Perspectives on the Front
Monday 30 August 2021
Robert George McDougall
Saturday 3 July 2021
William McKay Little: A Hidden Past
On a day when the weather was perfect for a ceremony - a bright sky, occasional clouds, and a temperature that was not too severe for the marchers in the Decoration Day parade - Saskatoon added 45 new trees to the 421 that already lined Memorial Avenue, as a living memorial to the city's fallen soldiers in the two world wars. William McKay Little, who had spent much of the pre-War years in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, was one of the men honoured on August 23rd, 1942.
Like many men from Weyburn, Little enlisted in the 152nd Overseas Battalion that began recruiting in Weyburn - Estevan in late 1915. He had just recently received his Lieutenants Certificate at the Infantry School of Instruction in Winnipeg - one of many such schools set up across Canada to provide qualified officers and NCOs for the army. Enlisting with the 152nd in June, 1916, Little shipped overseas in October and, as with many in the 152nd, was transferred to the 5th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Western Cavalry) - he was Taken on Strength on 28th April, 1917.
In the years before the War, William Little had been a leader in the Weyburn community, having lived in the town for more than a decade. Married, with two young daughters, Little had been one of the originals on Weyburn's first hockey team in 1903; he was a member of the Weyburn Chapter of the Masons; he was one of the town leaders who had greeted Sir Wilfred Laurier on his whistle stop in Weyburn in August 1910; and, as Manager of the newly chartered Weyburn Security Bank, his signature was on the new five dollar bank note, issued in 1911; and in 1913, having left his long held position with the bank, Saskatchewan's Lieutenant Governor appointed Little as Sheriff.
In May 1916, however, William Little was arrested while employed as Sheriff on a charge of appropriating money from the provincial government. While he plead "not guilty" and elected for a speedy trial, he was convicted. But prior to his arrest and subsequent to his conviction, Little had enlisted with the 152nd and the Crown raised no objection to giving him a suspended sentence which would continue for six months beyond the end of the War - and restitution of $10,000.
For much of the Battle of Passchendaele, the 5th Battalion was well behind the lines, only moving forward to Brigade Support on the November 9th, and the subsequent attack by the 7th and 8th Battalions on the 10th. From the 9th to the night of the 11th, the 5th Canadian Infantry Battalion lost 320 men, one of whom was William McKay Little.
Three months after William's death, his brother George, an ordained minister who was living in Guelph enlisted with the Canadian Chaplain Service. He sailed for England and served with the 1st and 11th Reserve Battalions before crossing to France a week after the signing of the Armistice. George returned to Canada in June 1919; he married, had two children, and died in 1958 at the age of 74.
Friday 8 May 2020
A Remarkable Life: R.C. Royston, Part 2
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Cunard Line RMS Alaunia, 1913 |
At the turn of the century Canada was opening up its land with grants to those willing to work hard and take their chance. Creston was a small town on the Crow's Nest Pass, halfway between Nelson and Cranbrook with a population in 1914 that was still well under 1000 people. But it was a fertile fruit growing district with more than 50,000 acres of rich fruit land, much of it for sale - and help would be needed on the farms.
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Farm land advertised for sale in Creston in the 1910 edition of Henderson's BC Gazetteer and Directory |
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High casualties and a long fight The Vancouver Daily Province, August 25, 1914 |
In Creston, the send-off for the six men was pulled together on short notice because of the uncertainty of their departure date. The station was dressed in gala attire with flags in evidence everywhere, including the town’s flag that flew aloft on the new pole erected near the station the day before. After the bands played and the crowd sang their selections, Edward Mallandaine, a prominent citizen of the town who was one of its early settlers and a witness to the driving of the Last Spike at Craigellaachie in 1885, delivered a brief but heartfelt thanks. He offered a few tokens of appreciation for their “loyalty in volunteering for active service in defence of the King and Empire and also as deep feelings of patriotism of the Canadians.” The men were presented with a pipe, a pouch and a generous supply of tobacco.
