Returning from a visit with her aunt in England during the Second World War, Elsie Dandy, a Canadian nurse working in the country, missed her train back to the hospital. Not long after the air raid siren went off near the station.
“The guard just said, ‘Missy, come on down,’” the now 97-year-old Dandy remembered. “So he took me down below ground and gave me tea and what have you and then put me on the next train at three in the morning.”
Though this may seem hard to imagine in Canada today Dandy said, “It was just part of life. So you can’t expect young people to understand that. You have to go through it.”
Dandy, a Fergus resident, is a veteran of the Second World War where she was a nurse stationed at Basingstoke Neurological and Plastic Surgery Hospital for the Canadian Army, about 60 miles from London, England.
She is one of 50 inspirational Canadians who are being honoured with a Canadian flag on its 50th anniversary, presented by the government of Canada. She’ll be receiving her flag on Feb. 28 at the Royal Canadian Legion branch 275 in Fergus.
“Our national flag is a symbol of Canada and everything it stands for and I think it’s very appropriate that on the 50th anniversary to give Elsie Dandy the flag because she too is a symbol of what it means to be a great Canadian,” said Wellington-Halton Hills MP Michael Chong. “And this country is what it is today because of her generation and the example they set for the generations that have followed.”
For Dandy, the honour is a humbling experience.
“I feel that I’m really representing the Nursing Sisters of Canada,” Dandy said. Nurses had to be registered before they served in the war, Dandy explained. So most of them were older than the troops, and anyone who would have served in the Second World War would now be no younger least 95-years-old.
“I’m very appreciative of representing the nurses,” she said.
Dandy had a calling to be a nurse and said she just knew that’s what she wanted at the young age of seven.
“As a little girl I always read stories about nurses and thought I’d like to do that,” Dandy said. “So I succeeded in it.”
During her training in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Dandy graduated from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where she gained experience working for a plastic surgeon, taking care of the children after surgery.
When the war broke out, Dandy joined the army.
“I went to a movie and the movie was showing the troops and the injury and I just felt that I should join,” Dandy remembered.
She said she thinks she was placed at Basingstoke because of her plastic surgery experience and she considers herself lucky because of all the learning opportunities she was offered while serving.
Dandy started out working on the brain surgery ward before moving to plastic surgery.
“You weren’t working with sick people. You see that’s something that people don’t realize. If you’re in the services you work with healthy young people,” Dandy explained. “You know they’re not sick patients like you have at home and that’s very important because the person has the ability to get better.”
She said one of the biggest challenges as a nurse was when soldiers came to the hospital and were angry with themselves.
“The patients came in and they had just been fighting a war,” Dandy explained. “They were upset about their pals but they were getting better themselves.”
She remembered one of her most difficult patients. The young Vancouver man was 24-years-old and was training to become an officer. One night, during a blackout, he dove into a pool and broke his neck because it was empty, it had recently been drained and he was unaware.
“He was impossible. He hated himself and everything we did was wrong,” Dandy remembered. “He was mad at himself so he was taking it out on us.”
When she had time off, she wrote letters home for him but he would never let her tell his wife he was paralyzed. When Dandy learned he was going to be sent home, she said she knew she had to tell his wife, because she thought about her reaction if her husband was paralyzed and she didn’t know.
“Now what I did, I didn’t tell her what was wrong, I wrote a separate letter to the doctor,” Dandy explained. “I said ‘take to the letter to the doctor and he will explain to you what is wrong with your husband.’”
The soldier returned home and went on to win the Order of Canada, Dandy said. And six years after his return he was walking.
“It was the greatest reward to me for me to be patient with him … and again it was kind of against the rules for me to write and yet I was never sorry because as I say he and his wife, she would write what he said to us and became a friend.”
Dandy was hesitant to reflect on other patients she treated along the way, but many involved brain surgery, face repairs and burns.
“You see it wasn’t as if the patient was taken right from the battle,” she explained of Basingstoke. “It was an organized hospital and we had to have lectures from the doctors because we were doing specialized work.”
Dandy’s husband, Jim was also overseas during the Second World War as a colonel in the Canadian Army. The pair became engaged the day before he was deployed and married in England on March 17, 1945.
When the war was over the couple returned home to Canada and eventually settled in Wellington County, where Jim worked as the head of geography at Centre Wellington District Secondary School and Dandy was a personnel manager and nurse at Harding Carpets for 20 years.
Now, Dandy is retired but volunteers her time at Groves Memorial Community Hospital and J.D. Hogarth Public School.
She has been at J.D. Hogarth for 10 years and is loved by the students. She said last year the Grade 5 students wrote her letters titled “You’re my hero,” and she keeps all the letters on a shelf below her television.
“They’re a joy to me and I do it for myself, to keep me happy,” she reflected. She works with Grade 1 to 4 students so had worked with the Grade 5s for their entire school career.
“[I] try to help the teachers with mundane work so that they don’t have to take everything home,” she explained. Her husband would never do anything in the evenings while he was teaching and she wants to do her part to relieve some of the after school pressure for the teachers she assists.
The same rings true for her hospital volunteering.
“I just work at the hospital for myself,” she said. “I do take patients to x-ray, take things down to the lab, simple mundane things that leave people to their work.”
Her volunteering is one of the reasons Chong nominated her to be a flag recipient.
“Quite simply she’s an example to all of us on how to be active citizens and how to be active in our local community,” he said. “This is an example for all of us; something to live for, something to emulate. She’s a demonstration, a living example of Canadians across the country who contribute to their local communities and I think it’s something we should celebrate and recognize and that’s why we’re happy to see she’s getting one of the 50 flags.”
For Dandy, she won’t ever forget the people that showed her kindness along the way.
“You don’t expect people to recognize what you have done yourself. You don’t expect them, anything that is drastic or different, you don’t expect them to understand,” she said.
But for people who hear her story, she is the inspiration.
“If I could sum it up, when I grow up I want to be like Elsie Dandy,” Chong said.
