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THE ONES WHO HAVE TO PAY
THE SOLDIER-POETS OF VICTORIA BC IN THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918
By ROBERT RATCLIFFE TAYLOR Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2013 Robert Ratcliffe Taylor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-9034-0
CHAPTER 1
THE SOLDIERS' VICTORIA
"An inspiring scene" was enacted at Victoria's inner harbor on August 26, 1914, when were heard "the shouts and cheers of [an] immense crowd", gathered to bid farewell to hundreds of equally enthusiastic volunteers. The men boarded the Canadian Pacific steamship PRINCESS MARY, which would take them to Vancouver whence they would travel to the training camp at Valcartier, Québec, and on to the battlefields of the Great War. The Daily Colonist described how the 5th Regiment, consisting of artillery-men from the local militia, marched through the city to the wharf, accompanied by "the crackle of musketry, the skirl of the pipes, [and] rousing and appropriate airs by bands ..." (27 August 1914, 1). Two days later, the PRINCESS SOPHIA left with five hundred volunteers from the 50th Regiment, Gordon Highlanders, and the 88th Fusiliers of Victoria. The "sight was overwhelmingly impressive" said the Colonist, as thousands of people lined both sides of the harbor and Premier Richard McBride joined in wishing the militiamen godspeed (29 August 1914, 1). [Fig.I.1]
Departing on these ships were several of the local poets whom I quote in this essay. Major Lorne Ross, for example, was one of the leaders of the 50th Regiment and Captain Robert Harvey was a member of the 88th Fusiliers. In later years, volunteers included the soldier-poets Charles Armstrong, Edward Vaughan, and Leonard McLeod Gould. Two of these men (Armstrong and Macleod) were former journalists. Most local soldier-poets, however, were not professionally trained in the use of the English language but had benefited from a good public school education and had been raised in a social climate which valued poetry. Part of the most literate generation in Canadian history, they all seem to have departed Victoria with the same enthusiasm as was expressed on the causeway, the grounds of the nearby Empress Hotel and the harbor wharves in 1914 and 1915. In their poetry can be heard the echoes of the fife and drum band and the cheers of those Victoria citizens who gave them such a spirited send-off in those fateful years.
A Literate Population
Many of those relatives, friends and supporters gathered at the harbor in the early years of the Great War enjoyed reading. In fact, nineteenth century Victoria was already a highly literate place. The settlement was founded in 1843 and by 1858 several newspapers served the community. As early as the latter year, Thomas Hibben had established a stationery and bookstore, and in 1864 David Spencer opened his own reading room and bookstore. Some early residents, such as Benjamin William Pearse, surveyor-general of the Colony of Vancouver Island, owned large libraries. Walter Colquhoun Grant, another early surveyor, arrived in 1849 with his large personal book collection. By the 1880s, Victoria had seen the establishment of a Shakespeare Club and the Alexandra Club for the enjoyment of music, art, and literature.
From the city's beginnings, education and its product, literacy, were important to local residents. On the outskirts of the city, Craigflower School, considered the first Canadian school built west of the Great Lakes, was founded in 1854. In 1860, the Girls' Collegiate School was established by the Anglican authorities. In 1886, the Provincial Museum was opened. In 1891 the Public (Carnegie) Library was established and, when Victoria College was founded in 1902, a campaign to have a local university was inaugurated. In 1911, construction began on a new four-storey high school, which became one of the most imposing structures in the community. In 1914, the Normal School for the training of teachers opened in an impressive towered structure on a rise overlooking the city.
Poetry in Victoria in 1914
"If you published a book of poems in London a hundred years ago, you could live for three years on the proceeds," avers a twenty-first century Victoria poet. Many of our great-grandfathers and—grandmothers loved poetry. Canada was "a society in which poetry mattered", writes Jonathan Vance; "no other mode of public expression drew such a wide range of practitioners". Indicative of the popularity of verse is the frequency with which it was published even in Victoria's labor union periodical, the Semi-Weekly Tribune. A Journal of Industrial and Social Reconstruction. Its editors—although committed to practical reform—expressed their enjoyment of poetry, traditional as well as polemical, offering several poems in every edition. In Victoria's more widely circulated dailies, the Times and the Colonist, the verse of poets employed as book-keepers, bureaucrats and glassblowers, for example, was published. Most of the soldier-poets were from this middle class, a relatively large group even in 1914. Although some heavy industry had developed on its harbor shores, the city was predominantly a bourgeois place, with a large literate population of provincial government employees, professionals, white collar workers, craftsmen, men from the new skilled trades, and already (by 1900) many well-educated retirees.
