The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Page 4 West Vancouver Historical Society May 2005 World War II Musings -by Helena (Aldred) Link In May 1939 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited West Vancouver. A large crowd of school children sat on the bank above Taylor Way north of Inglewood Avenue to watch the Royal Couple drive past on their way to the Capilano Golf and Country Club. I still have the cake plate with a picture of Their Majesties in the centre and the Princesses on all four corners that was given out to all school children. I also have a sterling silver teaspoon. It has a beaver on the top and the heads of their Majesties below that, with Canada underneath. I cannot remember from where that came. Were spoons given out, too? The Second World War started in 1939 and my brother Harry Aldred joined the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada the day after Canada declared war. His kilt was meant for a much taller person. When he took his tunic off, we could see that his kilt was up under his armpits. He was on the first troopship (the Queen Mary) heading for England in December 1939. Harry, like all soldiers, did his basic training, but in England he was transferred to the Lome Scots and was kept doing clerical work for the entire war. He told me after he came home in August 1945 that the Lome Scots were in 100 years disgrace for having run away in battle. He never told me what battle or when the 100 years started or would finish. While overseas he visited our maternal grandmother in Coventry. They had not seen each other since 1918. Unfortunately I never got a snapshot of him when he returned home in a regular uniform. In February of 1941 my brother Philip Aldred joined the Duke of Connaughts Own Rifles (DCOR’S) It had been a cavalry regiment but was now a tank regiment. Some basic training was held at Nanaimo, then at Niagara-on-the-Lake. He was home on leave twice, the second time from Debert, Nova Scotia, where he was training as a cook. He also had to be able to drive a Ram tank. On his second leave home, he wanted to show off his cook’s training. He brought our ration of butter out of the icebox and put a large part of it in a frying pan. Our Mom had it back out of the pan before much of it could melt. There were no shortages of ingredients for cooks in training in the army. In October 1941 he was on his way to England in the largest convoy ever assembled. There were three hundred ships in total, zigzagging all over the Atlantic. In England he had to retrain on Sherman tanks in case he was needed as a co-driver. When the war ended, he signed on for another year as a cook at the staging camp for troops coming home to Canada. He anived home in 1946. Philip Aldred (The month Philip joined the Duke of Connaughts was the month he turned nineteen years of age.) A DAY IN AMY IN AMBLESIOE IN 1914 By Peter Hall A few years ago I was asked to tell a group the history of West Vancouver and was given 10 minutes to do so. While West Van is not as richly endowed historically as some places, the task of treating the subject in the allotted time was so daunting that I took the ‘one day in the life of...’ approach. The piece is about a family in Ambleside in May 1914. Some licence is of course required, but the rest is history as they say. I should add that I gave this talk, as the group was on at least its second glass of wine. So it went over very well indeed. Perhaps you should do the same to get in the mood for this bit of whimsy. Father works in the city and usually walks down to the foot of 14‘^ Street to the ferry wharf. After buying his tickets at the Ferry Building (still standing), he boards the Doncella, the Sonrisa, or the brand new West Vancouver #5 for the 25- minute trip to the city wharf at the foot of Columbia Street. It’s only a short walk to father’s office and to many others of Vancouver’s places of business. Woodwards is only five minutes away. Please turn to Page 10