MARY DOANE/DOANE FAMILY ARCHIVE/SCAN BY SHOEBOX STUDIO OTTAWA

Cordite, camel trains and General Allenby: Uncle Harvey’s war diaries

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

A time-worn album of sepia-toned photographs and a file of yellowed handwritten intelligence summaries tell the wartime backstory of a peacetime storyteller, my Great-Uncle Harvey.

The First World War-era pictures appear with my cover feature in the November-December 2023 issue of Legion Magazine.

The intel reports, or war diaries, most of which are buried in the recesses of Britain’s National Archives, were kindly unearthed and photographed for me by Paul O’Rorke, a Royal Garrison Artillery researcher in Berkshire, England.

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Wikimedia

Nellie McClung, a military mother

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

A suffragist, reformer, legislator and author—Nellie McClung was an early-20th century jack-of-all-trades, perhaps best known for helping to forever change the course of Canadian women’s lives on Oct. 18, 1939. A member of the Famous Five, she petitioned tirelessly, alongside Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Muir Edwards, for Canada’s highest court to deem women “persons.” And not only did McClung fight, she won.

But McClung’s public persona rarely portrays her full history. Beyond her triumphs in literature and women’s rights, McClung was also a soldier’s mother, connected to the trials of war through her eldest son, Jack.

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