Cenotaph’s Gray area
Bench recently dedicated to six siblings who served during Second World War
When Helen Gray decided she wanted to join the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in 1942, Rose and William Gray already had four sons serving in Europe.
“Mom wasn’t too pleased,” recalls Helen (Gray) Peck, 95, “but she thought, if my sister, Ruth, who was just old enough to join, if we could go together, it would be better.”
And so it was that six siblings from the Gray family from Cascumpec joined Canada’s Second World War effort.
Helen Peck is the last surviving member of the Gray family, and, although she resides in Ontario, still calls P.E.I. home. She recently arranged to have a stone bench donated to the Alberton cenotaph in recognition of the six sons and daughters of William and Rose Gray who served.
St. Anthony’s Branch of the Royal Canadian Legion held a dedication ceremony for the new bench last week. Peck is pleased it was installed in time for Remembrance Day.
“I hope people will sit on it. That’s what it’s for; just sit there and reminisce or meditate or whatever,” Peck said in a phone interview from her home in Ontario.
“I was just lying in bed one morning and I thought, ‘Hey, six of us were in the war; I’d love to put a bench near the cenotaph in my hometown,’” she said, noting she subsequently contacted the mayor of Alberton to make the offer.
The cenotaph is on the grounds of Alberton’s Old Stone Station.
“That old station, it’s from there that we all left home,” she said, pointing to it.
She is the last surviving member of William and Rose’s family of nine children. Last year she donated a bench to the Cascumpec Baptist Cemetery where many of her relatives are resting.
The cemetery borders the old Gray farm.
Helen and Ruth trained as switchboard operators in Kitchener, Ont., and subsequently went to work in Halifax.
“I’m ironing my shirts one day and one of the girls poked her head in the door and said, ‘Gray, you’re wanted in the captain’s office,” Helen said in describing how she joined her brothers overseas.
“I still remember being on that old ship and seeing Canada fade into the distance,” she said, admitting saying good-bye to Ruth in Halifax was hard.
Ruth was the only one of the siblings who joined the Forces, who was not sent overseas. Helen went on to work as a switchboard operator at the Canadian military headquarters in the heart of London.
She recalled London residents being so fearful of the nighttime air raids that many of them took their bedding into the underground terminals and slept there. She recalls barely having room to walk through those terminals without stepping on someone. Her duties at headquarters were deemed so essential that she didn’t get to return to Canada until January, 1946.
The voyage home was so rough and almost everyone onboard was sick, so she doesn’t recall seeing Canada return to view. She and her husband George Peck, whom she met in London, raised three children in Ontario.