A widely publicized poster, featuring a stern Kitchener pointing directly at viewers, captioned, “Your Country Needs You” fanned the flames of patriotism, especially after Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II reportedly referred to Britain’s “contemptible little army.”

An escape from the grinding poverty and tedium of everyday life; decent food, clothing, and pay (one shilling a day for privates) and the promise of post-war employment for returning veterans, encouraged further enlistment. But more soldiers were needed.

Men like Lord Derby and Sir Henry Rawlinson realized that whole groups might enlist more readily if they could serve with people they knew. Recruiting in Liverpool in 1914, Lord Derby coined the term “Pals.” The idea of Pals’ (or Chums’) battalions caught on. Crowds flocked to recruitment centres. Stockbrokers, artists, footballers, journalists, shop assistants, teachers, Glasgow Tramways workers, Tyneside Irish, and many other groups of friends, neighbours, relatives, and colleagues formed quickly.

These cohesive units would train together, travel together and serve together, fighting side by side with friends, not with strangers. Unforeseen was how many pals would die together.

On the opening day of the Battle of the Somme—July 1, 1916—the British Army suffered its greatest single loss in its history.  The nearly 60,000 casualties overall, of whom more than 19,000 died, included devastated Pals battalions. Some 720 Accrington Pals of East Lancashire who went over the top into No Man’s Land were “mown down like meadow grass” in less than half an hour. They suffered 235 dead and 350 wounded. Leeds Pals lost about 750 of 900. News travelled back to small towns where whole districts drew their blinds and listened to tolling church bells.

“Never such innocence again,” Philip Larkin wrote of the eager men lining up to enlist in 1914. The success of Pals as a recruiting tool came at too high a price in practice. A surviving Pal said, “Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history.”

This memorial to the 124^th Pals battalion at its first barracks, Jesse Ketchum School, honours the one thousand men commanded by Lt. Col. Vaux Chadwick, recruited in a two-week “whirlwind campaign” from December 27, 1915 until the end of the first week of January, 1916. “Join the Pals” was the cry.

Inoculated and vaccinated at the Armories, trained at Toronto, Camp Niagara, and Camp Borden, they sailed for England aboard the Cameronia in August 1916. In Boulogne, France, by March 11, 1917, and redesignated 124^th Pioneers (4^th Canadian Division), they served at Arras, Vimy, Hill 70, Ypres, and Passchendaele. Some went as reinforcements to other units. All would face the same grim prospects as the British Pals.

War memorial at Jesse Ketchum School. © Ontario Genealogical Society, Toronto Branch

Long before Degrassi TV, two De Grassi sisters, Charlotte, 15, and Cornelia, 13, starred in a real life drama of 1837 Ontario. Their father, Phillipe, supported the government against William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebels. His young daughters, excellent riders, rode with him one moonlit early December night from their Forks of the Don homestead to Government House in Toronto. Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head, had to know the numbers and strength of the rebels before confronting them.

Cornelia and Charlotte risked their lives to spy on the rebels and report vital information to Bond Head.

At a wheelwright’s shop near Montgomery’s tavern Cornelia pretended to ask the price of a sleigh. The rebels, suspecting her of spying, ordered her to dismount. She rode off at high speed. One musket ball went through her saddle; another grazed her clothing. When Cornelia told Bond Head that the number of rebels had been exaggerated, he revised his strategy. Mackenzie later wrote that one of the loyalists “had employed a woman as a spy (De Grassi, I think he called her) who we had let pass.”

Charlotte relayed messages behind enemy lines, carrying an important dispatch along Kingston Road and returning to the city with the answer. As she headed home, rebels shot at her, wounding her and her pony.

On December 7, Cornelia followed loyalist troops to Yonge Street to observe the cannon and gunfire and report to the chief justice. Homeward bound, she saw that rebels had set fire to the Don Bridge. She raced back to the city to raise the alarm.

The short-lived Rebellion of Upper Canada soon ended. Phillipe De Grassi recorded his family’s contributions in a diary. The exploits of Charlotte (d. 1872) and Cornelia (d. 1885) seen as inspiring examples of courage at the time, were not widely remembered as years passed. The De Grassi property was expropriated in 1968 for recreation and flood control.

Degrassi Street in Riverdale honours either Phillipe or a son, Alfio, a merchant and Mason well known in Toronto in the 1870s.

The De Grassi Family

Phillipe De Grassi (1793-1877) his English wife, Charlotte Hearn, and eight children came to Canada in 1831. Born in Italy, De Grassi served under Napoleon, was taken prisoner by the British, but later obtained a commission in the British army. On their 200 acres in the “Boatbuildery” area of the Don River and a further 200 acres added later, the family suffered setbacks including a devastating fire that left them with just the clothes on their backs. They moved into a shelter built for horses, where De Grassi said one child was “literally born in a stable and laid in a manger.” Phillipe died penniless in Lindsay, Ontario.

De Grassi Family papers are held in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, and among the Boyd Family papers (Series F) at Trent University Archives, Peterborough.

