Remembrance Day post: The Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland

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Letters from Beauly: the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland.

I thought that I would include a post for Remembrance Day tomorrow by publicizing a Canadian Forest History project that has already seen quite a bit of mention in the press, Melynda Jarratt’s book (in progress) on the CFC’s activities in Scotland during the Second World War.

Jarratt is a Fredricton historian and her grandfather, Pat Hennessy, had been a cook in the Forestry Corps in the 1940s. He was one of 7000 Canadian lumbermen who served felling trees in the Scottish highlands for the Second World War effort. The wood was required for everything from ammunition crates and building materials to soldiers’ coffins.

Hennessy’s family, in Bathurst New Brunswick, had known about Pat’s war service but it was the more recent discovery of Pat’s 300 wartime letters in an attic archive that caught Melynda’s interest. Having already done research on Canada’s war brides, she is currently putting all of her grandfather’s letters onto a website, www.lettersfrombeauly.com, and is looking for stories from surviving veterans of the Forestry Corps to complement the letters. These will all be used to inform a book project, and the letters will be donated to the New Brunswick Archives.

If you have funds to help support this project, or wish to volunteer to help transcribe the letters, you can reach Melynda via the lettersfrombeauly webpage.

Featured image: Photo by shayd johnson on Unsplash.

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David Brownstein

David Brownstein is the Principal of Klahanie Research Ltd (www.klahanieresearch.ca). He is also a longstanding UBC sessional instructor, and the continuing co-ordinator of NiCHE's "The Canadian Forest-History Preservation Project" (still facilitating archival donations after 11 years).

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