J.J. Carney

By Jim Carney Jr., Vancouver

John James (Jim) Carney was born in 1894 on the Simpson cattle ranch in the southern Okanagan Valley of BC. He was the eldest of four siblings. His parents, John Joseph and Bridget (née Casey), were first-generation Irish Canadians, born in Ontario of Irish immigrant parents. After completing high school Jim earned a teaching certificate at the Provincial Normal School in Vancouver and taught for two years in Flagstone, a small farming and logging community—long gone—in the southeast corner of BC near the US border.

On February 7, 1916, just twenty-one years old, he enlisted in the Rocky Mountain Rangers, joining the 172nd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The 172nd spent the summer of 1916 training, living in tents. On May 15 he was promoted to acting corporal. On October 25 the battalion departed Halifax on RMS Mauretania, arriving in Southampton, England, on October 31, and Camp Bramshott in Hampshire, the primary staging base for all British and colonial troops headed for Europe, the next day.

Over the next three months Bramshott suffered outbreaks of both German measles and mumps; Jim fell victim to both, spending several weeks in the isolation hospital at Aldershot. He remained at Bramshott until May as an instructor in physical drill and bayonet fighting.

On May 5, 1917, Jim volunteered to join the 72nd Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, a Vancouver-based kilted regiment then fighting in northern France near the Belgian border. He spent two weeks at the sprawling Allied hospital and staging area of Etaples, France, before joining the 72nd Battalion in early June.

For sixteen months (May 1917 to August 1918), Jim saw extensive action along the Western Front. He had arrived in France just one month after the iconic Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge, which broke the seemingly intractable position of the German army in northwest Europe. Vimy Ridge was part of a broader conflict known as the Arras Offensive. The Seaforths, a component of the 4th Division of the Canadian Corps, were a major force in that campaign, culminating in what is now known as “Canada’s Hundred Days” (August 8 to November 11, 1918).

Carney participated in the holding of Vimy Ridge after its initial capture and subsequent battles in the Arras (France) and Ypres Salient (Flanders/Belgium), including Belleau Wood (June 1 to 26, 1918), as the Allies pushed north (though mercifully not Passchendaele). Most notable was the Battle of Amiens (August 8 to 26, 1918), strategically perhaps as significant as Vimy Ridge, for which Jim (and many other Canadians) was recommended for the Military Medal—a high-level award for “conspicuous gallantry”—which he received on May 12, 1919. (The equivalent for officers was the Military Cross.)

Sent to Officers’ Training School at Bexhill, Seaford, England, on August 31, 1918, he was promoted to lieutenant on November 5, 1918. In those years, given the rigidly class-conscious British military system, an enlisted man from the colonies receiving a commission in the field was exceptional.

Following the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Lieutenant Carney was sent back to Etaples in January 1919 on “conducting” duty. He returned to England in May 1919 and, after several months in various hospitals primarily due to knee injuries and intestinal infections, on August 19 was “recommended for invaliding to Canada,” departing on September 11 on the hospital ship Araguaya. He arrived in Halifax on September 19, where he was again committed to hospital until October 9, 1919. He was twenty-five years old.

Jim returned to Vancouver and taught for two years but in 1922 went to China, volunteering as a “stoker” (shovelling coal into the ship’s boilers) on SS Canadian Inventor. He spent the next seventeen years with the Shanghai municipal council, first as a policeman and later as a public health inspector, while also volunteering in the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, a British-led militia force. In 1935 he married Dora May Sanders, a young Canadian journalist, born in Capetown, South Africa, of English-Irish parents. They had four children, twins Jim (“JJ”) and Pat, Norah and Thomas.

Images this page courtesy of John Edmond

Following evacuation in 1937, a return to Shanghai in 1938 and a final return to Canada in October 1939, Jim Carney enrolled in the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph, Ontario, graduating in 1945 as a doctor of veterinary medicine (DVM).

From 1945 to 1962 Dr. Carney was employed by the government of British Columbia as a livestock inspector in Victoria–Saanich (1945–49), the West Kootenays (based in Nelson,1949–60) and the Fraser Valley (Abbotsford, 1961–62). He and his wife, Dora, spent much of their retirement years on Saturna Island. Dr. Carney died in June 1976 at Shaughnessy Hospital, Vancouver, at the age of eighty-two. Dora died in 1986 on Saturna.

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