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BEECHEY: You think we’ve suffered?

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You know how the shoemaker’s children run around barefoot? Sometimes those who research history have difficulty getting their own family history done.

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While researching for First World War Tillsonburg men, I collected information on my family members as well. My grandfather, Archie Sidney Philpott Turner, was the interesting black sheep of the family. In the 1880s he ran away to sea but was too young and the British Navy sent him home. He used his slingshot, hit Queen Victoria’s coach and was yelled at by the Queen. He finally got in the navy, which he later deserted and joined the U.S. Navy, which he deserted, then he sailed the Great Lakes based in Windsor.

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When a cousin asked to know more about his wife, our grandmother, Lily Hodgson Turner, I thought most women back then were wives and mothers, not exactly inspiring. I was very wrong and I learned a lot about life and how to stand up against difficult times.

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Lily Hodgson’s family was fairly well off and ended up in what is now part of London, England. Back then school finished about age 14 and off to work they went. Lily became a machinist at a costume maker shop. Women’s clothing was referred to as costumes and about 100 women in a large open room would be operating what we call a sewing machine! It was good job!

In 1914, the First World War started and by 1916, Clapham Common was involved in what I call England’s first ‘Blitz,’ as German Zeppelins would float over the city dropping bombs – more bombs than you would care to imagine all around where she lived. During the Second World War, they would hide in the subways and emerge to pick up the pieces.

Around her family’s home were several hospitals for invalided soldiers and grandpa Archie, who signed up in Canada (buried alive in France and rescued), got patched up in three of them. Lily, her sister and many others would visit the wounded ‘boys.’ They met and married in 1918. Archie was shipped home to Canada with the other injured and Lily followed two months later. They set up housekeeping in Windsor.

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They had two months together before the Spanish Flu pandemic hit Windsor. Back then the average family could not afford electricity, most had no phone. Take our pandemic and remove our electricity, electronics, radios, televisions, computers and probably your car too … they were still very expensive luxuries.

No antibiotics for secondary infections and no vaccine. Back then, one in 25 people got sick.

Between the war and pandemic life, it got back to some semblance of normal by the mid 1920s. They had four to five better years until 1929 when the stock market fell and grandma, who invested in the Home Bank, lost everything. The Great Depression was terrible. During her first two decades in Canada Lily had three sons to clothe and feed. My father remembered trying to grow what they could in the backyard, getting some chickens, and trying to catch anything – even sparrows – to eat. Not pretty killing your own dinner.

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Most of the Dirty Thirties were all about surviving, but gradually life got better. Of course that didn’t last for in 1939 Britain went to war against Germany. Commonwealth nations jumped into the Second World War.

Son Bruce joined the Canadian Navy, Sid joined the Canadian Airforce, and my Dad got tuberculosis in his kidneys and could not join anything.

Two sons went to war, but only one returned. On Sept. 8, one of Lily’s worst fears occurred when Sid and his Wellington crew were reported missing on their bombing run to Tobruk in Northern Africa. Months later he was declared officially dead.

In 1943, Bruce married in Nova Scotia and came home with his bride to visit his parents and his brother in the sanitorium before returning east and back to the war.

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First World War shrapnel that couldn’t be removed, and drinking mustard gas tainted water, caught up with Archie in 1944 and he died at age 59.

The point of this whole story is to consider Lily’s life and what your grandparents or great grandparents lived through in the First World War, a pandemic much worse than COVID, the Great Depression, and the Second World War.

Compare it now to your life. What do you own? Do you have to eat sparrows? Your children have probably not gone to war and died there. You can communicate with friends and family whenever you wish. There are some, of course, with very little or homeless with nothing.

Compare your life to them. Do we have the right to whine?

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