On Aug. 4, 1914, Britain entered the First World War and sent a call throughout the Empire for recruits to aid in opposing Germany and Austria-Hungary. This excerpt from Barry Gough’s meticulously researched account of Victoria High School during the Great War captures the fevered excitement that gripped the city in the first months of the war.
When news of the war reached Victoria on Aug. 5, 1914, plans were enacted to call out the militia and place the local regiments on a permanent footing. Suddenly, the city was alive with military forces. The public, long used to the great peace that had given it such splendid isolation from world affairs, now realized that the young fellows were flocking to join up.
Recruiting depots advertised for new enlistments. The war might be over by Christmas, so the call to arms spoke of urgency if one wanted to get in on the action. There was a deeper message: the bugles of England were calling to the men overseas. It was time for the Empire to come to the support of the colours. This was the requirement of imperial citizenship. Rudyard Kipling had been talking about it for some time. The moment had come; the time was now.…
On Wednesday, Aug. 26, volunteers from the 5th B.C. Regiment of Garrison Artillery, RCA, crowded aboard the CPR steamer Princess Mary in Victoria’s Inner Harbour and sailed for Vancouver, there to entrain for Valcartier Camp, Que. An estimated 60 officers and men comprised Victoria’s initial contribution to the First Contingent. On Aug. 28, the 50th Regiment, Gordon Highlanders, and the 88th Regiment, Victoria Fusiliers, about 500 men, left Victoria on the Princess Sophia. A company of men known vaguely as No. 2 Foreign Service Company also left on Aug. 28. Who knew what fates would await them.
Among the first to enlist was 34-year-old Edwin (Ned) Sherwin Tuck, a true soldier of empire. Born in Saint John, N.B., he had then come west with his family. He had fought with the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles (South Africa) against the Boers. He had been awarded the Queen’s South Africa Medal with Transvaal and South Africa 1902 clasps.
He was the only Victoria High School “old boy” who was decorated before going into the Great War. Married in 1913 to Alice, he gave his address as “Rocca-Bella,” Quadra Street, Victoria.
By trade and training he was an expert in communications, specifically telephones, and had worked for B.C. Telephone Company. He had been in Nelson for a time and also worked for Northern Pacific Railway in Washington state.
Tuck was well known in Victoria military circles because for a time he was in the 5th B.C. Regiment of Garrison Artillery. He went overseas as a sergeant in the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish) and, truth to tell, was likely saved (at least for a time) because he fell ill at his camp at Salisbury Plain and was sent home. Once recovered, he joined up again, though this time he had to go as a private rather than a sergeant (one of those oddities of being a non-commissioned officer).
He fought through the war with the 47th Battalion and died age 37, on Jan. 18, 1918. He was laid to rest in Sucrerie Cemetery, Ablain-St. Nazaire, France. The devastating news was reported in the Victoria press. He was much lamented by a large circle of friends, for he had spent most of his boyhood in Victoria, a student at Boys’ Central and Victoria High.
“His widow is now living here with her little child,” reported the Daily Colonist with sorrow on Feb. 2, 1918.
Many among the first to go were from the school. Donning the kilt, as The Camosun noted, Douglas Campbell, who had joined the 50th Regiment, Gordon Highlanders, was one of the first to volunteer. One patriotic family, the Carters, sent three sons: Elmer, Vere and Howard. All had been cadets at the school, all belonged to the 5th B.C. Regiment of Garrison Artillery, and all left on the first steamer from Victoria.
Lt. Charlie Brown, of the 88th Regiment, Victoria Fusiliers, and Sergeant (Budge) Paul, also in kilts, were among the first to go. Arthur Beaumont Boggs and Herbert William Boggs, whom we meet later, had gone early, though in different ways. Shirley Yuill, once leader of the cadets, went to McGill and then joined a regiment.
Lt. F. Carleton Hanington, who was to receive the Military Cross and was for years a cadet leader at the school, went on to McGill like so many others and was commissioned through the Officers’ Training Corps. He made a quick return to Victoria and joined the 5th B.C. Regiment, and by December 1914 was reported as being on Salisbury Plain in training. Lt. Henry L. Robinson, a law student at McGill, had blithely changed his career to that of “arms.” They were all “off to war.”
“As to the boys who were with us last year,” noted The Camosun, with sadness, “very little need be said. We feel their loss so much that we need not be reminded of their deeds.”
The same story listed Capt. Richard Wallis, Private Proctor McPherson, Sgt. E. Ferrar Hardwick, Private Cecil Milloy and Private Dono Heyland. These last were rugby men who had become soldiers.
“All were on our famous team last year; who can take their places? But as they brought the old school glory on the rugby field, what honour will they not win on the battlefield?” The last few years before 1914 had seen a surge in the number of boys’ athletic teams — rugby (junior and senior), soccer, two school basketball leagues, and three grass hockey teams. From the number of balls being pursued on the school grounds after classes closed for the day, it seemed that every boy played something.
The girls were similar. Two grass tennis courts were also laid out. “Play up, play up, and play the game” was always the credo of sports at the school, an essential part of its student pride and institutional identity. But for the moment, that was generally held in abeyance.
This was the first time and the last in Canada’s history that the pressure of war was turned directly on the whole youth of the nation.
Those already in employment had freedom to answer the call to the colours. Many of them had been in the cadet battalion (with all its training and attention to discipline and marksmanship). Many, too, had gone on to join militia units.
As for the students in the school, those enrolled in 1914 stayed in; they could not enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force until they were 18, though many fudged their age and got early entry. As one year passed into another, and with no end in sight for war’s end, the students made plans to enlist as soon as they could.
In the years after 1915, the upper echelons of the school’s males seemed to empty out, much to the sadness of the female students. Taken all together, the four years of war brought untold damage to Victoria society.
In 1904, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the prime minister, had pronounced that the 20th century would belong to Canada. All that was spoiled by the dizzying slide into disaster that began with young nationalists in Serbia, who assassinated the archduke and archduchess of Austria-Hungary and set in motion a series of blunders that brought the ruination of Europe.
In Victoria, those at the school, as well as those in the city and its suburbs, realized that their best interests could be served by supporting the imperial cause. Given the almost total absence of Canadian nationalism at the time, and the plurality of Canadian political opinion by region, province or ethnicity, it is clear that the support for the British Empire and even “the Mother Country” was the true extension of the Canadian emotional and material effort.
The brightest and the best, who had got to the school by virtue of their success in an admission examination, were the certain vector for support of the colours. All their traditions, all their blood ties, all their sympathies were with empire. In Victoria they gave unqualified support, as indeed was the case in most cities in the Dominion of Canada, as the nation was then called.
The frustrations felt by the female students must have been acute as they saw their boyfriends going off to the combat zone. They also often had a brother or two going overseas as well. The war changed the home front. Before long, trenches were dug at Dallas Road near Clover Point, and dugouts were erected downtown to help with recruitment. Few people in the city could not know that there was a war going on. But as the new school year began in August 1914, no one could have realized that they would be involved in the most stupendous struggle, a battle for civilization, for that was what it was.
From Classroom to Battlefield: Victoria High School and the First World War
© Barry Gough, Heritage House Publishing, 2014
