Rubber Retention: I’ve written before about wartime supply-chain problems that threatened to stop the flow of hockey sticks and pucks during the Second World War — that’s over here. Above, a notice handed to fans at Chicago Stadium during the 1941-42 NHL season seeking their aid in keeping the game going.
War over, time for some hockey.
Not that the NHL had paused any of its winter maneuvers during the early 1940s as the Second World War roiled, though there were annual discussions, early on, about whether it might be right for the league to suspend operations for the duration.
Now, hostilities among nations having ceased, there was, in 1945, a sense that real hockey was back for the first time in years.
“We’re in for our greatest season,” NHL president Red Dutton was enthusing 76 years ago this very week.” The boys are playing for keeps this season. It’s something we’ve never experienced before. You have a rugged bunch of boys back from the services, bent on proving they’re still the best hockey players in the world. You have another bunch of wartime-developed boys battling to prove they’re as good as the veterans. And you have some ambitious youngsters that don’t see any reason why they can’t keep pace with the older ones.”
On a Saturday of this date that October, Boston’s Bruins were in Toronto to open the first season of the new peace at Maple Leaf Gardens. It ended up a good one, for the Leafs, the season: the following April, they were Stanley Cup champions again, claiming their first title since 1942.
For opening night, along with the traditional appearance by the massed brass and pipes of the 48th Highlanders, Conn Smythe’s Maple Leafs had arranged to host six of the 16 Canadian servicemen to have been recognized during the war with the Victoria Cross, the British Empire’s highest military honour, conferred for extraordinary courage and devotion to duty.
That’s one of the distinguished guests here, the man who dropped a ceremonial to kick off the new season: 30-year-old Private Ernest “Smokey” Smith, a son of New Westminster, B.C., the only Canadian enlisted soldier to have won a V.C. during the Second World War. (More on Smith and his colleagues at MLG here.)
With Smith here, from the right, that’s Boston Bruins’ captain Jack Crawford (last seen in yesterday’s post) and Leafs’ chairman J.P. Bickell. Bob Davidson is the Leaf at left. In 1943, when Toronto captain Syl Apps went to war, Davidson assumed command of the hockey team. After two years, Apps was back with the Leafs, and early that October week, the Globe reported Davidson’s greeting to the team’s star centreman: “Welcome back, Syl, and I’m officially turning the team captaincy back to you.”
Apps was excused, however, from this Leafs’ opener. During one of the final preparatory scrimmages that week, he’d suffered a broken nose and a bad cut. The Toronto Daily Star’s Joe Perlove filed a report from the Gardens:
He was the same cyclonic Apps of pre-war days, if slightly breathless. He was still hammering away three minutes before game’s end when hit on the nose by Gaye Stewart’s stick which flew out of the latter’s hand as he was heavily bodied by Elwyn Morris.
X-rays disclose Apps suffered a broken nose. He needed a stitch to close a slash under his right eye. The classic Appsian schnozzle was not badly dented and he will still take fine pictures from either side.
Without him, the Leafs skated to a 1-1 tie. A crowd of 14,608 saw Bill Shill score for Boston; Davidson countered for the Leafs.
(Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 7084)
With the NHL preparing for the mid-January launch of a second COVID-era season, I’ve been reporting for The New York Times on how hockey fared in some past times of crisis and contingency. That’s on the page in today’s paper, as well as online over this way.
This part didn’t make it into the Times piece, but as I was charting back through the challenges the NHL faced during the Second World War, I was reminded of another echo of former times that 2020’s fraught hockey season awakened.
Back in far-off February of last year, the NHL got a first inkling of the disruptions that were to follow when two major suppliers of hockey sticks, Bauer and CCM, shut down manufacturing operations in China as the coronavirus continued its insidious spread. Equipment managers fretted, along with some prominent players. None of them, of course, imagined at the time that the entire league would be summarily shuttered — along with everything else — just a month later.
The Second World War tested hockey’s supply chains, too. It was a lack of manpower at North American sawmills and lumberyards that raised the spectre of a scarcity of sticks in 1946, not a global pandemic. “We’re still making a few,” a Spalding spokesman warned early that year, “but we have no reserve stocks of lumber on hand. When these are finished, there won’t be any more this year.”
CCM faced a similar predicament. Disaster seems to have been averted — hockey carried on — but several minor leagues did wonder whether they’d be able to play, and those with sticks in hand were advised to wield them with caution, to preserve what they had.
Associated Press report from January of 1942.
Wartime shook hockey to its core — specifically, the small, black one at the centre of every game. In 1941, with war in the Pacific limiting the supply of raw rubber even as military demand was increasing, news of North American shortages began to spread.
