she received a slight shrapnel wound to her shoulder. That did not stop her saving the life of a Serbian officer.
When the time came for the great retreat of the army in 1915, she and another nurse organised taking 400 patients through the mountain passes of Albania on foot. The patients however were in bad shape and none survived. But the hospital staff managed to make it, finally reaching safety.
She was awarded the Serbian Order of the White Eagle, Order of St Sava 3rd class, the Serbian retreat medal and the Royal Red Cross.
It was during the war she was given the nickname Little Sister.
So heroic was she during her time in the war that she also ended up with the 1914 - 1915 Star, Victory and General Service Medals, and the Croix de Guerre Belgium.
Mary was not serving with our troops and so never received a New Zealand award for looking after wounded New Zealand soldiers in England as she did not serve on the New Zealand front line.
After leaving Serbia, Lewis nursed in Woking, England, before returning to Otaki in 1916. In 1917 she joined the New Zealand Army Nursing Service.
In 1919 she retired from military service and returned to nurse as a civilian in New Zealand until 1922 when she returned to England to look after her widowed mother and then work as a district nurse for the Worcestershire County Nursing Association.
She died at Pershore Cottage Hospital in 1966.
Lewis’ name is the first in the current volume of St Leonard’s burial register and her small gravestone.
She is buried in St Leonard’s Cemetery in Newland. On the small gravestone is her nickname from the war - Little Sister.​