Collection search - Everleigh, Lewis - Interview

Record information – Brief

1

Everleigh, Lewis - Interview

Item number (ISN):

379042

Series title:

[The Great War and Canadian Society]

Hierarchical level:

Item (Accession level)

Date:

1974-07-02

Item number (ISN):

379042

Link to related resource:

Type of material:

Sound recordings

Found in:

Archives / Film, Video and Sound

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Record information – Details

Fonds/collection:

THE GREAT WAR AND CANADIAN SOCIETY PROJECT

Accession:

1975-0098

Media:

Sound

Part:

1 of 1

Production date:

1974-07-02

Production company:

Opportunities for Youth

Production credit:

interviewer, Lori Rotenberg

Description:

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Interview of Mr. Lewis Everleigh, age 77, who was born in 1897 in Titcove, Newfoundland. He talks about: his parents and siblings; his moving to Toronto circa 1910; going to school; the community of Titcove, where most of the people worked at the Cape Copper Mine; religion; going to Sunday School; Sunday as a day of rest; getting supplies in Titcove from St. John’s, recreational activities such as concerts, Magic Lantern shows that travelled from town to town, and movies shown in the school; playing sports; his family’s house; fishing and hunting; living conditions in Titcove; his job before the war delivering telegrams on foot to a whale factory five miles away in Snooks Arm; going to a nearby town for dinners and dances in winter; the shut down of the copper mine in 1911 because it ran out of copper, after which a number of residents moved to Sydney or Toronto; an avalanche in Titcove in 1910; the family’s move to Toronto because a brother living there said that there was lots of work; the community of Newfoundlanders in Toronto, concentrated around Dovercourt and Westmoreland; a lot of Newfoundlanders at the Westmoreland Church; his father getting a job in construction with good pay; getting work driving a wagon for a fruit store; working at the Gold Metal Furniture Factory; his enlistment; going to night school before and after World War One; postwar university studies in mechanical drafting; difficulty in getting a job when he finished his studies because of the lack of jobs; his work at the furniture factory from 1912 to 1915; working conditions there; church attendance and the social life at the church; going on picnics and trips to Niagara Falls with friends; reading about the war in the newspaper; patriotism; enlisting in September 1915; going to a camp at Niagara-on-the-Lake; enlistment by most of his friends; his decision to enlist before he was conscripted; winter quarters at Exhibition Park in Toronto until April 1916; training in shooting, the use ofa bayonet, carrying packs and especially marching; how some officers had to be rough in order to train the men; military training, where civilians had to do things they weren’t used to; having to get into shape; his adjustment to military life because he was used to biking and walking and did not mind taking orders; going to shows in the evenings; religious services in training camp; his parents’ not approving of his enlistment but not really objecting; his not telling his parents until after he enlisted; wartime propaganda that this was the war to end all wars; his view that it was his duty to go and defend Canada; not wanting the Germans to defeat the British Empire; the belief that it was his duty to fight for liberty and justice and to end all war; sailing from Halifax to Liverpool aboard the Empress of Britain in 1916; men playing cards aboard ship; crowded living conditions aboard the troop ship; training at Bramshott Camp; being issued with Lee-Enfield rifles in England because of trouble with the Canadian-made Ross Rifle; the splitting up of the 75th Battalion and being sent to the 3rd Battalion; tougher training in England than in Canada; learning to be a good shot on the rifle range; greater discipline in the British Army than in the Canadian Army; the more experienced soldiers in the British Army being more used to discipline; Canadians taking less to discipline because they had been civilians; riots in training camps in England; soldiers complaining about bad food; a riot in Rill Camp in Wales after the war because the soldiers were sick of the delay in sending them home; his being wounded and gassed; returning to England; on hospital duty at Shorncliffe Military Hospital; more on soldiers waiting for months at Rill Camp; his return to Canada in 1919 with the 3rd Battalion; soldiers letting off steam and getting bored while they were waiting to go home; fighting in the trenches; seeing action at Ypres and Mount Sorrel; and holding the line. ~He also talks about: getting to Ypres after the big gas attack; protection against gas attacks; transfer from the scouts to the “battalion bombers” and then to the machine gun section until he got wounded; the use of Mills bombs; the move of Canadian forces from the Ypres Salient to the Somme; the line advancing and attacking all the time; getting a bullet through the elbow; getting gassed; the Canadians taking trenches; not hating the Germans because “they did not want to be there any more than we did”; the belief that somebody else was manipulating the strings behind the lines and the soldiers were just there to work out a game; sometimes hating the Germans when his friends were shot; having to kill or be killed; the feeling that the killing was