New Years Honour, 1970

Before the creation of the Australian Honours system in 1975, awards under the Imperial Honours System were announced in the New Year’s list and in the Queen’s birthday list. On New Year’s Day 1970, the list included Elsie Curtin selected to be appointed as Commander of the British Empire, the only West Australian to receive the honour in that New Year’s list.

For service to the community

Elsie received JCPML003731 & 2, the patent and CBE medal featuring the text For God and Empire, at the ceremony held in April at Government House Perth, when she was invested by the Governor Major General Sir Douglas Kendrew as Commander of the British Empire. The citation acknowledged Elsie’s services to the community, the encouragement she gave her husband during the war, her work in visiting prison inmates and service as a Justice of the Peace (Daily News 30 Apr 1970, JCPML00298/3).

Elsie Curtin outlived her husband John by thirty years, during which time she remained very active with a range of interests. She was appointed as Justice of the Peace in 1955, sat on the Married Women’s Court, was a member of up to eight organisations and continued to live in the family home she and John had built in Cottesloe. Elsie maintained correspondence with a number of people introduced to her while John was alive, including the Gowries and Tatsuo Kawai, Japan’s first Minister to Australia.  Her preservation of the correspondence, personal mementos and photographs collected during John’s lifetime, and retained in their home after her death, enabled these unique materials to become the foundation of the JCPML collections.

References

 

The London Gazette, 30 Dec 1969 https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/44999/supplement/1

 Oliver, Bobbie Elsie Curtin: a biography