Alexandra Seager was born Alexandra (some sources say Alexandrina) Laidlaw in Victoria. When she married Captain C. J. (Clarendon) Seager, an ex-cavalry officer of the British Army, she married into a family with a longstanding military tradition. The couple had three boys and three girls. They moved to South Australia in about 1910.
When World War I started, Seager was 44 and was running an agency to supply governesses, domestic help and other workers to country stations and farms. The Seagers' three sons enlisted in the first week of the war, and their youngest son was later killed at Gallipoli. Alexandra was a founding member (1914) and Honorary Secretary and Organizer of the 'Cheer-Up Our Boys Society' in Adelaide, entertaining, feeding, befriending and generally supporting servicemen stationed near Adelaide or passing through. She was the founder (1915) of Violet Day, on which every member of the public was asked to wear a violet in memory of those soldiers who had died for their country. It is claimed that Steager was the founder of the Returned Services League, as she called the first meeting of the men who had returned from Gallipoli, urged them to form their own organization, and gave them £50 from the Cheer-Up Hut funds.
The 'little mother' as she was called was much loved for her work at the Cheer-Up Hut. She had a blue felt hat which a party of soldiers 'borrowed'. They cut it up into small pieces, divided it among themselves, and took the pieces to war as mascots. The Cheer-Up Hut was closed in 1919, but re-opened during the Depression, again with the assistance of Mrs Seager.
The work Steager did for the Cheer-Up Society, and some of the poems she wrote at the time, are recorded in F. J. Mills' Cheer-Up: A Story of War Work (1920). Her poem 'Violet Verses' gave the name to the 1917 anthology compiled by Edith S. Abbott (q.v.) in which it is included, and her song 'Our Soldiers' Song' was set to music by Mr L. W. Yemm and sung at patriotic concerts throughout the state.
Seager died in 1950 on Kangaroo Island after being an invalid for 20 years. The Seagers' eldest son, Harold William Hastings Seager, married Joy Seager (q.v.) who wrote about her work on Kangaroo Island as a doctor.
