Bringing Him Home

Another iconic image and another tragic story that tells of a mother’s love for her son and her blind obsession with “Bringing Him Home”. But who was Anna Durie and what was the story behind her picture……

Anna Bella Peel was born on 13 November 1856 in Thornhill in Upper Canada, the second daughter of John Alexander Peel and Frances Burgess. Anna’s parents had emigrated to Canada from County Armagh in Northern Ireland. She and her elder sister, Emily, were raised in New Orleans, although the family home was based in Upper Canada. According to family records, her father had been a newspaper editor who after the civil war, became a highly successful merchant and was noted as a “man of culture and refinement.” Like many other residents, the young sisters and their mother left New Orleans to spend summers in Canada. In 1870 Anna and Emily were taken to Europe to complete their education and over the next three years, they studied painting, music, and languages and visited the great art galleries and opera houses of France, Belgium, and Germany.

Sadly Anna’s mother died in 1873 and just a few years later, in 1877, when she was just 21, Anna became engaged to William Smith Durie, deputy adjutant-general of Military District No.2 (Toronto and Central Ontario) of the Canadian Militia, a man 43 years her senior. William Durie was forcibly retired from army service in 1880, the year of his marriage, and to his great indignation, he received two years’ pay but no pension. Although he had spent much of his personal fortune improving Ontario’s volunteer militia, he went ahead with plans to build a grand home for his bride on Spadina Road just north of Toronto, on a site overlooking the city. He named it Craigluscar after the Durie estate near Dunfermline, Scotland. The couple had two children, William Arthur Peel (known in the family by his second name Arthur), who was born on 8 August 1881, and Helen Frances Peel, who followed two years later. The Duries’ circle encompassed many of Toronto’s elite and William, or Arthur as he was known, was destined to lead an uneventful life as a banker, but fate and the German Army firmly put paid to those plans after War broke out in 1914.

(Birth Record for William Arthur Peel Durie – Archives of Ontario; Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Series: Registrations of Births and Stillbirths, 1869-1913; Reel: 52; Record Group: Rg 80-2)

Anna was a devoted mother with an avid interest in genealogy, accumulating material relating to the Durie family going back to the 16th century. She was a member of St. Thomas’ Anglican Church, vice-president of the Conservative Women’s Club, a member of the Canadian Author’s Association, a life member of the Canadian Red Cross, and President of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals from 1912 to 1915.

(Arthur, Anna and Helen at the family home date unknown – Image courtesy of the City of Toronto Archives Fonds 1065, Series 833, File 5, Item 1)

William Durie died less than five years after the marriage, and during the business decline of the 1890’s Anna Durie lost her home and 15 acres on Spadina Road. By this time money was scarce for the young widow, however, the education of her children was important to Anna and she still managed to send both children to private schools, Arthur to Upper Canada College and Helen to Bishop Strachan. Helen flourished at Bishops Strachan, whereas Arthur found school a constant struggle. The teachers wrote; “seems to work hard and a little slow.” Arthur left school and joined The Royal Bank of Canada as a Junior. His sister Helen wrote to her grandfather, “he likes the work ever so much better than he did at first, I do hope he will succeed. He is not clever, but is exceedingly persevering, and mother and I hope that he will succeed.”

Prior to the outbreak of The Great War, Arthur attended the Toronto School for Military Instruction during October and December 1908 and attained the award and honour of ‘Subaltern’. Note; A subaltern is a British military term for a junior officer. Literally meaning “subordinate”, subaltern is used to describe commissioned officers below the rank of Captain and generally comprises the various grades of Lieutenant.

(William Arthur Peel Durie’s Certificate of Military Instruction – Library and Archives Canada; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; Series: RG9 II-K-6; Volume: 41)

The Schools of Military Instruction were established in Toronto and Quebec by a Military General Order on 25 February 1864 in order to train Militia officers and candidates for Militia commissions “in a knowledge of their military duties, drill and discipline.” All field officers and adjutants were required to earn a First Class Certificate, proving themselves in drill and Battalion field situations. Persons interested in becoming company officers were required to obtain a Second Class Certificate. The ‘Short Course’ training lasted three months, after which point exceptional officers may be selected for the twelve-month ‘Long Course’. There were four classes of certificates which included First and Second Class for officers, and Third and Fourth Class for non-commissioned officers, gunners, and drivers.

(William Arthur Peel Durie’s Course in Military Instruction – Library and Archives Canada; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; Series: RG9 II-K-6; Volume: 172)

In 1915, after the outbreak of War, Arthur enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force as an officer of the 36th Regiment and on 22nd November 1915 Arthur set sail for England, aged 34, as a Lieutenant of the 58th Infantry Battalion. Arthur’s mother Anna was extremely unhappy that her one and only son was going to War and tried to pull all the strings she could to try to keep him away from the Frontline. Anna was unsuccessful in stopping Arthur from going to War, so her next best option was to follow him to Europe and the Western Front, where she took up residence in London. It was from here that she relentlessly petitioned British, French, and Red Cross officials to allow her to volunteer as a nurse on the Western Front, just to be that little bit closer to her only son. Arthur sent his mother and sister letters about his life in the trenches telling them that the countryside reminded him of Ontario, “as you walk through the lovely country you would not know there was a war on”. In another letter home he advised his mother not to send the helmet as he wouldn’t wear it, “Officers just didn’t do that.”

