Friends of Hastings Cemetery

Charles Boulnois & Family p.4

Helen Mary Boulnois – born in the Punjab in 1872

Suffrage Debate - Hastings Chronicle, January 3, 1910

The local Women’s Suffrage Society had an opponent of their own sex, Miss Helen Boulnois in a debate with Miss Mildred Ransom, one of their own champions.

(It is possible that she was simply a suffragist, rather than a suffragette or actively against emancipation, as we find her later a member of the National Women’s Party (a US organisation seeking the‘guaranteeing the enfranchisement of women’)

BOULNOIS, Helen Mary

Chaplain, WWP [Women’s Working Party] 1943 Jun 1 1945

Medal card of Boulnois, Helen M. Corps: Church Army.
War Office: Service Medal and Award Rolls Index, First World War.

…………….. During the war she established a veterinary hospital but near Calais

INTO STRANGE LANDS - The West Australian Thursday 24 January 1929

A Woman's Experiences.

Central Africa and Tibet were penetrated by Miss Helen. M. Boulnois, an English artist, traveller, author and lecturer,- who reached Fremantle on Monday on the liner Aseamus. She is completing her first holiday visit to Australia, but announced her intention of returning next year.  Miss Boulnois will be remembered, by a number of Australian soldiers at the rest camp and receiving station at Marseilles.

After the war she commenced her wanderings into the little known parts of the world. In 1922 she journeyed through Kashmir into Tibet, where she spent several months. In 1924-25 she undertook, a journey into Central Africa to see the tomb of her brother, who died at Bahr-el-Ghazet, a province in the Upper Sudan.  [he was first governor of the province and founder of the city of Wau.]  She

covered 5,000 miles and was about to board a houseboat to take her up the Upper Nile when a native uprising resulted in the conversion of the houseboat into a floating fort and she was hurried out of the danger zone.

Her journeyings have provided Miss Boulnois with many subjects, for books, of which she has published six. When she is not travelling or engaged in painting excursions she lectures, and her days of leisure are spent on her citrus farm, called St. Clement's, on the White River in South Africa. '

……. What she describes as the most interesting, and at the same time most sad, memories of her war-time service was after the war, when the British Army authorities apportioned to her the task of official lecturer to the soldiers engaged in cleaning up the battle areas of Flanders and France and burying the dead, around Ypres, Poperinghe, Lille, and Arras.                NEXT