unnecessary; hearing Germans talking 150 yards away; wondering sometimes what it was all about; having to everything you could to survive; having to do things you did not agree with; having to carry out orders; instances of disobedience and desertion; feeling of patriotism by some soldiers; the physical and mental breakdowns suffered by some soldiers because of the gas, noise and other things they had to go through; the lack of acceptance at the time that some soldiers disobeyed or deserter because of mental breakdown or sickness; the death penalty for desertion; some men going on leave and not coming back; conscription; his view that to a certain extent the government had the right to force men to enlist because the men enjoyed the benefits of the country and should not just sit back and enjoy the benefits that result; attitudes toward conscripts, who were called zombies; not much difference between the fighting qualities of conscripts and volunteers; the daily rum ration; giving his rum ration to others unless it was cold and wet in the trenches; church parades in France; going on leave; the effect of the war on him; how the war matured him and broadened his thinking; making friends with French and British people; working as an orderly at the Shorncliffe Hospital in England; working on the Chinese ward for men who were building roads in England and France; his return to Toronto in 1919; help for veterans who wanted to take courses; his studies in mechanical drafting at the University of Toronto; a veterans’ allowance from the government; his completion of third-year work; the shortage of employment in the 1920s; trying to find work; being unable to find a job as a draughtsman when he finished university; his father’s job as a carpenter; his father getting run over by a streetcar in 1919 three days after Lewis returned from overseas; his decision to get his father’s tools and work as a carpenter; working for a construction company; working on jobs in the U.S. and Canada for the International Construction Company; the birth of his three children in the U.S.; his return to Toronto in 1929; various construction jobs there; his disappointment that he could not get a job as a draughtsman after the war; the need to adjust after military life and the war because in the army there is a routine, living quarters, meals and medical care, and in civilian life people have to go back to looking after everything for themselves; the failure of the government to provide jobs for veterans; getting a 10 percent disability pension because he could not use one arm very well; not joining the Legion because he wanted to get away from “all that”; his marriage and family life; people starting to move to different parts of Toronto after the war and meet different people; the impact of the war on religious beliefs; the postwar difference in dress and morals; parcels and letters from home when he was overseas; government propaganda to encourage people to buy war bonds; his never regretting that he enlisted; the Depression; people’s resentment during the Depression that they had served their country during the war and now had to beg for help; his marriage in 1920; and war brides.~The interview concludes with his comments about: his recreational activities in the 1920s, such as skating, tobogganing in High Park, sleigh rides, tennis, picnics, canoeing on the Humber River, going to Toronto Island and Hanlan’s Park, and trips across the Niagara; people travelling more after the war and moving to other parts of the country; good and bad memories of the war; the effect of the war on him; training young people to kill during the war and then expecting them to forget about it after the war; and the inability of some people to control their feelings after such training and the danger that they could become violent.

Language:

English

Notes:

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1. The interviews took place in 1974 and resulted in the publication of a book entitled "The Great War and Canadian Society" edited by Daphne Read - copyright 1978 - New Hogtown Press, Toronto.~2. Release forms, data sheets, and summary analysis/transcripts are available in binders labelled Opportunities for Youth - War and Canadian Society in VSA's audio-visual section.~3. Part of a series of recorded interviews with elderly citizens who lived in Canada during the period of World War I. The interview material consists of their opinions and observations about the war, the war years, and the effect on Canadian society during and after WWI.~4. The interviewee signed an agreement giving consent for a recording of this interview to be placed in the Public Archives of Canada for the purposes of historical research and also signed a publication agreement allowing any transcribed portions of the interview to be used in the book under the condition that no full names, addresses or phone numbers would be published.~5. Subject description is based on information found in the fact sheet, deposit agreement, publication agreement and summary analysis.
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Conditions of access:

Open

Consultation copy number:

A1 2007-05-0061
A1 2007-05-0062

Restrictions on consultation:

No Restrictions / Pas de restrictions

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With written permission of Copyright Owner / Avec la permission écrite du détenteur des droits d'auteur

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Date modified:: 2024-06-27