A century ago, the writing and the enjoyment of poetry was not the preserve of an elite of "intellectual" or "academic" writers remote from the general public. The ability to conjure up a verse to be read aloud at a social occasion or important public event was considered a normal accomplishment of a man or woman of almost any social class. In newspapers, journals, magazines and pamphlets, political rhymes were disseminated for popular reading. Advertisers used poetry to hawk their products. For a long time before and after 1914, classic poems had to be memorized in school, a procedure which, however dreary, nevertheless imbued a sense of rhythm, rhyme and imagery in many a child. Reaching adulthood, even if individuals never wrote any verse, they were receptive to the poems which they read in local journals.
In Canada, therefore, public interest in reading and writing poetry seems to have peaked in the early years of the last century and, as I have indicated, not only among the better educated classes. The great increase in literacy in the late nineteenth century, due to the expansion of compulsory primary education, meant that a large group of literate readers and listeners existed. As well, Mechanics' Institutes and public libraries had infused a respect for literature among the general public which has never since been equaled. Of course, an upper class education (which included the Greek and Latin classics) would help the reader to appreciate some of the more arcane published verse with its references to the legends, history and literature of the ancient world.
With the development of typesetting machines and high-speed steam-powered presses, the production of daily and weekly newspapers was becoming mechanized. In Canada, between Confederation (1867) and the outbreak of the Great War (1914), newspaper circulation increased over three times. In these publications, hometown readers read local poets with special pleasure because they expressed what was on many residents' minds. Even when the writers were not local persons, newspaper editors printed their poems when they thought the sentiment expressed therein was relevant to the home town community and its attitudes, values, and problems.
From their inception in 1858 and 1884, respectively, the Colonist and the Times regularly published poetry by locals and non-residents as well as by the well-known British, American and Canadian writers. Verse was also published regularly by such local periodicals as The Week and the aforementioned Semi-Weekly Tribune. As early as 1864, the Colonist—or the British Colonist, as it was then known—allotted a long column on page three to verse—and this in editions which usually ran to only four pages in total! On 5 June 1884, the Colonist announced a policy of promoting local poets' works. Poems were even occasionally featured on the front page of the two main dailies. Inside, often two or three poems would appear in one edition. Those printed on the editorial page expressed the opinion of the editors. Significant poems were published inside a frame, drawing attention to their themes.
The local newspapers also occasionally published articles about poetry. The Colonist, for example, offered detailed comment on Canada's Charles G.D. Roberts in 1907 and on Rudyard Kipling in 1908. Before the Great War, the themes of published verse in Victoria were similar to those across the English-speaking world of the nineteenth century: love, death, children, religious faith, nature, landscape, humor, and politics. Poems for children and for women were frequent. Both the Times and the Colonist published the equivalent of a "poem of the day".
Charles Swayne, who began employment at the Colonist in 1909 and became editor-in-chief in 1917, had a particular interest in literature and the arts, a fact which may account for the greater prevalence of poetry in that newspaper, compared to the Times. Assuming that its readers were familiar with Shakespeare, the Colonist could use passages from his works to satirize current provincial politics. This practice began even before Swayne's time. Taking a dig at local politics, for example, the newspaper's editors used a passage from "The Merchant of Venice" on 4 March 1867. The Colonist also reproduced the "Prologues" written in blank verse for private amateur theatrical performances (11 October 1871 and 14 August 1881). Poems written to commemorate events important to part of the local community, such as the retirement of a popular clergyman, were published (Colonist, 29 June 1887). Important here is the fact that, as the Great War developed, the Vancouver Sun published only five poems in September 1914, whereas the Colonist—in contrast—printed fifty-three in that month, and the Times, twenty-nine.
The Colonist tended to support the policies of the Conservative Party, while the Times favored the Liberals. In choosing verse for publication, however, the editors of both Victoria's main newspapers agreed with the views of the political, professional and literary elite of Victoria and of Canada, particularly during a time of national crisis. That elite included clergymen and school teachers who—before, during and after the war—instilled their tastes and values in young people, most of whom, by 1900, spent at least six or seven years in the public school and Sunday School systems. And so, evidence from these periodicals and from other sources (letters, diaries, and secondary studies) suggests that editors reflected rather than formed current views about art, politics, and war. Thus the absence of local criticism of Canada's entry into the Great War grew out of Victoria's traditions. Most of its citizens (at every class level and profession) were ready in 1914 to support a European war for the British Empire's sake and to encourage their young men to volunteer to serve. A different situation prevailed in prairie cities, where Central European immigration was a factor, and in Québec, where potentially anti-British feeling could erupt. Pacifism was not unknown in British Columbia but its adherents remained without much influence.
