Tag Archives: Stewart Memorial

Margaret (Campbell) Kilbride, RN

When I wrote about discovering an audio recording of our neighbours Margaret and Kevin Kilbride, I said I was sorry I hadn’t spent more time with Margaret in her later years, wished I had asked her more questions about her nursing career and military service. I knew a little bit, but not much, and didn’t know a way to find out more.

So imagine my delight when I was contacted by a woman who grew up in Foxley River and had interviewed Margaret in 1985. Susan Bulger Maynard was a neighbour of the Kilbrides, and of ours, and her parents, Roger and Norma Bulger, were close friends and great supports to both Kevin and Margaret.

Susan’s interview with Margaret was for an assignment for one of her university courses, and thankfully she saved the paper, kindly sent a copy to me, and has generously allowed me to share it here on my website. It is an absolute treasure and helped to fill in so many blanks about Margaret’s life.

All I had previously known about Margaret’s Second World War service was that she had been a nurse in Europe and somehow lost a finger during that time, but Susan’s interview uncovered many more details, including that Margaret had been a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps (Nursing Division) in charge of operating rooms in Belgium and France, and had been night supervisor of a 1,500 bed military hospital in England.

I can’t even begin to imagine what Margaret saw during her years with No. 10 Canadian General Hospital, and what she had to live with for the rest of her life. Her time as the head nurse of our little 13-bed Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley would certainly have been a very different experience, and there probably wasn’t much that could rattle her.

Margaret would often drop in to our house on her way home from work for a quick visit, sometimes still in her white uniform, so I was surprised to learn from Susan’s paper that after Margaret married Kevin in 1954 and moved to Foxley River, she took a few years off from nursing and worked at home. I expect that after having nursed full time for 22 years, 5 of those her service in the RCAMC, those few years of home life were a very welcome and necessary break.

While I went to school with some of Susan’s younger siblings, she and I have not often crossed paths, but we both feel that Margaret had a hand in bringing us together; if anyone can make things happen from beyond, it would be Margaret!

Margaret Kilbride, RN, in the kitchen at Stewart Memorial Hospital, 1970s

Monumental

Yesterday I finally caught up on my scrapbooks after having fallen behind during the pandemic. These are not the tasteful, fancy, currated scrapbooks of this century, but the newsprint and pot-of-glue ones from the last. It’s a habit I inherited from my mother, and from older neighbours, especially the man who lived across the road from us who had a beautiful, matching set of meticulously maintained scrapbooks that contained newspaper clippings of interest about his family and our community.

What do I save? Newspaper clippings, of course. Obituaries. Ticket stubs. Funny cartoons. Notes. Shopping lists. Articles about friends and family. Bits and pieces of paper I find shoved in books or the bottom of a box. I have a set of scrapbooks about Stewart Memorial Hospital that I started when I joined the hospital auxiliary in 2003; this series will soon be completed as the hospital was closed nearly 10 years ago and the building slated for demolition. I will turn the page.

I also find and save bits and pieces online I mean to write about here, but then digitally tuck away and forget about. Here’s one I just found about a monument to an agricultural pest:

From the Guardian December 28, 1921, page 3

I wrote here recently that I don’t have many regrets in life, but that’s not to say that I wouldn’t do some things differently if I had the chance. I guess what I really mean is that I’m fine with the way things have turned out in life. Peaceful. Grateful.

I also know there is no guarantee that making different choices would have meant my life would have turned out to be better, so looking back with curiosity rather than condemnation is probably for the best.

Oprah Winfrey popularized gratitude journals, which were heartily adopted by millions of her fans and ridiculed by those who saw it as just more New-Age fluff. The thing that Winfrey knew is that finding something to be grateful for each day is like anything else you practice or adopt as a good habit: if you do it when it’s easy, you will likely be able to do it when it is difficult.

Could I build a monument out of “profound appreciation” to my disasters and failures? Probably not immediately after they happened, as the citizens of Enterprise, Alabama did, but in a way I have, by becoming resilient, adaptable and even occasionally fearless. Things knocked me off whatever course I thought I had set for myself, but I righted and sailed on to arrive here, and here is good.

Just Names

The hallways and rooms of Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley had been decorated with paintings and photographs donated by community members. When the provincial government shut down hospital services in June 2013 and turned the building into a long term care facility, the mysterious figures who pull the levers from hidden corners of Health PEI deemed that anything in the building that wasn’t generic had to be removed.

You probably think I’m being dramatic, but I’m not. Down came the paintings that showed rustic local barns and familiar vistas, only to be replaced by made-in-China blandness. The reasoning? It was some vague idea that the facility was the residents’ home and…well, honestly, I never understood it. The place ended up looking like a forgotten corner of an airport lounge.

I documented all the original artwork in the hospital before it was removed, and they are in this Flickr album.

Most of the hospital rooms had been sponsored by groups or families, and all the plaques by the doors acknowledging these contributions had to come down. Photos of past staff, items donated to thank staff, all dismantled. The place had to look like everywhere and nowhere. You can guess I wasn’t a big fan of this move to strip away the long community history of this building.

A new building was built a few years later and now the old hospital building that has stood on a Tyne Valley hill since 1951 will be demolished. What was left in the old building has to be removed.

I received a call to see if our SMH Foundation wanted some memorial plaques. When someone died, and donations were made to the Foundation in their memory, a small plaque would be put up in a beautiful display case that was very visible in a hospital hallway. We had so many donations over the years that we had to build another case to house them all. Of course, as had happened with the artwork, when hospital services were discontinued, the cases had to be moved to an unused ambulance bay, and with them the memory of a community that had cared enough to support the hospital.

