This illustration accompanied a story by Fred Griffin about the homeless sleeping at the police station to stay warm. This was before the Great Depression when “hobos” were less common. The “better ‘ole” is in reference to Bruce Bairnsfather’s famous “Better ‘Ole” comic from World War 1.
Looking From the Engineer’s Cab Every Level Crossing is a Hair-Raising Hazard – The Engineer Cannot Slow Up His Train Every Mile or So – All He Can Do is to Watch, Watch, and Hope Those Motorists Ahead Will Have Sense Enough to Play Safe – Nervous Strain Terrible
By Gregory Clark, November 28, 1925.
Fifty-eight miles, fifty-nine, SIXTY miles an hour!
The gigantic engine leaps and sways like a racing automobile multiplied a thousandfold.
It feels as if it were hurling itself. The din is soundless, an ear-blocking din. Heat whirls in the grey steel-filled cab. Past narrow windows, the world streams dizzily past.
His gauntleted left arm resting shakenly on the huge throttle, his squinted eyes glued to the narrow ribbon of steel-shod way ahead, the engineer drives International Limited thundering through.
Sixty miles, SIXTY-ONE miles an hour!
Through narrowed eyes, he strains his sight ahead on that swift-rushing path ahead of him, swift-rushing towards him, like a river, a rapids, a furious torrent of road.
For he is coming to a level crossing that is a provincial highway. Soon he will see it. He reaches up, never moving his eyes from the path, and hauls heavily on a cord. Faintly in the din he hears his fierce whistle blow, long, long, short-short.
Then he sees far ahead the highway. Little black objects are scuttering across. Motors.
His giant Six Thousand leaps on. Oh, how the flickering dimly-seen, roadbed is swept up! The little black objects ahead seem to swell larger, larger. The engineer again reaches up, hauls the cord and the fierce whistle hoots.
Of course the highway crossing is protected. There are bells and wig-wags1 on it. It is broad daylight. It is a still afternoon, and his wild whistle can be heard miles. Yet…
The crossing is clear. The International is two swift train-lengths away from it. A low-hung touring car, grey, speeding, appears back on the highway racing for the crossing. Two hundred yards back!
The engineer crouches. The gauntleted arm clamps against the huge throttle. A wild thrill of horror seizes him, enfolds him. He snatches the whistle cord and hauls hard.
SIXTY-ONE!
He watches with half-closed eyes the point he will pass like a thunderbolt in three-two-ONE second.
The speeding motor car comes to a sudden stop twenty feet from the crossing. The man at the steering wheel is looking up with a grin and waves to the engineer. It was a little joke he was having… His passengers, women, are huddled terrified in the back seat.
The engineer, clammy from head to foot, wipes his gauntlet over his forehead and turns his eyes again on the wheeling road before him, his road. For a mile and a quarter ahead is another level crossing.
He is alone. This leaping, thrusting three-hundred-ton monster of black steel and white fire is his to make go and his to stop. Behind him, attached to him, in his care, are ten eighty-foot cars carrying three hundred and fifty men, women and little children. They are sitting unconcernedly, watching the country flying by, reading, playing, chatting as in a drawing room.
Speed Demanded by Public
The engineer is alone and all this is in his keeping. His mate, the fireman, sits across the cab, watching out the other window, his hand on the levers that control the automatic coal feed to the ravenous engine. But the two lone men in, the front of this mile-a-minute train are separated by an impenetrable, invisible wall of tumult.
You and I, in a hundred and fifty miles of motor travel, will cross perhaps four, five level crossings. We come to them as each of us sees fit, some of us cheerfully and recklessly, some of us cautiously. Four or five of them in a day’s long travel.
This engineer, traveling at tremendous speed, a speed demanded by the public as a whole, you and me included, a modern, twentieth century rate of speed, with neither the power nor the right to stop at crossings, this engineer has to cross not four or five but one hundred and forty level crossings in a hundred and forty miles of headlong, hurtling race.
One crossing to a mile is the average in the older settled portions of the province. Many of them are highways, protected by bells, automatic wig-wag signals or gates. But most of them are just open crossings with only the white cross sign. To you and me they are incidental risks of the day’s run. To the engineer in the cab of your train they are the ever-recurring, permanent, hair-raising hazards and terrors of a life of service.