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The send off for the Creston Men, joining others in the Kootenay Contingent from Nelson, Trail, Kaslo, Rossland and Greenwood on August 28th, 1914 |
The six men, Philip W. Barrington Foote, Dennis Bunbury Howard, Robert Sinclair Smith, Patrick Douglas Hope, and H.B. Ford boarded one of the three cars on the regular CPR Train 514 that would take them on the start of their journey. The first leg was a three hour journey to Cranbrook. From there they would join up with the rest of the Kootenay/Boundary contingent and board a troop train - eight first class carriages in length, along with baggage and dining cars - that would take them across country to Valcartier.
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Troop Train in Cranbrook, B.C. leaving for Valcartier with the West Kootenay Contingent August 28th, 1914 |
Saturday 25 April 2020
A Remarkable Life: R.C. Royston, Part 1
One of the things I am thankful for is the work done by archival teams around the world to capture history and move it online. In Canada, tremendous work has been done by Library and Archives Canada (LAC) to move information online and various provinces and municipalities have done likewise. I'm most familiar with the work done by the Vancouver archives, which has captured a rich visual portrait of life in the city over the past two centuries. Private organizations, like Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com are also a valuable resource to researchers, often providing the means for governments to bring more material online that they could not afford to publish themselves. I'm of two minds when I have to pay so much to view our national heritage, but I understand there's a price to make it accessible, although sadly only to those who can afford it. I think every Canadian should think about the family heritage that might be kept in boxes in their basement and where appropriate - where it might be valuable history or offer a narrative - donate it at the right time to an archive.
A few weeks ago I came across a picture of a young man, Richard Cuthbert Royston, in Archives Canada. He was a soldier in the 16th Battalion Canadian Scottish and an escaped Prisoner of War; there was no other information about him. Ancestry was the natural place to start but it provided little more than tombstone information - a disjointed family tree with no substantive data. But it was a place for me to start my research that took me deep into archival sources and, as always, new personal connections with others around the world.
So here's the story - the first of two parts - of Private Richard Cuthbert Royston.
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Private R.C. Royston, May 1918 |
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The Brattleboro Daily Reformer, Vermont April 20, 1918 |
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Giessen POW Camp - located on a slight hill just of town, flanked on one side by the main highway and the other side by pine woods. |
Royston and Spiers were captured during the second Battle of Ypres, on April 22nd/23rd 1915, along with 1400 other Canadians - the largest number of Canadians that would be taken prisoner on a single day in the War.
16th Battalion disembarking in St. Nazaire, Feb 15th 1915. Photo courtesy of Jakealoo, "Doing Our Bit |
The troops disembarked at dawn and by late morning, to the sounds of the pipe band and carrying their overcoats with the new goat skin coats and mitts that had been issued to them earlier in the day, they marched through the streets of the town on their way to the train. It had turned into a beautiful day, warm and bright.
The battalion boarded the train later in the afternoon - thirty-eight men to a cattle car, nine junior officers in a separate one, and the senior officers in the first class car - and at 5:08 the 16th Battalion headed towards the battlefields of France.
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Entraining at St. Nazaire, Feb 15th 1915. Photo courtesy of Jakealoo, "Doing Our Bit" |
Saturday 8 October 2016
The First Night
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Example of a typical battalion diary entry for the 16th Canadian Infantry Battalion during their deployment at the front lines, July 1916 |
In the two months that followed his arrival in France, Forbes was introduced to the routine danger of trench life, the monotony of life behind the lines, and the terror of sudden, unexpected and relentless enemy bombardments. Since the Canadian Scottish were serving in support to the 13th Battalion Canadian Highlanders and the 15th Battalion 48th Highlanders in the period immediately after his arrival, he had a soft transition to the War. But on the front lines, the two highland regiments were subjected to heavy enemy shelling and mortars - and in the case of the Canadian Highlanders, a local German attack on their trenches by three individual squads of seventy men; the casualty details in their Battalion diary attest to the ferocity of the brief encounter.
But for much of July Forbes remained in the relative safety of Corps and Divisional Reserve with the exception of five days, from the 15th to the 20th, when the Canadian Scottish relieved the 48th Highlanders and deployed to the infamous Hill 60. Again, their battalion diaries reveal little of the intensity of activity at the front during this brief period. On the day after their arrival, trench mortars killed two men and wounded a third. The shelling and trench mortars was tame by the standards of the Salient, nothing atypical and far from the scale of the battle they had endured in the Spring, in Mount Sorrel, that decimated their ranks. But the shelling would have been enough to shock and terrify someone who'd arrived from England less than a month before and had yet to serve in the front lines.
