Huron County and the First World War: Newspaper Man Enlists

From my research into Huron County’s newspapers, it’s clear that a lot of effort, long hours and personal sacrifice often went into putting a paper to press and ensuring the latest edition reach local subscribers’ doorsteps on time.

There were few excuses that could justify a late paper on the part of its proprietors: perhaps broken equipment, the precedence of a contracted print job, adverse weather, public holidays, or even the rare editor’s vacation.

One of the most notable reasons to stop the presses, however, occurred in 1916 when The Dungannon News ceased publication entirely because its editor enlisted to serve overseas with Huron’s 161st Battalion.

Born in 1891 in Blanshard Township, Perth County, Charles Arthur Harold ‘Harry’ Bellamy had moved to Huron by 1908 when his stepfather Leslie S. Palmer – a former staffer at the St. Marys Journal and owner of the Wroxeter Star – founded The Dungannon News.

His sisters, Amelia and Luella Bellamy, also worked locally as operators for the Dungannon telephone office.

When his mother and stepfather moved to Goderich in 1914, Harry became both editor and publisher of the News while still in his early 20s.

As editor, H. Bellamy strongly supported Canada’s involvement in the Great War within the pages of his publication, and by March 1916 had decided to enlist himself.

At only 24-years-old, and a newlywed of less than two years with his wife Annie Pentland of Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh (ACW), Editor Bellamy signed up to serve with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces at Goderich.

With the department of its proprietor, The Dungannon News merged with Goderich’s Tory weekly, The Star, and the newsman became the news, as fellow editors praised Harry Bellamy’s decision in the columns of their papers.

Assigned to the 58th Battalion in Europe, Private Bellamy appeared once again in the pages of the local weeklies through his letters from the front.

Stationed ‘somewhere in France’ on December 26, 1916, Harry wrote to his friend F. Ross of how his ‘three- or four-days’ trench life’ had begun with digging out a trench collapsed by shellfire; he had become accustomed to ducking down for enemy fire, no matter how deep the mud and water is’.

While evading sniper bullets in a no man’s land crater, Bellamy says he pretended he was at home, practicing with friends at the Dungannon Rifle Association.

Imagining away the conditions he described would have no doubt been difficult: ‘We sleep and rest in the dugouts, which are 20 to 25-feet underground. After splashing, crawling and wading through trench mud for hours at a time, we find it quite a relief to get down in these underground quarters.’

On Christmas day, Bellamy witnessed ‘a fierce bombardment…It was a magnificent sight to see the green and red flames and the shells with their tails of fire flying…The noise and din of the various kinds of explosives in use was deafening’.

In the same letter, which Goderich’s The Signal printed on its front page, he claimed that the brutal lifestyle had not dampened the soldiers’ spirits: ‘We never worry over here. We content ourselves with singing, ‘Pack all your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile’.

Although he was writing for the local papers, Private Bellamy could not regularly read them in Europe and complained that the delays in mail also prevented him from keeping up to date with happenings in Huron County.

According to his service records, a year after he had enlisted at Goderich, Harry fell ill with trench fever, an infectious disease carried by body lice.

He left France for treatment in the United Kingdom and after complaining of pain in his limbs at York County Hospital, doctors at the King’s Red Cross Canadian Convalescent diagnosed him with myalgia (joint paint) and an abnormally fast pulse.

In articles subsequently written for the Goderich Star, Private Bellamy did not detail his failing health, instead returning to his pen to share his experiences sightseeing on leave in Scotland and Ireland in August 1917.

Ever a committed imperialist, he enjoyed witnessing the Glorious Twelfth celebrations in Belfast, but reported caring less for his time in southern Ireland, since ‘there is no love lost between those in khaki and the Irish rebels’.

He felt wistfulness upon the end of his holiday, but Private Bellamy’s belief in the righteousness of the war had not wavered. He used his Star articles to rally home front sentiments against peace until the enemy could be decisively defeated: ‘Let…every one of us, as Canadians, recapture the heroic mood in which we entered the war’.

Unable to resume his duties as a soldier, Private Bellamy returned to Canada, where in addition to his persistent trench fever, he received a diagnosis of neurasthenia – a contemporary term broadly used for nervous disorders.

After his homecoming, he reappeared frequently in the local news columns, usually receiving mention for promoting the war effort at local patriotic events or canvassing for Victory Loans.

Other brief news items hint, however, that although Private Bellamy had returned home to Dungannon, he had not left the trenches entirely behind.

He received treatment at a London hospital in early 1918 according to The Signal.

Following a social call from former editor Bellamy, the Clinton New Era classified his nervous illness as ‘shell shock’, a mental and emotional disorder common to returning soldiers, which today would be understood as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In April 1918, a medical board at Guelph honourably discharged Bellamy as medically unfit due to illness contracted on active service.

His records list a ‘nervous debility’ as well as trench fever as the causes for his dismissal and note that ‘this man would be able to do more than one quarter of a days’ work’.

The listed symptoms in his medical records include dizzy spells, light headedness, restlessness, hand tremors, headaches, and an irregular heartbeat.

The Board determined that the probable duration of his debility was ‘impossible to state’.

Despite experts’ doubts about his ability to cope with a full-time job, Bellamy received a temporary government position as North Huron’s Registrar for 1918’s National Registration Day effort.

The federal government intended this wartime ‘man and woman power census’ to identify available labour forces for the home front and overseas by requiring all Canadians over 16 years old to register.

Nothing in the newspapers suggests that Harry Bellamy returned to printing or publishing on a full-time basis in Dungannon.

After the war was over in 1919, Ashfield accepted Bellamy’s application for the township’s annual printing contract with special consideration to him as a ‘returned soldier’, but according to an item in The Wingham Advance, he later declined the work for the pay offered.

There was evidently a vocation that Harry Bellamy now felt more passionately for than journalism, because in May of that year, the New Era records that moved to Toronto to accept a bureaucratic position, ‘in connection with the re-establishment of soldiers.’

In 1921, Bellamy ultimately sold The Dungannon News printing equipment to a buyer from Meaford, and he and wife Annie settled permanently in Toronto.

They didn’t entirely disappear from print, however, as local news columns over the next decade continued to note the couple’s visits to friends and family in Huron County.

Following Private Bellamy’s story via short items in the county papers certainly does not provide a full picture of his life, nor the toll of his experiences in the trenches of France.

The information gleaned, though, does speak to the value of these local weeklies as historical resources, and that comparing them against other records – in this case Private Bellamy’s military personnel files can help us to read between the lines.

It’s also a pertinent reminder that both historical and news sources are better understood if we know a little about the context and perspective of the people creating them.

What emerged in this case was the story of a man whose politics on the page never changed, whose service to the Canadian government continued beyond the battlefield and loyalty to the British empire never faltered, but who nevertheless could not quite pack the personal consequences of war away in an ‘old kit bag and smile, smile, smile’.

Some collections are on permanent display in the Military Gallery on the second floor of the Huron County Museum and Historic Gaol.

Right now, the museum has a temporary small exhibit upstairs in the upper mezzanine that was curated by a local youth group that focuses on women’s stories from the First and Second World Wars.

Visit these exhibits at the Huron County Museum to find out more information about war efforts made by those in the area.

For more information on local stories, visit https://www.huroncountymuseum.ca/stories/

Sinead Cox is the Curator of Engagement and Dialogue at Huron County Museum