There was never any doubt in Valda MacLeod and Mary Fisher’s minds that they would do their part to help with the war effort.
Although Valda hailed from Toronto and Mary was a Sackville girl at the time of the Second World War, both women admit more than six decades later that they couldn’t have imagined not jumping on board to help a country in need.
“We never thought about not joining up,” said Val from her Sackville home last week. “It was a time when there was the most pride in your country and that was the way you felt you could help out.”
Valda and Mary both enlisted in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS) in 1943, four years into WWII and a time when women were joining the navy by the thousands to “release a man to go to sea.”
Valda, now 85 and known to family and friends as ‘Val’ Fisher after having married her wartime beau Ned Fisher 60 years ago, said she signed on with the WRCNS (also known as Wrens) two days after she turned 18.
Val’s father, who had been a flying ace in the First World War, had forbade her to join the air force so she said she decided to join the navy instead.
Val was immediately sent to Galt, Ont. to HMCS Conestoga (“all the bases were named after warships,” she recalls) for her six-week basic training. From there, she moved on to HMCS Bytown in Ottawa, where she spent a year, and then to HMCS Burrard in Vancouver, where she spent several more months serving as a motor transport driver.
Although they were considered to be part of the Navy, Wrens did not serve on a ship but instead took on a myriad of on-shore, non-combat duties. At peak strength, over 6,000 women were fulfilling the various roles of coders, confidential clerks, messengers, telegraphists, cooks, stewards, drivers, and other jobs during the war.
In January 1945, Val was sent overseas and traveled by passenger ship to HMCS Niobe in Scotland, where the Canadian Wrens were on loan to the British Navy.
Val said she continued to serve as a driver, mostly transporting the signals officers from location to location.
She said she was fortunate because her Wren crew was one of the last to travel to Scotland and the air bombings there had already taken place earlier in the war.
Fortunately, Val wasn’t amongst the battlefields during her time in Scotland, and admits she didn’t see first-hand many of the atrocities that plagued many soldiers and seamen, but she does recall one particularly scary moment while she was on leave that will be embedded in her memory forever.
“We were travelling by train to Plymouth,” she said, “and when we got to the station and got off the train and looked out, there was no city. It had been flattened. That was something . . . what those people must have suffered.”
Throughout the war, Val recalls the Allied forces took plenty of criticism over the way in which the war was being fought. But she said she never lost confidence that victory would one day come.
“We knew, as difficult as it was, that the war needed to be won . . . it was just too important not to. You just had the feeling you had to win.”
Mary agrees, saying that “we all just did the best we could” to reach the end of the war.
Mary, who recently celebrated her 90th birthday, was 23 when she signed on with the Wrens, a young and carefree woman from small-town Sackville looking for an adventure.
“We just went with the flow . . . we tried not to think about all the gory details.”
She also recalls her father being worried about how his daughter would cope in what was traditionally a man’s line of work.
“I remember that dad had to check with all his pals first to see whether it was fit for his daughter (to join up). I think he wondered what we were getting ourselves into.”
Mary said she didn’t even complete her compulsory training in Galt before she was shipped off after two weeks with two younger Wrens to be stationed in Washington.
“They gave us a uniform and put us on a bus . . . we had no ID, nothing. We didn’t even know where we were going,” she said.
Because she was forced to skip her training, Mary had to learn her ‘coding and decoding’ skills hands-on.
She spent more than two years at the same post, right up until the end of the war, deciphering and translating messages for the Navy, including ones from when warships were sunk in battle.
Mary roomed at a boarding house only a 20-minute walk from her post and recalls sleeping out in a screened-in porch from early May until late November.
“By that time, it was getting a bit chilly,” she said with a laugh.
Mary returned to Sackville for a brief time following the war but then moved to Montreal to continue her education. She married Gordon McOuat and lived in Lachute, Que., where they raised four children. Mary moved back to Sackville in 1980.
Val – who had met her husband Ned in 1945 on one of her weekend leaves in Brighton, England (they were both staying at the same hotel) – returned to Toronto following the war to attend university. Ned was working in Sackville at the foundry after returning from the war but traveled to Toronto several times to visit Valda. The two married in 1950 and have been living in Sackville ever since, where they have raised three children. Val received an education degree from Mount Allison University and taught at local schools for 25 years.
The Wrens were disbanded in 1946 following WWII, but a Wren section was re-formed in 1951 in the RCN. Wrens continued to serve in the RCN and the Navy reserves until unification of the Canadian forces, although women in the navy were still known as Wrens right up until the late ‘80s. Today, no longer called Wrens, women serve in the Canadian navy, both regular and reserve, ashore and at sea.
Mary and Val will both be part of Sackville’s celebrations next weekend to recognize the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Navy, where the two women will plant a ‘Navy Lady’ rose at Memorial Park.
Other highlights of the centennial event, which will be held Saturday, May 15 starting at 2 p.m., will include the unveiling of the new HMCS Sackville garden, a Maritime Tea and Talk by Marc Milner, a presentation by the Canadian Naval Centennial Committee and a presentation by the Canadian Naval Memorial Trust.
