MARK MCNEIL:
The brothers who never came home and our last casualty of First World War
MANY DECADES AGO, on the wall of the rec room of the Ball family’s childhood home in Hamilton, there was a large rectangular shadow box containing three CD-sized bronze medallions.
Each of the Dead Man Pennies, as they were called, memorialized a great uncle who died in the Great War.
Each, according to the inscription, “died for freedom and honour.”
Jack Watson, Hugh Watson and Edward Watson were brothers in life, and brothers in arms.
They came from the same womb, and met the same fate in their early 20s on a battlefield in Europe one year apart.
They were part of a family shattered by the First World War, in a world devastated by the deaths of 10 million servicemen and seven million civilians.
One hundred years ago this weekend, the war finally ended, but the sorrow reverberated through the generations.
“We just can’t imagine how depressed my great-grandma must have been to lose three sons. Pictures we have of her, I don’t think we have one of her smiling,” says Terry Ball, 71, a longtime classical violinist and vocalist in Hamilton.
“I think it totally knocked her. Imagine losing three young men. It was pretty horrendous. I can’t begin to think what I would do. I know I couldn’t take it. I don’t know what I would do if it ever happened to my kids.”
Terry’s younger sister, Lorraine, says: “The thing that strikes me today — all these years later — is that the legacy continues because of the way it devastated the family.
“Two died in Belgium about a mile from one another in different battles of Ypres. And Jack, the baby of the family, died in France at the Somme.”
The great-uncles were English and fought for the British army. They had two other brothers living in Canada, including Ball’s grandfather, Frank, who avoided conscription because of his work as an electrical engineer at Westinghouse in Hamilton.
Military historian and author Tim Cook notes that 66,000 military deaths in a Canadian population of eight million at the time would be equivalent to more than 300,000 deaths in 2018.
“Imagine that many people dead today. We would be coming apart at the seams, which is what happened with the First World War. It propelled us onto the world’s stage but we did that as a broken country,” he says.
And then, as well, there were all the servicemen who came home with mental and physical trauma, many without limbs or blinded.
Robert “Doc” Fraser, the regimental historian of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders regiment, says he remembers his dad telling the story of servicemen finally coming home to Hamilton, arriving at the CNR Station on James Street North.
“My dad, who was born in 1910, told me one of the most vivid recollections from his youth was standing in 1919 by the tracks watching the soldiers arrive with a huge crowd cheering their arrival.
“And then, he said, it was time to empty the last car on the train. It was reserved for soldiers who were amputees. He said some of them were quadruple amputees who were carried off in baskets. He said it just stunned him and left an impression for the rest of this life.”
Ron Ellis, a retired Spectator copy editor, grew up with a father who was a First World War veteran who served in Passchendaele among other places, and was exposed to German gas attacks.
“I remember him coughing so loud we thought he was going to go inside out,” he says.
McMaster University history professor Ian McKay says: “It was really the first awakening we had to the nature of industrial mass warfare. There were previews with the American Civil War, and the Boer war, and the conquest of Africa, but this one — with 10 million plus dead on the battlefield — the world had never quite seen this.”
“And just think of how many hundreds of thousands of brilliant scientists, mathematicians, writers and musicians, were lost,” says Ball, who last year put together a Remembrance Day musical show with his family folk group, What the Folk, that focused on his great uncles.
WHEN BALL WAS A BOY, he and his two younger siblings — Lorraine and Eric — had little interest in the Death Pennies on the wall and the relatives they represented along with other items that included three memorial scrolls.
Dead Man Pennies, or Death Pennies as they are sometimes called, were given to the next of kin of every British and Empire soldier killed in the war.
Ball’s great-grandmother, Rose — the mother of the three fallen — brought them along with a trunk full of letters and other memorabilia when she moved to southern Ontario from England.
But as they grew older, the siblings asked more and more questions — eventually setting out themselves to find answers by travelling to European battlefields and chasing down service records.
“Lorraine and I went to all the sites where they fought on the continent. We followed their trails through hour by hour movements of their battalions and regiments. And we stood at the sites where they died,” says Terry.
There are no graves for any of the boys. Their bodies were never identified. Hugh and Edward Watson are listed on the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, Belgium. Jack Watson is listed on the Thiepval Memorial in France.
HUGH
WAS THE FIRST to die. He started out as a cook, shipping out in August 1914, shortly after Britain declared war on Germany.
Soon after, he wrote to his mother: “The whole of Belgium is in a most awful state and will take ... years before it is in its normal condition again. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like ... (M) en have to put up with the weather conditions and shell fire sometimes in trenches for a week without a change and ... standing in water. The only thought of a great many (of the troops) is that their sacrifice may not be in vain and that our cause will prevail.”
At the beginning of May 1915, in the Second Battle of Ypres, Hugh requested to leave his cooking post and fight side-by-side with the troops. He lasted less than two weeks, dying on May 13, 1915, just east of Potijze Chateau. He was 22 years old.
MEANWHILE, JACK was part of a battalion that became the 10th Lincolnshire Regiment and found himself in France in January 1916. Their first main battle was the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916.
Britain suffered its greatest singleday loss in military history that day, with more than 57,000 casualties including 19,240 deaths. Jack was one of those killed. He was 20 years old.
THE THIRD BROTHER, Ted, was part of the Third Battle of the Ypres, a horrific confrontation that led to 475,000 casualties, including 275,000 British and 15,654 Canadians. On Aug. 7, 1917, Ted was killed as his regiment held the trenches near Kitchener’s Wood under heavy bombardment.
Ted had planned to visit the spot, so close nearby, where his brother Hugh had fallen two years previously.
He didn’t live to do so. Ted had just turned 23 years old.
“The family went from five young boys growing up to a situation where three of them died in the war, and two of them moved to Canada,” said Lorraine, a psychologist who now lives in Pennsylvania and is the keeper of the Death Penny shadow box.
“Only one ever had a family, and just one child, my mother. From my mom’s point of view, she grew up an only child with all these ghosts of her uncles and, no cousins.”
“I think that haunted her.” And the family today wonders what would have come from all the children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren who were never born to their great-uncles.
There are no graves for any of the boys. Their bodies were never identified. Hugh and Edward Watson are listed on the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, Belgium. Jack Watson is listed on the Thiepval Memorial in France.