Gunner William Forrest Maxwell Sr.

By Judy Lam Maxwell, Vancouver

I remember my grandpa as very curmudgeonly. I don’t ever remember Grandpa—or even Dad—saying that he was in World War I when he was alive. I don’t think I even knew that grandpa was a Great War veteran until sometime after his death in 1982. He never talked about it, period. With the centenary of the war coming up, I decided to ask my dad a lot of questions about Grandpa’s experiences in the war.

Dad’s father, William Forrest Maxwell Sr., was born in Vancouver on February 2, 1896. Grandpa was the sixth son of Reverend George Ritchie Maxwell, British Columbia’s first Liberal member of parliament, Burrard riding, and the leading representative of the Liberal–Labour alliance. Great-grandpa Maxwell died in 1898 when my grandpa was just two years old, and his mother was left to raise seven children on her own. As the sole breadwinner, Mary Forrest Maxwell became a cleaning lady to provide for them and they lived very modestly.

William grew up in Vancouver and went to King Edward High School, where the Vancouver General Hospital is now located at 12th Avenue and Oak Street (the school later relocated to 33rd and Oak and became Eric Hamber Secondary School). After completing his grade twelve, William went to the University of British Columbia and studied in the faculty of science. During his studies in 1915, William and eight other classmates received a blessing from the university to take a leave of absence and join the war effort. They left Vancouver and headed for Kingston, Ontario, where they enlisted in December 1915. Grandpa and his classmates were part of the first graduating class of UBC in absentia. Grandpa was assigned No. 304597, in the 46th Battery (later the 33rd Battery), Canadian Field Artillery of the Canadian Expeditionary Force that went to France. Grandpa spent three years in Passchendaele, Belgium—on the Western Front—where, ultimately, the Allies lost close to 260,000 casualties, including an estimated sixteen thousand Canadians, to the Germans. Grandpa was one of a scant few who survived.

As a member of the Pacific Chapter of the Western Front Association, I’ve brought my dad to social events and on one occasion I discovered a fascinating tidbit of information about my grandpa. While attending a “dugout” in a member’s basement, the topic of field artillery came up in conversation and my dad told the group that he thought that Grandpa was a sniper. This was the first time I had heard this fascinating story. Dad went on to say that after the war, Grandpa used to meet up with some of his war buddies at the Legion and that they were all snipers: Roy Eden, Clem Morgan, Fraser Stanford and a couple of others. Dad also said that when he was a teenager, he went shooting with Grandpa in the University Endowment Lands and that Grandpa was a crack shot. If Grandpa was a gunner in the field artillery, he would have had hearing loss because they didn’t use earplugs in those days. Grandpa had had perfect hearing, so I think Dad is right about Grandpa being a sniper. It makes sense.

At the end of the war, William was given an honourable discharge in 1919 and returned to Vancouver for a short time. A group of wartime friends pooled their money and bought a homestead around Quesnel flats, the entry point to Barkerville. From 1919 to 1927, William worked on the railway and in the mines, inspected homesteads on horseback (he carried a gun), herded cattle and so on to make ends meet. It wasn’t until 1927 that William moved on with his life and became a teacher. He settled back in Vancouver in 1931 and started a family.

My educated guess is that Grandpa was always haunted by his experiences in Passchendaele: seeing soldiers drowning in mud, witnessing comrades being German targets for artillery and machine-gun fire, eating bad food and drinking water tasting like gasoline. Passchendaele was known as one of the disasters of World War I, and I can appreciate why Grandpa escaped reality and lived in the bush of northern British Columbia for over ten years. This solace was his way of regaining composure after such a nightmare of killing and death and destruction. W.F. Maxwell Sr. lived until he was eighty-six.

[To Top]

[Back to Our Own: The Regiments]

[Back to Contents]