Remembrance Day: Brave young men and women grew up quickly

Through good times and bad, young soldiers and sailors from across Canada grew up quickly during training and times on the field of battle.

My father, Gordon Douglas Harrison, pictured below (age 22-23, in Halifax or Scotland), said the following about lessons learned in Combined Operations (the navy): "Tides, winds, currents, ropes, motors, oil, cold dark cramped quarters. We learnt in a hurry in Combined Ops and it stood us all in good stead for after the war.”

(It was) “a strange foreign world and we made it work. The officers, like ourselves, must have seen the ratings (seamen) growing as they gained experience. As Montgomery said about the Canadian soldiers, "It wasn't a matter of how, just when.”


Never one to talk only about the hard times, he recalled the following pit stop aboard The Silver Walnut on his way around Africa to Port Said in the Gulf of Aden.”

“The Walnut remained in Cape Town for two weeks. We all enjoyed ourselves and I purchases a guitar and brushed up on some chords that I knew so my friends could share time singing navy ditties and other songs.”

“The ship left Cape Town on her own and we continued around the cape of Good Hope. I supposed that I was in the same waters that my dad had sailed when he served aboard a Royal Navy ship as a boy during the Boer War.”

More ‘growing up quickly’ took place when the Walnut reached Sicily a few weeks later, in the summer of 1943.

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I’ve been told I look like that boy who participated in the Boer War (my grandfather Harrison, a man I never met), and I brush up on chords every now and again too.

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