HWM's Nov.11s

On Wednesday, October 6, 1915, five weeks short of his 20^th birthday on November 11, Harry Whitfield Mollins, along with some pals, travelled from his home in Moncton,  New Brunswick,  to a Canadian Army recruitment centre at Charlottetown,  Prince Edward Island, and signed on to #2 Siege Battery. He began immediately keeping a diary in tiny pocket-sized notebooks. Here is what he had to say later on his birthday: 

Saturday, November 11, 1916

      (Based in a training camp at Horsham, Sussex, southern England)

   Weather: Fine   This is my twenty-first birthday. Left Horsham at 9:30 A.M. Arrived at London about eleven. Had dinner & caught the 3 o’clock train for Shorncliffe (Kent, southeast coast of England). Arrived about 6 P.M.  Put up at the Fernall Hotel, Folkestone. As it is useless to try and find any of the boys tonight, we went to the Pleasure Gardens Theatre & saw a play called “The Whip.” Enjoyed it very much. 

Sunday, November 11, 1917

 (Northern France battle grounds)

Weather: Showers   Were relieved this morning at 9 A.M. Was never so thankful for anything in my life.  Was wet through and coated with mud from head to foot. Returned to billets & turned in for a sleep. Stayed in bed all day.  We fired 240 rounds during our twenty-four hours duty. This is my twenty-second birthday. I spent my last birthday in England and the one before that in Canada. Where shall I spend the next? I hope in Canada.

      -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

    By November 11, 1918, the day the war ended, Harry Mollins was being treated for an illness from an infection acquired while an aimer in a cannon crew in combat. There’s no diary entry for that birthday—the same day armistice ended the war. But he was soon able to spend his birthdays in Canada. 

   Ten years later, with fellow Monctonian Vera Grace Mollins his wife, he was winding up studies at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University, where—despite his married state—he acquired Bachelor titles in Arts (BA) and Divinity (BD) to become a church pastor. Not to mention receiving a grand reputation as a baritone songster—a powerful talent enriched by singing lessons as a soldier in Horsham, as his diary reports. His singing embellished his role as a Baptist minister in Windsor, N.S., Ottawa, Brantford and Toronto.

   And, of course, there was his assistance in Grace’s bearing two wonderful daughters in the 1920s. And then—as immodest as this truthfulness may seem—the two stupendous sons of the 1930s.                 

–Carl Mollins  Nov. 9, 2010  

Picture taken at a war memorial at Canary Wharf, London, in September 2010

G20 and G-whiz in Toronto

  Following the last weekend of June, when G-20 leaders conferred in Toronto, I was keenly coursing the news for any positive accomplishments of the G-20 gang and accompanying Toronto street conflicts between police and demonstrating crowds promoting various social and political causes because I had learned little meandering that Sunday afternoon around the sites of both events.

   Each of the half-dozen cops I queried among the dozens assembled at all main intersections I encountered had nothing to offer -- "I'm from out of town" or "I'm from Ottawa" was mostly what I got.

   Even the interruption of my frustrated return home late  Sunday afternoon provided next to nothing.

   My homeward trip, aboard a Spadina streetcar northward bound from the lakefront, came to a halt at Queen Street -- because of an array of police preventing the southward advance of a hundred-or-so civilians.

  Some of the civilians were shouting something I couldn't understand. A few waved signs preaching "Peace," or else, curled up by breeze, messages were hidden. Every move I made prompted a police person to tell me to move away, albeit neither northward nor eastward.

  (None asked me to unzip my bombless handbag--something a woman cop at Union Station had earlier demanded, thereby discovering my rain jacket, folded umbrella, camera and a copy of the New Yorker magazine. She lightened up a bit when I remarked, “Darnit! I forgot to pack my bomb!”)

  Anyway, I walked westerly for five blocks -- warning eastwardly bound pedestrians en route that Spadina was shut. During that walk, I saw three 10-cop squads racing aboard bicycles towards the Spadina fuss, each platoon beeping siren-like horns as they blasted dangerously through intersection stop signs and signals.

  When I reached Bathurst street to catch a streetcar home, guess what? The first streetcar to stop was a diverted Spadina vehicle on a route that would not get me home. . . .

  Speaking above of the New Yorker, our Monday New York Times reports--by Canadian correspondent and former Macleansian Ian Austen--that among a few journalists amid the hundreds of people arrested by police during the weekend was Steven Paikin, host of the TV Ontario program Agenda.

  Speaking once more of the New Yorker, I have just received coincidentally a weekly email from that magazine. But I find nothing in its contents of the July 5 issue to satisfy my search for reports of any accomplishments by the international G-20 and combative police force actions in Canada.

The New Yorker's lack of reporting the G-hassle in Canada is particularly ironic because only a week earlier that magazine had been enriched by thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars from Canada.

Its June 28 issue carries advertisements from Canadian federal, provincial and municipal governments, plus a few Canadian businesses -- 22 ads in all, 15 of them costly, full-page Canada-promotions in that 80-page mag.

Odd, eh?   --cm 28-6-10

   P.S. On Saturday, July 10, calling it a Day of Action for Civil Liberties, about 1,200 people marched around  downtown Toronto denouncing how police and governments handled the G-20 summit and its aftermath. During that demo, the group held a brief sit-in at the intersection of Queen and Spadina streets, site of the June 27 demonstration when protestors and some passersby were  “kettled”--held for hours by police squads both behind as well as in front of that group--during a driving rainstorm. #

Picture Credit: Carl Mollins

Queen Victoria's birthday bust

Meandering along Bloor Street and our back lane this warm and sunny 24th of May holiday, I was shocked and outraged by the absence of any apparent celebration of Queen Victoria's
190th birthday other than shut shops on Bloor.

   There was a moment or so after returning home, I thought that maybe some jolly little-kids yammering nearby was a children's marking of Victoria's birthday.

   That seemed so when two of the little scamps came knocking on our front door--right beside the verandah window where I had placed a print of the portrait by American artist Thomas Sully of the pretty, teen-aged Queen Victoria.

   (She posed for Sully during the  early months of her  64-year year reign [1837-1901], which began with the death of her Uncle William IV on June 20, 1837, just 27 days after her 18th birthday.)

    But, no, the kids paid no attention to the picture.

    They were asking for access to our back yard to retrieve a frisbee which, it turned out, had been playing no part whatsoever in a celebration of Queen Victoria's birthday when one of the kids had sent it sailing over two fences into our yard.

    I was inclined to scold them and refuse to let them regain their frisbee.

    But then I thought: What-the-Heck. I escorted them into our yard to fetch their frisbee, then presented them with one of our ancient frisbees as well as some almost-as-old-as-Victoria tennis balls. 

   --cm 24-5-10

[picture from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website]