Back From The War

Phil Horton was a young boy during the Second World War, only 10 when the hostilities ended. He remembers taking the tram from Burnaby to visit his mother, Phyllis Horton, while she was working in the BC Electric mail room. Phyllis worked for BC Electric and BC Hydro from 1936 to 1965. During the war, BCE employees serving overseas were always very much on the minds of those at home, and Phil remembers conversations with his mother, who felt keenly the loss of her colleagues.

It was the old mailing department. I can remember putting the envelopes in the little machine. I probably shouldn't have been doing it. I remember that I met some people who hadn't gone to war yet and some who had. I remember a few who didn't come back. I recall Mother being very sad at the end of the war because such-and-such a boy had died in the fighting. She would say to me, "Do you remember a Wally?" "Yes, I remember a Wally." "He didn't come back." We felt very, very sad about it.

But, of course, many people did come back, and they were treated as if they had been employed. They could come back to their job and carry on. That didn't always work out, because you know what a war does to some people. But they never lost their seniority with the company. And so it should be, too.

Many BCE men and women served Canada-both at home and abroad-during the war. Over two dozen employees died. Among them were William Douglas, only 20 when he enlisted, who died in an airplane training crash in Regina; William McLellan, killed fighting with the South Saskatchewan Regiment in Italy; G. R. Bing, of the gas division, and P. E. Brown, who worked for BCE in Chilliwack, both killed in action; H. O'B Hayward, who died while on active service in India; and Monte Tucker, of the BCE building maintenance staff, who was killed on the Italian front.

A beautiful roll of honour was commissioned by the company to honour the 621 mainland employees-both men and women-who served. (Many employees from Vancouver Island also served.) Phyllis Powell, of the BCE drafting department, worked for 45 hours on the lettering. Group of Seven artist A. J. Casson did the heraldry. Dorothy Pink, whose husband, BCE employee Walter Pink, died in the Far East, unveiled the roll of honour, which bears this moving passage:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied, "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than the known way."

Despite the sadness of loss, BCE gained a new energy after the war, fuelled by the influx of men and women returning from the war effort. In 1945 alone, 322 BC Electric employees returned to the company to claim old jobs or start on new ones after serving in the armed forces; another 246 veterans found work with the company.

Jim MacCarthy came out of the Air Force and returned home to complete his last year of agriculture at UBC in 1946 and take a job with BC Electric. Jim remained with BCE and BC Hydro, working in many capacities, for almost 40 years. He remembers having many options after he finished university.

When I graduated, jobs were easy to come by. It was right after the war and we graduates had a choice of a number of jobs. I had been accepted into medical school at McGill University, but BC Electric's offer of a job was appealing and I had a romance going, so I thought I'd work for a year before going to Montreal. BCE was a highly regarded company within the community. There was great leadership from people like Harry Purdy, Bruce Robertson, and, of course, Dal Grauer. He epitomized what BCE was all about.

Bill Duncan served in the Navy from 1942 to 1945. Before the war, he had worked Consolidated Truck Lines, which was owned by the BCE subsidiary BC Motor Transportation. Bill says that his war experiences changed him and better prepared him for the workplace.

What I learned during the war was that there was no point in getting excited about things. Some people think everything is a calamity, that there are no small events in life. A calamity to me is when your house goes up in smoke. Most people who know me say I'm pretty laid-back. I don't know if that's because of the war or not, but I did have enough experience under shellfire to realize there's not much worse that can happen. It was good to have experienced it and come back whole. So many didn't come back or not whole, psychologically or physically. Anyhow, I came back. And in those days, when you served King George, your job was waiting for you back home.

Don Davis says that when he got back to his desk in Victoria, "the fellow who had taken my job was so mad he went to Vancouver and took the first job there." Don remembers how returning vets brought back with them some of their military ways. "Ted Fox from public relations had also been in the Navy. We used to see each other in the office and flash each other signals."

After serving overseas, Bill Sharlow joined BCE's gas department as a labourer in 1945. He retired in 1981. Bill was planning to work in the mines in Nelson, but when he stopped off in Vancouver he decided to stay and look for work.

I was waiting for a streetcar one day at the old office on Carrall Street. While I was waiting, one of the fellows said, "Why don't you try the BC Electric? They're hiring." I had never thought about that, but I went in while I was waiting for this tram to come in. Bob Middleton was the employment man at that time, and he said, "We've got two jobs-in the gas department or the track department. They're both labouring jobs, 68 cents an hour. The track department is mostly night work, because they are re-laying tracks." So I said, "I'll take gas," because I'd had enough night work in the army.

They were putting a new 12-inch main down Main Street going up to Sixth and Quebec. They didn't teach us very much when we started off. They'd give you a 12-foot piece of ditch and say, "You dig here." All of the mains were dug by hand; they never had any mechanical equipment on that job. I was used to hard work -I'd dug ditches all over-so that was nothing to me.

Bob Mounce was another veteran who came home to a job with the company in 1945. He retired from BC Hydro in 1980. Bob found work on Vancouver Island at BC Electric's Brentwood steamworks, the peaking plant near Victoria.

Brentwood was originally designed as an auxiliary plant to Jordan River and Goldstream. During the second war it got to be on 24-hour demand because of the shipbuilding. My brother was working there; he told Tom Walker, the superintendent at the time, that I'd be looking for work.

The steam plant was a 600-kW machine, the only one on the Island of any consequence. When the John Hart development power became available, the rates were good. There were all these little steam plants that burned hog fuel that shut down. I remember that they didn't have modern scrubbers in the stacks and so they sent up lots of smoke and fly ash.

They'd rebuilt Brentwood in 1942. The original two units had six steam boilers feeding them, superheated, oil-fired. They were converted to coal during the war when oil was hard to get. The new plant used both oil and coal, whichever was available. They burnt the coal in suspension in the middle of the furnace; it was pulverized to dust and blown in. It worked alright except the coal had a lot of slag in it. It was sucked out into a hopper, but sometimes it was a big solid mass of slag. I know the plant used to heat up the end of Brentwood Bay by a few degrees-the fish were a lot bigger up near the plant wharf.