125 stories for 125 years

The Comforts Club

The Pharmacy College Comforts Club was formed in 1940. At this time, 24 men and two women associated with Victorian pharmacy were serving their country. Each had a ‘fairy god-mother’ responsible for keeping in touch with him or her. The club supplied wool to willing knitters who produced socks, balaclavas and mittens. Parcels containing handkerchiefs, toiletries, sweets and magazines were sent to serving pharmacists. Many students made a weekly contribution to the club and social events such as dances and picture nights were organised to raise funds. Proceeds from the annual ball were also donated to the club.

In 1941 one of the fundraisers was an evening of ballet and drama presented by Edouard Borovansky, Irene Mitchell and their pupils. (Borovansky’s company was the precursor to the Australian Ballet Company.) Later that year the club ‘adopted’ a prisoner of war through the Red Cross and paid an annual donation of £52. By 1943 the Comforts Club had a letter writing section and regularly dispatched parcels, books and magazines. The annual ball raised £280 for the fund and that Christmas the club dispatched 70 parcels. ‘Weary’ Dunlop wrote from the Middle East in 1941 of his pleasure at receiving a parcel, ‘I felt just like a small boy visited by Father Xmas’.

Men were associate members of the club and contributed by making zinc cream and calamine lotion for the Red Cross. The Argus reported on 2 August 1941 that the club had prepared and donated to the Red Cross large quantities of sunburn cream, calamine lotion, iodine, insect lotion, foot powders, lint, gauze, dressings and bandages. It noted that the club was a unique patriotic organisation because its work could not be undertaken by unskilled volunteers.

The article also described another contribution to the war effort that was provided by pharmacists. When members of the Intelligence Department were ‘stumped by some intricate message in code they drop it into the nearest pharmacy. After dealing with doctors’ prescriptions, decoding comes easy to chemists … though one Intelligence man received a nasty shock, I hear, when a message he’d handed in to be decoded was given back to him in the shape of a reliable cure for chilblains!’

Major-General C.H. Simpson CBE MC VD PhC delivered the opening address for 1944. A graduate of the college who had had a distinguished military career in both wars, he mentioned that he had received parcels from the College Comforts Club whilst in the Middle East and had obtained great pleasure from the fact that people at home still remembered him.

At the end of the war, the Comforts Club sent cables to released prisoners of war who were associated with pharmacy. Of the 15 society members who had been prisoners of war, all but one returned. Sergeant Aidan Henry Long died whilst a prisoner of the Japanese at Ambon. He had passed the Victorian qualifying examination in 1936. One member had been a prisoner in Germany. The others were captured by the Japanese in the Pacific and had played a leading part in the ‘miracles of improvisation wrought, particularly in obtaining medicines’. A welcome home function was held early in 1946. At A.T.S. Sissons’ suggestion the Comforts Club sent Christmas gifts to children of pharmacists who had died in the war.

The Pharmacy Ball resumed in 1947 and raised £420 for the Comforts Club. Donations were made to various funds for disabled soldiers and to repatriation hospitals and parcels were sent to pharmacists in Britain. The club was wound up in 1947 and books were purchased for the library, initially for the particular use of returned servicemen students.