Fighting for the old country

The majority of chaps in the first contingent, a good sizable majority, were immigrants or the immediate offspring of immigrants from the old country. That includes England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales - all four of them. Of course, Ireland at that time was still replenishing a tremendous number of fine troops to the British Commonwealth, to the expeditionary force. And as far as the other enlistments are concerned, they would be nearly all native born Canadians, with a sprinkling of a few chaps that came over from the old country, such as myself. I came here in 1912, a month after the Titanic went down. And my parents had been here about 18 months prior. They left me behind to finish school over in England. So I came out here and I joined a boys club at St. John’s Norway. That’s on Kingston Road and Woodbine Avenue. And we were mostly English boys, English born, as a matter of fact. We didn’t rush to enlist right off the bat, because we didn’t know whether the war would be over very shortly. But when it started to drag on, we thought, “Well, we’d better get cracking.” And our main reason, one of our main reasons for joining was that the things that we had been taught to revere were being threatened. This was our churches, our schools, our friends, the population in general, our beautiful countryside in England - the whole of the British way of life was being threatened. So that we thought it was about time we try and do something about it, as little as it might have been.