To be sure, a degree of control over the print media—and some resistance to directives—existed in Victoria. During the war years, local editors, following the urgings of Ottawa's Chief Press Censor, Ernest J. Chambers, hoped that well-chosen poems might reinforce pre-existent attitudes to military service or the British connection. When Chambers sent memoranda to newspaper editors, indicating what he considered unsuitable for publication, editors usually complied. If periodicals that were usually supportive strayed from the government line, they were reprimanded gently, but a journal such as Victoria's The Week, which became socialist and pacifist in tone was actually shut down in 1918. During the first year of the war, the Times was more adventurous than the Colonist, perhaps because it had long been in sympathy with the federal Liberal party (now out of office) and hence was less inclined to support the policies of the Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden, who was in power in 1914. The Times occasionally published verse which could be considered more realistic, even possibly critical, vis-à-vis the war. Ultimately, however, censorship put an end to such daring. Later, when a poem might be considered less than "uplifting", both dailies tended to "bury" it on their back pages; i.e. not on page four, the editorial page, but on, for example, page seventeen.
Did Victoria's editorial offices ever receive a poem from a soldier deeply critical of the war effort or shockingly despondent over his experiences? We shall probably never know. The editors self-censored because they did not want to lose touch with sources of news. They lacked the self-confidence of a later generation of newspapermen who demanded to know more than they were officially told. To be fair, they could not know that some photographs sent from Europe might be fabricated—as was occasionally the case during the tenure of Max Aitken as director of the Canadian War Records Office in England.
If Victoria's editors ever questioned the purpose of, or were disillusioned with, the nature of the Great War, they saw their role as encouraging optimism and maintaining public morale. When the Germans threatened to break through the Allied lines in their great offensive beginning on 21 March 1918, the Times editors, perhaps inspired by a spontaneous influx of local morale-boasting verse, launched their own offensive. Although they had published no poetry at all in the previous five weeks, on 30 March they printed "Never Despair" (6) and followed it with five poems containing "uplifting" themes, such as "Look for the Bits of Blue" (25 April, 6) in the next month.
In the first years of the war at least, the editors of both the Times and the Colonist saw to it that verse continued to be published regularly as a form of comfort in those difficult times. For example, the Times published an occasional feature on its editorial page, "Passages from the Poets", including works by Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Burns. By 1918, however, the frequency of published poetry declined. In the case of the Colonist, for example, two regular features which consistently contained verse were discontinued. In the Times' case, the featured "poem of the day" (often a British or American classic) ceased in September 1915. The number of poems published on the editorial pages also declined in 1917-1918. Not unexpectedly, the year 1919 saw an increase in "In Memoriam" poetry in both newspapers, which commemorated local men killed in action.
The reasons for the decline of published verse in the war years are hard to discern. Certainly, lists of casualties took up space, often on the editorial pages. Possibly some editors had come to doubt that verse could have a salutary effect on public morale. Perhaps the inflated diction of wartime verse had come to seem tedious—even duplicitous—to editors, poets and readers. Conceivably Victoria's soldier poets had become too exhausted by stress to compose and submit verse, a situation which could apply to civilian writers, too. As well, technological developments meant that by at least 1919 more photographs were being published, which took up space formerly allocated to features such as verse.
A Hurricane of Poetry
Canadian soldiers of the Great War wrote and enjoyed much poetry—and they often wrote confidently. While serving with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Sergeant William W. Murray sent one of his poems to Rudyard Kipling, who graciously replied. Lieutenant-Colonel Cyrus Peck of Prince Rupert, BC, who volunteered in Victoria in 1914, and was later in command the 16th Battalion, "charmed the officers' mess with recitations from Shelley and Keats, poets Peck revered...." Among the lower ranks, poetry was read and recited. Robert Service's work was popular with many. Victoria's George Jarvis carried "'Songs of a Sourdough' with him into the trenches." In the hours before an attack, Paymaster F.C. Bagshaw and Saskatchewan volunteer Dave McCabe, for example, recited Robert Burns and Shakespeare to each other. This love of verse continued after the war. For example, Lieutenant-Colonel George C. Machum included five of his own poems in his Story of the 64th Battalion, C.E.F. 1915-1916. Every one of the chapters of R.C. Fetherstonhaugh's The Royal Montreal Regiment, 14th Battalion, C.E.F. 1914-1935 begins with a quotation of poetry. Lieutenant Ralph Lewis of the 25th Battalion quotes Kipling in his memoirs. Few of these men were "English majors" at university—if, indeed, they had had any post-secondary education. The works of Victoria's soldier-poets, however, show a similar familiarity with the poetry of both classic and modern writers, such as Thomas Gray and Lewis Carroll.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE ONES WHO HAVE TO PAY by ROBERT RATCLIFFE TAYLOR. Copyright © 2013 Robert Ratcliffe Taylor. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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