Shell Shock 1921

Pretty unknown girl found in among Nicholson pictures. Might be Sophia Nicholson, but more likely May Watters or perhaps a Peppler.

I’m watching Jules et Jim on Turner Classic Movies and I’m up the the war part. I have always considered this movie one of my favorites, but I saw it only in art cinemas in my twenties.

It seldom comes on TV. And here it is.

It’s a bit ironic that I’m watching this movie that begins in the Tigholas era, 1912, and has the Jeanne Moreau in the fashions of the day.

I’ve just read a letter from 1923, from Sophie Nicholson Bell, Margaret’s niece (well, Norman’s niece as she is the daughter of his brother, Gilbert.)

In 1911, she is off to Edmonton to join her father and drops in to see Margaret and Margaret is miffed as she doesn’t even ‘take off her hat.’ Margaret suggests she is a snob of sorts.

Anyway, in this letter, Sophie is answering for her father, who no longer writes letters. (Not a surprise, his earlier letters are almost illegible.)

Flora has written him. Norman died the year before.

“Dear Flora,

Your letter came to father at Christmas, and he was very pleased to get it as Uncle Norman always wrote at this time of year.

I am penning you a few lines tonight. I have just put the girls to bed and the baby doesn’t get fed until 11.00 so I have a whole hour at last.

I have a maid, but she used to make ammunition in England and should be somewhere doing that now instead of posing as a domestic.

It has been almost a year since the unexpected wire: we would be glad to hear just what happened and what the operation was for.

All we heard is the paper report which was mostly about the funeral. It was very real. I could see it all: going up over the hill to the old cemetery and I felt very badly as it recalled the others that rest there. (St. Andrew’s in Melbourne.)

(Norman’s death certificate says Pulmonary embolism and cardiac failure.)

Father is getting quite old in many ways. He does not try to do anything but a little work in the garden and take care of his hens. He is troubled with indigestion and stays indoors too much.

It’s much nicer for Aunt Margaret to be with you all in Montreal. How is Marion and the children? Some one said she has four and a boy among them. Well, I guess I’ll just put an ad in the paper for someone to leave one at my doorstep as it’s no use depending on the stork.

Kileen? says she won’t have a boy in the house, they screech and fight and you just can’t train them.

John is not well. Sick most of the time since coming out of the army. He has a nervous trouble, also a poisoned system so he is in soldier’s hospital.
The Drs. don’t seem to be able to do much for him. But now a new treatment has come out of California and seems to be helping some of the cases….

Hmm. An interesting lady, this Sophia. The only Internet mention of her is on a Wikipedia page about the Edmonton 1927 civic elections where she is elected as a school trustee, so also a politician like Marion. She seems to have Marion’s sense of humour, too.

Funny, the Nicholsons were so close to the Watters, the cousins related to one of Norman’s sisters, but his brother Gilbert’s kids were almost strangers to them. Gilbert inherited the family farm, which meant he was the one who didn’t get any schooling. His letters suggested as much.

I have her wedding invitation somewhere. I know she married a Bell. Well, that’s obvious, but is JOHN her husband? Is he the one with shell shock? Not likely as she is still getting pregnant. She mentions no husband, does she? Gordon is a brother. John may be another.

Shell shock! I recently wrote about Chester Coy’s madness and I have read other letters from the 1920′s discussing it. (One of these letters is from 1921 from a Reid in Carlisle England; the Reids are also relations of the Nicholsons and the Clevelands and Coys, but I don’t quite understand the connection. (My mother in law used to mentioned a Helen Reid who was related in some way to the skier Ken Reid.) I feel odd reading this particular letter, as Carlisle was where my father was lodged as a child when he was sent away from Malaya to school in England. An aunt lived there. This was from 1927 to the thirties, so maybe they passed in the streets)

Perhaps Chester Coy left his sanity at the Front. I hadn’t thought of that. And I just posted a bit about Herbert Tucker, Flora’s boyfriend. She never married him, but seemed to go out with him for many years… so maybe he too was ruined by the war. His letters show that he feels terrible that he survived and his brother, Percy, didn’t.

WWI destroyed many men, by death, by disfigurement and by insanity.

I just saw Colin Firth’s A Month in the Country, posed on YouTube. It’s about that very thing.

The Loom of God

Colin Firth in A Month in the Country, where he plays a WWI veteran who stammers, like in the King’s Speech.

January 18, 1918, it is written at the top of the yellowed newspaper clipping. The Gazette. On top of that in pencil “A very brilliant speaker.” Edith’s handwriting.

The Headline: War is Grim but Needed Blessing.

Dr. William J. Dawson, formerly of London, England and now of Newark is the man.

“In Saint James Methodist Church last night, William J. Dawson preached the gospel at once terrifying and comforting that the nations are being redeemed and regenerated through war. (With the help of cosmic processes.)