In December of the year, just a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Canada’s minister of Munitions and Supply, C.D. Howe, announced a ban on the sale of all rubber tires save those new vehicles. Two months later, one of Howe’s deputies, Alan Williamson, warned that Canadians didn’t understand just how dire the rubber situation was: it was “the gravest problem confronting” Canada and the Allies, he told the Canadian Hardware Convention and Exposition that February.
In another address, he upped the ante even higher, saying that he did not consider it “an exaggeration to say that anyone who uses rubber for any unnecessary purpose is committing an act of treason.”
For effect, Williamson enumerated some of the things for which rubber was no long being made available: “rubber soles, rubber heels, rubber bands, rubber bathing suits, garters, suspenders, foundation garments, tennis balls, flooring, rubber mats, shower curtains, tires for passenger cars, bathing caps.”
In January, the Canadian Press quoted Williamson as saying that while his department did not propose “to tell manufacturers of hockey pucks, tennis balls, and golf balls to stop making them, it would be ‘nothing short of a miracle’ if they were to get the rubber to do so in 1942.”
“New Composition Expected For Hockey Pucks,” an Ottawa Journal headline announced that winter, without offering any specifics: “the future of this staple article in Canada’s winter sports calendar is still obscure” was as far as the accompanying article was willing to go.
NHL teams were already doing their best to maintain their strategic puck reserves. The Chicago Black Hawks posted signs at the Stadium asking fans to return any puck that found a way into the crowd because, well, the very future of the league depended on it.
A New Jersey newspaper reports on puck paucity in December of 1941.
“This is a great national emergency,” a team spokesman reasoned. “Everything must be saved. Rubber is in great demand and we must conserve it. Pucks are made of rubber and we must conserve them, too. It would be a great shame to see a great sport and morale-building game like hockey go into the discard because of a shortage of pucks. That’s why we call upon our fans to throw back our pucks in the interest of sport and conservation of valuable defense material.”
Earnest as it was, this appeal didn’t convince everyone. When the Black Hawks hosted the Boston Bruins on Sunday, December 14, 1941, the only puck to leave the rink during the teams’ 3-3 tie was not returned, proving (as Edward Burns wrote in the Tribune) “a souvenir bug will cling to almost anything.”
Efforts were made at other rinks, too. Madison Square Garden was still home in 1941-42 to two NHL teams, the Rangers and the Brooklyn Americans. Games there began with advisories over the public address system emphasizing that that repatriating pucks that strayed was the “patriotic” thing to do.
Those who tossed them back, it was duly noted, were cheered lustily. Louis Schneider, a syndicated financial columnist, reported on the fate of the bold soul who tried to hang on to a puck in New York. “The hockey fan that grabs one and refuses to throw it back is all but mobbed by soldiers and sailors in addition to being booed by the crowd.”
Wartime precautions kept the Royal Canadian Air Force from identifying the precise setting for this memento of a gathering of high-level hockey talent: the caption affixed to the back of the photographs says “somewhere in England” and leaves it at that. My best guess is that it dates to early 1944 and the rink we’re seeing is the one in Durham in Yorkshire, which is where the RCAF’s Sixth Bomber Group was stationed. Wherever Canadians gather there will be, of course, hockey, and so it was that the Bomber Group Championship came to be played in March of ’44 between teams named the Rossmen (not for Art Ross, but after the CO of an air-station) and the Lancasters.
The final was a two-game, total-goals series featuring some high-powered talent: the Rossmen iced a pair of former Boston Bruins stars in Flying Officer Milt Schmidt and Leading Aircraftman Bobby Bauer, while their former NHL linemate, Pilot Officer Woody Dumart, turned out for the Lancasters.
The Rossmen won the first game 5-0. To start the second, the Lancasters took a 2-0 lead. It didn’t hold: Bauer eventually tied the game before Schmidt scored a pair of goals ten seconds apart. Final score: 4-3 Rossmen.
The men posing here were all serving in the RCAF that spring, though not all of them played for the championship. From left, they are: Roy Conacher (another Boston Bruin before he enlisted); Alf Pike (an erstwhile New York Ranger who’d go on to coach the team); Paul Platz (who played pre-war with the AHL’s Providence Reds); Jimmy Haggerty (a member of Canada’s team at the 1936 Winter Olympics who also played a handful of games with Montreal); Bob Whitelaw and Sid Abel (both Detroit Red Wings); Frank Boucher (a member of the RCAF team that won the 1941-42 Allan Cup and a nephew of the Hall-of-Famer of the same name); Lloyd Gronsdahl (Boston); Ernie Trigg (AHL Cleveland Barons); Milt Schmidt and Woody Dumart (Bruins both).
Noble Oblige: Reg Noble strikes a pose in the late 1920s, when he turned out, and captained, the Detroit Cougars.
