Tragic Endings: Manitobans who died fighting "Spanish" Influenza (Part 1)

© 2020, Christian Cassidy. Please respect my research.

This series is also part of my Tragic Endings series where I try to piece together the lives of Manitobans who died well before their time.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on the importance of health care workers in our community. A century ago, it was no different when they were called upon to fight the "Spanish" Influenza pandemic of 1918 -1919.

These are the stories of some of the Manitobans who gave their lives treating the ill a century ago. The exact number will never be known. As you will see below, there were hospital nurses, volunteer nurses, and doctors who provided care across the province. Some went to other jurisdictions - even overseas - to tend to the sick.

Given the uneven news coverage in rural areas and the long list of deaths that newspapers had to report daily at the tail end of the war and peak of the influenza pandemic, it is likely that the fact that some of the dead were health workers was missed.

Below are the names I have been able to track down so far and I have prepared a brief biography for each of them. I will post a few of them each day until the series is finished.

These biographies have been pieced together mainly from brief newspaper mentions of the day and supplemented with information, if available, from Manitoba Vital Statistics, military files, street directories, cemetery records, community history books, etc.. Still, it is likely that some contain inaccuracies. If you want to make a correction or addition, please contact me at cassidy-at-mts.net.

Nursing Sister Miriam Eastman Baker (1886 - 1918)
Marion Munro Ross (1887 - 1918)
Jessie B. Lawlor (1894 - 1918)
Nursing Sister Christina Frederickson (1886 - 1918)
Nursing Sister Ainslie St. Clair Dagg (1892 - 1918)
Eva May McNee (1890 - 1918)
Ella Nichols ( 1896 - 1918)
Lillian M. Campbell (1883 - 1918)
Annie McIntyre Wisley (1883 - 1918)
Elsie Kaufman (1889 - 1918)
Marguerite Pocock (ca. 1891 - 1918)
Anna Gibson (1896 - 1918)
Harriet Constance Hurlburt (1886 - 1918)
Mary Depoe (1893 - 1918)
Florence Smith (1896- 1918)
Winnifred G. Goulding (1894 - 1918)
Linia Young (1894- 1918)
Edna May Firby (1897 -1920)
Anabel Schnell (1895 - 1919)
Dr. David Ralph Houston (1883 - 1918)
Dr. William Frederick Orok (1882 - 1918)
Evelyn Maw (1890 - 1918)

As most of the health workers who died were nurses, here is some background on the types of nurses there were who fought the flu and where most of them worked.

King George Hospital (Source: Riverview Health Centre)

There were a few main centres in Winnipeg where influenza sufferers were cared for.

The 200-bed King George Hospital opened in 1914 and was Winnipeg's main isolation hospital. When it became overwhelmed with patients an emergency room annex was set up in a former men's hostel at 175 Logan Avenue. The main floor with 40 beds opened on October 29th and was expanded by another 70 beds on November 5th. It reached its capacity of nearly 200 beds later that month.

The IODE Convalescent Home was the main isolation hospital for soldiers. The military took over the LaSalle Hotel on Nairn Avenue in late October to serve as as its extension.

The large number of influenza cases meant that most people, particularly those from poorer neighbourhoods who couldn't afford a hospital stay, had to be treated in their own homes.

November 15, 1918, Winnipeg Tribune

These hospital annexes and the home care system would not have been possible without the V.A.D., or Voluntary Aid Detachment. This was a military program that enlisted and trained volunteers, including nurses, to serve in the war, but was revamped to recruit volunteers to help in the war against the influenza pandemic. The Emergency Bureau for the V.A.D. was housed in the Manitoba Medical College and training was provided by agencies like the city health department and Red Cross.

There were already dozens of V.A.D. nurses on the books in early October 1918, but a wider call had to be put out in the first week of November to bolster their numbers. Within days, more than 400 people, mostly women, responded. That number had risen to 638 by November 23rd.

Organizations, such as the Salvation Army and other religious organizations did their own recruiting with the blessing of the city and provincial health departments. A group of Jewish women, for instance, mobilized 350 volunteers to provide supplies and care to stricken families in their homes.

A story in an early December 1918 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press mentioned in passing that around 1,500 women actively worked to fight the flu in the previous two months.

Even with these large numbers, the effort fell short some days and dozens of calls for help went unfilled.

Volunteer nurses received four days of training before being sent out into the community. They could be identified by their white armbands stamped with a green cross.

Some V.A.D. volunteers were assigned to drive doctors, nurses, and medical supplies to the homes of the sick in their personal automobiles. Others worked at dietary aid kitchens, the central one located in Alexandra School on Edmonton Street, at which hundreds of meals a day were prepared and delivered to homes.

January 11, 1919, Winnipeg Tribune

A November 1918 Winnipeg Tribune editorial stated that nurses working on the front lines of the pandemic are "just the same as the nurses who go to the battlefront." It was a sentiment shared by most in the city but it doesn't appear that health care workers received any official recognition, nor was there a permanent memorial to those who died.

A rumour appeared in the papers in November 1918 that the province was going to bestow a medal or special certificate to front-line health care workers. The provincial secretary later denied there were any firm plans, just that some sort of public recognition had been discussed around the cabinet table.

In January 1919, the city's Welfare Commission passed a motion that would have seen a bronze tablet to honour nurses and front-line victims of the flu installed inside city hall. It had to be approved by council in order to be acted on. That does not appear to have happened.

Motion from Dec. 23, 1918 council meeting (City of Winnipeg Archives)

Winnipeg council did pass a motion at its last council meeting in 1918 stating that it "... desires to pay tribute to those volunteer nurses and others who sacrificed their lives to alleviate the sufferings of humanity." No other form of recognition is mentioned.

Why the lack of a permanent memorial or other public recognition?

It could have been that after four years of bloody war, an influenza pandemic, and a general strike, officials and the public were anxious to move on with their lives. When attention turned to creating memorials in the 1920s the lengthy and bloody war was remembered, but the relatively short-lived deadliest phase of the influenza outbreak was not.

Another explanation could be that there was no official end to the influenza pandemic as there was with the war and general strike. Though things started to return to normal in Winnipeg in the last days of November 1918, the flu continued to be an issue for years to come. A milder "third wave" came through in the spring of 1919 and in January 1921 a training course was held for a new round of V.A.D. influenza nurses.