Duncan Campbell of Mimico is one of the engineers who drive the International Limited, that great train run by the National Railways across Quebec and Ontario into the United States. As you know, engineers do not run a train the whole of its great run. They take it over in “divisions.” At every hundred and forty miles or thereabouts is a “division point” on the line, where a new crew come aboard, to drive the mighty creature its next hundred and forty mile run. Engineer Duncan Campbell’s share in the run of the International Limited is from Toronto to Sarnia and then, after a rest, from Sarnia to Toronto again. This division is one hundred and seventy-four miles through the most thickly-populated district of Ontario and of Canada, and his steel path is crossed by no fewer than one hundred and seventy-nine roads. More than one to every mile of his run. And in that run he hits sixty miles an hour -when he may.
“Each and every one of those crossings,” says Engineer Campbell, “is in itself a danger and a terror. Many of them are just little Country dirt roads. But in this day and age, with the motor car risen to such a place as it has in our lives, there is no road that has not its menace. Of course, an engineer, after many years back and forward on his division, every day of his life, comes to know each stick and stone of it, as a man knows his path home.
“Our orders are to keep our eye on the road all the time. Care as we must for our engines, we must keep our eye on the track ahead. We know every crossing as we come to it, we learn to sound our whistle without really seeing the whistle-post. Some crossings we learn to distrust more than others. All crossings, despite the fact that we pass them several times a week, fill us with secret fear.
“For you must understand, we run on a schedule of time and of speed. The public demand it. But I can stop my train with the emergency brakes, in about twice its length.
“If my train is ten cars, my train is about eight hundred feet long. Therefore, I can stop in 1,600 feet.
One Bad Fright Every Trip
The emergencies that arise at level crossings arise at far less than 1,600 feet; they arise at five hundred feet, four hundred feet. It is the man who suddenly decides he can make it after all, the man who has slowed up and then puts on speed to cross over, the man who is one hundred or two hundred feet from the crossing, who breaks the hearts of engineers.
“Engineers are trained to be experts in judging the interrelation of distance and speed. That is our business, our skill. As I sit at my window watching the crossing ahead and suddenly see a man start up to try and beat me to the crossing I know better than he that I am going to be at that crossing before he possibly can be.
“You would be surprised to know how many motorists strike trains in the second and even the third coach back in these attempts to beat us. If we had tried to stop, we might have just succeeded in slowing enough so that our pilot would have struck and destroyed them instead of them striking us. You have only to recall the sudden way a train appears to rush into the station platform to know how deceiving a train’s speed is. Yet coming into the station the train is actually slowing up, not speeding up.
“There is no trip that we do not have at least one fright. We do not know that the car running to the crossing really going to slow up. We do not know the intentions of the driver. We do not even know if he has seen us. It happens all in a few seconds. To us it sometimes seems an eternity. Yet we never become accustomed to it. Sometimes the cars will skip across so close in front of us that I am in doubt whether we have hit them or not. But no: they got across and waved jokingly to my mate at the other window,
“We are helpless. Once we have set the engine in motion and at a speed demanded by official schedule, we cannot stop save in emergency. If we slowed up for every crossing, not only would it make travel impossible, with a slow-up every mile, but would only make the motoring public confident instead of otherwise with regard to crossings.”
A C.P.R. engineer who cannot be quoted by name has the same experiences to tell.
“It is a regular thing in our trade for engineers to wear out under the strain and have to be laid off or transferred to lighter runs,” he said. “One bad accident puts a nerve strain on engineers throughout the country that is sometimes very hard to bear.
“A few days ago I sat at my cab window and counted eleven cars that crossed on a certain eastern Ontario highway after I was within one train length of the crossing, a matter of seconds, for I was hitting nearly fifty miles an hour. What if one of them had got rattled? What if two of them had met and locked? I could not stop in time. I pulled the whistle cord and held my breath. This was only a few days after a big smash near Toronto when half a dozen were killed.
“That night I dreamed some pretty tough dreams, I can tell you.”
What is to blame for the accidents? If the people of Canada paid out millions in taxes for gates at all crossings, as they are in England, would it help?