Here’s a story, for Reg Noble’s birthday — well about Reg Noble, the day after his birthday, which was yesterday. June 23 was a Tuesday in 1896, in Collingwood, Ontario, on the shores of Georgian Bay, which is where was Noble was born 124 years ago. If you’re vague on Reg Noble details, here are a few of his hockey specs: he was very good, possessed of a wicked shot, a forward at first, then later a defenceman, played for the old Toronto Blueshirts and the Montreal Canadiens in 1917, the final year of the old National Hockey Association.
The following year, 1918, when the NHA was supplanted by the brand new National Hockey League, Noble signed with Toronto, whom he duly helped to win the Stanley Cup. He stayed with Toronto on into the 1920s, playing and captaining and even coaching the team as they turned into the St. Patricks, and winning still another Stanley Cup in 1922. The St. Pats eventually sold him to the Montreal Maroons, and he won yet another Cup with them, in 1926, before joining Detroit’s original NHL team, the Cougars, in 1927. That’s their livery he’s wearing in the photograph here, posing on a wintry tennis court colonized by the Cougars for a team practice and photo session.
Noble captained the team in Detroit for three seasons, and played on when they shifted identifies, from Cougars to Falcons. He was still there in 1932 when the team re-launched as Red Wings, though not for long: Detroit released him early in the season. He had one final whirl later that year when he returned to the Maroons, by which time his was the distinction, at age 36, of being the very last player from the league’s inaugural season to still be skating on NHL ice.
Noble was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1962 — a few months after his death, as it happens, at the age of 65.
And the story? It’s a wartime tale, going back before the NHL, in 1916, when Noble did what many young men were doing in the torrid time: he went to war.
He tried to, at least. Unlike Red Dutton and Joe Simpson and several other of his fellow Hall-of-Famers, Noble never made it overseas much less into the frightful fight of the Western Front.
As much as he might have wished to serve, he was ruled out and discharged before he got the chance. Hockey had rendered him unsuitable.
Noble was 19 in the winter in which 1915 turned to 1916. He was playing with Toronto Riversides that winter, as rover on the seven-aside team that won the OHA Senior championship that wartime winter. When the team’s regular season came to a close at the end of January, Noble was featuring prominently in a 4-0 victory over a military team, the 40th Battery. “Noble, as usual, was the fastest man on the ice,” the Globe reported, “and some of his rushes bordered on the sensational. He is a very hard man to relieve of the puck and is learning every game how to go in on a defence.”
Six days later, Noble joined up, presenting himself at the Toronto Recruiting Depot on the Exhibition grounds. His attestation papers from that day tell the tale, and show his orderly signature as he took an oath to be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth, promising to fight all HM’s enemies and obey all of his orders, as well as those of all his Generals and Officers, so help him God.
Noble was measured for height (he was 5’8”) and girth of chest (40”), and the locales of his five scars noted down: three on a shin, one each on a foot and a knee. His complexion was deemed fair, his eyes blue. A Captain Barton was in charge of this medical examination, declaring Noble fitfor duty with the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force.
That was just the beginning of Noble’s busy Saturday. That same evening, he lined up with his fellow Riversides to see to beating Toronto R and AA by a score of 7-2 in a playoff game at the Arena on Mutual Street. By midnight, Noble was home and suffering, not so fit as he’d been earlier: “he was in bed,” according to a subsequent report, “with a raging fever and a beautiful attack of la grippe.”
The battalion that Noble joined was a newborn unit, the 180th, formed in Toronto in January of ’16 under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Dick Greer, a prominent Crown Attorney who’d been a distinguished athlete in his own right in his University of Toronto days. “Pals” battalions had been common in the British Army since the start of the war, whereby men with common backgrounds — friends or neighbours or co-workers — enlisted to serve together. Conceived as a Sportsmen’s battalion, the 180th was one of the first units in Canada to follow that lead.
It did a roaring business filling its ranks that winter. Football players, scullers, boxers, and runners flocked to attest their willingness to serve in the early days of February. The famous Mohawk marathoner Tom Longboat, made on his way on foot from Brantford to Toronto to join up. Tommy Daly volunteered for the 180th, too, the well-known Toronto boxer who was also making a reputation as a baseball and hockey trainer — and who, post-war, having shifted his name to Tim, served for decades in that role for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Lou Marsh, who’d played football for the Argonauts and wrote sports for the Toronto Daily Star was a lieutenant in the 180th as well as keeping up a busy schedule as a boxing and hockey referee. He was on the ice the night Reg Noble enlisted, in fact, whistling the game between Riversides and Toronto R and AA. Noble, it’s worth noting, wasn’t the only hockey player bound for the ranks of the 180th: a report from a few days later made clear that the team’s entire line-up was joining up, the coach, too, Bonny Gard, who said “he might as well go along with them in France as stay at home here and be lonesome.” (With another month of the season still to play, possibly, Colonel Greer graciously agreed to make sure that the Riverside recruits would be granted leave for all and any games.)
