I had always thought it was family folklore. A myth, really.
My siblings and I had all heard the story, growing up, about our maternal great-grandfather, Arthur Wigglesworth – who enlisted in Kelowna on Nov. 23, 1915 – and how a Bible stopped a bullet meant for his heart when he was fighting in the First World War.
But when my grandmother died, I saw for myself it was real.Tucked away in an old Cadbury’s Chocolate box, I remember the musty smell from the small book, which was actually a New Testament, and the small hole near the bottom right from a bullet that caused so much damage, rippling and burning and curling the book’s pages with its force and heat.
It went nearly all the way through, scorching its way through New Testament verses and 1916 Christmas cards from his wife and children, but ultimately, stopping before it went through his heart, as he kept the book in his left breast uniform pocket.
As Remembrance Day nears, it presents an opportunity to again, remember and honour the lives lost, and the many sacrifices made for the freedoms we had today.
I spoke to several family members for their memories relating to my great-grandfather, and reached out to the Kelowna Museum, where military history interpreter Keith Boehmer was a massive help in tracking down Arthur’s military records, old newspaper clippings, and more.
Arthur Wigglesworth had just been promoted to corporal mere days before he was killed in action near Vimy, France, where his name is engraved on the Canadian monument.
Born March 26, 1884, Arthur was the son of Edwin and Emily B. Wigglesworth of Leeds, Yorkshire, England. He had a wife – my great-grandmother Esther Victoria Craig, born March 15, 1882 – and three children when he enlisted in 1915.
They lived in Rutland on a cattle ranch with an apple orchard.
By the time he travelled on the RMS Mauretania to England Oct. 25-31, 1916 with the Canadian military, Esther was pregnant with their fourth child – their youngest and his namesake, Arthur, who was born in December, 1916.
Although Arthur enlisted in the 172nd Battalion, he was a lance-corporal in the 54th Battalion, Canadian Infantry, when he proceed with his battalion from Bramshott, England, to France.
They arrived in France in December of 1916.
He didn’t make it to December, 1917.
Remembering great-grandpa
I really enjoyed learning as much as I could from Arthur’s military records – photocopied to preserve the beautiful penmanship and ink stains from people’s handwriting more than 100 years ago – as well as from family emails, family history/ancestry research, and in conversations with Ted Wigglesworth, my Mom’s cousin, who now lives in Camrose, Alta. with his wife, Orline.
He is my great-grandfather Arthur Wigglesworth’s grandson, and remembers growing up as a young boy in Kelowna with his twin brother, Ken, and their father (Arthur, the youngest son and namesake of my great-grandfather) and mother, Anne.
Military records list Arthur Wigglesworth as 5’5” tall, with a fair complexion, brown hair, and grey eyes and also, note he was a bugle player.
“He played in a fife and drum band with the regiment. He was considered to be a very, very great guy and everybody liked him,” Ted said.
Ted and his brother actually knew the last man to see their grandfather alive, who had served alongside him in the trenches of the First World War in France.
He lived in north Kelowna, and Ted remembers he and Ken were asking their dad, Arthur, about him. His name was Dick Rolley.
“My dad said, ‘If you want to speak to somebody who was a personal friend of grandpa’s, go talk to Dick,” Ted recalled.
“So Ken and I went to talk to Dick. We knocked on his door and Dick said to us, ‘What are you two doing here?’ and we said, ‘We were told by dad that you knew our grandfather,’ and he hesitated, and said, ‘I normally don’t talk about that at all.’”
Most of the men who returned from the war didn’t talk much about it, Ted noted.
“If you knew the guys who came back from the First World War or even the Second World War, they didn’t talk about it, because the memories were so horrendous for them,” Ted, who trained as a Canadian military chaplain in addition to earning degrees in geography, anthropology and divinity, said. “(Dick and Arthur) both came out of the Okanagan Valley. They grew up together, they worked together. When you lose a close friend the way they did…” he trailed off.
But Dick agreed to talk to Arthur’s grandsons.