“The vast majority of our accidents and our scares,” says Engineer Alexander Bond, who for thirty years has driven on the Toronto-Sarnia run and now is one of the crack drivers of the International, “occur not at night but in the daytime. Our great electric headlight seems to be sufficient warning at night. In the daytime nothing but caution will do. For it is the opinion of engineers generally that seventy-five per cent. of the people hit are fully aware of the approach of the train and are struck as the result of misjudgment or carelessness or recklessness in the face of danger. Perhaps not even twenty-five per cent. were struck not knowing the train was upon them.
Foolish “Jokes” of Motorists
“I recall one day an open car coming at a fair speed towards the crossing. I had blown my whistle, but because it appeared to be a carload of girls I blew it again, for safety. Instead of slowing, the car put on speed. It was already too late for me to brake. We were hitting our top speed. All this happens, you must remember, in a flashing second or two. I was sick with the shock of it. I could scarcely look for fear. But as we rushed past my frozen gaze beheld two or three young girls laughing below me and waving, having pulled their car up suddenly, as they had intended from the start, not fifteen feet from the train.
“We get the shock, whether we hit or not.”
It is safe to say there is not an engineer of really long standing who has not hit something on a level crossing. He has excellent reason to fear them.
One engineer told of his worst accident. A car came to a stop at the crossing, the engineer watching, relieved of heart. The train bored on. Suddenly, to the horror of the engineer, he saw the car jerk into motion and start to cross after all, in low gear, apparently. Whether it was misjudgment of speed or whether the driver, flustered, had put his engine into gear; at any rate, the engineer and his mate felt the little bump which means that the 300-ton engine has struck the one-ton car. When they got stopped they found, on the pilot, a little boy of about five years dead. The father and mother were in fields to right and left.
“There was only one man who could possibly, under heaven, have averted that accident,” said the engineer, a pathetic look on his face, in remembrance of that horror. “And it was not I.”
Thundering through, the great engine cannot dodge. Either it must travel at its modern speed or railways must give up. And no matter whether the speed is sixty or twenty, the relative danger is still there.
What is the answer? In Ontario alone, in 1924, 63 persons were killed and 132 non-fatally injured in level crossing collisions. Ontario alone. The figures for the present year, to date, are 43 killed and 132 injured, in Ontario alone.2 The National Railways supplies the Safety League with statistics as to all cars that crash through gates after they have been lowered. This year the number has been 70. So gates, in a sense, are an actual menace, since a car that crashes gates stalls on the tracks, naturally.
Several of the United States have adopted the “stop law” at all level crossings. That is, motor cars and other vehicles must come to an absolute stop at level crossings at all times, whether there is a train coming or not. This necessitates the car changing gear and crossing in low or second. It permits warning signals to be seen or heard.
What inconvenience, what injustice would the stop law do the motoring public? In a hundred miles of travel a man would have to stop at level crossings an average of half a dozen times. In the course of a day a motorist does stop and change gears half a dozen times merely from the ordinary hazards and chances of the road, either a hole in the pavement, a detour obstruction, a traffic jam. Would the stop-law be so great an inconvenience?
Over a hundred dead in the past two years seem to testify in Ontario alone that the stop- law is due.
Thundering through they must thunder through, those great trains. A whole transportation system depends on the exactness of arrivals and departures.
On what depends the speed and the care of a motorist on the highway?
Just lives, human lives.
Editor’s Notes:
This illustration went with an article by Fred Griffin on how juries are selected in Ontario. It notes that Ontario still does not allow women on juries while jurisdictions like Alberta and some U.S. states have allowed it since 1922 and 1920 respectfully, despite recent changes giving women the vote. The article also lists all of the conditions to become a juror such as being over 21, being a British subject, not infirm, and owning $600 of property in cities or $400 in towns or villages.
This is the first appearance of Pigskin Peters.
This illustration accompanied a generic article by Raymond Knister about community or church suppers usually held in the fall. In this case, “Birdseye Center” was used as a generic term to describe a small town, and did not have anything to do with Jim’s comic. John Knister was known primarily for his realistic narratives set in rural Canada.
By Gregory Clark, November 14, 1925.
Did you go in for radio heckling during the campaign?1
It’s the latest sport.
Amongst those invited in to hear the speech of the Right. Hon. Mackenzie King was our Aunt Jess.
She is getting on in years, but still bears a stout and doughty attitude towards life. And she is a Tory.
During the preliminary speeches Aunt Jess sat in stony silence, a slight smile on her face, which curled with mild scorn whenever there came the buzz of thunderous applause out the horn.