Later that same week, on February 14, a recruiting jamboree for the 180th filled Massey Hall. “Half a dozen boxers, recently enlisted, gave sparring exhibitions, enlisted bike riders raced on rollers, and there was a long program free to members of athletic clubs,” a dispatch in the Montreal Gazette affirmed. “Massey Hall was packed to the roof with the flower of the Queen City’s athletes.”
In two hours, the 180th had signed up 325 new recruits, breaking, it was reported, “all Canadian recruiting records.”
At strength, the battalion eventually counted 31 officers and 833 other ranks. They spent the spring and summer training as infantry at Toronto’s Exhibition Camp. There was time for some hockey, too, before the ice thawed out for the season. In March, a few days after Noble and the Riversides wrapped up the OHA Senior championship over a Berlin, Ontario, team anchored in goal George Hainsworth, the 180th’s hockey team took on the 93rd Battalion from Peterborough in a St. Patrick’s Game at the Mutual Street Arena.
Reg Noble skated in that game, at rover, and he was judged to be the best player on the ice. He had a couple of teammates with OHA Senior experience skating with him, but they couldn’t overcome the 93rd squad, who’d played the season on the OHA’s Intermediate loop. The visitors ended up winning by a score of 2-1. Between the first and second periods, a speedy local skater named Fred Robson scampered (unofficially) 50 yards in just under the world’s record time of five seconds. In the second intermission, he returned to entertain the crowd with a barrel-jumping show.
Noble still had more hockey to play before he fully devoted himself to soldiering. Though Riversides opted out of heading west to Winnipeg to play for the Allan Cup, the national Senior championship, they did play several exhibitions late in March. Facing Dick Irvin’s visiting Winnipeg Monarchs at the Arena, the Riversides prevailed 8-7, with Noble playing a starring role that included scoring a goal while (the Daily Star related) “practically standing on his ear and with four Monarchs glued to him.” (The team that did win the Allan Cup, by the by, was Joe Simpson’s 61st Battalion from Winnipeg.)
At some point, with hockey having reached its seasonal end, the sporting soldiers of the 180th moved north out of Toronto to continue their training at Camp Borden, southwest of Barrie, where as many as 25,000 soldiers were under canvas that summer. When they weren’t learning infantry tactics and how to use their weapons, the men of the 180th boxed and raced and hit baseballs whenever the opportunity arose. In July, they helped build an in-camp stadium with seating for 15,000 to 20,000 spectators.
“Good athletes do not always make good soldiers,” a column in The Windsor Star warned around this time, noting that Lieut.-Colonel Greer had been forced to make some hard choices as the summer went on. “Much to the colonel’s surprise, he has been compelled to drop several champions from the ranks because they could not stand the wear and tear of a hard route march.” Names were named: Erme Woods, “the well-known distance runner” was ousted along with a couple of accomplished boxers who couldn’t keep up.
“Colonel Greer is handling his battalion just as he would [a] baseball team,” the Star said, “and is rapidly getting rid of the ‘dead-wood.’ He wants only the best, and it is his determination to make the 180th battalion second to none.”
He must have pleased when, in August, the Sportsmen dominated the 4th Brigade athletic meet, showing particularly well in the mile-run, the 16-pound shot put, and the tug of war. The Sportsmen didn’t fare so well in the bayonet-fighting contest, which they lost by a score of 5-3 to the 147th (Grey) Battalion from Owen Sound.
No Noble: Bidding farewell to Toronto in November of 1916, the men of the 180th (Sportsmen’s) Battalion prepare to leave Union Station on their way to Halifax and, from there, the war in France. Reg Noble had already been discharged by this point. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 821)
In September the battalion got its notice from Ottawa to be ready to ship out — the 180th was “warned for overseas,” in the parlance. In fact, it would be November before they made their move by train to Halifax. From there, they crossed the Atlantic to England in four days aboard the Olympic.
Many of the men would see action — some would die — the following year in the harrowing battles around Vimy Ridge in northern France. But the 180th was no longer, by then, a unit. In January of 1917, the battalion was absorbed into the 3rd Canadian Reserve Battalion, from which the men were assigned to other battalions in need of reinforcement.
The Leafs’ trainer-to-be got to England, where Private Tommy Daly served as Colonel Greer’s orderly — his servant, basically — before being invalided home and discharged from the CEF because of a wonky right shoulder. Daly had hurt it in February of 1916, not a month after enlisting. “Injured slightly while boxing,” his medical records testify, “Feb. 21/16, and has had pain since then.”
