FY NHAID A FY NAIN:

MY GRANDFATHER AND GRANDMOTHER

    Olive Thomas and William Ramsey Fleming.  I think a marriage photo?

    This chapter and those going forward are going to be even more on  short on facts and long on stories half heard and hardly remembered.  Strangely enough, the most turbulent period of William's life, the war years, are the best documented.  In fact, an entire book was written about Bill's part in the "Great War".

    It wasn't great.

    I never met my grandfather; he passed in 1951 at the not-so-ripe age of 61.  He died of transitional cell carcinoma (bladder cancer, TCC). It's a pretty common cancer, characterized by blood in the urine, and, due to the nature of the beast, it frequently is a terminal diagnosis.  That is a sad little fact is best remembered by all descendants of Bill...especially when we remember that his own son, my father, Kelvin Orr Fleming was diagnosed with TCC when the doctors had to look at his prostate in his late seventies.

    Bill's remains, as I understand it, are up in Mountain View Cemetery.  The only reason I know this was because I found a note about his grave in an on-line archive.  I did hear one story, mildly humorous, about my brother Craig asking why people were buried 6 feet deep when they were going to ascend to heaven.

    I guess my parents hadn't yet broke the sad news to Craig about Santa Clause, the Easter bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

    William Ramsey spent two years at UBC and then a year at Normal School, becoming a teacher.  I'm going to assume that was the way he met Olive Thomas; she was also a teacher.  Otherwise I'm not sure how a man from downtown Vancouver ever met a young woman from the wilderness of South Cedar.  I'm also going to assume that they were an item and probably betrothed before William shipped out to Vladivostok in 1919.  

    In 1919, the world was a horrifically scarred planet, and the pain was ongoing.  The Spanish Flu was still riding for the Grimm Reaper, his head count obviously not fulfilled by the slaughter house in Europe.  A large part of an entire generation was left rotting in the mud of Flanders, the Russian monarchy had been slaughtered against a basement wall of some rural dacha and the first communist state was born as the Soviet Union.  Everyone that understood the armistice agreement that ended the "Great War" was a travesty that was likely to trigger a future conflict. And thousands of war scarred soldiers were returning home to friends and families that had no understanding of the horrors of the trenches.

    Throughout the war, the Western Allies, in support of their Russian allies, had shipped massive amounts of military ordinance into the eastern port of Vladivostok.  When the Russian monarchy fell and was replaced by Lenin's Soviet, that ordinance was trapped in what was likely now a combative country.  The Allies wanted that ordinance back.

    And in comes the Canadian Expeditionary Force of 1919.

    If a person really wants a detailed examination of the expedition out to Vladivostok, look up "From Victoria to Vladivostok" by Benjamin Isitt, a professor out of Victoria.  Once one manages to get over the extreme socialist bias of  Isitt, it is a pretty good read.  (okay, I found it tedious and pedantic). He did touch on some facts that I knew first hand from my father.

    Four years of trench warfare drew down the available recruits from all the countries involved.  Conscription became a necessity as the carnage continued to take its toll, and that was a trigger point for Canada especially.  Throughout the war, the anglophone population of Canada had fully supported the effort and the francophone population had been reluctant to support what they considered to be a "British" issue. Conscription  became a flash point that almost triggered a civil war in Canada.  

    A similar situation occurred slightly over 20 years later during World War Two; conscription pitted the Anglo community against the Francophone minority.  The reluctance of the Quebecois to support a war being fought, to some degree, in opposition of the Nazi occupation of France, was a hard pill to swallow for the Anglo population.  It was clear in conversations with my father Kelvin that the Francophones were either traitors or cowards in his eyes.  I'm sure that opinion was shared with his own father.

    Either way, the Canadian Expeditionary Force to Vladivostok was mustered and was to ship out in the late winter/ spring of 1919. The goal superficially was to recover the lost military ordinance, but there was a secondary goal of testing the stability of the fledgling Soviet Union.  There was an underlying hope that the Canadians would be accepted as welcome liberators rather than an invading force.

In his full kit, two years before shipping out. He shipped out as 
communications specialist.

His recruitment sheet. His "next of kin" was 
James Ramsey, his brother.  James had named his mother
as his next of kin.

 

    

  

 

The mustered force at the Victoria barracks was an odd mixture of Anglo and Francophone recruits.  

    The Quebecoise soldiers, for the most part, were an extremely unhappy bunch.  Many or most had joined the Canadian military after the Great War was over and had assumed that their service would be filled with tedious peacetime duties, a roof over their head and regular rations.  A job, a home and food was not necessarily something that could be counted on back home in the perennially impoverished Quebec.

    The fact that they were now being shipped out to a war zone did not make the Quebecoise happy and they threatened to mutiny. They balked at the final march down to the docks to ship out.

