An interview with Jean Sears (Mrs. J.H. Suydam), age 78, of Toronto. This is 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. Her father came from Kent, England, and moved to Ontario as a young man with his parents and siblings. Mrs. Suydam had 5 siblings. Her father owned and published a newspaper with a Conservative outlook. She talks about: her happy childhood; immigrants to Welland; household servants; the arrival of immigrants who could not speak English and seemed very different; the impression people had that the new immigrants kept coal in their bathtubs; high school; children from town and the rural areas attending school; her family’s prestige even though they were not wealthy; the family attending the Anglican church; other newspapers in Welland, namely the Liberal paper the Welland Tribune; her father doing the printing, reporting and publishing; the eldest brother’s marriage into the family which owned the Welland Tribune; the friendly rivalry between the two newspapers; childhood pastimes such as climbing trees, playing with dolls, taking piano lessons and going on picnics; a lodge in the valley; ice cream parlours; attending plays at the opera house; going for drives; her recollection of seeing the first automobile in 1908; the joke that the owner, a friend of her father’s, spent more time under the car than in it; the lack of paved roads; going to picnics at Port Colborne by train; attending public school; discipline at school; a school principal who bullied a boy by chasing him around and beating him; going to high school at age 13; Catholic children attending the public school; attending a convent boarding school in Niagara Falls; dating; social life at the convent; dances at the convent; games at school; strict discipline at the school; getting up early and attending Mass at the convent; before-breakfast prayers; American and Canadian girls at the school; returning home at age 17 to Toronto, where the family had moved; studying piano and singing; her youngest sister’s training as a nurse; the family’s South Parkdale neighbourhood, which was beautiful, with wide streets, massive trees, the nearby lake, and only a few apartment buildings; her father’s job at the Toronto Type Factory; getting used to life in a large city; her mother’s difficulty in adjusting to city life; the enlistment in 1915 of her younger brother, her sister’s fiancé and another boy she knew; their training at Val Cartier and their deaths in the war; her volunteering for the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD); her parents’ reluctance to let her go because they felt they had given enough to the war; her mother’s willingness to let her go if her father agreed; her VAD training in home nursing and first aid; going to homes and assisting nurses; recruiting by St. John’s Ambulance and the Red Cross; recruiting of girls with similar backgrounds to hers, from various places such as London, St. Thomas, Hamilton and Toronto; working at a convalescent hospital on College Street near Yonge Street in Toronto, assisting nurses by making beds, washing patients and putting on bandages; the hierarchy in the hospital, which was run on military lines, with nursing sisters ranked as lieutenants; the VADs reporting to nurses and to the matron; working in Toronto for 5 to 6 hours a day; going to England where she worked on the night shift; a party before she left for England; her passage to England on a ship that was not in a convoy until it reached a danger zone; drill on board ship; seeing a Zeppelin in the sky during the ship’s journey; her decision to volunteer out of patriotism; and the feeling during those days that people were patriotic and did not think about the cost to themselves. ~She also talks about: ; the majority of the nursing volunteers who were from a British-Canadian background and thought of themselves as Canadian first and British second but never thought of separating the two; the lack of understanding of the causes of the war but knowing that Britain was in danger; the later understanding of the causes of the war; the view that Canadian men were going to serve in the military and that if Canadian women got the chance they should go and help; her impressions of England where she saw many troops; being assigned to a hotel in London near the British Museum; going the next day to VAD headquarters at Devonshire House; assignment to the Second London General Hospital; hierarchy among the nurses in England, even extending to seating arrangements at dinner; strict discipline; being reported because she talked back to someone who was rude; soldier patients from all over the Empire; service in the officers’ ward until she told off the matron and was moved to the privates’ ward; doing surgical nursing; description of the condition of soldiers in the ward; not being allowed to go out with the patients; soldiers not talking about life on the line; the soldiers’ happiness at being in London and seeing Canadian girls; wards for the blind; working long hours at the hospital; night duty; living in residence at the hospital; getting rheumatism because of the lack of central heating; homesickness; her work in London for 1½ years; the terrible pity and sacrifice of young lives; not being able to get away from it if you were a thoughtful, sensitive person; the dreadfulness of it all; the 1918 influenza epidemic; her recovery from the flu; the many flu cases on the ward; her fiancé; her marriage; the motivation to get married because so many people around her were dying; the reluctance of the soldiers to think about the war; entertainment for the soldiers; hatred for the Germans; internment of Germans; German spies; the difficulty of a German teacher to get students and the teacher’s having to report to the police periodically; the view by people in Toronto that the Germans were the enemy; widespread support for conscription; contempt for people who did not volunteer; her lack of support for women who went around handing out white feathers to men who were not in uniform; rationing; Toronto as a very British city; there being no question that “we belonged to the Empire and should help”; her receiving a telegram near Christmas with the news that her brother, Reginald Sears, had been killed in action; having to tell her sister and parents; the lengthy casualty lists; the evil and stupidity of war; the lack of time during the war to think about the foolishness of war because they were right in the middle of it and could not see the end results from there; war and religion; her husband’s near death from trench fever; the fear when her brother enlisted and her father’s support because he would have felt ashamed if his son had not enlisted; her father’s teaching the family to be proud of their name and to be patriotic; stern discipline and hardship of the VADs serving overseas; air raids in London during World War 1; a nearby anti-aircraft gun; meeting people of different backgrounds; the British lower class as the backbone of the British Army; patriotism and Canadian nationalism; the view that war was foolish but people did not have time to philosophize; VAD discipline less severe in Canada; patients falling in love with the VADs; women working in canteens in Toronto; her lack of support for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; Young Women’s Christian Association work during the war; a story that all the lampposts in London were bent when the Australians went home; soldiers going off with prostitutes; postwar life; the Roaring Twenties, when people felt relief from the war and its tensions; the fashion trend to flat bosoms; and hardships raising babies.~The interview continues, with comments on: ; fear over the Russian Revolution and how the Russians withdrew support for the Allies; vague recollections of the Winnipeg General Strike; the hardship of the 1930s when men lost their youth; jobs for returned soldiers; her American husband enlisting; ill-feeling toward Americans until they entered the war; the feeling that the Americans entered the war too late; Americans bragging about winning the war; retrieving a Union Jack in the mud after a fire in Philadelphia; social change; the homesickness of war brides who arrived in Canada; the Canadian welcome for war brides; how the war broadened the outlook of people and forced them to grow up suddenly; the lasting effect on her of her experience as a VAD, making her impatient with small-mindedness; and how the veterans and their war brides brought up good families.
