Langley's women in uniform: a Murrayville nurse in Italy, a Langley Prairie nursing sister, and the women who served after

On July 31, 1944, a nursing sister from a Murrayville farm reached Avellino, in the hills east of Naples. Jessie Lee was 27. She had already spent more than a year in England looking after some of the worst-wounded men of the war, and before it was over she would nurse in the Netherlands and Germany too.

Langley’s cenotaphs carry men’s names. The women who served are harder to find in the records: fewer of them, fewer files, and often a married name that hides the girl who grew up here. These are the Langley women the records let us tell properly, plus a few we’re still looking into.

Jessie Lee of Murrayville (1916–2019)

Jessie Annie Lee was born on December 12, 1916, and grew up on her family’s farm in Murrayville. Her father, James Lee, farmed there. She trained as a nurse at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster and joined the army in 1942 as a nursing sister, with the rank of lieutenant.

Her first postings were close to home, at Nanaimo and Prince Rupert. In March 1943 she went overseas. At No. 7 Canadian General Hospital in Taplow, west of London, she cared for men with serious wounds. Then came Italy, where she arrived at Avellino on the last day of July 1944, and after Italy, the Netherlands and Germany. In the interviews she gave the Township in 2012, she talked about nursing at Nijmegen and about VE-Day, which she spent at Oldenburg.

Some of her patients were German prisoners. Asked about them by the writer Elinor Florence in 2015, she was plain about it:

“They were just patients, never an enemy.”

After the war she came home, and in 1948 she married at Sharon United Church in Murrayville, the building now known as Sharon Chapel. She went on to study obstetrical nursing at McGill, and in later life volunteered at the hospital and the hospice in Abbotsford. She died on May 22, 2019, at 102.

Her own voice survives. The Township holds ten recordings of her interviews with the historian Warren Sommer, made between March and August 2012 (catalogue number SR-260), and the BC History of Nursing Society keeps another oral history and a file on her.

Isabelle Innes, born at Langley Prairie (1878)

A generation earlier, Isabelle Innes was born at Langley Prairie, today’s Langley City, on November 10, 1878. She served in the First World War as a nursing sister, listed with the rank of lieutenant, and she came home.

She had left Langley long before 1914: her enlistment address was in Victoria, and her next of kin was her sister, Agnes Geddes, of Port Moody. So she’s a Langley-born servicewoman rather than one who signed up from here. Her service file is held at Library and Archives Canada; the online indexes don’t say where she nursed, and we haven’t found a photo of her.

She wasn’t alone. Our First World War story counts roughly 400 local men “and some nursing sisters” who went.

Elsie Bevan: the Cold War, in confidence

Not all service happened overseas. In 2019, at 87, Elsie Bevan was living in Langley when a published interview told her story: as a corporal in the RCAF during the Cold War, she monitored the skies, working in classified settings where keeping secrets was part of the job. The interview doesn’t say where she was stationed or for how long. What it does have is her summing-up of why people like her signed on:

“We have a desire to serve.”

Margo Mayo: Trenton to Egypt

Margo Mayo spent twenty years in the Canadian Armed Forces, from 1970 to 1990. She nursed at Trenton, including on aeromedical evacuation flights. In 1973 she went to Egypt with a Canadian medical contingent serving with the UN Emergency Force, and she remembered an Egyptian man thanking Canada, and thinking:

“Maybe we’re doing a good thing here.”

Later she taught at the Canadian Forces Medical Services School in Borden and became Standards Officer in the Engineering Division of the Canadian Forces Fleet School in Halifax. In 2018 a magazine profile found her living on the river at Fort Langley.

The jacket with no name

In the Township’s museum collection there’s a Canadian Women’s Army Corps jacket, object 1994.002.001, with a corporal’s stripes and overseas-service chevrons on the sleeve. The catalogue doesn’t say whose it was.

Langley women did serve in all three women’s services of the Second World War, the army’s CWAC, the RCAF Women’s Division and the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (the “Wrens”), according to Warren Sommer’s history of the Fort Langley cenotaph. Their individual stories are the part still waiting to be pieced together.

Names we’re still looking into

• Helen Poppy (née McLaren). In a 1991 Township oral history, she talks about growing up in Langley and about cooking and administration for women in the military during the war. The recording’s notes don’t say which service or what rank.
• Lorraine Jones (née Gibson). Listed with “Langley, BC” in the Wren Association’s Book of Remembrance, published in 2013. She died on November 10, 2012.
• Irene Parkes. A postwar RCAF veteran living in Langley in 2022, who had kept photographs of wartime airwomen.

If your family has letters, photographs or service records for a Langley woman who served, in either world war or since, we’d love to hear about it. Email [email protected].

Go and see

• salishan Place by the River, the Township museum in Fort Langley, looks after the collections behind several of these stories, including the CWAC jacket and Jessie Lee’s interviews. Being in the collection doesn’t mean it’s on display, so check before you go.

• Sharon Chapel, 21562 Old Yale Road, Murrayville: the old Sharon United Church, where Jessie Lee was married. You can see it from the street.
• On November 11, Murrayville’s ceremony is at the cenotaph in Murrayville Cemetery, a few minutes from the Lee family’s old farm country. Times for every ceremony are in our Remembrance Day guide, and the stories behind the stones are in Langley’s cenotaphs and memorials.

We will remember them.