by Gill Paul
… true love “is a union of personalities, mind, soul and body.”
Evelyn Kelly: She wrote to Fred, “One thing I don’t like about being married is that I’ll have to take your name, and I like my own better.”
In the letters they analyze when their feelings for each other started and he admits that he had hesitated to declare his because although he had always loved her, he was not sure if they were physically compatible—perhaps because she was very short and slight—but then he realized that true love “is a union of personalities, mind, soul and body.” Another man, John, had been courting her, but Evelyn explained he didn’t “measure up to the standards I had set in my mind, which I knew you fitted.” They sometimes quarreled as they negotiated the terms of their future together, but they saw eye to eye on all the major issues, such as woman’s suffrage, and both supported a women’s right to work after marriage. They even wrote advising each other of the nightwear they would bring for their wedding night!
Fred and Evelyn’s wedding on June 12, 1914, at Thorold Church, Ontario. It was a perfect day, followed by a glorious honeymoon that ended prematurely when war was declared.
Fred and Evelyn got married on June 12, 1914, in Thorold, Ontario, and set off on an extended honeymoon starting at Niagara Falls, followed by New York, Ireland, and Great Britain. They had read in the newspapers about the mounting tension in Europe but both were eager to see Britain and didn’t think it would come to war. However, when they arrived in London, he wrote in his diary that they “heard the beat of drums and knew troops were marching along the Strand.” The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a sermon appealing to all that was “best and noblest in British character,” and Fred noted: “Vicissitudes may come and defeats may be ours, but in the end we shall win because the cause is right.” They were loyal subjects of the British Empire and listened gravely when war was declared on August 4, three days after Evelyn woke up crying with a feeling of all-pervasive dread.
The War Years
As soon as they could get a passage, Fred and Evelyn sailed back to Canada and set up home in Calgary near his law firm, Clarke, Carlson, and Company. She had already explained that she did not want to rush into starting a family right away: “Of course, I want children, but I don’t want them to start on. And you said you didn’t either.” She enjoyed going to the opera and theater and concerts, and, unusually for a married woman in that era, began working as a trainee at Fred’s law firm.
In the summer of 1915, her sister Ora’s husband, Art, went to Europe as a medical officer and in October, while Evelyn was back east visiting her family for a few months, Fred signed up for a local militia regiment, the 103rd. He didn’t volunteer for active service; he would merely train with the militia so as to be ready if the day came when he was needed, explaining his reasons to Evelyn in a letter: “I have had a terrible battle to fight—to decide how far family ties should be considered in the face of such a pressing and universal need.”
A telegram from Fred sent on March 25, 1917, as his ship was about to set sail from Halifax bound for England.
“I have had a terrible battle to fight …”
It was June 1916 when Fred enlisted as a private in a reserve battalion. As part of the empire, Canadians were fiercely patriotic to Great Britain, and he felt it was his duty. Had he volunteered for the University Battalion, he might have got a commission as an officer, but he chose the 21st Reserve Battalion in the hope that it would allow him to spend as long as possible at home with his wife. Evelyn did not attempt to discourage him from signing up except once when she asked, “Why should we if others do not?” He replied, “Why should others and not we?”
During the winter of 1916–17 he worked as a recruiting sergeant in Alberta, and it wasn’t until March 3, 1917, that he was sent to England to train with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force. He and Evelyn resumed their habit of writing to each other, but her first letters are gloomy as she considers how long it might be before she will see him again: “It is maybe wrong of me to let you know how absolutely I miss you, but that is the chief thing in my life.” She was short of money, but focused on studying for her law exams and making up boxes of essentials to mail to her husband in the UK.