Dr. Dawson’s sermon was taken from Luke XXL.

The Minister admitted that while we look down at the mutilated men lying on the fields of France and Flanders, the doctrine that war is working for redemption and regeneration seems a terrible one.

One had to look up to see the loom of God weaving with many a blood-stained thread.

Peace was the mother of prosperity and best for the individual development, but what only a very few men have been able to see, that civilized nations were apt to become over-ripe with a prolongued peace, and at last rotten.

Just as vultures are ministers of purification, the eagles of war did not gather in an age and under conditions were the moral health of the world was perfect. Before war came there was always corruption of thought, some decadence of morals, a materialism which mistook luxury as the prime end of life, a weakening of the spiritual ideals of nations.

Among the signs of the coming redemption the speaker mentioned the downfall of the czar in Russia. (This following part is underlined by Edith.)

It is the testimony of history, again and again, that the fire of revolution, on behalf of liberty, once lit, never goes out. It may be trodden down, it may be drenched in blood, but it never goes out.

Other signs mentioned were the death of the party spirit, a unity of sentiment and purpose through the British Empire, and among free nations, prohibition, arrived or coming soon. (sic). And countless other reforms that without the war could not have been achieved.”

…Well, I don’t think Vera Brittain agreed after losing her brother and boyfriend.

To think of all the great books that weren’t written, great paintings not brushed on canvas, great leaders not realized, great ideas not generated, because of this slaughter.

Chances are, because you are alive today, no ancestor of yours fought in WWI.

Edith Nicholson, too, years later, after living through two wars (and being Commandant of the Quebec Red Cross in WWII, told my husband, her great nephew, that wars are always “all about money.”

A few months later, a family friend, Percy Tucker would die in battle, after re-enlisting. Just before Armistace.

I wrote about it in an earlier blog.

The Ignatieff’s had already come to Richmond, I guess, by this time. Not sure, though. This might account for Edith underlining this part. There are other Nicholson clippings about the Russian Revolution, however.

Good Citizens and Future Soldiers…

Mother portrayed as Goddess of Wisdom in 1900 advertisement for some healthy baby food. If British, this baby would grow up likely to die in WWI. A mother’s job is to raise good citizens, unless they are needed for other things.

When looking up info on the 1908 Olympics in the Montreal Gazette, I found another intersting headline: A War in Europe would be a Bloodbath.

In this instance, the word ‘bloodbath’ is a bit of an understatment. Blood Tsunami better describes what followed in 1914 to 1918.

Here’s an interesting newspaper clipping I found in the Nicholson collection. It is likely from the Montreal Witness.

How this War Concerns Canada

It is said that the native-born Canadian is not volunteering readily for overseas service. Neither the French Canadians nor the English Canadians are coming forward in anything like the proportion which is represented by the tide of volunteers in the Old Country.

Some, with narrow vision, are inclined to say: “Oh this is England’s battle. Canada is not concerned.”

It is very apparent that such do not understand the situation. There is very good reason to believe that Canadians in France are fighting Canada’s battle.

They have gone to fight the enemy where the enemy is.

It has been stated upon authority that Germany’s great aim in this war is to possess Canada, the greatest country in the world for colonialization purposes. The British navy is all that lies in the way of direct German attack on these shores, teh capture of Halifax, St. John, Quebec, Montreal and a serious attempt to subjugate the country.

The men of Canada who talk of this being only England’s battle should ponder these things.

The soldiers of Canada who are going forth form these shores to fight the enemy in Flanders are just as surely defending their Canadian homes from German attack as they would be if they were volunteering only upon the sound of guns on the St. Lawrence.

The invitation is to every man of good health, of military age, who loves his country.

…..Well, then they put in a draft. Very controversial. But it was easy to get around the draft in Canada.

The letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ discuss the war of course. Dr. Moffatt, in BC writes to to Norman that the Britishers are indeed signing up for service, but he feels it is only to get a free ride home. There’s a kind of depression going on there in 1915. Marion writes about how angry her mother-in-law is over the coming draft. “She acts as if she is the only one with sons to lose.”

Votes for Women; Chastity for Men

Suffragettes getting in a scuffle from Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1913 bio

Here’s a weird one. I was listening to last week’s Saturday Play on BBC Radio Four before it disappears for good. It was A Month in the Country. I looked that story up (because I had never heard of it) and saw that it was a 1987 movie with Colin Firth. So I went to Amazon.co.uk to buy a DVD of it, but you can’t. So I went to YouTube and found it there, in ten installments. A great copy, too. (Firth’s character has a stammer, just like the King he plays in his soon to be released film. But he also has a kind of rooster hair-do and pencil moustache and try as I might, I couldn’t see Mr. Darcy there.. well, only a flicker or two of those famous affectations.

