Remembrance Day, 2010

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day. It’s the first Remembrance Day of my life that I will not be celebrating with my grandfather, Murray Anderson, a veteran of the Second World War who passed away last winter.

In December, 2009, I scanned a number of pictures he took during his time in the Royal Canadian Navy with the intention of uploading them to honour today. Unfortunately I cracked the motherboard of the computer containing those scanned pictures last spring, and I haven’t managed to recover the harddrive yet. When I do, you can be sure I’ll upload them to this blog.

In the meantime, I want to put something up here in his memory, and to mark this day where we remember all those who have served and sacrificed in the past and present so that we can live in a better world. On my facebook profile I have a collection of photos of his ship that I’ve found online up, and so I’ll republish them here for a wider audience.

This is my grandfather’s ship, the HMCS Dumheller (K167). Of the 37 U-Boats destroyed by the Canadian Navy during the Second World War, it sank one and assisted in sinking another. It also served in Operation Neptune, the naval component of Operation Overlord, the Allied Invasion of Europe.

My grandfather was one of the wireless operators aboard the HMCS Drumheller. His ship escorted the Mulberry hulks, old wrecks that were scuttled off the D-Day beaches to make breakwaters and piers so the Allies could use the Normandy beaches as a port.

On June 6th the HMCS Drumheller was just offshore. He could see bodies floating in the water. He told me he saw a troopship, its deck full of soldiers, hit a mine and vanish in a flash of light and white water. Later that day he was out on the deck when the HMS Norfolk was firing its eight-inch guns inland against Nazi positions. He burst his eardrum and permanently lost his hearing in his right ear. He never reported the injury for fear of being put ashore, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that he filed a claim with veterans affairs. He was afraid he was going to get in trouble somehow for concealing his war wound for so long.

This is the HMCS Drumheller coming into a harbour. This photo was taken from the deck of a Canadian destroyer. See the sailors lined up on the deck? During the run up to D-Day it worked alone, shepherding individual ships from British port to British port along the English Channel.

One night he said they were escorting an American merchantman through the English Channel, and they could hear over the water the special whine of a German E-Boat (a torpedo boat that was easily a match for the Drumheller). The Canadians were hoping that the Germans wouldn’t find them, but the Americans had a 50-calibre machine gun bolted to their bow, and they started firing wildly into the night. All of a sudden my grandfather heard the ‘Ping! Ping! Ping!’ as the bullets bounced off the metal of the E-Boat. The Germans revved up their engines, turned tail and ran. He figures they must have thought anyone with the nerve to shoot at them must have been another torpedo boat. The Americans trigger-happy attitude saved the day.

My grandfather told me once they were in Portsmouth, and V-1 Buzz Bombs were flying overhead. All the ships in the harbour were firing their anti-aircraft guns, and then the orders came over the radio from the harbour master to cease fire immediately: If any of the V-1s were shot down, they could have hit one of the ammunition ships. The RAF would take care of them once they were in land.

Murray Anderson’s Eulogy

Murray and Serena Anderson at their 60th Wedding Anniversary

My grandfather, Murray Anderson, who I’ve mentioned before at least in passing here, here, here, here, here, and here on this blog, passed away last Sunday. He was a few months shy of his eighty-sixth birthday, and he was the finest man I have ever known. I gave a eulogy at his funeral yesterday, and people thought it was very well said. As this blog has featured him so heavily already –and will continue to do so– and as it serves as a place for my writing, I thought I should publish his eulogy here. I also have a copy of a speech I gave at his sixtieth wedding anniversary a few years ago somewhere. I saw it a couple of days ago, but I can’t seem to find it at the moment. I’ll put it up when I do.

Awesome Pictures: The Great Depression Era’s Concept of Gun Safety

What is it:

This is my grandfather, Murray Anderson, in 1942 at age 17, pointing his gun directly at the photographer.

Why is it Awesome?

Okay, let’s get a closer look at this. You tell me, what’s interesting about this image? Is it the bit where you can see directly down the barrel of what is almost certainly a loaded firearm? I’ll admit, it makes for an interesting picture –especially once I was assured the photographer is not now dead and quietly buried in a shallow grave somewhere out in the forest– but what is the wider context? What can this photo tell us about the life and times of the generation that grew up during the Great Depression?

Let’s take a step back and remember what we’re talking about here. This is not a couple of teenagers horsing around with firearms. Well, okay, it is teenagers horsing around with firearms, but it’s also one of those things that disconnects the Greatest Generation from my own. Even the Baby Boomers can’t really wrap their head around the idea that in the Great Depression, you fed your family however you could. Everyone had a garden. If you lived near a lake or a river, you fished. If there were wood lots around you, you hunted. You didn’t do it because you were starving. You did it because it was something you could do to make things easier on the family budget. It wasn’t a question of desperation so much as independence.

My grandfather was a horse-driving milkman as a young man. This is his story.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I spent last weekend up at my grandparents, and I scanned in over a hundred old photos. Here are a couple of them, along with an essay my grandfather, Murray Anderson, wrote at some point for a local newspaper about his days as a milkman in Bracebridge, Ontario, in the late 40s and early 50s. I don’t know which one, or when, or how much of it was published. This was the draft he sent them, and so I’m republishing it at its full length with pictures from his old albums.

It’s a pretty great collection of stories about a very different world, when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with cars and trucks. I lived and worked in Mennonite Country for a year after graduating school, so it’s not a totally foreign concept to me, but somehow it never quite sunk in just how much the horse decides where it wants to go until I read this essay. Throw in the steep hills of Muskoka, and the icy winters up there, and you can see just how much a willful horse like my grandfather’s Queenie could change the whole business of getting around town.

Murray Anderson, age 24, with Queenie

A day in the life of a milkman in the 1950s

Refrigerators were non-existent for the working man. Ice-boxes were what some could afford, the rest of us just let the kitchen tap drip on the milk bottle to keep it cool in summer (also let it drip in winter to keep the pipes from freezing, but that didn’t always work – these were in the days before central heating, running water, and indoor plumbing for the working man).. Milk delivery was a 7 day a week affair in the summer months and 6 days in the winter, which meant a double load for delivery on Saturdays.