Granddad’s sacrifices haven’t been forgotten
Kelowna veteran to represent his grandfather at Ottawa ceremony marking Battle of Vimy Ridge
John Reay’s grandfather survived the Battle of Vimy Ridge but he did not escape unscathed. His grandfather, also named John, was poisoned by mustard gas while in the trenches in France and suffered significant vision loss. But the greatest impact may have been psychological.
“He was sent back to England a few weeks after the battle, suffering from what doctors then called shell shock and what today would probably be called posttraumatic stress disorder,” Reay, 78, recalled Sunday.
“My grandfather was on the front lines for 13 months, so you can just imagine some of the pretty horrific experiences he would have gone through,” Reay said. “Thousands of men died at Vimy Ridge, but it’s a pretty safe bet that even the ones who survived were never really the same afterwards.”
Reay will leave Kelowna on Wednesday for events in Ottawa to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. He got a call “out of the blue” from Veterans Affairs Canada in early March asking if he’d like to represent his grandfather at the ceremony.
“I really don’t know how they got my name, but I guess with the military records and all it wasn’t too hard to find me,” Reay said. “I’m just very honoured and thrilled to participate in this on behalf of my grandfather.”
John Reay was much older than most Canadian soldiers when he enlisted in 1914 at the age of 35. Of the 424,000 Canadians who were sent to Europe as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, almost 52,000 were killed as a result of enemy action.
“During his roughly five years in service, Pte. Reay fought bravely and with distinction, earning the War Service Badge along with three medals: the 191415 Star; the British War Medal 1914-1918 and the Allied Victory Medal,” Veterans Affairs Canada says.
Reay received a medical discharge in 1919 and died at age 51 in 1930.
“It’s hard to say for sure if his early death was related to the war, but what he went through over there certainly would have affected his mind and body,” his grandson says.
Reay was in the military himself, as was his father. But the family doesn’t have any war stories passed down from the First World War.
“My dad told me that his father never really told him anything about the war,” Reay said.
The family, however, does have a diary kept by John Reay. Its first line is, ‘War is hell. If men were wise, war would be a game that kings could not play.”
The oldest man from the Okanagan to be killed in action at Vimy Ridge in the First World War fell 100 years ago Saturday.
Most of the 34 Okanagan men who died at Vimy between March and mid-April 1917 were in their early 20s.
But Oswald Allen Pease was a married, 45-year-old Kelowna rancher with four children, serving as a private in the 47th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, when he was hit by shrapnel and killed.
“Given his age, he certainly could have sat out the war,” says Okanagan Military Museum historian Keith Boehmer.
“But healthy men of all ages would have felt compelled to join up, especially if they had any previous military service, either in the militia or the army back in Britain,” Boehmer says.
Pease’s attestation papers show he had no such experience. He came from a wealthy English family, and his uncle was J.S. Fry, head of a cocoa firm that still bears his name.
Pease came to Canada in search of his own fortune, farming for a time in Nelson and arriving in the Okanagan in 1903 at age 32 to grow fruit in Rutland’s Black Mountain district.
He married Angeline Agnes Begbie, a sister of his brother’s wife, in 1908. So all the couple’s four children would have been under 10 when he enlisted in 1916.
At Vimy, Pease was hit by shrapnel in his leg on March 31, 1917. He died in a field hospital the next day.
A century ago, it took weeks for the death of soldiers at Vimy to be relayed to family in the Okanagan. The Vernon News, on May 3, 1917, described Pease as the “best known” of that week’s Okanagan casualties, and noted sombrely that his wife was “now left a widow with four young children.”
Pentictonite Harold Torance Burgess was killed 100 years ago on Sunday.
Born in Ontario, Burgess was working as a stenographer in Penticton when he enlisted a few months after the war started in 1914. By the spring of 1917, he was a lieutenant in the British Army’s London Regiment of the Royal Fusiliers.
Burgess was killed in action at the Battle of Arras on April 2. He was 23 years old.