William Carr

Who was William Carr?

Surgeon Rear-Admiral William James Carr, CBE, Australian naval officer, was the Royal Australian Navy's Director of Naval Medical Services from 1932 to 1946.

Carr was born in Thornton in Craven, a village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, where his father James was a solicitor. He was educated at Marlborough College in Wiltshire and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained an arts degree in 1904, specialising in classics: he read both Latin and Greek. He then studied medicine at the Royal London Hospital, becoming an LRCP and MRCS in 1908. He remained at London Hospital as a resident medical officer until 1910, and then worked as a ship's doctor on a merchant vessel.

In 1911 the newly formed Royal Australian Navy advertised in Britain for professional men to join the service, and Carr enlisted on 9 December. He was posted to the new Australian light cruiser HMAS Melbourne with the rank of surgeon-lieutenant, where he served until 1917. During World War I he saw service in New Guinea, the Pacific, North Atlantic and West Indies. In October 1917 he transferred to the battlecruiser HMAS Australia, and in March 1918 to the cruiser HMAS Sydney, where he served until 1920.