During the spring and summer of 1917, Fred was training at Bramshott Camp in Hampshire, England, and enjoyed cycling around country lanes and exploring stately homes during his time off. He wrote to Evelyn about the air raids taking place—“The boom from the guns and dropping bombs became louder and louder . . . we tried to count the planes and I’m sure I counted 36”—and he wrote in his diary about everyday life, commenting that food left on plates was scraped up and reused in soups, stews, or puddings. Evelyn worried that he would be too cold in England and sent him bed socks, but in fact there was hot sun and a muggy atmosphere that left him sweating after each drill. As their third wedding anniversary came and went, Fred recalled what they had been doing on each day of their honeymoon, and he often wrote to Evelyn about how much he loved her: “The glorious thing is that we do love each other now so dearly—yes—and I believe wisely.” Evelyn went back to Ontario for a summer break and suffered a hemorrhage of the uterus, which meant prolonging her stay while she recovered. On her return she went back to work with Fred’s law firm and wrote to tell him, jokingly, how “several have said that I was doing your work.”
Bramshott Camp, Hampshire, summer 1917. Fred enjoyed his time cycling around exploring the English countryside, but disapproved of the drunken behavior he witnessed: “The waste and squalor and disease and poverty caused by drinking is alarming.”
And then, on September 15, Fred wrote with the news that both had been dreading—he was being sent to France—although he hastened to reassure Evelyn that it was bound to be some time before he was sent to the Front. Deep down, with all the talk of a “big push” due to take place that autumn, he probably suspected he would be in the trenches before long, but he didn’t want to alarm her. Before leaving, he arranged to have an album of photographs sent back to Evelyn in Canada, hoping it would arrive in good time for her birthday in November.
ZEPPELINS
Zeppelin airships had first been developed in the 1890s, and during the war German commanders used them to launch bombing raids on Britain. The airships had a rigid frame of rings and girders containing hydrogen-filled gasbags, with motors underneath to move them and a basket for the navigators to sit in. The first bombing raid of the war hit the Norfolk coast in January 1915 and raids continued until May 1918, causing substantial damage and civilian loss of life. The British army introduced searchlights and anti-aircraft guns, but it proved difficult to puncture the multiple layers of the Zeppelin in order to ignite the hydrogen. On the night of September 2, 1916, the first Zeppelin was shot down by Lt. William Leefe Robinson, who fired three drums’ worth of incendiary bullets into the airship SL11, causing it to catch fire, and became a national hero. During the summer of 1917, Fred Albright witnessed several alarming Zeppelin attacks, writing on July 7, “It is reported that the London Genl. Post Office is in flames—that St. Paul’s cathedral was also bombed.”
A recruitment poster with an image of searchlights picking out a Zeppelin in the skies above London.
The Battle of Passchendaele
Fred’s descriptive letters to Evelyn continued after they arrived in France on September 17, 1917. He wrote about local vendors crying, “Apools, chocolates!” and described the way they used a mixture of currencies so that a bar of chocolate cost “one franc 4 penny.” Much sooner than he had hoped, his company were sent to the trenches, and he wrote on September 28, “For the past week I have washed, shaved & bathed out of a shell hole.” As a lawyer, a man of erudition, it was not what he was used to. He described the way the men kept very still when German planes flew overhead because “the least movement on the ground is discernible . . . we don’t want Heine [the Germans] to know what positions we occupy.” He watched a German plane being shot down and all his fellow soldiers gav
e a cheer.
A letter from Fred, written on September 12, 1917, telling Evelyn that he had been sent to France. He couldn’t include details of his location, but described a town where the trees were all dead, blighted by the effects of poisonous fumes.
On the morning of October 20, Fred wrote telling Evelyn that it was “a fair morning again and the sun is shining,” then added, “Tell Mrs B. that I am carrying her Belgian coin for luck.” (Mrs Brown was a family friend who had given him the coin before he left.) It seems he knew he was being sent to the front line near Ypres that day, where the Third Battle of Ypres (also known as the Battle of Passchendaele) was raging. The village of Passchendaele had been chosen as a target because it was on the supply route for the German Fourth Army, but conditions were atrocious after weeks of heavy rainfall had turned the ground into slippery mud. It was Fred’s first engagement in the fighting and it would be his last. On October 26, when Canadian forces joined the battle for the first time, Fred’s company was stationed in a badly exposed spot, with no adequate trenches. Fighting was fierce and during the day Fred’s position was hit by a shell that killed several men, including him. Only two or three men from his platoon of fifty-two soldiers survived.