“He sat down and talked to us a bit about Art and what a great guy he was – how he was the kind of guy who would do anything for you, and that he had a good sense of humour,” Ted recalled. “He was well-known and well-liked by the troops he worked for, and worked with.”
Military records show he was promoted to corporal (acting corporal) on Sept. 1, 1917, just days before his death.
It turns out, my great-grandfather was literally in the trenches, when he died.
“They were in the trenches near Vimy Ridge and (my grandfather) spoke to Dick – they were talking together, and my grandfather told Dick he was going to go around the corner of the trench to see if the (Germans) were infiltrating the trench,” Ted said.
“He stepped around the corner and was killed with a mortar bomb. Dick said there was hardly enough to, you know, bury him type of thing.”
My great-grandfather had hoped to be home in time to pick the apples from his beloved Rutland orchard, but that sadly, didn’t come to pass.
Arthur was killed in action on Sept. 6, 1917.
He was only 33 years old.
‘I hope to be home in time to pick the apples’
A letter from great-grandpa Arthur to his brother from the front lines in France (typeset from a photocopy of the original, as the original – handwritten in pencil – is in extremely delicate condition):
May 26, 1917
Dear Will
Your letter was very much like a newspaper, telling about what changes were about to take place & what had already taken place around Rutland. I did think that you would write to me sometime & I hope you will write again.
It is one of the things we look forward to the most, the receiving of letters from one’s folks. We are camped in a dandy place just now, in a wood, the trees are all well leafed out & there is lots of shade. I wish I knew the names of the different kinds of trees. I know the horse chestnut trees, they are in blossom now. I suppose things will be looking fine around Rutland way. I wouldn’t mind being back there now. We had some sports here on the 24th & I was feeling good that day so as usual I entered in some of the races & worked hard but did not win anything. We had a good time though & one could almost forget there was a war on even right behind the lines. I heard some guns pounding away early this morning but I don’t hear any now.
The guns used to be quite near here before the advance, but now they have moved ahead. A short time ago we were on the ridge doing salvaging work. We found quite a lot of Fritz’s war material. We found several cases of dynamite which we destroyed. I suppose if he had had time he would have destroyed some of us with it. We have to look out for traps when searching the places the enemy has left, they say he is quite an artist at that. I think that when he had to get off the ridge he was taken by surprise & did not have time to set any traps for I don’t know of anyone finding any. We found several bodies both of ours and the Huns & of course buried them. We get used to looking at dead bodies & after a while it doesn’t bother one at all.
Rutland is sure losing the men that came from there. In this battalion there is Arthur Gray, (name illegible) and myself left yet. Ernest Schofield was only three days in the line when he was killed. There are very few that don’t have narrow escapes time after time when they go up the line. The last time our company was in the line digging a trench close to Fritz, he bombed (illegible) bombs dropped very close to where I & some others were & scattered dirt & stones all over us. We wear steel helmets & when the dirt hits them they ring. They are a great protection for the head though a bullet will go right through with a direct hit. As a rule, the bullet, after passing through the helmet, generally makes a fatal wound in the head, because the nose of the bullet is blunted in passing through the steel. I have noticed this in several cases where men have been sniped.
Well, that’s all this time. I hope to be home in time to pick the apples, but I have my doubts. Give my love to Mother and Lucy.
Yours affectionately,
Arthur
The ones who didn’t come home
Although Arthur was killed in action on Sept. 6, 1917, the news didn’t always reach family right away.
I’m not sure if my great-grandmother Esther received the dreaded telegram from the war office to inform her of his death.
On Sept. 27, 1917, The Vernon News listed ‘Okanagan soldiers on the casualty lists,’ where Arthur Wigglesworth was listed as ‘one Okanagan man killed in action.’
Later, in the same paper, under ‘Happenings throughout the district’, the paper reports that ‘news had been received of the death at the front, on September 6th, of Lance-Corporal (his promotion to Corporal had not yet made its way through the layers of military bureaucracy) A. Wigglesworth. He went overseas with the 172nd Battalion, and had lived in the Rutland district for about seven years; previously he was on the prairie near Regina. He leaves behind a family of a wife and four young children.’