When the prime minister was announced she sat forward in her chair and bent a challenging gaze into the amplifier.
“Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,” began the prime minister.
“Bah for you!” shouted Aunt Jess.
“Sssh!” we all hissed, in astonishment.
“It is a source of very special pride and pleasure,” continued the prime minister, unabashed by Aunt Jess’ rude interruption, “for me to-night…”
“Daddy, what did you do in the great war!” yelled Aunt Jess, who is a reader of the Telegram as well as the Mail.
“Sssh!, Whisssht!” we expostulated.
“… to have with me on this platform to night,” continued the prime minister, “my chief lieutenant in the government of this country.”
“For five days more!” yelled Aunt Jess, in a loud voice, and very red in the face.
We turned off the switch.
“Look here, Aunt Jess,” we cried, “you can’t do that! He can’t hear you, you know.”
“I know that, my lad,” replied Aunt Jess. “But you don’t know what pleasure it gives me to be quite rowdy. I have never heckled in my life before and here’s my chance. Turn that thing on again.”
“Please, Aunt Jess, we want to hear Mr. King’s message.”
“Would you deny an old woman her dying wish? Turn that thing on!”
“But –“
“But nothing. I have been going to political meetings all my life and have had to sit like a fool, afraid to open my mouth for fear everyone would turn and stare at me. Now’s my chance. Let ‘er go!”
Sat Closer Than Before
And Aunt Jess sat up closer to the horn than before, in a most rowdy attitude, her eyes sparkling. “Let ‘er go!”
“I understand, ladies and gentlemen,” came Mr. King’s voice, “that the right honorable the leader of the opposition…”
“Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Tiger!!!” roared Aunt Jess into the amplifier, while Mr. King’s voice continued unperturbed but somewhat drowned by the lone cheers.
“I would like to ask Mr. Meighen to do what I have attempted to do here,” went on the prime minister.
“Oh, is that so!” shouted Aunt Jess.
“I would like him to state on this platform, who he will have in his cabinet from Quebec, and who he will have in his cabinet from the west?”
“Better men than you’ve got!” cried Aunt Jess, her face up to the horn.
The old lady’s spirit was infectious. We all began to see this as a battle between Aunt Jess and the prime minister. As the speech went on Aunt Jess unloosed some expressions, some modern and some quite old and well-worn, that we had no idea she possessed in her ladylike vocabulary. When the prime minister got going in his stride, with long, oratorical sentences that could not very well be broken in on, Aunt Jess would merely retort with long, raucous laughter, utterly confusing and spoiling the effect of the prime minister’s best arguments. She produced a small flag from her sateen bag and began waving it in front of the horn with derisive shouts.
“These are the policies,” said the prime minister, “for which the Liberal party not only stands…”
“But falls!” shrilled Aunt Jess. And she rose to her feet.
Continued Right to the End
The prime minister was marching to a close.
Aunt Jess removed her little bonnet which she wears in the house. Eyes alight, voice husky from use, she continued her heckling right to the end.
“.. and with that greater understanding,” concluded the prime minister eloquently, “a larger fellowship for the good of the individuals concerned and the greater good of all.”
Aunt Jess hurled her bonnet into the horn, thus muffling the Liberal cheers which sprang from it.
“Hurray for Meighen!” she screamed. “Hurray! Hurray!” And she did a sort of dervish dance in front of the amplifier.
“The best time I ever had in my life,” declared Aunt Jess, breathlessly. “How much do these radio things cost?”
Aunt Jess has a lot of old scores to pay.
“There are singers I want to inform that they have rotten voices. There are certain ministers in this city I would like to interrupt.”
(Aunt Jess is an Anti2, you understand.)
“All my life, for over sixty years, I have had to go to concerts, meetings, and to church, and listen to people that irritated me beyond measure. Here is my chance to tell them what is on my mind. You see, I give them no offense, yet I get a burden off my mind that has weighed too heavily… Turn on some singer until I see what it feels like.”
We got a station in which a lady with a slow soprano was singing “Marquita.”
We sat in silence. Aunt Jess lifted her chin and tapped with her knitting needles.
“Too slow,” she called into the horn. “Don’t chew your words, girl. Enunciate. Enunciate. Oh, horrible. Stop her!”
We switched off.
Aunt Jess tossed her head delightedly.
