Second World War horrors stayed forever with nurse Margaret Guildford, dead at 105

Fittingly, the celebration of Dame Margaret Guildford’s life will be held on Remembrance Day.

Guildford was 105 when she died last week in the Camp Hill Veteran’s Memorial Building in Halifax. She was 98 when she moved into Camp Hill, which left her time to give nursing students instructions on folding proper hospital corners when making a bed. 

She had long ago earned the right to advise nurses, or anyone else, about the value of doing things the right way. 

Guildford got around being too young to join the Canadian Army and work overseas as a nurse during the Second World War by volunteering for the Red Cross. Soon, she was on a ship bound for England, where she expected to be reunited with a British pilot she’d met in New York City. Instead, she was met by his family, who gave her the news her boyfriend had been killed during a bombing mission. 

“The next day she accompanied his family walking his remains in a wheelbarrow through a small English town to the church for burial,” says her obituary. 

 A chance meeting with Bank of England director Sir Edward Peacock led to her finally getting into the Canadian Army, and she was soon working in a field hospital close to the front line, caring for wounded soldiers.  

“Then we started receiving the people from the concentration camps, and that was horrible. … They would just bring them in and leave them on the floor; and the doctors told us not to try and touch them, they were all, you know, they were all next to death.”

Second World War Nurse Margaret Guildford, in an interview with the Memory Project last year

“We had a burn unit and a lot of the men had lost a large percentage of their skin. They would all have to be grafted after; and they used even pigskin to graft on them because they wouldn’t have enough of their own skin left,” said Guildford in an interview with the Memory Project in 2022.

“Also, people who had lost fingers on their hands, they had toes grafted to their hands and…you had to keep circulation going, so the toe would be embedded up into their belly and they would have what they called tentacles or something like that, it would be a roll of flesh. And then it would be grafted to the hand, and all sorts of new stuff like that. And on the faces, people that would have lost part of their faces, they would try and graft. If they had lost parts of their jawbones and things like that, all that kind of work was done in plastic surgery.” 

Not every day during the war was a horror. Guildford remembered a dance hosted by a regiment near the Rhine one winter. It was too muddy to do much fighting, so the men were looking for something to do. 

“They came to our matron at the hospital and asked if some of the nurses would be interested in coming to a party there. ‘Oh yeah, they’ll go.’ It was quite a distance, but we were taken by our hospital in the backs of the trucks to this party; and they had gone to so much trouble to arrange this big party,” Guildford told the Memory Project.

“They had big tents and they’d gone around the countryside; and they had beautiful Persian rugs, and they had chesterfields, and electric lights and they had a big dance floor. They had the band from the army that was playing music; and they had dug a pit, and they were roasting an ox in the pit. They’d had it going for a couple of days.” 

The nurses were told the Germans were on the other side of the Rhine, and shown where to take shelter if there was any shelling. 

“The Germans could hear all this music going and every once in a while, they’d let off a lot of gunshots, but nothing came across the river. But we thought that was one of the biggest parties that we ever would go to. It went on most of the night, and we just got home in time to get our uniforms on to go to work.” 

Second World War Nurse Margaret Guildford, in an interview with the Memory Project last year

“The Germans could hear all this music going and every once in a while, they’d let off a lot of gunshots, but nothing came across the river. But we thought that was one of the biggest parties that we ever would go to. It went on most of the night, and we just got home in time to get our uniforms on to go to work.” 

Margaret Guildford met the man she would marry on a blind date in the United Kingdom. David Guildford spent most of the war in Italy, but they would sometimes meet up in England, where he’d play piano at tea dance while Margaret cut a rug. 

At least once, she caught a ride on an empty bomber to meet David, and he drove a motorcycle a long way to meet her. One day, he tracked her down at a German estate the army was using as a hospital, took her out on a lake in a small rowboat and proposed. Later, she claimed she had to say yes because she didn’t know how to swim.  

When the end of the war was announced, casualties stopped arriving at the hospital and everyone was given a glass of Champagne.  

“Then we started receiving the people from the concentration camps, and that was horrible,” Guildford said. “The army had to go in and rescue them because there must have been a camp near our hospital; and they would go in and wrap them in army blankets, probably strip off what clothes they had on and they would just be on litters. They would just bring them in and leave them on the floor; and the doctors told us not to try and touch them, they were all, you know, they were all next to death. You couldn’t tell, they were hardly breathing. And they all looked alike, they were all grey and their mouths were open, and you just dribbled fluids by the teaspoon in their mouths. 

“Today, I can see those people coming out of the concentration camps. I can’t forget that. I can see them.” 

The war had been over for more than 75 years when she said that. 

The Guildfords settled in David’s home city of Halifax and had four children, two of whom developed Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Margaret cared for them herself for 30 years, until they moved into a nursing home. She went back to nursing, eventually becoming a hospice nurse, and spent many years helping patients and their families deal with death. 

When she became a widow, Margaret paid off the mortgage by operating her home as a bed and breakfast for 10 years. She spent 35 years in St. Margarets Bay, and always believed a swim in salt water could cure anything. 

At 98, she decided to move to Camp Hill, where she had volunteered for many years. 

The medals and awards she received for service to her country and fellow veterans include the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2002) and Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012).  

At the age of 100, she was knighted and made a Dame of the Order of Saint George.  

In her memory, Guildford’s family encourage thanks to a veteran for their service, or a donation to the Camp Hill Veterans Memorial Gardens through the QEll Foundation. A celebration of Margaret’s life will be held from 3-5 p.m. on Nov. 11 in William Black United Church Hall.