Private Reg Noble’s story was a little different: he never even made it to the wharf in Halifax. Declared “Medically Unfit,” Noble departed Camp Borden, the battalion, and the Canadian Expeditionary Force in one fell swoop at the end of September of 1916, a victim of — well, I guess in Colonel Greer’s way of seeing things, he was surplus to the battalion’s second-to-none purposes.
Noble may have had an 18-year NHL career ahead of him but that fall, as it turns out, he just couldn’t march the way soldiers of the infantry are meant to march.
An old hockey injury was to blame. Or maybe newer baseball damage? Contemporary newspaper accounts suggest that he hurt an ankle playing ball at Borden in the summer of 1916 and that the injury was not only serious enough to see him mustered out of uniform, it looked like it might keep him off skates, too.
That could well have been the case but if so, it doesn’t happen to have been entered as the official reason for Noble’s military career coming to its end.
As detailed in Noble’s CEF discharge papers, one of the scars that Captain Barton had marked down when Noble attested in February, the one on the instep of his right foot, commemorated a cut from a skate he’d suffered in 1914 playing hockey back home in Collingwood. The blade had gone deep, enough to cut the tendon and immobilize his big toe.
The 180th’s Medical Officer, Captain Brown, wrote it up. “Can follow the marching under difficulty but has to have frequent periods of light duty,” he noted. “Sent him to hospital where they could do nothing for the condition.”
On a second page, Captain Brown gave his own interpretation of Noble’s scar status — unless Noble had acquired a new configuration in a summer of mishaps? Now, instead of 3 shin scars and one apiece on a foot and a knee, he was credited with
Scar on palm of left hand. Scar on right foot. Bullet scar on right leg.
Farther down the page, in answer to the military form question What is the probable duration of the disability?Captain Brown wrote “Permanent.”
Next question: To what extent will it prevent a full livelihood in the general labour market? Please state in fractions. Captain Brown’s answer: “Will not prevent his earning full livelihood more than before enlisting.”
True enough. By mid-November, as Noble’s former brothers in arms set sail, the word from Toronto was that Eddie Livingstone, wildcard owner of the local NHA Blueshirts, had signed Noble to his first pro contract.
And so, in the winter he didn’t go to war, Noble lined up for a team that included Ken Randall, Harry Cameron, and Duke Keats. He made a quick impression, and a good one. The Blueshirts started the season in Montreal by beating Canadiens, defending Stanley Cup champions, by a score of 7-1. Noble didn’t score, but neither did he seem to show any signs of a tender ankle or instep. “He checked [Didier] Pitre, the Canadien star forward,” Toronto’s Daily Star noted, “and smothered him throughout the game. … His rushes were effective, too, and he had speed to burn.”
Reg Noble scored his first pro goal, and his second, in Toronto’s next game, back at the Mutual Street Arena, when the Blueshirts did away with the Quebec Bulldogs by a score of 8-5.
The Blueshirts didn’t last out the season: early in 1917, when the team from the 228th Battalion famously left the NHA in a whole lot of hurry, the league decided to eject Toronto, too, mostly because they didn’t want to deal with owner Eddie Livingstone any longer. That’s when Noble made the switch to Montreal, seeing out the ’16-17 season with Canadiens.
That fall, of course, the NHA collapsed and the NHL arose all on the same day, in Montreal, mostly, again, to stymie Livingstone. Toronto launched a whole new team that year, and Reg Noble was one of the players they signed up. That’s how, in December of 1917, he was on the ice to score an Auston Matthewsesque four goals in his and his team’s National Hockey League debut, as they started out on their way to winning the franchise’s very first Stanley Cup.
For a panoramic view of the many men of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s 180th (Sportsmen’s) Battalion, proudly paraded in April of 1916 at Toronto’s east-end Riverdale Park, click over this way, then click again to zoom in. Reg Noble is in there somewhere, along with the man-who-would-be-Tim-Daly, long-serving Maple Leafs trainer. Let me know if you find them. Look beyond the soldiers, too, over to the right: those are hockey rinks coming down for the season, aren’t they?
The story of the Newfoundlanders who stopped on their way to war in 1917, played hockey in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and sat for a photograph, is one I wrote about more than a year ago — you can read it here. The photograph (that’s it again below) is a favourite of mine (the studio setting; the sticks and dated puck; those sweaters!). It’s also heartbreaking in the way that peaceable wartime groupings like this one always are when — because — we know the history of how bad it would get for these boys.
Last April, on a visit to the First World War battlefields of northern France, I walked the trails at Beaumont Hamel, where Newfoundlanders died by the dozens on the first day of the Somme in 1916. Afterwards, I stopped for lunch a few kilometres to the west, in Auchonvilliers, where the Avril Williams Tea Room doubles as a museum of World War I artefacts and memorabilia. There’s a copy of the photo of the Newfoundland Regiment hockey players hanging there, in the big main room, amid the armour and the ordnance, overlooking the battle maps, the regimental badges, the battalion histories. I studied the faces one more time, searched them all. And I read the names aloud.