Fred Albright’s grave in Larch Wood cemetery, Zillebeke, near Ypres, Belgium. He had only been in France for six weeks when he was killed.
Unaware of his fate, Evelyn continued to write: “That last winter was very precious,” she wrote on October 28. “I think we grew nearer than ever then.” On his return she wanted them to move into a new house and “start anew,” like being married all over again, “only we shall have all our love and understanding to make things run smoothly.” Two weeks later, on November 12, she received the dreaded telegram: “Deeply regret inform you 895173 Pte. Frederick Stanley Albright was officially reported killed in action.”
Canadian troops hold the line at Passchendaele in late October/early November 1917. The mud was treacherous after weeks of rain.
Fred was buried at Larch Wood Cemetery near Ypres. On November 6, Canadian troops finally succeeded in taking the small village of Passchendaele but at huge cost to both sides. Almost 16,000 Canadians were killed for a victory that ultimately had little strategic value.
THE EFFECTS OF SHELLING
In September 1914, at the Battle of the Marne, a group of soldiers were found standing dead at their posts without any obvious injuries. A rumor spread that the huge new field guns being used could cause dark forces to move through the air and damage men’s brains. Some who survived heavy shelling turned up at casualty clearing stations badly confused and trembling, with headaches, dizziness, and memory loss, and medics at first diagnosed these cases as physical injuries caused by trauma to the brain from an explosion. However, many commanders believed “shell shock” to be a nervous complaint, a kind of emotional collapse that occurred in men who hadn’t necessarily been exposed to shelling, and so the debate began: was it physical or mental? At the end of the war a British government report on shell shock stated that only a small proportion of cases (5 to 10 percent) had physical concussion following shelling and that the rest were of nervous disposition. An estimated 1,663,445 men (10 percent of all those wounded in the war) were diagnosed as suffering from shell shock. But Fred Albright was killed by shell concussion, when the blast waves from a shell did indeed cause fatal damage to his brain without producing any external sign of injury, just like those men at the Marne.
A shell exploding during the Battle of Passchendaele: A Red Cross volunteer described being caught in the blast force as “like being struck unexpectedly by a huge wave in the ocean.”
“Oh dearest, if I had only someone who looked like you, who was part of you, to love.”
Struggling with the enormity of her grief, Evelyn carried on writing to Fred in a notebook, letters that would never be sent: “I suppose it seems silly to write to you, but . . . I go on pretending as I have ever since you went away last March, that you were coming home again . . . I shall try to live cheerfully and well, but it seems that I am like a tree, half killed by my [sic] lightning.” She spent hours poring over the book of photographs, the last gift he had sent her. As Christmas approached, she wrote about that other Christmas fourteen years before when he gave her an apple and some silly verses. She wrote to him about the details of her day-to-day life—“Today I have been re-lining my coat”—still sharing them as they had when he was alive. She wrote of friends who were being kind, of books she was reading. And she wrote how bitterly she regretted not having had a child with him: “Oh dearest, if I had only someone who looked like you, who was part of you, to love.”
Evelyn bravely continued with her law studies and graduated as a lawyer in 1919, coming third in the province. After that, she returned to Ontario to live with her father and joined the English department at the University of Western Ontario. By 1934 she had been promoted to Associate Professor, specializing in 18th-century English literature. She never remarried. She had already met her great love, and their two years, nine months of domestic bliss, as well as the 550 letters they had written to each other over a fourteen-year relationship, provided her with enough loving memories to last a lifetime.
When Evelyn graduated in 1919, she became only the second woman to qualify as a lawyer in the province of Alberta.