What a great movie, tho, with some ‘unrequited love’. But of course, because of Tighsolas, I am into WWI stories. I recently read Testament of Youth and the Juliet Nicolson book The Great Silence, about the post WWI period in England.

So, even before the Kenneth Branagh character discussed the shame of being an ‘intact’ survivor, I was already thinking the same thing.

Nicolson tells about the horrible disfigurements so many WWI veterans suffered – and how they became pariahs upon returning home. Branagh’s character is also gay, it is suggested.

Nicolson also tells about the soldiers in WWI who were court-martialed for having gay sex, as was this character. (Perhaps.) She also tells of the boys who got their first sexual experience with prostitutes, women who just laid on their back and serviced soldier after soldier, until they were worn out and retired from ‘action’.

Before the war, prostitution was the Great Social Evil, but during the war it was a kind of ‘public service.’

I found this very odd pre-war piece, written by Christabel Pankhurst, on archive.org. Plain Facts about a Great Evil,1913. She claims that giving women the vote will eliminate prostitution. Hmm. A 2005 survey in the UK claimed that the use of prostitutes had actually doubled in the previous decade. Go Figure.

“This book deals with what is commonly described as the Hidden Scourge, and is written with the intention that this scourge shall be hidden no longer, for if it were to remain hidden, then there would be no hope of abolishing it.

Men writers for the most part refuse to tell what the Hidden Scourge is, and so it becomes the duty of women to do it.

The Hidden Scourge is sexual disease,which takes two chief forms — syphilis and
gonorrhoea. These diseases are due to prostitution —they are due, that is to say, to sexual immorality. But they are not confined to those who are immoral. Being contagious, they are communicated to the innocent, and especially to wives. The infection of innocent wives in marriage is justly declared by a man doctor to be “The crowning infamy of our social life.”

The sexual diseases are the great cause of physical, mental, and moral degeneracy, and of race suicide. As they are very widespread (from 75 to 80 per cent, of men becoming infected by gonorrhoea, and a considerable percentage, difficult to ascertain precisely, becoming infected with syphilis), the problem is one of appalling magnitude.

To discuss an evil, and then to run away from it without suggesting how it may be
cured, is not the way of Suffragettes, and in the following pages will be found a proposed cure for the great evil in question. That cure, briefly stated, is Votes for Women and Chastity for Men.”

Now, there were some parties, in 1913, that believed that sex education was the cure for STD’s. I’ve seen 1910 era articles to that effect.

Hmm. I wonder if I’ll have Edith read this…or talk to someone who has read it.

Remembering WWI: Remembrance Day 2010

39 York Westmount. The white house very probably was where Marion Nicholson Blair and husband and her sister, Flora Nicholson, lived during WWI.

I know because I have it in a letter.

As Remembrance Day is coming up, I thought I’d write a few blogs about the POST -Tighsolas era, using the Nicholson letters from 1914-1918. I’ve already posted one a few days ago about the Tuckers, who in 1918, lost a son, Percy. They were family friends of Flora and Edith.

But I know from reading the letters from 1914 and 1918 a while back that they contained some interesting stuff.

In 1914, Marion was married with a newborn, Margaret. Flora was living with her, and also teaching at William Lunn in Griffintown. Edith was teaching in Richmond, in 1914, her second year there. By the end of the war era she’d be working at Sun Life Headquarters. I have one typed letter from her. She says she is boning up on her stenography, trying to re-gain speed. So it looks like she did take a secretarial course, sometime before. (Stenography often just meant typing back then. She joins the St. John’s Ambulance in 1917. She was Commandant of the Quebec Red Cross during WWII.)

Norman in 1914 was at home, but in 1916 he went to work on the La Loutre Dam. He writes this letter. He starts off complaining about Herbert, which was a major theme of the 1908-1913 letters…The war is only heightening his anxiety.

“Herbert seems to be a strange boy in not letting us know what is happening to him. He is altogether different from the girls. I get the blues about him, fooling away his life when young, not providing for his later years. I hope he doesn’t enlist and go to the front. When in Montreal, I was walking on St. Catherine Street, where I met two returned soldiers, one of whom had a crutch and one leg and one with his arm tied up, I couldn’t see with his big coat. Both about Herb’s age. To have to go through life in that way seems hard. When you think how much that is to suffer all your life to satisfy a few crown heads. All other troubles can be settled by the courts or tribunals of some sort. But their troubles have to be fought out there, is still something wrong with this civilized world of ours. I am not making a speech or trying to write a book, but I feel sad to think that the best of our young men have to be slaughtered in this war. It will take twenty five years to replace these men and 100 years to pay our war debt. “

In another letter Norman talks about the cost of flour. 16.50 a bushel where it had been 5.00 prior to the war. And Marion talks about how every free plot of land in the city is being taken up with vegetable gardens, more than in Richmond, although she suspects the harvests from these gardens won’t be terrific as many people seem to be first timers. “Every vacant lot around the city has been utilized for gardens and I think it is more common to see people out digging and planting these days than it is in Richmond. Surely, with all these gardens producing it ought to make some difference in the cost of everything. That is if they all amount to anything. Some, I think, are making their first attempt.”(Margaret had long kept a vegetable garden in Richmond.) Marion’s husband Hugh digs a garden for them eventually, where they grow onions, beets, carrots, lettuce and radishes.