White. Bennett. Strong. Winter. Williams. Strong. Duley. Newman. Churchill. Mews.
Caribou Crew: Soldiers from the Newfoundland Regiment, starters and spares, pose in hockey garb, and not, in 1917, in Windsor, Nova Scotia. Back, left to right: Rex White, Sydney Bennett, Jack Strong, Duke Winter. Middle: Hayward Williams, Charlie Strong, Lionel Duley, Stan Newman. Front: Ernest Churchill, Harry Mews. (Image: The Rooms, Provincial Archives Division, St. John’s, Newfoundland)
Duley was Lionel Thomas Duley, a St. John’s bank clerk who took his oath and joined the Newfoundland Regiment in 1916, attesting six days after the slaughter at Beaumont Hamel. He’s the goaltender in the Windsor photograph, taken the following year, when he was 19. The next time I saw his name written was a few days later, 120 kilometres to the north, across the French border into Belgium, when I went to see his grave in the Tyne Cot Cemetery near Zonnebeke. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains thousands of cemeteries and memorials around the world; Tyne Cot, the final resting place for the remains of 11,961 servicemen from across the British Empire (and four Germans), is the largest of them all. Fourteen Newfoundlanders lie at Tyne Cot, along with 966 Canadians.
Drawing on records held in Newfoundland’s Archives at The Rooms in St. John’s you can chalk out an outline of Lionel Duley’s life.
I’ve been by the family house in St. John’s, the one he grew up in, where he was living when he left for the war, although I didn’t know it at the time I was passing by. 51 Rennies Mill Road, across from Bannerman Park.
His father, Thomas J. Duley, was an Englishman, born in Birmingham, who landed in Newfoundland. He married a daughter of Carbonear, Tryphena Soper — Phenie, she was known as. Together they had five children, Cyril, Nelson, Margaret, Gladys, and Lionel. I’m not sure of the proper order to put them in. I think Cyril was the eldest; he served in the Newfoundland Regiment, too, as a captain, survived Beaumont Hamel and then bad wounds later in 1916. Sister Margaret is often called Newfoundland’s first novelist: she wrote four books, including the novels The Eyes of the Gull and Highway to Valour.
Thomas was a jeweller and an optician and sold luxury goods on Water Street in St. John’s, T.J. Duley & Co. the business was called, The Reliable their slogan. I’ve been by there, as well — there’s a marijuana dispensary on the premises today.
Lionel did his schooling at the Methodist College in St. John’s. He was clerking for the Canadian Bank of Commerce when he presented himself for a medical check-up in April of 1916 at the Church Lads Brigade Armoury on Harvey Road. By July, Private Duley was duly enlisted, attested, assigned the regimental number 2945. His height was recorded as 5’7”; his pay was the regular rate of $1.10 a day, half of which he assigned to his father’s care. Promoted twice in those early months of training, he was Corporal Duley by the time he departed St. John’s aboard Florizel for Nova Scotia and the Windsor sojourn — puckstopping included — that delayed his arrival at the war.
It was April of 1917 when he sailed on the transport Northland for Liverpool. With the rest of the Newfoundland reinforcements he went from there to Scotland as part of the 2nd (Reserve) Battalion. He was promoted again, receiving his commission as a second lieutenant in May. He was in France by January of 1918, joining 1st Battalion just as they were ordered from positions they’d been occupying in northwest France, near Arras, and shifted to the Ypres Salient in Belgium.
It was at the end of September that Second Lieutenant Lionel Duley was killed. The Battalion had, by then, been incorporated into the 28th Infantry Brigade of the 9th (Scottish) Division positioned west of Ypres for the offensive across Flanders fields to seize Passchendaele Ridge from the German Army. On the second day of the advance, Sunday, September 29, the Newfoundlanders were on the move near the village of Keiberg. 2/Lieutenant Duley was leading his platoon forward when he was hit in the thigh by machine-gun fire.
Regimental records held at The Rooms describe the horror of it but briefly. “Before he could be taken back [he] died, probably from shock and severe loss of blood,” an officer wrote later. It was about 11 o’clock in the morning, 43 days before the Armistice. Subsequent paperwork testifies that his body was found by a fellow subaltern, 2/Lieutenant R.E. Evans, who buried it and erected a cross, taking note of the exact map reference. “This is not a military cemetery,” a memo in the file takes pains to record, “but at the place where he was found dead with some of our men also lying dead beside him. They were all buried together.”
Tyne Cot Cemetery isn’t far. The first British and Canadian war dead were buried there in 1917 while the guns were still thundering, before anything was decided. I’m not entirely sure when 2/Lieutenant Duley’s remains were moved, just that his family got confirmation in 1921 that he was resting there, in Plot 53, Row H, Grave 8.