“What a treat!” said Aunt Jess. “Are there any Unionist ministers preaching to-night?”
“No, not until Sunday.”
“Very well, I’ll be here Sunday,” said Aunt Jess.
Editor’s Notes:
This illustration accompanied a story by Amy Carr about the dentist. I have no information on who she was.
No Politician Need Fear The Soldier Vote, For The Veterans of The Great War Are Scattered to The Four Corners of the Dominion – Disunion Is Evident – Lack of a Soldiers’ Organization That Represents The Old Corps of War Days – What Chance of a Canadian Legion?
By Gregory Clark, July 18, 1925.
Canada has succeeded magnificently in disbanding her army.
One of the oldest problems in the history of the world is how to disband an army.
Raising an army is a joke. Any country can raise an army overnight. The late war proves it. A few drums, a few flags, a few promises. But it is getting rid of that dangerous mustering of men that is the mischief of a job. The world’s history is full of jagged holes torn by armies that wouldn’t disband. Caesar’s to Napoleon’s, great, rearing political and social factors that the statesmen had not counted on when they planned and executed a “good war.”
Caesar set out to make the world safe for democracy: and, after he had done all he intended, here were legions unnumbered cluttering up the streets of Rome, who wouldn’t go back to the plow, but, professional veterans, began agitating for democracy. Napoleon set out to make the world safe for democracy, against the kings of the world; and before he finally got his army disbanded he was an emperor, an exile, and his old army disbanded itself in the cafes of Paris under a king.
It isn’t an army in the field that is a dangerous thing. It is an army back home.
Canada’s army is utterly disbanded. It was probably not by design that our regiments were recruited from different parts of the dominion. Yet there is the secret of disbanding. To hold a reunion of one Toronto regiment, for example, you would have to get its old members from Owen Sound, Ottawa, Quebec, New Brunswick, North Bay, Alberta and Kingston.
That regiment cannot hold a reunion. It has never held a reunion. It disbanded in Toronto Exhibition grounds. And its members scattered to the four winds of the vast dominion. As a whole, it will never be again. A thousand old familiar faces are gone forever. This is the fact about practically every regiment in the Canadian corps.
No politician has anything to fear from the soldier vote. Nor need anything great ever be expected, by way of splendid constructive and organized effort from that magnificent body of Canadians who stood together, say in 1917 and 1918.
The recent gathering of veterans at Ottawa to meet Lord Haig and to hear his inspiring appeal for the union of all Canada’s veterans and to join Canada’s veterans with the British Legion in an imperial association of all the ex-soldiers of the war has merely brought to the front the fact of the disunion of Canada’s veterans.
That Canada’s veterans have tried to get together is proved by the fact that there have been and are in existence at least twenty and perhaps more distinct veterans’ organizations in Canada. There is one strong one – strong, in comparison with the others – one that was strong in the hectic days of 1921, but now of unknown strength, and then a large number that trail away to mere regimental societies, looking after the dependent members of the units they commemorate.
Each Claimed the Honor
That any or all of these veterans’ associations actually represent the ex-service men of Canada as a whole is claimed by all, but stands in need of proof.
Five offices of five separate and distinct veterans’ associations were visited in Toronto. In each office a paid official stated in unqualified terms that there was only one real, strong, representative soldiers’ organization in the country.
This emphatic statement by five paid officials does not mean that the union inspired by Lord Haig has suddenly come into being. Nor does it mean that all five are agreed that one of their number is really the one effective, powerful agency for the service of the ex-soldier.
No. Each official claimed the honor and distinction for his own association! And the words that each used regarding all the others, only a few hours after the meeting with Lord Haig, were hard words.
The reunion of old regiments is physically impossible. The effort to enroll the veterans in a civil organization has failed in the upspringing of a score of separate and opposed associations. The union of these associations, without the leadership of a mighty man, and the co-operation of tens of thousands of Canadian ex-service men who have never joined any organization, is most unlikely.
Yet every one of these societies of veterans has had as its first principle the assisting of ex-soldiers or soldiers’ widows in the winning from the government their just dues in pensions, allowances, and medical treatment. All of them have done something in this direction; some of them have done much. The millions of dollars that have been awarded by official departments in the last eight years on the representation of these veteran societies is proof enough that they have been of value to the country. That such service bureaus would have emerged at the end of the war was perfectly natural, of course.
