Family & Other Stories

Family Stories - Brian Gibson

Arthur Pitts

This is my Gt Uncle Arthur Pitts, reading his journal, the collection which I have, (and which tend to be highly illegible!) and waiting to be shipped to the front, World War 1 1915. Image courtesy of British Columbia Museum and Archives, who hold a number of his paintings, particularly of the Native Peoples of the region and their Reserves. I have various paintings and a book written in 2017 on The Life and Art of Arthur Pitts and the author, with whom I have contact, also interviewed him in 1997 about his life, including his involvement in WW1, for British Columbia beautiful and this is the extract I read to all on the Trenches Tour:-

"The First World War had just broken out. Pitts, raised on stories of British heroes in the Crimean and Boer wars, enlisted immediately. By spring 1915 he was back in England with the 29th (Vancouver) Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force; fall found him at the front in France. For weeks he survived in a trench some 10 metres from the Germans. He kept as a souvenir a chunk of shrapnel that narrowly missed his head. And though he and his comrades "every moment expected a quick dispatch to eternity," somehow Pitts managed to write, sketch and take photographs.

In spring 1916 the men were moved to the front near St. Eloi, south of Ypres, Belgium."The conditions were awful," wrote Pitts. "We all were thoroughly wet and uncomfortable..standing in inches of water my feet were saturated and I was very cold throughout the weary guard of four hours." When off dutyPitts was unable to sleep, "being tormented by rats."

In April 1916, in the middle of the night, Pitts was caught in a shell attack. The two friends he stood with were killed instantly. Pitts survived, but with both arms nearly blown apart. He made his way back from the front on foot, and 21 hours later was on a hospital train bound for Boulogne. Two months later he reflected , "My wounds caused me considerable pain but deep down within me was a feeling of content and thankfulness to be away from that inferno." ( I later established my Gt Uncle's injuries were broken and shredded arms) As for countless others, the great adventure had turned into a nightmare.

Given the choice by the army of a full discharge in England or being sent to Canada for treatment, Pitts chose British Columbia for his convalescence. He arrived in January 1917 at Resthaven Hospital in Sidney, north of Victoria. There, at a social given for the recuperating soldiers, Pitts met Peggie McKenzie, his future wife. Ironically she had lost her fiancé in the same attack?"

Reference to the confusion by soldiers of directions to fight at this time was referred to in The Path of Peace by Anthony Seldon p268.