Letting light shine out of darkness: The life of Katherine McKinnon

Emergency room nurses at the Ross Memorial Hospital are accustomed to the steady stream of ambulances arriving, the cries of those in distress, and the cacophony of sounds emitting from a bewildering array of life-saving medical equipment. While many patients will be restored to health, the grim countenance of death lingers ominously at the bedside of others. The ER can be a frightening place of tears, of pain, of uncertainty – and yet the consummate professionals who staff it continue to do their duty day in and day out, in often trying circumstances.

Katherine McKinnon would have understood. She lived it, working in the very different and challenging field of military nursing during the First World War. Surrounded on all sides by the anguished, frightened faces of young men who had been gassed, shelled, shot, and left in mud on the slaughtering fields of France, Katherine and her colleagues sought to let light shine out of darkness.

Now 140 years after her birth – on International Women’s Day – her story continues to inspire.

Katherine Eva McKinnon came into the world on March 8, 1886. Her father, John McKinnon, was a Sonya-area farmer who allegedly once worked for Sir Sam Hughes, Victoria County’s crusty member of parliament and minister of defence when war was declared in 1914. In her late 20s, Katherine ventured into Lindsay to enrol in Ross Memorial Hospital’s school of nursing. Here she met other young women who, like herself, would within a few years find themselves on active service in crowded hospitals staffed by members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps (C.A.M.C.). Some of these women, like Peniel’s Winnifred Hardy, were only a few years behind Katherine in age; others, like Lindsay’s Olive Williamson, were considerably younger.

On June 9, 1916, Katherine, Winnifred, Olive, and five other nurses were presented with their diplomas during a moving ceremony at the Academy Theatre. Each of them no doubt knew that careers in civilian nursing would have to wait; a worsening war across the sea beckoned them to don the famous blue uniform of the C.A.M.C. and “do their bit.” Katherine herself was appointed as a nursing sister on Nov. 16, 1916. She was 30 years old and, in Canada’s military nursing hierarchy, automatically held officer status with the rank of lieutenant.

Within a month, Katherine was in England, working in the Moore Barracks Hospital at Shorncliffe. Between looking after the primary care needs of her patients and ensuring that her ward ran efficiently, Katherine was kept very busy. When she did find the time, she might have had tea with her fellow nurses or written detailed epistles to family and friends in Mariposa Township.

These letters, published in The Lindsay Daily Post, offer us some of the most heart-wrenching insights into her work as a nursing sister. “The tales of the trenches are terrible to relate,” Katherine explained in a letter dated Dec. 30, 1916. “Sometime I will tell you more of what the boys have told me.  One poor lad told me that he prayed for death in the trenches. He said to me, ‘Sister, why did you ever leave your happy home in Canada to come to this awful place?’ I told him it was to try and cheer a poor lonely heart like his.” Another letter, dated May 12, 1917, speaks poignantly to the impoverished conditions Katherine witnessed while visiting London. “As I saw those poor, wee dirty kiddies of London streets,” she wrote, “my mind went back to my childhood days, when I used to hide my crusts at the side of my plate so my mother would not see them and daddy would come to my rescue and eat them for me, and mother would say, ‘some poor little kiddies were hungry while I was wasting.’”

Katherine remained on the C.A.M.C. payroll until 1919, when she was struck off and returned to civilian life. She married George Allen in 1922, gave birth to a son a year later, and relocated to Lindsay around 1927, when her husband took a job as manager of the Lindsay Fairgrounds.

By the 1930s, the Allens were living in the shadows of Lindsay’s water tower at 8 Henry St., and Katherine was employed as a home care nurse. Margaret Robertson’s family were neighbours of the Allens during this time, and she recalls when “Aunt Katie and Uncle George” would come over for a visit. In the late 1950s, Margaret’s mother underwent an operation and Katherine was hired as a private nurse. Margaret remembered her mother saying that “she knew things were going to be okay when ‘Aunt Katie’ stepped through the front door.”

A cradle Presbyterian, Katherine worshipped at St. Andrew’s Church, where she would have rubbed shoulders with her old RMH nursing classmate, Olive Williamson. Surviving nursing sisters of the Great War in the Lindsay area – like them – were dwindling in number, and their presence at reunions of local veterans was always duly noted. Katherine outlived many of her comrades and died on Sept. 17, 1977, aged 91. She was buried in Riverside Cemetery beneath a granite monument that read “resting till the resurrection morn” – fitting words of hope for someone who brought hope to so many.