SPECTATOR GOLF

Golf wasn’t the only great thing Harvey did

Golfers in the Hamilton area can be forgiven if they don’t know or have forgotten how good a player Florence Harvey was.

After all, it was quite a long time ago when she was winning provincial and national championships while representing the Hamilton Golf and Country Club.

She won the 1903 and 1904 Canadian championships and was runner-up on two more occasions.

Harvey also won the Ontario championship four times: 1904, 1906, 1913 and 1914.

Quite the organizer, she founded and was secretary of the Canadian Ladies Golf Union which morphed into the Canadian Ladies Golf Association which eventually joined up with the men as the Royal Canadian Golf Association, now Golf Canada.

For those contributions to golf, Harvey is in the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame, the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame and, of course, her hometown Hamilton Sports Hall of Fame.

A little known part of Harvey’s life is coming to light as she is being honoured with several other women for their heroic actions during the First World War in Serbia.

What had been known is that when the Great War broke out, Harvey wanted to go and help but permission was flatly refused by her parents.

Instead, she used her organizing skills to help raise enough money to buy an ambulance to send to the front.

Cathy Diklich of the Serbian Heritage Museum in Windsor, who has helped research their display, takes over telling the story.

“Our exhibit is ‘women who went to war’ during the Great War,” Diklich says. “Some were in the military and some were medical help.

“We knew during ‘The Great Retreat’ the Serbians weren’t going to be able to resist the Germans, and so they left. The Scottish Women’s Hospital was there already, and some of them even travelled during the Great Retreat.”

Diklich says that their research shows that there was an influx of women coming from Great Britain, Australia and Canada to help the Serbs during the Great Retreat.

“They were unique women, obviously, and many of them came from very wealthy families,” says Diklich.

“In 1918, Florence Harvey joined the Scottish Women’s Hospital as an ambulance driver and she served in Vranje and Belgrade, both in Serbia. She scoured the country to find the wounded and continued even while under attack.”

Diklich says some of the women who went over died within months from Typhoid fever, which was rampant.

Harvey returned to Canada before the war ended to continue her fundraising efforts.

After the war, she moved from Canada to South Africa and became a poultry farmer. She also spent time in England and the U.S. before moving back to Canada in 1954 Harvey died in 1968. The exhibit at the Serbian Heritage Museum in Windsor runs through Remembrance Day.

Whole-in-one: Includes four aces, two at Chippewa Creek, Vince Stevens on the 165-yard eighth hole of the Red Falcon nine with a fivehybrid and Jim Smith on the 168yard sixth hole of the Red Falcon nine, also with a five hybrid. And there were two singletons at Willow Valley, Mark Smith on the 108-yard eighth hole with a sand wedge and Alf Hume on the 118-yard 17th hole with a nine-iron.