The storytellers of our society tend to be our elders. In most European cultures, and indeed First Nations cultures, the laws, the lineage and the lore are generally gathered and told by the senior members of society. That’s why the stories of young researcher and military historian Rebecca Murray proved so refreshing to me.
“Kate Reid served as a WD (Women’s Division) in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War,” Murray explained during her presentation at a history conference I attended in Calgary last week. “She was my Nan, and one of 17,000 WDs in the Air Force.”
Having graduated from Carleton University’s Canadian Studies program just a dozen years ago, Rebecca Murray quickly acquired the skills of a reference archivist at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. In an occupation dominated by men – and mostly older men at that – historian Murray chose to search out Kate Reid’s wartime story partly as a tribute to her grandmother, but also to correct an oversight by many Canadian historians.
“Women are severely under-represented among the 175,000 RCAF photographs in Canada’s national archives,” Murray said. “Servicewomen made up 5 per cent of the Air Force during the war but are depicted in fewer than 1 per cent of the images.”
Part of Murray’s work as a feminist historian also includes her revelations about the way Canadian servicewomen, such as her grandmother, were assessed by the forces. Murray calls the process “historisizing.” When determining Leading Aircraftwoman Reid’s credentials, her senior officers described her as “smiling, hard-working, demure, rule-following, and almost always perfectly put together.”
If Air Force brass categorized women volunteers for their looks, in the post-war period, they were just as biased about the men they recruited, at least as far as Adam Coombs expressed it at the Air Force conference last week.
When he delved into RCAF social history, Dr. Coombs discovered that “being a hockey scout was part of (a commanding officer’s) job description,” since the competition at the base hockey rink was just as stiff as training to outsmart the Russians in the skies over the Canadian Arctic.
Coombs noted that in the 1940s, the aircrewmen stationed at B.C. bases such as Watson Lake and Fort Nelson couldn’t wait to level the ground and flood their outdoor hockey rinks to beat their northern rivals.
However, none of the outdoor rinks compared with the one constructed in northern Alberta, at Canadian Forces Base Cold Lake in 1947. Base commanders and players boasted that their rink was “seven feet longer than the ice surface at Maple Leaf Gardens.”
Dr. Coombs explained that he’s just as keen as his Air Force research subjects to play, because he regularly plays goal with his history research buddies. The difference, however, is that young Coombs plays non-contact, rec hockey.
“The Cold War hockey players had very little equipment and their games included plenty of violence. … perhaps help them deal with the remoteness of their stations.”
Joining the three-day conference by Zoom, another young PhD historian named Sarah Hogenbirk revealed some stunning First Nations history to the audience of older, more established historians. She told the story of Alice Lovina Anderson, from the Rama First Nations Reserve, north of us.
As a teenager, Alice actually attended Uxbridge Secondary School, graduating in 1938; unable to find work beyond domestic work and waitressing, Alice eventually enlisted in the RCAF, but like LAC Kate Reid, found herself categorized as “suitable for Air Force cleaning, messenger and runner duties.” LAC Anderson persisted and eventually moved to general clerk in December 1944.
Tragically, according to Dr. Hogenbirk’s research, Alice Anderson contracted tuberculosis and died in June 1946.
Discrimination, which Hogenbirk describes as “the whispering campaign” inside the military, prevented LAC Anderson from receiving proper medical attention, military service pension or even a military headstone until October 1946. Her parents even wrote repeated letters to RCAF authorities to retrieve their daughter’s effects from the sanitorium where she died.
Anderson’s service and story have finally received appropriate recognition thanks to Dr. Hogenbirk’s recent publication Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the Second World War, and the name of Alice Lovina Anderson has now joined those in Canada’s official Book of Remembrance.
Sometimes it takes the attention of younger historians in the research trenches to uncover the unsung heroes of our military past. Those such as Rebecca Murray, Adam Coombs and Sarah Hogenbirk have blazed new trails with the same kind of passion and authority as their famous predecessors – Jack Granatstein, David Bercuson and Tim Cook. I applaud and encourage them.