Marie Galway, popular intellectual, liberal half-German wife of anti-German South Australian governor
Despite the anti-German zeal of her husband and South Australian governor Henry Galway, no one seemed to mind that his popular wife Marie Cariola was half German.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
Marie Carola Franciska Roselyne Galway, a compassionate woman of culture, liberal opinions and charm, was the unlikely wife of Henry Galway, South Australia’s governor during World War I. Unlikely, because she was half German and Galway, as governor, was hysterical in his anti-German attitudes during the war and backed the cultural backlash against the state’s 10% of people with that heritage.
Marie Carola Galway was the daughter of two leaders of the English liberal Catholic movement, Rowland Blennerhassett, Irish baronet and parliamentarian, and his wife Countess Charlotte Julia de Leyden, a biographer and historian from Bavaria. Marie Carola attended private schools and convents in Bavaria, France and Switzerland, and read widely in six languages.
In 1894, she married Baron Raphael d'Erlanger, a French biologist who built his own laboratories at Heidelberg University. He died three years later. Returning to England, Marie worked for the sick and destitute, helping to found (and later chairing) a committee advising on parliamentary laws affecting women or children.
In 1913, in the Royal Bavarian Chapel, London, she married former soldier Henry Galway, just before he was appointed governor of South Australia. Marie Galway’s gifts as a public speaker were soon appreciated throughout the state. She started the Adelaide branch of the Alliance Française, and gave literary and historical talks to the Poetry Recital Society, the Victoria League in South Australia and kindred bodies.
Audiences thronged her lectures on modern languages at the universities of Adelaide and Melbourne. Marie Galway supported children's hospitals and orphanages, the District Trained Nursing Society and the Young Women's Christian Association. She apologised for being “more of a slavedriver than a patroness” but her enthusiasm, ideas, friendly manner and willingness to shoulder some of the burdens were admired. She inspired the South Australian Catholic Women's League to seek greater public recognition and helped make Catholics more socially acceptable in Australia's most Protestant state.
In 1914, Marie Galway founded the South Australian division of the British Red Cross Society to assist the sick and wounded,and set up a missing persons bureau. She directed this organisation until 1919, along with the Belgian Relief Fund, producing the Lady Galway Belgium Book (1916). Founding president of the League of Loyal Women supplying comforts for servicemen, she also persuaded the Institute of Accountants in South Australia to train 60 female bookkeepers as temporary replacements for male clerks who’d enlisted.
Despite her husband's anti-German zeal, no one seemed to mind that she was half German. She travelled widely, addressed hundreds of meetings, wrote thousands of letters and helped to raise more tan £1,200,000 for patriotic causes. For her efforts, Marie Galway was awarded the Belgian médaille de la Reine Elisabeth and the médaille de la Reconnaissance Française, and was appointed dame of grace of the Order of St John and companion of the British empire.
Before her departure in 1919 (15 months ahead of her husband), the state's women war workers gave her a diamond and opal necklace. Adelaide's leader writers noted that her arresting personality, untiring activity and oratory had enabled her to exercise a real influence over the trend of public thought, and that she had “raised the whole status of women in public life”.
She contributed an essay to A Book of South Australia (Adelaide, 1936), urging women to build on advances they had made since 1914,
