Over on the Queen Elizabeth

Heroes Remember

Over on the Queen Elizabeth

Transcript

Then they were mobilizing more units, hospital units and so they were taking the girls who had been in Canada, and had gone through the military training. Then they took them and we went up to Brockville in September and eventually, we were there for, I think, nearly a month, something like that, til we all got together. And then we went, there were 300 nursing sisters went over on the Queen Elizabeth from Halifax in, I guess, it was October. Yeah, we got over in October. Interviewer: October, 1941? No, that was in ‘43. It was kind of fun getting on the boat.

Picture of Nurse and Soldier.

We had to go up a long gangway, I guess, to get on the boat and we thought we would never see any oranges, chocolate bars, toothpaste and so on again so we packed our trunks but we had our steel helmets, we had a haversack and we had our coats and we just stuffed our pockets and our steel helmets which we shouldn’t have. We had such a load, we could hardly walk up the gangplank and as I said in my book, we almost staggered up and the soldiers must have thought, if they had to depend on these poor old broken down nursing sisters for care, they wouldn’t get much care. And then going over, we had three meals a day but there were 18,000 on the ship, it was the Queen Elizabeth. And we had two meals a day but the nursing sisters were fortunate, they were allowed to go up on, I think they called it the poop deck or something like that, it was someplace up on top and we could go up there for the day but it went over very fast. I think it was four days or something.

Description

Ms. MacAulay talks about her voyage overseas on the Queen Elizabeth.

Kathleen Jean MacAulay

Ms. MacAulay was born in Meadowville, Nova Scotia on January 2, 1917. She attended school in Meadowville in a one room school for grades 1 - 10. Then she went to nearby Stellarton for grade 11 and New Glasgow for grade 12. After attending Maritime Business College for a year, she left and went to Halifax to train as a nurse at the Victoria General Hospital. Ms. MacAulay graduated as a nurse in 1941 and enlisted to go overseas. Ms. MacAulay made the four day voyage on the Queen Elizabeth and landed in Scotland. Shortly after arriving, she was sent to Bramshott where she worked in the operating room and in the ward from Oct. ‘43 to July ‘44. From there, she went to Whitby for a short period before heading over to Normandy. Ms. MacAulay ended up in Germany at the end of the war and was there for part of the occupation. She met her husband, a Canadian soldier, in Germany and was married to him in Jan. ‘46. She returned to Canada aboard HMS Rodney in June of ‘46.

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