But in 1917, conscription is the talk of the town. The Nicholsons feel that Borden is using it as a political ploy. They describe the French as being all up in arms against it. Marion says her mother in law, Madame Blair and her sisters are terribly upset: “What they say I could fill a book and some of the sayings are NOT very deep…..”There is a lot of talk of conscription here, and the French are more than excited about it. I am not well enough versed in the political affairs just now to form much of an opinion. But it seems on Borden’s part an effort to keep his party in power -for a great many will be afraid to oppose it. Whether it is for the best, or not, I do not know but personally I hope it will not go through; it seems so different when you know it will take some of your own people.” Later, in another letter, she chides her mother in law again, “Madame Blair is not the only woman with sons to lose.”

This gardening part of the WWI story has an enormous amount of relevance to my Flo in the City book. I have spoken a great deal about the ‘deskilling’ of women. Well, today, we are almost all essentially deskilled at practical activities. But what happens if, Heaven Forbid, we are called upon to feed and shelter and clothe ourselves from scratch?

Remembrance Day 2010 _A Canadian Story

Canadian Troops from WWI from YouTube video.

“Alternately depressed and elated during more than a month past, owing to confusing reports stating one time that hsi son, Lt. P.G. Tucker had been killed in action and at other times that he was only wounded. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Tucker, 36 Lorne Avenue, have finally been reconciled to having their son dead, because of three letters received from his battalion in France..Three telegrams were received by Mr. Tucker, the first saying that Lt. P G Tucker had been killed, the second that he was wounded and the third that he was dead. Since the receipt of the last wire, however, a personal letter from the Minister of Militia congratulated Mr. Tucker on the fact that the reports of his son’s death were erroneous..until the letters came from France.”

This is a blurb from a 1918 Montreal Gazette article. The family in question were friends of the Nicholsons, indeed the girls roomed in that house. I have a 1918 letter from Flo to Margaret telling about a visit made to the Tuckers, and how they heard the son was alive, then dead, and how confused they were.

More than that, I have letters from another son, also on the front, to Flora. Apparently, she was the girlfriend.

Here are three letters, shortened.

Dear Flora,

I have received more letters from home since I came to this country than I received all the time I was in England. You say you would like to come over here as a nurse but take it from me and stay as far away from this country as you can. It’s no bonne over here. If you want to drop me a letter again, which you can do as often as you like, send them to #349412.4th CDAC France.

Love Herb

France, Feb 14, 1918

Dear Flora,

I wrote you a letter the same night as I received your parcel. I got a letter from Bid last night and she says you wouldn’t go to church with her and pray for me. Mr. Craig wrote me a very interesting letter, telling me all about the fine work done by the Aid Society and all other branches of relief societies etc. in which I am very interested. How is the world using you? There isn’t much to do now, so there is nothing much to write about. I got a letter from Percy at last. He is now an officer and is expecting to come back soon. I started to write this letter last night, but had to stop. I got another letter from Percy to-night. He is in Bramshott. Well, Flora, I guess I will quit.

Epsom, 27-10-18.

I received your letter last night and was glad to hear from you. I feel pretty blue over Percy as he refused to go back to Canada when he was here last time. It doesn’t pay to be a hero here. He must have been killed outright as he wasn’t admitted to any hospital. There are quite a few 24th boys here and they all speak very highly of him. I don’t know how I got away with what I did. It is only a miracle that brought me here alive. If I had fallen, I would have been killed but as luck would have it, I stood up and got away with a crippled finger. It might come back in time but I doubt it. The piece went through the back of my hand and came through the knuckle of my first finger. I can’t use my finger at all but can get on without it. I’ve had a swell time since I came across. I was in hospital away down in Devonshire. I only came here on Thursday and the sooner they send me out the better. I expect to go on leave Friday. I am going to London for a while and then I am going down to Exeter in Devonshire for the rest of my leave. The meals here are punk and good grub is half the battle. Do you love me as much as ever, because if you don’t I will get downhearted and marry my nurse and stay here after the war. Well, Flora I think I will quit for today as I have written four letters today and can’t write any more. Remember me to your people and take care of yourself,
Love Herb.