TV series tells story of Canada’s Black sleeping car porters

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Despite oppression and discrimination in their day-to-day lives, hundreds of Black men volunteered for service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force between 1914 and 1918, only to be met with another uphill battle simply to go to war.

Most were rejected for service in local fighting units. About 800 eventually ended up in No. 2 Construction Battalion, a segregated support element commanded by mostly white officers. Still others—some 700—managed to join regular infantry units.

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Aubrey Cosens and the Victoria Cross

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Aubrey Cosens was already a battle-hardened soldier when he earned the Victoria Cross three months shy of his 24th birthday.

He’d had a hard life. He was born in 1921 in remote Porquis Junction in northern Ontario, a town reachable only by train. His father was a railwayman. After his mother died when he was four years old, Aubrey was raised by a neighbour.

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The Royal Navy’s war on trees

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

For almost two centuries through the American Revolution, the War of 1812, wars with France, wars with Spain and dozens of other wars, conquests and explorations, Britannia ruled the waves thanks largely to the mighty oak.

At the zenith of Horatio Nelson’s navy in the late-1700s into the 1800s, it took about 4,000 oak trees, or up to 40 hectares of forest, to build a single 100-gun ship of the line. That’s equivalent to 3,750 city blocks of optimum-density oak forest for a vessel that, on average, sailed for 12 years.

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Robert Shankland and the Victoria Cross

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Robert Shankland was a Canadian hero who served in both world wars and earned the Victoria Cross.

Shankland was born in Scotland but emigrated to Winnipeg in 1910. He boarded on Pine Street, later famous for being home to three Victoria Cross recipients, including Shankland, and renamed Valour Road in 1925.

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