Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Cheese-rolling, straw bears and weird rituals galore: one man’s mission to record all of British folklore

There are now 25 million people in the AncestryDNA database.

On Monday evening at 7 pm OGS Oxford Branch welcomes Glenn Wright presenting “Proudly She Served – Canadian Women at War – 1885-1945.” Registration for Zoom attendance at https://oxford.ogs.on.ca/

U of S restoration helps honour memory of those who served in First World War.

AN ARMISTICE DAY THOUGHT
(from the Ottawa Citizen, 11 November 1919)

The German warlords submitted to the Armistice terms of the Allies one year ago today. They submitted while their armies were still in invaded territory, though they were hastening back to Cermany as fast as transportation facilities could carry them. The supreme warlord hid himself in Holland. The militarist dictator, Ludendorff, retired as far as Norway

Ludendorff’s memoirs seem to confirm the opinion held by some Canadian soldiers that the German people never actually rose to the same height of sacrifice as the English people. At the end of the war, the people at home in the British Isles were facing the winter practically without domestic coal to carry them through. They had rationed themselves to the bone on food supplies. They did this to keep their allies from suffering any worse plight and to spare all the ships needed to bring American troops over. When the Canadian troops entered Germany, they were often surprised to see how well-fed the people looked. The world had been led to regard the German nation as starving, but the British nation starved itself to win the war.

Earlier in the same memorable year, 1918, when the British armies, including the Canadian Army Corps, were being driven back on the Channel Ports, Sir Douglas Haig gave the order to the men not to give way another yard but rather to give their lives where they stood. Does anyone doubt that the British would have fought on to the last against whatever careening force the Germans had come on with? Can anyone imagine Sir Douglas Haig taking refuge across the channel? There would have been no armistice day dictated by Germany as long as the man at the head of the British army remained alive.

This is a good day to remember, with gratitude, the spirit of the men of the British Isles—where the Military Service Act applied to men up to the age of 55, married and single alike—and of the men of Canada, who served overseas for years without the remote possibility of seeing home even for one week’s leave. There is no warmer admirer of the British “Tommy” than the Canadian-born soldier, and nowhere is the Canadian more highly regarded than in the Motherland.