"We have had with us a young lad (only 17 years old) since last night. He was going to the trenches with the 13th Battalion last night, and he opened our gun pit door and asked for a drink of water. He was just able to stumble in and I thought he was going to faint - he looked so white and sick. We asked him if he was a wounded and he said, 'No, just all in."
Norman Macintosh, CEF June 1916Two days later the Germans again bombarded the Canadian Scottish lines, this time for two hours, killing four more and wounding twelve.
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Printed in the Vancouver Daily World August 4, 1916 |
"Son of Fernridge Resident Falls in Action: Mr David Wix, of Fernridge, yesterday received the sad news that his son, Private Capon Victor Wix, had been killed in action on July 19th."A two week break for the Canadian Scottish, following their July stint at the front, was an opportunity to refresh their knowledge and training: they attended aviation lectures, gas school (where they got a sample "taste" of gas) and performed general battalion work - as well as competing in baseball and soccer matches against neighbouring teams from the 29th Battalion and the Glasgow Yeomanry.
"I saw a grand football match this afternoon between two famous Canadian regiments. It did seem strange how everybody there forgot the blooming War and the thumping of the distant guns and were wholly taken up with the progress of the old game, so associated with peace times of old. The enthusiasm all through was tremendous, especially as the regiment that has the biggest name got beaten."
John Pritchard Sudbury, 458189, 9th Cdn Brigade Machine Gun CompanyAt the beginning of August their rest in the Dominion Lines would came to an end and the Canadian Scottish would be back in the front lines around Hill 60, in what would be their last engagement in the Salient, and Forbes's true Baptism of Fire.
Sunday 26 June 2016
The First Draft
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The Kilt Apron bearing the names of the First Draft from the Seaforth Highlanders to the 16th Battalion. It bears the signature and regimental number of each man. |
My grandmother used to describe her brother, ten years older, as a quiet, sweet boy; a comment echoed in his obituary that described him as having "a bright and kindly disposition". He was a lad who Colonel Cy Peck, V.C., D.S.O. and Bar, Commander of the 16th Battalion Canadian Scottish and member of Parliament, remembered fondly when, as she recounted it, he visited the family in Vancouver upon the return of the Battalion in 1919, and delivered a copy of a small red book, A Remembrance, dedicated to the men of the Canadian Scottish Regiment from the survivors of the 16th Battalion, CEF.
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A tribute from the men of the 16th Battalion presented to Forbes parents after the return of the Battalion from France in 1919 |
It was not unusual for battalions upon arrival in England to be broken up or parcelled out to units already in France. In fact, the 72nd Battalion was one of the original Highland regiments from which men were drawn to create the Canadian Scottish. But there would no doubt have been some disappointment on being selected as part of that first draft, comprised of men drawn evenly from Company A and Company B. He would be leaving those to whom he'd grown close, or at least gotten accustomed to, in the nine months since he had enlisted.
Nevertheless, he was joined by many others from his own company - men like Johnny Dewar, the "Kamloops Thunderbolt", who'd made a mark for himself in the boxing ring before they left Vancouver; Lance Corporal Finlayson, a stalwart member of the Battalion soccer team, who some claimed was a bit of a grand-stander on the field but also known never to waste a kick; the 31 year old, Five Acre Mac" McGuire who was said to be able to do more with two acres than most men can with four - though it was a nickname he didn't take kindly to; and Louis Walker, at twenty-seven one of the older men in his company, who lived on the same street as Forbes, just two blocks away, on the other side of Kingsway.
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Bramshott Camp 1916 |
The Canadian Scottish were in dire need of replacements when the first draft was called. A little more than a year earlier, along with much of the Canadian 1st Division, they had been decimated in the fighting around Ypres; first, in their Baptism of Fire in the Second Battle of Ypres where gas was first used effectively, and then a few weeks later in the Battle of Festubert. At one point they were down to half of their strength until, in late July, they again regained their full complement with the arrival of a draft from the Cameron Highlanders. But after spending the winter in the relatively quiet Ploegsteert front, they returned to the Ypres Salient at the end of March, reputedly "the most dangerous place on earth". And on June 2nd, while stationed in reserve, the Germans launched a devastating attack towards Hill 60, Mount Sorrel and Sanctuary Wood that ultimately cost the Canada 1st Division 8,000 casualties.