But to what extent are the veterans’ associations now active representative of that Canadian corps which enlisted, from its start to its finish, over half a million men in Canada?
This has become more than a little question. Because, at the meeting with Lord Haig in Ottawa, the various associations, with a decisive gesture, appeared to hand over to Lord Haig not merely the associations or clubs of veterans which were represented there, but the veterans of Canada as a whole.
When, for example, a veterans’ organization of all of them for that matter makes a public pronouncement on some public question can this be accepted as the opinion of the old Canadian corps?
Descending Order of Figures
To our representative in Ottawa C. Grant MacNeil, general secretary of the G.W.V.A., Nell gave the following figures. He stated that the active and paid-up membership of the G.W.V.A. throughout Canada is now 99,900. He gives as the Ontario membership 42,000.
Mr. A. Shields, secretary of the Ontario district command, stated that the active and paid-up membership of Ontario would be about 30,000, and of Toronto about 5,000.
Mr. Harry Bray, president of the Toronto district, said that 5,000 would be about the paid-up strength of Toronto, and that the Riverdale branch, probably the strongest in the city, would be 600.
The secretary of the Riverdale branch stated that his active paid-up strength was 480.
This downward discrepancy of figures throughout would probably seriously affect Mr. MacNeil’s estimate that there were 99,900 active members in his organization, the strongest of all the associations.
In the audit of the G.W.V.A. dominion headquarters at Ottawa an order of the senate committee which was investigating the payment of trust moneys made to Mr. MacNeil, it showed that money received by the headquarters of the G.W.V.A. over the whole period of eight years of its existence as per capita tax of 60 cents per member per year, totalled for the whole period only $121,000. Divided by eight, this would give some $15,000 a year, the per capita tax of some 25,000 members over the whole dominion. However, some years, the per capita tax receipts were bigger than others, the largest being for ten months ending February, 1920, when over $30,000 was received, the tax on about 50,000 members.
But the last record, the tax received from May, 1923, to April, 1925, when the audit was made, shows only $13,197 over a period of two years, which would indicate a membership, active, during the past couple of years of something around 11,000 members in good standing – not 99,900!
Mr. Shields, the Ontario secretary, explained this extraordinary discrepancy by pointing out that in the case of a returned soldier organization it was hardly fair to demand the paid-up and active membership as being the strength of the organization. The enrolment was much greater than the paid-up strength.
But in searching for the right of representation of Canada’s ex-service men can anything but paid-up figures be allowed? And, of course, the G.W.V.A. is unquestionably the strongest of all the organizations.
“What percentage of your membership is Canadian born?” we asked Mr. Shields.
“Not a very large percentage,” he replied.
“Why is that?”
“Well, for the main thing, because the majority of the troops in the Canadians were Old Country men.” stated Mr. Shields.
This was received with some astonishment, and we were able to supply Mr. Shields with the official figures of the Doomsday Book, showing the records of total enlistments in the Canadian corps to be divided as follows:
Born in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales 221,495
Born in Canada 317,705
Born in the United States 37,391
Elsewhere, some 13,000.
This shows a majority of nearly a hundred thousand Canadian born over Old Country men in the corps. And it shows one-sixth as many Americans as Old Country men, which is an arresting thought, since surely the United States had no particular call to arms until at last she entered on her own behalf.
Absence of Native Born Puzzle
In the same building in which Mr. Shields was being interviewed, as a matter of fact, there had been held a mass meeting of veterans during the recent excitement over the establishing of a Canadian flag, at which all veterans present passed a unanimous resolution that the Union Jack was Canada’s flag. The hall in which the meeting was held was the G.W.V.A. hall.
“How many of the veterans present at that meeting were Canadian born?” we asked Mr. Shields.
“There would not be a great many,” he admitted.
“Would there be ten?”
Mr. Shields thought there would be more than ten. But he would not say precisely how many. He makes no bones about the fact that the Canadian born, who were in the majority in the corps, are by no means in the majority in the G.W.V.A.
So, admitting, for example, the perfect right of every man to express the love of his native land in any way he likes, the mass meeting of veterans that passed the unanimous resolution that the Union Jack be in no way added to by a symbol of Canada, these veterans – Canadian no less than any man who lives and loves and toils in Canada – were none the less British-born veterans expressing their love of their own land above all else.
