More on the life of Winnifred G. Goulding

© 2021, Christian Cassidy

Goulding ca. 1918 (WCPI -Thorlakson Manitoba Medical College Collection)

I came across the name Winnifred G. Goulding back when I was compiling names for my series on Manitobans who died on the front lines of the 1918 - 1919 influenza pandemic.

After writing that brief biography I felt the need to dig into her story a little deeper. Perhaps it was because she died so far from her family in an isolated prairie town, or that she was here attending medical college which was uncommon for women in the 1910s.

Thanks to a little story in the Regina Leader Post and a photo from the Western Canada Pictorial Index, (above), I was able to track down  more details about her life.

Here's a more complete biography of Winnifred G. Goulding.

Census of the Northwest Provinces, 1906, Library and Archives Canada

Winnifred Goulding was born in Ontario in August 1894 to Thomas and Letitia Goulding. She was the eldest of what would be eventually be a family of five daughters and one son. They moved West around 1903 and settled in the village of Sintaluta in the Qu'Appelle District of Saskatchewan where Thomas worked as a telegrapher for the CPR.

The city of Regina was a big part of Goulding's life.

She graduated from Regina Collegiate Institute at the end of the 1910 - 11 school year and won a $25 award for having the second highest mark in mathematics. From there, she attended the Regina Normal School to receive her teacher's certificate and went back to rural Saskatchewan to practice. The 1916 census finds the 21-year-old teaching in Moose Mountain, Saskatchewan. She also taught at Indian Head.

A 1918 Regina Leader Post story published after her death noted that Goulding had “spent the summer months here for the last half dozen years.” One of the locations may have been with her sister Irene who in 1915 -16 worked for the Royal Bank and lived at a rented room in a house owned by the Jackson family at 2324 Scarth Street.

A Visual History of the Medical Campus, U of M

Teaching was not the life Goulding wanted. She was accepted to medical school at the Manitoba Medical College for the 1917 - 1918 school year. A notation with her photo in the Thorlakson Manitoba Medical College Photo Collection indicates that she would have been class of 1922.

Goulding moved into Manitoba Lodge at 437 Ellice Avenue at Kennedy Street. It was a residence for around ten female students affiliated with the neighbouring Manitoba College. (It became the rectory when the building became St. Paul's College a decade later.)

The Medical College building, located on Bannatyne Street where it is today, was just a few minutes away for Goulding by omnibus or the Sherbrook Street street car line.

Manitoba Medical College Women's Basketball Team, 1917-1918 (U of M Archives)

By all accounts Goulding had a very successful first year.

Goulding became captain of the 1917 -18 Medical College Women's basketball team - which sported awesome uniforms - and was a member of the Ek-o-le-la Society, a university women's sports club. (Unfortunately, the 1917-18 Brown and Gold yearbook is among the handful not scanned in the U of M's archive of 100+ years of the years of the book, so other achievements or activities are not known.)

The 1918 Leader Post article referred to above noted that Goulding's spring exams marks were second only to that of the gold medallist.

Goulding returned from another summer in Regina to start her second year at college only to have it postponed in October when the influenza pandemic reached Winnipeg.

The university, including the medical college, closed in late October. The college became the headquarters of the V.A.D. volunteer nurse's bureau which was responsible for recruiting and training hundreds of women to care for flu-stricken patients in their homes.

Gladstone in the 1910s. (Peel's Prairie History)

Goulding did not go to her parents, who had been transferred to Huxley, Alberta, or her sister, who had been transferred to the Govan, Saskatchewan branch of the Royal Bank. Instead, she chose to go with medical college classmate Ada Wilson to her family home at Gladstone, Manitoba. 

The Gladstone Age newspaper gave a sense of what life was like around Gladstone during the epidemic in a November 1918 story titled, "No Influenza Here". It credited the "prompt and energetic actions" of town council and the local health officer, Dr. Warner, for keeping the disease outside town limits.

It felt that the district's strict quarantine measures, including business, school and church closures, "saved as much illness and possibly several valuable lives as well", but warned that there were cases of influenza in the countryside around Gladstone, so townspeople shouldn't let their guard down no matter how restless they were becoming with the restrictions.

What Wilson and Goulding did, flee infected Winnipeg to the disease-free countryside, was frowned upon in small communities. It is perhaps because of this that Goulding offered her services as a volunteer nurse at the town's emergency isolation hospital.

November 23, 1918, Regina Leader Post

According to the Gladstone centennial history book, Golding was assigned to look after a sick family of ten people in Berton, Manitoba. The hamlet itself is not on modern maps but Berton School was located 20 km southwest of Gladstone by road.

It was while tending to this family that Goulding contracted the disease and was admitted to the isolation hospital. She died after a week's illness on Saturday, November 16, 1918 at the age of 24.

The November 18, 1918 Winnipeg Free Press carried a brief story obviously written by someone from the town that noted Goulding was the first death at Gladstone's emergency hospital and that, "The circumstances of her death are very pathetic and have aroused the deepest sympathy of the entire community".

Goulding's parents had been called to her bedside but did not make it on time. The Govan Prairie News noted that Irene Goulding left for Gladstone the morning of her sister's death. (Their lateness may have been due in part to the fact that train service on some prairie lines had been scaled back either due to regional public health orders or the large reduction in passenger traffic.)

Source: No Worries at Find A Grave

Goulding' body returned with her parents to Alberta and was buried in Calgary's Union Cemetery. In later years she would be joined by her mother and father.

When classes resumed at the medical College on Thursday,  November 25, 1918, it was without Goulding. Her death, like most who died fighting the flu battle, had been largely forgotten.

In Gladstone, the article noted above about the town being 'flu free' was written two weeks after Golding's death and does not mention her as a victim.

The Manitoban resumed publication with its  December 1, 1918 edition. There was only a brief reference in a larger story in its women's section about what some students did to fight the flu during the break: “The members of the Ek-o-le-la Socity deeply regretted to hear that Miss Winnifred Goulding, while doing heroic work in nursing the ‘flu’ victims, was fatally taken with the dread disease. We wish to extend to her parents and her fellow students our deepest sympathy.”

1919 - 1920 Brown and Gold yearbook, U of M Archives

What happened to Goulding's classmate? 

Ada Wilson returned to the college when it reopened and went on to receive her medical degree in 1922. She was one of just two women to graduate from medicine that year, (the other, Anne Wiegerinck, was an international student who transferred to the Manitoba Medical College from Holland in the third year).

You can read more about her later life in this blog post at St. Vincent Memories.