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Chapter Nine
Canada's Nursing Sisters: Our Daughters on the Front Lines
British Columbia and the other western provinces produced some tough fighting men, accustomed to the outdoors and hardships. It also produced a tough breed of nurses, sometimes horrified by the carnage, yet resigned to endure under incredible difficulties. Some were raised to be proper Victorian ladies, but that propriety was put aside on the front lines.
Victoria author Maureen Duffus wrote a book about it, Battlefront Nurses of World War I. Maureen was inspired by the life of her aunt, Nursing Sister Mary Ethel Morrison, who made a precious photo album documenting her experiences.
“I knew that my aunt was in the Nursing Sisters Corps,” Maureen told us. “And I knew from family members that she was decorated and was a very brave person. She had a Royal Red Cross—and I had no idea at the time this was such a tremendous award, the prime award for Nursing Sisters.”
Morrison and fellow nursing sister Elsie Dorothy Collis joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps in Victoria in the summer of 1915, as soon as the British Columbia medical unit was formed. Both went on to the Mediterranean Front in Salonika in 1916 with No. 5 Canadian General Hospital. Both were in France near the front lines when German aircraft bombed Canadian hospitals in the Boulogne area in 1918.
“These were ladies born in Victorian days and very gently brought up,” says Maureen. “They decided to train as nurses, and when the war came along I don’t think they realized they would be in such ghastly conditions.”
They trained in tents and then were sent over to England as a group, where they were divided into different hospitals for their training. But they were all in Salonika together. Later in France, they could be assigned to any hospital in need.
“It was particularly dangerous when they got to France and very close to the front line. The trains came in daily with more and more wounded, and by then they were so used to it they would just say, ‘more femurs.’ It was mentioned very matter-of-factly.”
For her distinguished service, Nurse Morrison was called to Buckingham Palace in 1917 to meet with the Queen Mother, who presented her with the Royal Red Cross Medal.
The award was made to fully trained nurses of the official nursing service who had “shown exceptional devotion and competency in the performance of actual nursing duties, over a continuous and long period, or who performed some very exceptional act of bravery and devotion at her post of duty.”
In 1938, Nursing Sister Morrison told the Canadian Nurse publication, “Month in and month out, a constant stream of gassed and wounded patients were cared for with a complete turnover every three weeks. Day duty, night duty followed one another until at last came the eleventh day of November, 1918. At the eleventh hour, surrounded by our wounded patients, we realized that the order to ‘cease fire’ had gone into effect. The War was ended.”
Contents
Thomas Pidgeon
Article: A Letter Home
Nursing Sister Marjorie Beatrice Moberly
Before She Was a Rattenbury, She Was a Heroic Nurse
Sidebar: From Our Listeners
Thomas Pidgeon
In his mother’s papers, Harlan Goodwin found her autograph book. This small book contains names, drawings and poems from soldiers she nursed. On January 1, 1918, Thomas Pidgeon, a twenty-year-old soldier from Prince Edward Island wrote the one shown here.
We wondered who T.D. Pidgeon was and what happened to him. Here is a bit of that story. Searching through attestation papers from World War I, we found Thomas Dewey Pidgeon, a farm boy from Wheatley River, PEI, who joined the 8th Canadian PEI Siege Battery, one of the PEI units that stayed together through the war.
The Siege Battery was the target of a gas attack in July of 1917. Thomas and his fellow soldiers were temporarily blinded by the gas and shipped back to England—where Nurse Tucker encountered some of them at the Taplow Hospital at Cliveden.
Many soldiers survived gas attacks and were sent back to the front after months of recovery. Thomas was not so lucky. He was shipped back to Canada aboard a hospital ship.
Thomas ended up in Nova Scotia and married a local nurse but never fully recovered from the injuries to his lungs. He died at the Vernon Jubilee Hospital in 1920. His body was sent back to Nova Scotia where he is buried.
[Click here for A Letter Home from a Victoria Nursing Sister]
Nursing Sister Marjorie Beatrice Moberly
Some nursing sisters never made it overseas. Marjorie Beatrice Moberly graduated from the Nursing School of the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Vernon.
In October 1918 she died of influenza at the Coquitlam Military Hospital. The obituary in the Vancouver Province read:
The death occurred at the Coquitlam Military Hospital on Saturday of Nursing Sister Marjorie Beatrice Moberly, aged 23. She had applied for overseas’ service eighteen months ago, but was not called on until the influenza outbreak, when she immediately went to Coquitlam. After a few days she contracted the disease. She was the first military nurse to die from the epidemic. She was the daughter of Major Moberly of the Board of Pension Commissioners.
Before She Was a Rattenbury, She Was a Heroic Nurse
Alma Clarke grew up in Kamloops. She was born in 1895, the stepdaughter of a prominent local newspaperman. Alma excelled at music, composition and performance. She attractedmany admirers and just before the war, she married a dashing Irishman, Caledon Robert John Radcliffe Dolling. Dolling was a realtor in Vancouver, but when war broke out, he soon joined up. The couple moved briefly to Prince Rupert where they were the talk of the town.
Dolling became a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Despite bad eyesight, he went overseas and received the Military Cross for bravery in February 1916. A few months later, he was killed by shell fire at Mametz Wood during the Somme offensive.
Alma was desolate but anxious to get to the front to do her part. She joined the Scottish Women’s Hospital Organization, which was then working with the French Red Cross at Royaumont, an abbey that had been turned into a military hospital. Alma experienced the worst of it, bombardments, dreadful wounds and amputations. She herself was wounded in action and received the Croix de Guerre from the French government for her bravery.
The rest of the story is better known. Alma remarried but fled that disastrous second marriage and moved back to Victoria where she met architect Francis Rattenbury. Rattenbury left his wife for Alma and the ensuing scandal forced them to leave Victoria for England. In 1935, Rattenbury was murdered by his chauffeur, who was said to be Alma’s lover. The chauffeur was found guilty of the crime. Alma was cleared. Despondent and worn down by one of the most widely covered trials in British history, she committed suicide just a few days later. A tragic end for a brave nurse.
From Our Listeners
A Wartime Romance: "Recruiting was brisk everywhere and nearly every available man joined up; I felt I must soon enlist.” At the same time, Robina Stewart took a nursing position in Trail. Soon she too was over in London, with the nursing service of the Canadian Army Medical Corps.[Read more]
The Eyes of an Angel: I never heard about the hard times; he liked to talk about training in England, the horses he cared for, the camaraderie. His favourite story was how he opened his eyes one day and saw an angel. [Read more]
War Crimes—The Llandovery Castle: The brand new 517-foot, 11,423-ton Llandovery Castle had been commissioned as a hospital ship in July of 1916. She held 622 hospital beds, with a medical staff of 102, plus crew. [Read more]
Tell Them to Carry on—The Bombing at Etaples: "Had a terrible air raid from 10:30 p.m to 12:30 a.m. Was a beautiful night—as light as day...Before I left for supper I heard distant guns and thought nothing of it." [Read more]
My Uncle Donald Rose: Less than two years after his enlistment, he was missing, presumed killed, on the first day of the Battle of Flers-Courcelette. He was one day short of his twenty-eighth birthday at the time of his death. [Read more]