Fallen Hurricane PAGE 38
THURSDAY November 7, 2013 • www.langleytimes.com LEST WE FORGET Remembrance Service Details
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SPORTS Goodchild’s a Good Man
36 Langley’s Jessie Middleton served as a nurse both in Canada and across Europe during the Second World War. Here, Lieutenant Nursing Sister Jessie Lee is shown in 1944, posing with a farmer near Avellino, Italy, where she was sent to work with a mobile Canadian Army hospital. After enlisting in 1942, Middleton also served in England, the Netherlands and in Prince Rupert, B.C.
Below: Middleton today in her wartime nurse’s cape, displaying her Diamond Jubilee Medal. s u bmitte d pho to
Healing hands and a heavy heart LANGLEY WOMAN SPENT WAR N URSIN G SOL DIE RS IN C ANADA AND ACROSS EUROPE WA R R E N S O M M E R Ti m e s C o n t r i b u t o r
WA R R E N S O M M E R p hoto
Jessie Middleton’s wool nurse’s cape is weighted down with medals received for service in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. Almost 70 years later, Jessie has received an additional award, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, granted for a lifetime of humanitarian service to Canadians. She is modest about the recognition: “When I get these things, I feel as though I’m receiving them on behalf of all those classmates and friends that I trained with or worked with in the army, because they also served, and I miss them.”
Now almost 97, Jessie has seen most of her contemporaries pass on, but she holds their memories close to her heart. Born in Murrayville in the middle of the First World War, Jessie was the 12th and last child of farmer James William Lee and his wife Edith Mary Brown. When Jessie was born, two of her oldest brothers were away overseas, fighting the Germans in the trenches of the Western Front: “All my life I knew about Hubert and Sam being in the first war. Occasionally stories would come out, but they talked very little about it.” Jessie grew up in Murrayville and attended the local elementary school before going on to the
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old Langley High School on the Fraser Highway. With 11 brothers and sisters, one of them 20 years her senior, she became an aunt when still quite young. When her sister Dorothy Barichello lost her infant son Georgie in 1924, the whole family was devastated. Jessie felt a need to intercede: “I was introduced at quite an early age to death. I had a helpless feeling [but really wanted] to help my sister.” Girls graduating from high school in the mid-1930s had few career options. Those who chose not to marry and raise a family generally trained as secretaries, teachers, or nurses. Jessie had
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long wanted to nurse and enrolled in Royal Columbian Hospital’s training program. Living in the hospital’s nursing residence and instructed by doctors and nurses of the “old school,” Jessie sometimes felt stifled: “Most of them were very officious in training. “There were some who had a tender heart, but most of them were very stern in their attitude toward the student nurses — you toed the line.” Jessie qualified as a nurse in September 1939, on the same day that Canada declared war on Germany. Continued Page 6
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