Echoes from the Great War
Canadian soldier’s bugle found in France to be returned to grandson
David Bootes’s voice began to tremble over the phone.
The Star called him out of the blue last week with some unusual news — a museum in France had located a 101-year-old bugle that belonged to his grandfather, a soldier who fought in the First World War.
And staff asked for help to send the artifact to the soldier’s next of kin, if the Star could help find them.
“Those are the types of things that happen to other people . . . I was rather taken aback,” Bootes, 68, said in a later interview. “It is part of my heritage, and I didn’t know (it existed).”
The news was emotional, Bootes said, because his grandfather, Sgt. Albert George Bootes, died four years before he was born. His father, aunts and uncles — who have all passed away — “rarely” spoke about their father, Bootes said, and the little he does know about his grandfather was gleaned from snippets of conversation he overheard as a child.
“He was a very nice person, and he was in the war — that’s all I knew. I didn’t know what or where or any particulars,” Bootes said. “I have absolutely nothing of my grandfather’s, not even a picture. I wish I did.”
Bootes said he didn’t even know his grandfather was buried in Toronto.
But it was a record of the soldier’s final resting place at Prospect Cemetery that narrowed down the hunt for his family, according to Thiepval Visitor Centre employee Céline Jasiak. The centre, about 170 kilometres north of Paris, is a museum dedicated to the Battle of the Somme and sits next to the Thiepval Memorial, which commemorates 72,246 soldiers from the U.K. and South Africa who died in the battle but have no known grave.
Jasiak said a resident of Le Havre, in Normandy, contacted the centre about a month ago saying he’d found the bugle, made in London by the now-defunct company Hawkes & Son in 1916, in his parents’ home and asked for help.
“He said, ‘If you can find somebody who is family, I want to give them the bugle,’ ” Jasiak said in a phone interview from Thiepval. “. . . And I said, ‘I can try.’ ”
With a British colleague, Jasiak was able to link the battalion number and name — misspelled “Boots” — stamped on the bugle to records for a Canadian soldier who returned home after the war, died in 1944 and was buried in Prospect Cemetery, near St. Clair Ave. W. and Caledonia Rd.
She then reached out to the Star on Facebook, asking for help with finding next of kin.
Jasiak said the centre received the bugle from the Le Havre man on Thursday and will be mailing it to Bootes shortly.
The senior Bootes had a son with the same name who also fought in the war, but didn’t make it home. He’s buried in the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery in Belgium
It’s unclear how the man’s parents came to have it in the first place. According to Jasiak, he told her it had belonged to his father, who died in 1993, who kept it as an antique.
“We suppose somebody gave it to them and they’ve kept it for a long time. We don’t really know why (it was in their home),” she said.
“It’s moving for us, too, to find the name on the bugle and then find the family.”
This isn’t the first time someone has contacted the centre asking for help reuniting a soldier’s lost item with his family, Jasiak added. A woman once came in with a soldier’s fork, which the centre also managed to return.
According to enlistment records, Albert George Bootes was born in Greenwich, England, on Aug. 4, 1878. He was five feet, 5 1⁄ inches tall and
2 had blue eyes with black hair.
A blacksmith by trade, he was married to a woman named Alice and enlisted in Gananoque, Ont., on Feb. 9, 1916.
The senior Bootes had a son with the same name who also fought in the war, but didn’t make it home. He’s buried in the Lijssenthoek Mili- tary Cemetery near the Ypres battlefields in Belgium.
David Bootes said the bugle will be his first “concrete” connection to his grandfather.
“Other than the odd little bit of memory, there’s nothing, nothing that I have first-hand,” he said, his voice wavering.
“Everything has been what my mother mentioned, or dad mentioned in passing. There was nothing that I know one-on-one that’s concrete, but this will be concrete.”
He has a simple plan for the bugle once it’s in his possession.
“I’m going to display it,” he said. “There’s a mantel it’s going to be put on (and I’ll) probably make a nice case for it. It will be displayed.”