Huronia Museum

From the April 3, 1919 issue of The New Era, newspaper published in Victoria Harbour, Ontario, recently donated to the Huronia Museum (copies of The New Era are exceedingly rare)

THE NEW ERA 1919, NURSE CAMPBELL RETURNS HOME AFTER SERVICE IN FRANCE DURING WORLD WAR ONE

Nursing Sister Leah Campbell, NA, MC, returned home from overseas, on Friday night. She left Canada in September 1916. She crossed to France shortly after her arrival in England and was on duty at Etaples Hospital, until that refuge was bombed by the Germans in May 1918. Nurse Campbell went through this trying ordeal, but escaped unscathed other than the shock incidental to such an experience. From there following that occurrence, she was detailed for a few days to an Imperial unit and then received her “Blighty”*, being assigned to Canadian Hospital No 14 at Eastbourne on the south coast of England. She sailed from England on [page cut here] and speaks highly of the staterooms and comfort provided to the nurses travelling. Miss Campbell brings many interesting souvenirs of life at the front, both of British and enemy origin. One of these is a fine example of the exquisite workmanship of an British soldier on war materials in his leisure hours. What Nurse Campbell treasures most of those strenuous days of duty is the recollection of men who looked her up, because she came from a village in Ontario, known to them as “The Waub”.

*BLIGHTY from Wikipedia article – During World War I, “Dear Old Blighty” was a common sentimental reference, suggesting a longing for home by soldiers in the trenches. The term was particularly used by World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. During that war, a Blighty wound — a wound serious enough to require recuperation away from the trenches, but not serious enough to kill or maim the victim—was hoped for by many, and sometimes self-inflicted. The word blighty is a corruption of a term from Persian that means roughly “province”.