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German gun emplacements around Sanctuary Wood in the aftermath of the Battle of Mount Sorrel in June 1916 |
Finally, in the early hours of the 13th, in driving rain and wind, the Canadian Scottish attacked across ground that would latter characterize the battlefields of the Somme and Passchendaele. The men "kept tumbling and slipping into the mud over the smashed branches and stumps; their rifles became useless". The Battalion fought throughout the night and under cover of their own barrage they attacked the enemy around Observatory Ridge. As day broke on the 14th Lieutenant "Pete" Osler mounted the parapet of a trench with a red flare in hand that he waved back and forth, the signal for "alls well" (Lieutenant Osler would be killed the same day, shrugging of wounds that, once at the casualty clearing station were evidently more serious and led to his death).
The Canadian Scottish had achieved all of their objectives, but at great loss. The officer corps in particular was hard hit. In the preceding ten days they had lost ten officers, greater than that sustained by the Battalion in any engagement of the war.
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Cant. James Hamilton, M.C. and Bar |
The trip had begun on the morning of the 18th with a swift three mile march to Liphook Station, a place they had last seen on their arrival six weeks before. From Liphook they took a train to Southampton which delivered them right to the docks; and from there they went aboard one of the many channel boats. Typically the channel crossing would have taken no more than a few hours - nine at most - but in June, likely less. It was then a day's travel by train to Poperinghe - generally in boxcars designed to hold horses. But what could have been a two day trip from Bramshott to the front seldom took less than three or four days, often requiring an extra night's stop after arrival on the French coast, to get kit in order or wait for transportation.
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The contrast in the towns of Poperinge (left) and Ypres (right), just a short distance from each other., in 1916. |
The new draft was inspected by the new Command on the afternoon of the 22nd, while Captain Hamilton began his return journey to the 72nd Battalion, still in England. There would be further inspections with the entire Battalion in the two days that followed, as well as a church parade on the morning of the 25th. And then late that same evening they boarded a train for the short journey to Ypres where they relieved the 5th Battalion: their role, to provide support for the 13th and 15th Battalions who were on the front line.
In the days that followed the front line was heavily shelled, and in the early hours of June 27th the 13th and 15th Battalions were forced to repulse a localized German attack. A day later the Canadian Scottish were hit and two men were killed and nine others were wounded. But this was a gradual introduction to the War for the men in the Draft. Through the weeks of July and August, as the Battalion gradually regained its strength in officers, it returned to Hill 60, site of the devastating battles earlier in the summer, and the routine of War in the Ypres Salient.
Wednesday 1 June 2016
July 1st, 1916 - Canadians in the Somme
By the time the Somme offensive had petered out four months later, in mid November, four hundred thousand Commonwealth soldiers were missing, wounded or dead. And of those casualties, approximately 125,000 were dead - one third the number of commonwealth combatants killed in the six years of the Second World War.

One of these men was Charles Taylor who showed up at the CLB Armoury, named for the Church Lads’ Brigade, on Tuesday September 1st, 1914, ten days after the enlistment of recruits had started for the newly formed Newfoundland Regiment. Already 597 men had signed up, although by the time he actually declared on October 2nd, enough had failed to get accepted that he would be counted within the “First Five Hundred”. Like others in the regiment he wore the blue puttees that, in the absence of khaki material, had been scrounged from blue broadcloth and would give the First Five Hundred their other nick name.
Unlike the Newfoundlanders, not yet a part of Confederation, the Canadian Division would not join the battle until the Fall when they moved from the Ypres Salient to provide "fresh blood" for the depleted British, Australian and New Zealand troops.
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So different from the claustrophobic Ypres salient |
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The rolling fields of the Somme looking towards Regina Trench from Pozieres |
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The modern day town of Courcelette |
“Huge shell holes, half-filled with water, pitted the fields in every direction. . . Far beyond Courcelette I saw the German flare-lights and the bursting of shells. It was a scene of vast desolation, weird beyond description. . . When I got in to Regina Trench I found it was impossible to pass along it, as one sank so deeplyinto the heavy mud” Canon Frederick Scott, 1st Canadian Division, 1924