{"id":17746,"date":"2017-07-05T16:46:04","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T20:46:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=17746"},"modified":"2017-07-05T16:46:04","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T20:46:04","slug":"brocks-banter-when-canada-was-a-sprightly-46","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/brocks-banter-when-canada-was-a-sprightly-46\/","title":{"rendered":"BROCK’S BANTER: When Canada was a sprightly 46"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amid the excitement and all-round whirl leading up to Canada\u2019s 150 Celebrations, which kicked off Friday with the 150th Anniversary of Town Park and continued right through to the following evening\u2019s fireworks, I was saddened to learn of the death of one of Aurora\u2019s eldest surviving veterans just shy of the grand old age of 104.
\nAllen Griffiths was born in the United Kingdom and served in the Royal Navy through multiple theatres of war. Having first met him when he was a young lad of 99, I was immediately struck not only by his good humour, but the fact he was always so forward-looking.
\nAlthough he told stories of the past, with some memories dating back to the final years of the First World War with enthusiasm and relish, he never struck me as one who yearned for what some people so tritely \u2013 and erroneously \u2013 describe as \u201cthe good old days.\u201d Rather, he was looking to share the lessons he learned in the past, particularly his experience in war, to make sure they never happened again.
\nIn my experience, people of his age often long for that mythical simpler time of their youth \u2013 but not him. His rose coloured glasses were broken in the submarines he served, often in times of extreme peril, and he never bothered, or seemed to want to have them fixed.
\nAnd, with that, we can be grateful.
\nSo, I was saddened not particularly by the loss of someone at such a grand and venerable age \u2013 entering this world when Canada was just a young slip of a 46-year-old girl is certainly a life well lived \u2013 but by what he took with him and the lessons we still had to learn.
\nBack as he excitedly prepared to mark his century, he sat down with me for a lengthy interview, which ultimately turned out to be one of our most popular articles since I joined The Auroran back in 2009.
\nHere are some excerpts, and Godspeed!<\/p>\n

Swathed with scarves around his head and neck, soot strategically placed on his face and arms, and brandishing a sword like a self-described \u201cvagabond\u201d, Allen Griffiths found himself on shipboard amongst the enemy.
\nIt was the late 1930s, the Spanish Civil War was still raging, the Germans were interfering, but the Second World War had yet to break out.
\nAs a stoker on board the ship, he clearly remembers popping out of his hold and exclaiming, \u201cCookie, have you heard the buzz?\u201d
\nUndoubtedly it\u2019s a quote that would not be out of place in the middle of a 1930s sea battle and indeed the ship was going down. Water was coming on board and his fellow seamen were quickly jumping overboard to save themselves.
\nThey were not, however, in danger just yet.
\nWhile Mr. Griffiths was indeed a stoker on board the ship, actively serving with the navy, this was all in good fun. The filmmakers who had drafted him and many of his other shipmates into \u201cextra\u201d roles in the 1937 film \u201cOur Fighting Navy\u201d (later re-titled \u201cTorpedoed!\u201d) had taken over the HMS Royal Oak and turned it into one of the \u201cenemy\u201d ships in the film.
\nMemories around the filming of \u201cOur Fighting Navy\u201d are some of the happier ones associated with the HMS Royal Oak. Shortly after he moved onto another ship, the Royal Oak was torpedoed by the Germans in the early days of the Second World War, killing 833 people on board.
\n\u201cShe never fired a g\u2013damned shot,\u201d says Mr. Griffiths. \u201cShe was lying up in the north of Scotland supposed to be safe as nobody could get in because of the rocks and the sand, but that all disappeared over the years because nobody had surveyed it. The German submarine came in just as smooth as you like at midnight, fired five or six torpedoes on it and she went down all hands.\u201d
\nHe was born on the border of England and Wales in 1913, less than a year before the outbreak of the First World War.
\nHis father was a policeman who served in the Boer War, while his mother served as a nurse, treating some of the names that would have filled the newspapers of the day. When war eventually broke out in Europe, it was a break felt very much on the home front.
\nHis father was back in service, heading overseas with his wife, back in her nursing uniform. While they served, their sons were taken into an orphanage under the auspices of the local police authority where they were treated to conditions which were commonplace at the time, but would be shocking to today\u2019s society.
\n\u201cI was a bed wetter,\u201d he says with a laugh. \u201cThis Mrs. Murray used to come to us, get me by the hair and shove my nose it, then lock me in a cupboard while she made the beds. I got so scared of going into bed that I would lay on the floor. I would get so cold, I would have to jump back into bed and then wet the bed again.\u201d
\nRelief finally came with the Armistice in 1918. When peace was declared, he remembers celebrating by getting dressed up as a soldier, complete with his arm in his sling, to parade for Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, one of Queen Victoria\u2019s more eccentric granddaughters who was visiting the village.
\nFinally, their mother came to pick them up, but she was not accompanied by their father. He was felled on the field in 1916.
\n\u201cWhen he was shot, they sent his clothes home in a coffin,\u201d says Mr. Griffiths. \u201cThree or four coins fell out of his pocket. I still hang onto the farthing. The penny with the bullet hole in it was given to my brother, Jack.\u201d
\nSettling back with his family, Mr. Griffiths\u2019 story turns to village life, heading to his grandfather\u2019s tenant farm, which his family had on a 99 year lease from the local \u201csquire.\u201d From cleaning the squire\u2019s boots, he eventually rose through the ranks to become a groom, preparing horses for the local hunts.
\nThose halcyon days came to an end with the death of the squire. Looking for work, he got a job as an errand boy for a wholesale grocer, eventually delivering sugar throughout the Welsh valleys before he joined his young friends in looking for work with the Navy.
\nIt was at a time when Hitler wasn\u2019t yet seen as the threat he would soon be.
\nAfter one of his first missions, he and his crew were greeted back in Plymouth in a public celebration by King George V, accompanied by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor), who inspected the ranks. It was a very big deal and looking back, he suspects it was all part of the propaganda machine to face the challenges ahead.
\nAnd as someone who had just finished laying a minefield on the seabed with his crew as Neville Chamberlain triumphantly flew back in England waving a piece of paper declaring \u201cpeace in our time\u201d, there were certainly many challenges awaiting Mr. Griffiths.
\nFor the continuing story,
\nplease see: newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=3656<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir Amid the excitement and all-round whirl leading up to Canada\u2019s 150 Celebrations, which kicked off Friday with the 150th Anniversary of Town Park and continued right through to the following evening\u2019s fireworks, I was saddened to learn of the death of one of Aurora\u2019s eldest surviving veterans just shy of the grand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-4Ce","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-03 04:23:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}