Rena McLean

McLean was born in Souris on Prince Edward Island, Canada in 1879.[2][3] Her parents were John McLean, a businessman and Conservative politician, and Matilda Jane McLean (née Jury).[1][4] She studied at the Mount Allison Ladies' College in Sackville, New Brunswick, and the Halifax Ladies' College, graduating in 1896.[1] McLean completed her training as a nurse in 1908 at Newport Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, in the United States.[1]

At the outbreak of the war, McLean had been working as head nurse of the operating room at a hospital in Gardner, Massachusetts.[1] She enlisted and was assigned to the Canadian Army Medical Corps on September 28, 1914, leaving soon after for Britain.[1] By November 1914, she was in France. She was one of a group of Canadian nurses who converted a hotel into a hospital in Le Touquet. In 1915, 1,100 Canadian soldiers were treated there after they had been gassed.[1]

She served in France, the UK and Greece.[1] She died when the Canadian hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle was torpedoed off the south coast of Ireland.[5][6] Even after the Llandovery Castle had sunk, the U boat continued to kill survivors in the water either by ramming their lifeboats or machine-gunning them.

A soldiers' hospital in Charlottetown was named for her in the year after her death, but it closed quite soon. There is a plaque in her memory at Charlottetown's Queen Elizabeth Hospital in their radiography department. Two other plaques recorded her life: one is at St James United Church in her home town and the other was in Mount Allison's Memorial Library, which was demolished in 2011.[1][7]