This is merely one case that makes it interesting and necessary that the relation of such veteran societies as exist to the ex-members of the Canadian corps as a whole be looked into.
The absence of Canadian born from the various veterans’ societies other than those special ones referring to some particular disability is one of the puzzles and problems of the whole situation.
“It is admitted,” says Mr. Harry Bray, the Toronto president, who is, Canadian born himself, “that the majority of veterans are not enlisted in any association, which, from the point of view of the service they might render, alone is a great pity. And it is also clear that those principally absent from the associations are the Canadian born.”
Mr. Bray stated that not one per cent. of the cases that come into his hands as an officer of the Soldiers Aid Commission for relief of various kinds are members of any veterans’ organizations.
How utterly the old corps is disbanded! The regiments but memories. The veterans in conflicting societies of undemonstrable strength, though doing good work. And these societies not representative of the Canadian born, who, though not in the first contingents, the statistics of which are a glorious tribute to the love of Old Country men for their homeland, nevertheless made the Canadian corps predominantly Canadian as a whole.
Who can bring all the veterans of Canada into a union? Can Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the corps, do what Lord Haig, commander of all the British forces, did with the British veterans?
If he could and does – and indications are not wanting that the duty is inevitably moving his way – would it be a good thing or a bad thing for Canada?
History tells that disbanded armies have been mighty social and political factors, most of them very much for the good of the nation. They served to check the ambitions of victorious tyrants. But they have also played tool to politicians.
One little organization with headquarters in Toronto, little in the sense that it has only a small office with three paid officials and no membership of its own, though representing nine different Ontario veteran bodies of various sizes down to regimental veteran associations, is known as the Veterans’ Alliance. It was formed in 1923 as a protest against the inactivity of the Dominion Veterans’ Alliance.
Canada as a Motherland
This independent alliance, with a staff of three, in the seventeen months it had functioned up to the time of making this return to the government secured for veterans from the pensions board and other official sources the sum of $109,080 in cash. These were just and honest claims that the government was not paying until brought to their notice by a society that secures the services of the city’s foremost medical specialists, without cost to the pensioner, and spares no pains to make a true and faithful presentation of claims. The pensions this represents over a period of years could be shown in millions. But the $109,080 is cash already received by ex-service men.
That is an indication of what the need of some independent representation for the ex-service man amounts to. It is very real and, urgent.
What a great union of all veterans, a Canadian Legion, like the British Legion or the American Legion, could do in the wider field of service to Canada as a whole demands vision.
The commander of that legion when it was a corps serving Canada on the field of battle is known to be a man of vision.
With him at the leash the corps did Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens, Arras, Cambrai to what we all thought was the finish.
Some want to call the proposed union of veterans the British Legion. Another group want to call it the Canadian Legion.
If the union consists simply of those associations now existing, it should be called the British Legion in Canada, unquestionably, because it would very largely consist of British-born veterans of the corps.
If a union under a great leader can be devised that will include also a just proportion of the Canadian born, then it should be called the Canadian Legion, in memory of that great corps which consisted of British born and the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of British born and of French-Canadians, Americans and sons of many lands. Yet any organization which denies to the Canadian born the divine right to love the land they were born in more than any other and whatsoever will not much appeal to Canadians as a whole.
To the British born in Canada the last vision vouchsafed to them on this earth will probably be some bit of Surrey, some little street in Scotland, some green hill of Erin. The spirit turns again home.
Yet to their very sons, as to the sons of their predecessors in the building of the empire, the last vision will surely be of some sweet, familiar glimpse of this beloved motherland that is Canada.
Editor’s Notes: As indicated in the article, after world War One, there were a number of veteran organizations, with the largest being the Great War Veterans’ Association. These organizations were needed as the government was not very good at looking after veterans. By November of 1925, the appeal for unity lead to the creation of the Royal Canadian Legion.
Prohibition had been in place in Ontario since 1916, but it had huge pockets of unpopularity resulting in numerous referendums. In 1923, the conservative government of Howard Ferguson was elected. A referendum in 1924 on repeal was basically 50/50. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, in early 1925 it was announced the repeal of restriction on the sale of beer, allowing the sale of a beer with a maximum alcohol content of 4.4% which was nicknamed “Fergie’s Foam” or “temperance beer”. Full repeal came in 1927.
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