Arthur Wigglesworth’s name is engraved on the Rutland cenotaph at Rutland Lions Park, on the Kelowna cenotaph, and is also, on the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.
Ernest Schofield, whom he mentions in his letter from the front-line trenches, is listed on the same memorials.
My Aunt Marion remembers reading journal entries from my great-grandmother Esther’s sister, Florence, who recalled Esther’s grief when she learned Arthur had been killed.
They were sad “That they would never see his bright, merry face, or hear his cheery whistle again,” my aunt recalled in an email, adding that the commanding officer of Arthur’s battalion and one of the corporals each wrote Esther a personal letter, speaking in very high terms of Arthur.
Life went on, however, and for a grieving widow with four young children living on a Rutland ranch, my great-grandmother likely had her hands full.
Ted Wigglesworth still has some of the letters Esther received from Arthur when he was overseas, and while military pension payments weren’t that much – about $20 a month, Ted has letters from when Esther eventually, remarried (to Robert Cumming, on April 21, 1920) and was accidentally overpaid.
“They were going after her with these letters to get back the payment… it wasn’t very much, about $45 or something, and they sent her letters to get her to pay back $5 a month or something like that.”
One of Ted’s earliest memories is from when he was a young boy living in Kelowna with his mother, Anne, who married Arthur, the youngest of my great-grandfather’s children with Esther.
This would have been the summer of 1945, at the end of the Second World War.
The person they were waiting for made it home, this time.
“When I was four years old, I remember standing at the bus stop in Kelowna with my mother in the middle of summer, watching bus after bus come in, and these soldiers all getting off, and finally, the bus came in that my dad was on, and dad got off the bus and mom ran up to him, and I knew that this guy was my father – I can see that as vivid as anything,” Ted recalled.
“He was a part of the Royal Canadian Electrical Mechanical Engineers in the Second World War and he worked… in Europe. He learned to speak Flemish, because that’s part of the area where they were,” he said, remembering how some customers came into the store – Newton’s Grocery – in Kelowna after his dad came home from the war, and were astonished he could communicate with them in their native tongue.
In the First and Second World War, they called what soldiers experienced during war time “shell shock,” but now, it’s more commonly known as post traumatic stress disorder, Ted said.
“I remember one time, as a kid, sitting around the table, when dad got back. It was about 6 o’clock and we were sitting down to have supper, and all of a sudden, dad rose up off his chair and was under the table,” Ted said.
“And then we heard the blast from the quarry.”
A rock quarry at the north end of Kelowna, which had stopped blasting when soldiers returned home from the Second World War, had apparently decided about three months later, to try blasting again – without letting residents know.
“They got such a response from people in Kelowna, they stopped blasting. (Soldiers) were so sensitive to the airwaves and the bombs going off, and that sort of thing, that they would feel that before we were even aware of it – the sensitivity they developed to the shells going off – things that people like ourselves, who have never been in a theatre of war, have no clue about.”
There’s a Wigglesworth Park and a Wigglesworth Crescent in Kelowna as well, which everyone in the family thought was related to my great-grandfather Arthur Wigglesworth, but Ted said it was my Uncle Stanley who did the research, and found out they were actually named for Ted’s mother, Anne Wigglesworth (whose maiden name was Newton), who was a prominent business woman in the community.
Gone, but not forgotten
No one in the family knows when the bullet struck the New Testament in my great-grandfather’s left breast uniform pocket, but it was sometime between December, 1916 and September of 1917 in France, during the First World War.
While it saved him the first time, it likely wouldn’t have helped against a mortar bomb.
Even though I never had the chance to meet him, I’m so deeply proud of my great-grandfather, and of how brave he was, to travel overseas and face the horrors of the First World War that today, we can only imagine.
I’m glad his memory hasn’t been forgotten, and his name on the war memorials in Kelowna, Rutland and France helps ensure others don’t forget, either.
It’s what Remembrance Day is all about.