I left a pebble on the top of the stone. I spoke his name.
Lionel Duley.
He was 20 years old when he died.
What particularly endeared Detroit Red Wings coach and GM Jack Adams to his goaltender in the spring of 1943? That Johnny Mowers was “twice as bad a loser as I am.”
“That’s what I like,” Adams effused. “Give me those bad losers; let the other clubs have the good losers.”
1943 was a fine year to be a Red Wing. That April, Adams’ team had failed to lose to Art Ross’ Bruins, sweeping to a Stanley Cup championship in four straight games. Mowers, 26, played an outstanding series, shutting out Boston’s shooters entirely in each of the final two games. In his third season patrolling the Detroit net, Mowers, who hailed from Niagara Falls, Ontario, also won the Vézina Trophy as the NHL’s best goaltender and a place on the league’s First All-Star Team.
Adams, it turned out, would have to make alternate goaltending arrangements for the following season. With the war in its fourth year, Mowers enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in July of ’43, reporting for training to No. 1 Manning Depot on the grounds of Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition. “The red lights in NHL arenas will not shine behind [Mowers] this coming season or for the duration,” ran the caption that went with this photograph, taken there in late August.
That’s not to say Aircraftman 2nd Class Mowers didn’t see the ice while he wore his country’s uniform. That winter, he tended the nets for the Toronto edition of the RCAF Flyers during their OHA Senior schedule on a team that also counted on a number of NHLers-turned-airmen, including former Maple Leafs Ernie Dickens, Red Heron, and Bud Poile, and Peanuts O’Flaherty, who’d skated with the New York Americans.
Back in Detroit, Jack Adams would call on four goaltenders to defend the Red Wing net as they tried to defend their championship through the 1943-44 season. Connie Dion, Jim Franks, Normie Smith, and rookie Harry Lumley all saw pucks in that vain campaign — the Montreal Canadiens ended up winning the Cup in ’44.
Johnny Mowers served three years with the RCAF, making it back to the NHL after the war. He rejoined the Red Wings in 1946, though only as a reliever: Harry Lumley had, by then, established himself as the starter.
The RCAF Flyers proved themselves to be Canada’s best senior hockey team in 1942 when they won the Allan Cup. The Flyers benefitted from what might be classed a wartime windfall: among the Ottawa-based airmen at their disposal that season were all three members of one of the NHL’s most effective forward lines, the erstwhile Krauts (and Boston Bruins) Milt Schmidt, Woody Dumart, and Bobby Bauer. When another stacked military team succeeded the Flyers as Allan Cup champions the following year, it was thanks, in large, part to goaltender Sugar Jim Henry. After winning the 1941 Allan Cup with the Regina Rangers, Henry had played his rookie year in the NHL with the New York Rangers. Inducted into the Canadian Army in the summer of ’42 (above, to the right), he was posted to Canada’s capital where he suited up (above, left) for the Ottawa Commandos. Replacing the Ottawa Senators in the Quebec Senior Hockey League, the Commandos had their wings clipped a little when, to begin the season, the league decreed that teams could only ice four players with NHL experience in any given game. (That limit was later raised to six.) The Commandos had plenty of options: along with Henry, the former NHLers they iced that season included Montreal Canadiens’ veteran Ken Reardon, brothers Mac and Neil Colville (New York Rangers), Jack McGill (Bruins), Alex Shibicky (Rangers), Gordie Bruce (Bruins), Joe Cooper (Rangers and Black Hawks), Bingo Kampman (Maple Leafs), Polly Drouin (Canadiens), Gordie Poirier (Canadiens), and Ken Kilrea (Red Wings). The team the Commandos beat in the Allan Cup finals was a military one, too, Victoria Army, and they boasted a bevy of erstwhile NHLers, too — including Nick Metz (Maple Leafs), Joffre Desilets (Canadiens), and Bill Carse (Rangers and Black Hawks) — but not quite enough.
Key Punch: Lieutenant Harry Broadbent in uniform in 1920. (Image: Library and Archives Canada)
Right winger Harry (a.k.a. Punch) Broadbent was one of the stars for the NHA’s Ottawa Senators in March of 1915 when they succumbed in the Stanley Cup finals to a Vancouver Millionaires team that featured Cyclone Taylor and Frank Nighbor. In July of that year, Broadbent, who was 22, “engaged and agreed to serve” (as his Attestation Papers put it) in the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force, “for one year, or during the war now existing between Great Britain and Germany should the war last longer than one year.” He went on to join the 25th Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, winning a Military Medal for bravery in the field in France. He was Lieutenant Broadbent by the time the longer-lasting war ended this month in 1918, and with the new NHL season about to open, there was hope that he’d be back on the ice for the Senators. An Ottawa newspaper confirmed it at the end of December:
A member of the Citizen staff, recently returned, states that he met Broadbent in England, and that “Punch” was then awaiting embarkation orders for home. He expected to sail on the next boat. Broadbent is reported to be in fine health, and is eager to get back into hockey. Needles to say, he will be given a rousing reception by Ottawa patriots and hockey lovers.
