ONCE again RTÉ’s Nationwide has come up trumps and Mary Fanning and team have made a programme which will celebrate the first female veterinary surgeon in Ireland and Britain – Aleen Cust – to be broadcast next Friday, November 5th on RTÉ One at 7pm. Aleen Cust was a pioneering Irish woman born in Tipperary who studied veterinary surgery back in the 1890s at the New Veterinary College in Edinburgh and completed the course in 1900 but was not admitted to the exclusive male register until 1922.

On the outbreak of World War 1, in 1915 Cust left Ireland to volunteer at the front to assist in the treatment and care of horses, working with the YMCA from a base near Abbeville. In 1917 she was appointed to an army bacteriology laboratory associated with a veterinary hospital. She is also listed as a member of the Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps 1n 1918.