Print sources include:

Foster, Merna. 100 More Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces. Toronto: Dundurn, 2011.

Sauriol, Charles. Remembering the Don: a Rare Record of Earlier Times within the Don River Valley. Scarborough, Ontario: Consolidated Amethyst Communications, Inc., 1981.

The Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography, by W. Stewart Wallace. Toronto: MacMillan, 1963.

If you have comments or questions about this post or the For King and Country project, we’d love to hear from you. Please visit our contact page.

On 27 June 1918, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the Canadian hospital ship, Llandovery Castle, bound from Halifax, Nova Scotia, for Liverpool, 114 miles southwest of Fastnet Rock, off the coast of Ireland. Carola Douglas, a graduate of Harbord Collegiate, was among the 14 nursing sisters who died. As the ship was showing regulation Red Cross lights and many survivors were machine-gunned, Llandovery Castle became a rallying cry for Canadian troops during the Last 100 Days offensive of the war.

Carola Josephine Douglas was born 7 April 1887, in Toronto. She enlisted 2 March 1915, at the age of 29.

A memorial photograph of Miss Douglas hangs in Harbord Collegiate. Further photos and her attestation paper can be seen on the Canadian Virtual War Memorial website.

Alberta writer Debbie Marshall shares info about Canadian WWI nurses on her blog “Finding the forty-seven: Canadian Nurses of the First World War”.

More about Llandovery Castle — the 24 survivors, the 258 dead, and the post-war trial about the sinking are at The Great War Project.

Carola Josephine Douglas, 1887 – 1915

If you have comments or questions about this post or the For King and Country project, we’d love to hear from you. Please visit our contact page.

For King and Country will be featured this March in the “Finding Your Great War Ancestors” Workshop presented by the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society. This will be an excellent opportunity to update the community on our progress—3,600 names recently added to the database—and remind those who’ve forgotten what the project is about.

The program for the workshop is both extensive and intensive, with some of Canada and the world’s leading experts. It’s unlikely you’ll encounter a more focused opportunity to learn about Great War family history research during your genealogical lifetime!

You’ll find more information on program and registration here.

We are particularly pleased to be sharing a session with the Far From Home project, which, so far as we know, has received little publicity in Canada. The project is the mission of Diana Beaupré and Adrian Watkinson, two researchers in southeast England, who have arranged for well-known Canadian Great War expert, Glenn Wright, to present on their behalf at the workshop.

Their goal is to locate and photograph all of the First World War Canadian graves and memorials throughout the United Kingdom—and create profiles for each of the nearly 4,000 men and women in whose memory they stand. With 2,200 profiles completed, their work is spectacular as in this example for Private Harry Francis Culliford, who enlisted in Toronto on 6 January 1916 and died in London on 8 October 1917 from wounds received at Vimy Ridge. In addition to information on individuals, they also profile each cemetery to offer a “snapshot” of the last resting places.

If you have comments or questions about this post or the For King and Country project, we’d love to hear from you. Please visit our contact page.

Coming very soon will be: Lambton Park, Long Branch Continuation School (now James S. Bell), Brock, and Courcelette. We’re working on the histories for each of these schools, which can be a challenge.

I’ve been at the library three times lately over the history of Long Branch Continuation. Out there in the Lakeshore area, groups were often “seceding” from Etobicoke, so it’s hard to sort out what Board of Education was in charge over the years, etc.

Etobicoke’s evolution from township, to borough, to city, to part of MetropolitanToronto is hard to follow. Fortunately, there are many local histories about Etobicoke’s early days.

History of the schools is murkier. Small school boards valued independence. Sifting through local histories one senses that separatist feelings were strong. Was it worry that a bigger board meant a bigger mill rate—higher taxes? Was it that “our” way of running things was better? Hard to know, and harder to follow from a distance in time.

The school being researched might have been governed by Lakeshore Board of Education, Long Branch Board of Education, or Etobicoke Board of Education, etc. Useful for unravelling tangled threads is Sylvio Sauro’s: A Celebration of Excellence: to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the amalgamation of the Etobicoke and Lakeshore District Boards of Education 1967-1992.

Mr. Sauro lists each school separately, with relevant chronological dates and snippets of local colour:

• 1889:(When S.S.#12 Long Branch was to be demolished to make way for a CPR spur line) The Board persuaded the railway company to provide another school site, build the school and pay the Board $150.
• 1908: Ratepayers vote to break away from S.S.#3 Lambton Mills to establish their own school (Sunnylea)
• 1930: Long Branch becomes an incorporated village.
• 1931: Long Branch secedes from the Township of Etobicoke.

Seeking ALL war memorials
“For King and Country” aims to photograph, index, describe, and annotate all war memorials in any Toronto schools: elementary, secondary, private, religious, etc.  Most memorials will be for WWI, WWII, or the Korean War, but we welcome information about any war service memorials connected to Toronto schools.

Coming soon: Brock Avenue Public School (Landmarks of Toronto, volume 6, p 547)

If you have comments or questions about this post or the For King and Country project, we’d love to hear from you. Please visit our contact page.