    The reaction of command was quite predictable: they considered the mutineers to be potential deserters, and the punishment for desertion was death.  The mutineers were disarmed, and the loyal troops were armed with rifles, bayonets affixed.  The march line was set: French soldiers in the lead with their Anglo troop mates behind them, all marching at double time and straight onto the ship.

    It's hard to have a good finish when you have a poor start.  I'm not sure I would have wanted any of the rebellious conscripts covering my back in a war zone.

    As it was, the entire expedition was a complete boondoggle.  On arrival in Vladivostok, it was immediately apparent that the Canadian troops were not considered liberators; finally free of the rapacious Russian aristocracy, the new Soviets were reveling in their liberation.

I have to believe Bill is somewhere in this photo. I hope
the powers that be had bigger plans to deal with the nascent Soviet state
than this rag-tag troop.

    Orwell had not yet written "Animal Farm" and Stalin had not killed Trotsky, helped Lenin die and purged millions of Russians in his effort to consolidate his power.  The world had not yet learned "four legs good, two legs better".  New bosses, same serfdom for the vast majority of the people.

    The Canadian Expeditionary Force never saw much action.  The ordinance was forfeited and the troops shipped home having achieved nothing.  William Ramsey returned home having only heard a few gunshots in the distance.

    Now comes a story that I rather doubt the veracity of, but it does fit my impression of Olive Thomas.

Young Olive

I'm not sure what these pictures are: they
look like something that a photo booth might produce.  Except they
are clearly professionally posed.

I think probably a teen-aged Olive.

Olive around 20 years old?

    With the Spanish flu killing more more people than the war, the returning troops were supposed to be quarantine aboard the "Empress of Japan" for several weeks.  It seems that quarantine was far too long for the force of nature that was Olive Thomas.  She would never sit for that.

    Well, she did sit. Really.

    It seems that Olive came down to the docks and set up a deck chair at the bottom of the ramp, harassing the commanding officers as they came and went.  The pressure built and, rumor has it, William Ramsey Fleming was discharged early from quarantine into the arms of the irrepressible Olive Thomas of South Cedar District.

The Empress of Japan: Side bar story: the captain of the Empress of Japan
was an dedicated collector of Japanese sword guards (tsuba). That collection was a major part of the
museum at the old planetarium; I still have the book about that collection. A fiberglass copy of the figurehead from that ship remains on display in Stanley Park to this day.

    William Ramsey Fleming and Olive Thomas married in 1920.  It must have been a busy marriage; by all accounts Bill was on the road for his job with BC Telephone for months at a time and yet he managed to father three children in three years (or so).  I know my father Kelvin was born in the spring of 1921, with Bryce and Ormond following quickly after. 

The Marriage in 1920. William would have been 29 at the time. 
perhaps a bit late in life, but world wars tend to postpone life.

And the honeymoon. I wonder who took the photos.

   

 With a husband on the road for much of the year, thank goodness Olive was a person of iron will.  I have no doubt the three boys had a long list of rules and knew them all by heart.

    I have no idea how my father was raised.  My memory of Kelvin Orr was that he was a stern man with an air of command that meant that he never really had to raise hand or voice to any of us kids.  Dad was short on words, but you better be listening and follow orders when he did speak.  There was always a sense of unyielding steel whenever Dad brought down the hammer.  (but Kelvin Orr did like telling "Dad" jokes...pretty good jokes too)

    While I only remember one spank for dawdling when I should have been jogging (it did launch my 4 year old ass into orbit, but the punishment was not the single spank...it was the public nature of the punishment), dad was pretty free about handing out manual labor.  I cut and split a lot of wood and dug many a hole or trench for teenage transgressions.

    Having said that, I at least have some idea how arguments were settled.  With three boys all within two years of each other (1921, 1922, 1923) I would bet that sibling rivalry was taken to a whole new level.  There was the gloves.

    In a dark corner of our basement at 5788 Cypress there was a basket of sports gear.  Basketballs, baseballs, mitts, a frisbee or two and then three sets of boxing gloves.  I might have been ten or younger when I fished those gloves out and presented them to Dad.

    With the exception of Craig's foray into karate, nobody in our family were involved in any form of combative sport (we all got to pound on each other without any training whatsoever) and, from what I knew, my father and his two brothers never had dallied with the squared circle in any way.  I asked Dad what the gloves were for.

    "Arguments" was his his three syllable answer.  He probably expanded it to include that he meant "arguments between the three brothers", but the short-hand version of the story (because that was all you ever really got from Kelvin Orr) was that whenever any of the three boys had a disagreement, they would slap on the gloves and decide the winner of the argument by the victor of the fight.

    I have a suspicion that worked out better for Kelvin, the oldest, than it did for his younger siblings.  But, getting the stuffing beat out of you regularly does tend to toughen one up, and rumor has it Ormond ended up being the one man of the three you really did not want angry.  