A delegation from the Senators was on hand at the Ottawa train station to greet him when he arrived home in late January of 1919, along with his grandparents and his sister. (A brother, Spencer, had been killed in France.)
Broadbent made his NHL debut a few days later as Ottawa edged Toronto 3-2. He only played a few minutes, giving “a good account of himself” (said the Citizen) though he’d only “been on his skates once in four years.” He received a “vociferous ovation” when he first skated out, “everyone in the rink joining in the applause for the returned hockey hero.” His first shot on Toronto goaltender Bert Lindsay — well, it wasn’t. He missed the net, “narrowly.” He scored his first goal February 13 against the Montreal Canadiens. Against Toronto a few days later he put two past Lindsay, including the winner in overtime to seal Ottawa’s 4-3 victory.
“More men are being recruited or authorized here at the present time than at any period since the war started, and far more, of course, than ever before in the city’s history.” That was the word in the Montreal Gazette in January of 1916, just as the 148th Overseas Battalion, one of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s newest infantry battalions, was getting ready to start recruiting. Here, from the archives, are a couple of the posters that went up to aid in that effort. Above, somewhere in France, out beyond the artillery, a lone soldier wonders why he isn’t being reinforced. The answer is right there in front of him, wafting out of the barrel of his Ross rifle: hockey.
If, as a Canadiens fan seeing this on a wall outside the Montreal Arena, the guilt didn’t get you, maybe would the promise of a real game and/or a challenge to your manhood do the trick? The poster below tweaks the taunting a little, revealing the laggardly fan at home, slippers on, browsing the sports pages in his recliner as the spectre of that other poster rises accusingly from the pipe he’s fortunate enough to be smoking.
Whatever the battalion’s marketing department’s view of hockey fans might have been, the 148th didn’t see a contradiction in welcoming as many of them as possible to the Arena on the night of January 27, 1916, for a “patriotic benefit” pitting veterans of the famous Ottawa Silver Seven against a team of former Montreal greats. The teams had previously played in Ottawa, drawing 3-3 a few nights earlier. Montreal older-timers included defenceman Dickie Boon, who’d captained the Montreal HC to successive Stanley Cups in 1902 and ’03, along with a parcel of other future Hall-of-Famers in Russell Bowie, Ernie Russell, and goaltender Riley Hern. Ottawa’s line-up of retired greats featured House Hutton, Harvey Pulford, Alf Smith, and Rat Westwick.
“Those who journeyed to the Arena to see a burlesque on hockey,” the Gazette reported, “were surprised as the players of both teams played as they did in their palmy days.” Powered by Bowie’s four goals, Montreal prevailed by a score of 6-2. The seven-a-side exhibition raised $1,500 on the night, which was divided between the 148thand another incipient battalion, the 150th.
“At the conclusion of the game,” the Gazette noted, “the officers of the regiments for whose benefit it was played journeyed to the dressing rooms to thank the players for their kindness in staging the game.” Players and officers alike later repaired to the St. Regis Hotel for an informal dinner. Guests, including Stanley Cup trustee William Foran, listened while they supped, to a musical program, “while speeches were made by nearly all present.”
Van Doos On Ice: It’s been 65 years since the armistice that brought the Korean War to a close was signed in 1953. More than 26,000 Canadians served in the fight; 516 lost their lives. Veterans Affairs Canada last week launched its commemoration of the anniversary, which will continue as the year goes on. Next up: a ceremony on June 24 at Ottawa’s National War Memorial. Above, members of the Royal 22nd Regiment’s hockey team take a stand on the ice of the Imjin River in 1953. From the left, they are Captain Donald McCormick, Private Gilbert Pelchat, and Corporal Jean Savard. (Image: Library and Archives Canada/Department of National Defence fonds/PA-136787)
The headwaters of the Imjin are in what’s now North Korea; the river flows south, crossing the border that wasn’t yet there 65 years ago. In the early 1950s, Canadians were at war nearby, of course, and when the winter came, and the river froze, what else were they going to do but play hockey? U.S. Army helicopters hovered overhead to watch the action; a referee wore his 9-mm sidearm along with his whistle: earlier this week, The Globe and Mail’s Nathan VanderKlippe laid out the whole story, and in style; find it here.
(Images: Top, Library and Archives Canada, PA-173471; Bottom, PA-184724)
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