So, my mother and I went to pick up the box of plaques at the new long term care facility, which is a beautiful building appropriately devoid of much local character. I picked up the little box of plaques and carried it back to my car. It felt like a funeral and I was carrying the ashes of all that we had worked so hard to maintain.

I put the box on a table when I got home, but didn’t feel up to going through the plaques. The next day, I decided to have a look, and near the top was the plaque with my father’s name from when he died at Stewart Memorial in 2008 after having resided there for a couple of years. I flipped through a couple more names and started to cry. I knew them all, related to many.

The loss of our hospital still stings, and I think it always will. Soon the building will be gone, and younger people will never really know what we had and what we lost. They can knock the place down, but I will never stop talking about it, the remarkable achievement of building and maintaining a small rural hospital for over six decades.

Some of the artists who donated their artwork to the new wing of Stewart Memorial Hospital in 1983.

70 Years

The Stewart Memorial Health Centre officially opened in Tyne Valley on this date in 1951. It rained that Victoria Day Thursday, so people sat in their cars to listen while speakers addressed them from the 7-bed hospital’s verandah. After the official ceremony, hundreds of people toured the building, and no doubt the ladies of the community provided ample and delicious refreshments.

Much of the money to build the little hospital was raised through suppers and bake sales, concerts and fundraising drives. The building was constructed by local contractors, and when we held a 60th anniversary celebration in 2011, a couple of the men who attended told me about working with their fathers to help with the initial build.

My mother tells of going to Stewart Memorial with a friend to help clean the rooms after construction was completed. The Women’s Institutes would answer their roll calls with canned goods that would be given to the hospital to provide food for patients, and they sewed curtains and johnny shirts. Farmers would donate eggs and meat, fishers would drop off trout and cod and lobsters.

Stewart Memorial had its own board until 1995, when amalgamation fever was high on PEI and regional health boards were formed. By that time, two building additions had added 16 more beds for a total of 23.

Over the years the hospital had provided almost every service except for major surgery. Many babies were born and cared for, there was an emergency room (and staff would attend accidents before there was an ambulance service), outpatient services, acute and later long term care. It provide generations of local residents with good jobs. It was the place where members of Lennox Island First Nation would come for medical care, first by boat or on a potentially hazardous trip across ice in winter, and later via the causeway built in the early 1970s.

After the regional health board was established, services at the hospital were gradually decreased until the government announced in 2013 that Stewart Memorial Hospital would close and be turned into a nursing home. Many of us fought to save our little hospital and the valuable services it provided to our area, spending thousands of hours in meetings. I’ve never really gotten over the closure, and trying to save it consumed my life for a couple of years.

Today I spent a couple of hours looking over old documents and thinking about all the people connected to our hospital. My grandmother was the first cook, my father served on the board of directors for many years. I went there to receive medical care, to volunteer, to visit sick relatives, so say goodbye to loved ones. My father lived there for a couple of years while dementia slowly took him from us, in a wing of the hospital he helped to raise the money to have built. He died there, as had his mother, his brothers, his friends and relatives, all cared for by people who knew them.

Soon there will be a generation of people who won’t know that we once had a hospital, that it was a focus of community pride and energy. I suppose it won’t matter, but I’ll never let it go, because it was important, despite what the Capital City bean counters told us. Closing Stewart Memorial didn’t fix the out-of-control health budget, it didn’t solve provincial health care staffing issues, it certainly didn’t improve health outcomes for my friends and neighbours. I’m not sure what closing it achieved, but I know what the hospital achieved while it was open, and that was life, and death, and everything in between.

April 1, 1920

I was a regular reader of UPEI’s Island Newspaper site’s “This Day In History” feature when I first became aware of it in 2014 (probably through Peter or CBC Radio, two of my main sources of cool PEI news!), but I let the habit slide after a couple of years. Each day the site highlights the issue of the The Guardian from 100 years before, and there is always something interesting, even if it’s just the ads.

I have been reading it everyday again for the past couple of weeks now that I have more time, and it has been more fun as I am now seeing people that I actually knew in the paper. The young adults of 1920 were in their sixties and seventies when I was a child.

The first person mentioned in the April 1, 1920 issue that I knew was my great-aunt Dorothy MacDougall.

Aunt Dot would have been 19 and had just been married the year before. She was a lot of fun as an older lady, and I imagine she was a pretty sparky young woman, too! Her older sister and probably her best friend, Gladys, was my grandmother. Dot’s grandson, Gary, was the editor of The Guardian for 20 years and retired in 2015 – he, as all of her grand and great-grandchild did, called her Ga.

On another page was a wedding announcement:

Angus was one of the contractors for the hospital we used to have in Tyne Valley, Stewart Memorial, that served our area from 1951 – 2013. The hospital fundraising foundation still exists and I have been its secretary since 2014. We are trying to acquire the old hospital building on behalf of the community with the intention of turning it into a community care facility; our board chair is Hilton MacLennan, Eva and Angus’ grandson.

Both Dot and Gladys worked at the hospital. They were also members of the hospital auxiliary, as am I, as was my mother, as was Eva, and Eva’s daughter-in-law, Ruth, and Ruth’s daughter, Aleah. Aleah was a nurse at the hospital and cared for my father, Harold, when he lived there in the long term care wing for the last four years of his life.

At this time of social distancing directives and upsetting news, I’m deriving an enormous amount of comfort from getting lost in the past, of connecting the Dots and Evas, as it were! I know the deep, complex connections I have all around me are precious and rare, even in this interconnected age. I am wrapping myself up tightly in this long, warm tapestry of family and friends on this rainy April evening, and thinking of Aunt Dot, with her beautiful red hair, boarding the train to go to Summerside.