Hugh & Jessie
MANN
Married: October 15, 1914
The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, who fought in Highland dress. Out of thirteen battalions of just over a thousand men each, they lost 5,930 men during the war and gained fifty-seven honors in battle, including three Victoria Crosses.
Hugh Wallace Mann
SCOTTISH
Born: January 13, 1891
Rank & regiment: Captain, 5th Battalion, The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders
Jessie Reid
SCOTTISH
Born: July 11, 1895
Hugh as a second lieutenant in 1916. “I’m just fair longing to see you and our nipper,” he wrote to Jessie, “and if something doesn’t turn up, I’ll desert.”
As the son of a minister who was himself studying for the ministry, one might have expected Hugh to be a rather serious young man, but instead his letters to Jessie show him to be witty, irreverent, and full of fun.
H ugh attended Glasgow University at the same time as Jessie’s brother, Arnold, and the two became close friends. Hugh could either have met Jessie when Arnold invited him to the Reid family home in Glasgow, or they might have bumped into each other for the first time at Hugh’s and Arnold’s graduation ceremony in June 1911. In an early letter to her in July 1911, Hugh talks of their “ancient friendship,” but this could well have been a joke given the light-hearted tone of the rest, in which he teases her about her “deplorable writing.”
Jessie was the fourth of seven children and was born in Alva, Clackmannanshire. When the family moved to Glasgow in 1904, she attended the High School for Girls, where teachers commended her as “a pupil of great promise.” She was intelligent, with a pretty face and a cheerful smile, and despite her youth Hugh started writing to her when the Reid family went on holiday to the Isle of Arran in the summer of 1911. She replied to his letters, romance blossomed, and by January 1912 the two were already talking of marriage. “I suppose it will be a few years before we set out together, but it will be,” he promised. He particularly enjoyed planning where they would take their honeymoon, suggesting various locations for her approval.
“I want to hold you close and closer, to look into your eyes … and to kiss you … till I have to order your little heart to stop thump-thumping.”
Although Hugh called her K, Kid, or Kiddie in his early letters (she was five years his junior), there is no doubting his passion for Jessie: “I want to hold you close and closer, to look into your eyes . . . and to kiss you, Kid, till I have to order your little heart to stop thump-thumping.” By the summer of 1913 he was sufficiently welcomed in the Reid family to join them on their holiday in
Arran, but had to hurry back to Glasgow after his father took ill and subsequently died. Jessie was Hugh’s steady support during this difficult time, and he wrote to her how much he regretted that she never got to meet his father, who would have “rejoiced” in their love.
In autumn 1913 Jessie started her own degree at Glasgow University, studying Latin and Mathematics, while Hugh worked at the Wellpark United Free Church in Greenock, west of Glasgow. Their love deepened during the year and then in summer 1914 came what he referred to obliquely as a “debacle.” First of all Jessie began to take “seedy turns” and then it was confirmed that she was expecting a baby. “Keep up your heart, little one,” Hugh wrote, the stress obvious in his tone. “I guess it will be alright.”
Hugh (center of middle row) with some of his men in France in the summer of 1915. His room is just behind the group. “We are usually shoved into barns, and many of them have fallen into disrepair,” he wrote.
A Wedding and an Enlistment
Hugh’s family certainly didn’t think news of the pregnancy was “alright.” It could ruin his chances of making a career as a minister in the very strict Free Church and bring shame on them all. A hasty registry office wedding took place on October 15, 1914 without guests, who might have spotted Jessie’s condition, and on the same day Hugh signed up to fight in the battalion being enlisted by Colonel D.W. Cameron of Lochiel, as advertised on the sides of buses across Glasgow at the time. Jessie was sent to stay with her married sister in Sheffield under instruction that she must not set foot in Glasgow, or even in Edinburgh, lest any family friends see her condition. There was no question of her continuing her university degree. Hugh was saddened by the turn of events, wondering when he could be with Jessie again, but he followed his mother and uncle’s wishes that they keep their marriage secret until such time as the child could be passed off as one conceived within wedlock.