    I actually have a problem believing any of that story: I have no memory of my father ever raising his hand or voice in anger in my life... but that's not to say that I did not learn early on that things were about to go sideways badly whenever Kelvin Orr dropped his voice low and brought his steely grey eyes to bear on my person. (and the face flush combined with the bulging neck veins was a good sign to just shut up or run).

Having known all three, I can tell you that
the grown men they would become were
already present. There is no doubt who was who.

The three boys at a very young age with the Fleming taid and nain.

Kelvin in 1922 or so.  At one of the rentals before 5788 or maybe
downtown at the Richards Street residence?

    

   

     Bill came back from the war to a pretty good career with BC Telephone surveying and establishing phone lines up into the interior of BC.  It must have been relatively lucrative because they managed to make some good investments and were able to afford to build at 5788 Cypress in Kerrisdale in 1928. That address was not quite so toney then as it is now: back then it was strictly middle-class.  Now it has been renamed "New Shaughnessy" or some such nuveau-riche made-up name.  Probably bumped the real-estate prices up thousands of dollars with a simple name change.

    And they raised the boys.  I know a very little bit about those years.  I know they eventually joined Ryerson United Church...but I'm not so sure about the religious affiliation implied there.

    In my teens I tracked down some pretty gaudy purple and yellow sweat pants tucked away in one old trunks in the basement (the same one that held some old military kit from First World War: I always assumed that gear was my grandfather's, but it might have been James Ramsey's kit).  I wondered who in our household had ever worn purple and yellow sweats.  

    I turned out that the sweat pants were my father's from his days on the Ryerson Church basketball team  (there was an old, mostly unused gymnasium associated with the great stone church that still sits at 45th and Yew in Vancouver).  In fact, that appears to be the reason that the Fleming family ended up attending a United Church: basketball.

Ryerson United at 45th and Yew in Vancouver

    I can't say I was terribly surprised to find out that father's idea of pious devotion was dunking baskets for points.  I never did get much of a sense of religious fervor from Kelvin Orr: dad was all about facts, science and reality (He read fiction, but his television seemed limited to Sunday football and the odd episode of "Perry Mason" ;  I know that he refused to ever go to a movie again after suffering through Brando's "Streetcar Named Desire")

    Athletics were a big thing in the Fleming household.  I know my Uncle Bryce eventually became a semi-professional lacrosse player (Canada's National Sport).  Bryce was a crack marksman and, by some bizarre genetic fluke he had abnormally sharp vision, something that got him loaned to American Intelligence (not an oxymoron back then) helping reading reconnaissance photographs  of enemy positions.  The only thing I knew about Ormond was that in his youth his brothers took great joy in watching him clear a barroom by being the toughest man left standing when the dust settled (again, rumor, not necessarily fact.)

    I know my dad valued sports...but was heard to say at least once that he thought his own children should be involved in multiple sports, changing with the season.  I must have been quite a disappointment since I had one sport, swimming, and I was, at best, mediocre at that.

    Interesting side bar here.  I have always loved going to the small market upscale fast-food chain "The White Spot".  In my opinion they have the absolutely best burgers (their seasonal blue-cheese burger is sublime) and there is no competition in the world for their milkshakes.   In the "teens" of this century I sat down at the Kerrisdale White Spot for a family dinner and looked up at a historical photo on the wall above my table.  There, looking back at me from sometime in the late thirties, was my own father dressed as a busboy, working at the original White Spot located down on South Granville. Now, on the very rare occasions I still go to White Spot (Roni is not a fan, so those occasions are very rare indeed) I pause to realize that my Family has nearly a hundred year history with that little provincial restaurant chain.

    Bill managed to get at least Kelvin a job with BC Tel.  That was a gift that managed to be passed on to the next generation.  Digging post holes and laying telephone cable at 100 pounds per cable-foot gave Kelvin a strong appreciation of manual labor.  Until father's Parkinson's Disease finally debilitated him, father could dig holes better and faster than anyone I ever knew.  Furthermore, truthfully, due to Kelvin's tendency to hand out manual labor to wayward teen-agers, I can dig like a coked-up groundhog myself.

  Manual labor is under-rated these days; much more efficient than corporal punishment to remind teenagers about the rules.

    I really don't have any more knowledge of the remainder of Bill's life.  I have no idea when or why he was diagnosed with TCC.  All I really know is that he passed in 1951, leaving behind three adult sons and Olive.  All his sons were well educated professionals.

 Not too shabby for a son of a Scottish immigrant.

I'll fill in with some pictures.  And Olive has not left the story yet. 

William Ramsey in the back yard at 
5788, before the trees had all grown up.

Possibly the same day as above: Bill relaxing in his yard.

Olive and Bill in downtown Vancouver.  I would love to know the story
on this shot; there is an almost identical shot of Kelvin strolling 
down the street, taken from the same angle. And probably by the same person.

And a final compilation.  His resemblance to Kelvin at that age was a bit uncanny.