Hennessy Pat - Letters from Beauly: Pat Hennessy and the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland, 1940-1945

During the Second World War, thousands of woodsmen joined the Canadian Forestry Corps to log the Scottish Highlands as part of the war effort. Patrick Pat Hennessy of Bathurst, New Brunswick, was one of them. For nearly five years, Pat served as camp cook with 15 Company near the village of Beauly, Scotland. A middle-aged farmer and lumberman with a third-grade education, Pat saw more of the world than he had ever dreamed of, visiting ancient battlefields he had learned about as a child, travelling to his ancestral Ireland, and attending lectures in British history at Oxford University.

While in Scotland, Pat regularly corresponded with his family. Drawing from this unique collection of more than three hundred letters, as well as hundreds of archival documents and photographs, Melynda Jarratt provides a rare and unusual glimpse of what life was like for the men who served in the Canadian Forestry Corps and the families that stayed behind.

Letters from Beauly: Pat Hennessy and the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland, 1940-1945 is volume 23 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

Pat Hennessy in his kitchen, CFC Lovat No. 2 Camp, October 3, 1942 (Photo by Lieutenant Robert Bob Allen. Hennessy Moran Fonds, PANB)

New Brunswick Military Heritage Series, Volume 23

Copyright 2016 by Melynda Jarratt.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by J. Brent Wilson.

Cover and page design by Chris Tompkins with Kerry Lawlor.

Front cover: Cooking crew, Indian Falls, Nepisiguit River, New Brunswick, 1930s: (left to right) Bert Wood, John Hanna, Pat Hennessy, Walter Glidden, and Peter Arseneault

Front and back cover: No. 15 Company, Canadian Forestry Corps. Scotland, August 1943. (Photo by the Service Photo Co, Pirbright, Surrey, 1815. Courtesy of Alfred Blizzard Jr.)

Photographs are provided courtesy of the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (Hennessy Moran Fonds) except where noted. All photographs used by permission.

G17024 by Fred Cogswell was published in Systems of Value, Structures of Belief , special issue of Canadian Literature 128 (Spring 1991). Reprinted by permission of Kathleen Forsythe.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Jarratt, Melynda, author

Letters from Beauly : Pat Hennessy and the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland, 1940-1945 / Melynda Jarratt.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

Co-published by New Brunswick Military Heritage Project.

ISBN 978-0-86492-893-1 (paperback).--ISBN 978-0-86492-932-7 (epub).--ISBN 978-0-86492-933-4 (mobi)

1. Hennessy, Pat, 1884-1970--Correspondence. 2. Canada. Canadian Army. Canadian Forestry Corps (1940-1945). 3. World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, Canadian. 4. World War, 1939-1945--War work--Scotland--Beauly. 5. World War, 1939-1945--War work--Canada. 6. Lumbermen--New Brunswick--Biography. 7. Farmers--New Brunswick--Biography. I. New Brunswick Military Heritage Project, issuing body II. Title. III. Title: Pat Hennessy and the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland, 1940-1945.

D768.153.J37 2016 940.541271 C2016-902444-X

C2016-902445-8

The publishers and the author acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, artsnb, and the Government of New Brunswick.

Goose Lane Editions

500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

Fredericton, New Brunswick

CANADA E3B 5X4

www.gooselane.com

New Brunswick Military Heritage Project

The Brigadier Milton F. Gregg, VC,

Centre for the Study of War and Society

University of New Brunswick

PO Box 4400

Fredericton, New Brunswick

CANADA E3B 5A3

www.unb.ca/nbmhp

To my mother, Lucy (Hennessy) Jarratt of Bathurst, NB, and the late Fred Wilmot Hubbard of Burton, NB, born a month apart in 1917.

Their wartime memories of the people they loved
helped me to write this book.

Contents

Pat Hennessy and 15 Company, Canadian Forestry Corps

From Valcartier to Scotland

Arrival in Scotland

Meeting the Locals

England and the Search for Mrs. Haggerty

Settling In for the Duration

Ireland

Social Relations

The Children Left Behind

Fred Cogswell, Poet of the Camp

Oxford University

Alleyne Hubbard, an Irreplaceable Loss

A Longing for Home

Introduction

You Canadians may be cutting the Scots firs of the Highlands, but in Highland hearts you are planting something far more lasting.

Lady Laura Lovat, Inverness Courier, August 14, 1942

Letters from Beauly tells the story of Pat Hennessys experiences during the Second World War and his nearly five years service overseas as cook with 15 Company, Canadian Forestry Corps (CFC), on the northern Scottish estate of the famed Highland chief, Lord Lovat. It is not a military history of the CFC, nor is it an accounting of the CFCs logging operations in Scotland: as interesting as they might be, readers who want to pursue those parts of the CFC story should refer to William Wonderss excellent book, Sawdust Fusiliers, which is considered the seminal work on the subject.

The CFC is unique among the many specialized units that served in the two world wars. Made up primarily of English- and French-speaking loggers and foresters, they were experienced woodsmen who cut timber for the war effort in Scotland. During the Second World War, seven thousand men left the logging camps of rural Canada to serve in the CFC in Scotland. Nearly one thousand were from New Brunswick, and my grandfather, Patrick Pat Hennessy, was one of them.

This book began in summer 2008, when a chance search through the attic of our familys nineteenth-century homestead in Bathurst, New Brunswick, resulted in the discovery of nearly three hundred wartime letters written by and to my grandfather while he was serving in Scotland. An old man by comparison, Pat was fifty-six and the father of six adult children three of whom would join the armed services themselves during the war when he enlisted in the army in 1940. But in Pats case, age didnt matter: he had more experience as a cook than anyone else, and thats what the army needed. He had worked every winter in the logging camps of northern New Brunswick since he was a youngster at the turn of the century, and every spring hed run the drives, cooking meals in a makeshift boat that trailed behind the woodsmen along the rivers edge. The CFC needed people like Pat, and despite his age, he was welcomed into the army. So began a five-year odyssey in Scotland that changed his life forever. There, Pat truly came into his own. For the first time, he was able to live the life he had always dreamed of, visiting Ireland, England, and Scotland, and establishing close friendships with the local people, especially the Frasers, with whom he developed a special bond.

As a family, we were astounded by the enormity of the collection in the attic. Not only did we find a treasure trove of personal letters, but the cache also included hundreds of archival photographs and documents as well as a few boxes of heather! The entire collection was donated to the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, and is called the Hennessy Moran Fonds in recognition of both my grandfathers and grandmothers sides of the family. And although the old homestead was turned over in 2010 to the Doucet Hennessy House Association a charitable organization that aims to preserve and restore the heritage building letters continue to be found in its nooks and crannies to this day, almost willing themselves to be read.