(William Arthur Peel Durie)

(WW1 CEF Personnel Files, 1914-1918 for William Arthur Peel Durie – Library and Archives Canada; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; CEF Personnel Files; Reference: RG 150; Volume: Box 2775 – 5)

On 5th May 1916 near the town of Zillebeke, at Ypres, Belgium, Arthur was shot and seriously wounded in the right shoulder. The wound was near fatal and the doctors listed his condition as “dangerously ill.” A bullet had passed through his right lung and into his chest and lodged in an inoperable position, narrowly missing his heart. The bullet would remain there for the rest of his life and never be removed. Anna was shocked when she visited Arthur and commented;“His breath came with such difficulty that he could only speak in gasps,” when she wrote to her daughter, aghast at the blood that came out of his mouth when he tried to talk”. He was admitted to Queen Alexandra’s Hospital at Millbank and the record shows ‘Gunshot wounds to chest”.

(The  National Archives War Office; First World War Representative Medical Records of Servicemen MH 106/1772)

After convalescing in Britain and France, Arthur was destined for a safe staff position which Anna had secured with Canada’s Minister of Militia and Defence, Sir Samuel Hughes, however, he refused to accept it, telling his mother; “I do not want a job, and was very sorry you spoke to Sir Samuel Hughes. I could have got some sort of a job in London, but would rather rejoin the 58th. Everyone knows I want to go back and I am afraid you have only done me harm. I know dearest Mother, you think you do things for the best, but don’t you think you are a little impetuous? This is a battalion where all the officers and men return to their own battalions in France, and I will rejoin the 58th in due course,” he wrote in a letter home on 20 November 1916.

Arthur rejoined his unit again on December 1916, but only lasted two weeks on the front where it became abundantly clear that he was not ready for action and was ordered to return away from the frontline. During this time he was able to meet his mother Anna and there is a record of Anna Durie arriving in Liverpool on Christmas Eve 1916, sailing from New York.

(Passenger  Record for Anna Durie 1916 – The National Archives of the UK; Kew, Surrey, England; Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department and successors: Inwards Passenger Lists.; Class: BT26; Piece: 628; Item: 58)

After spending Christmas 1916 with his mother, Arthur returned to the frontline once more, in March 1917, just in time for the assault on Vimy Ridge. At this time, driven by a quest for validation or maybe to escape the clutches of his smothering mother, Arthur was determined to make his mark with his battalion. The Canadian Corps were part of the assault on Vimy Ridge on 9th April 1917 and remained here for the summer months before eventually being moved, in October 1917, over to Passchendaele and the 3rd battle of Ypres, where his battalion were decimated. Arthur survived the battle and even managed a trip to England on leave, where he was able to meet up with his anxious mother, who even managed to buy him a new pair of boots. He returned to his unit just before Christmas on 22nd December 1917 and just one week later on 29th December 1917, Arthur’s war was over, he was killed by mortar fire near Lens, France and buried in Corkscrew Cemetery. At the time Anna was crossing the Atlantic to visit her daughter in Canada and she learned of his fate only when she stepped off the train at the North Toronto Station. Arthur’s war was sadly over, but for Anna, her story was about to begin…………

(Library and Archives Canada; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; War Graves Registers: Circumstances of Death; Record Group Number: RG 150, 1992-93/314; Volume Number: 174)

Initially, she seems to have accepted her son’s interment overseas, probably with the belief that it would be temporary; in 1918 she wrote that “with their comrades in arms our heroes sleep in an enchanted ground.” But after the conflict was over, she became increasingly preoccupied with bringing her son’s body home. The Great War had cost the Allied forces over 5 million lives, including those of roughly 60,000 Canadians, far too many to allow for repatriation of their remains, even if they could be identified. In 1915 Fabian Arthur Goulstone Ware, founder of what would become the Imperial War Graves Commission, had argued that officers “in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred will tell you that if they are killed [they] would wish to be among their men.” Another concern was that only the well-to-do would be able to bring their loved ones back. Even our own Royal Family were unsuccessful in repatriating Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, who was killed in WW1. Prince Maurice of Battenberg was the only member of the Royal Family to lose his life on the battlefield, but despite the Royal families campaign, even they had to concede and the Queen’s grandson is buried in Ypres Town Cemetery alongside his fallen comrades.

It was eventually decided that soldiers of the British empire would be left where they had been buried, “facing the line they gave their lives to maintain.” Objections were many, but as time passed and the IWGC cemeteries blossomed, arguments fell away. Anna, however, would not be silenced. Petty rules, necessary for the common soldier, did not apply to a Durie. She had lost her son when he went to war, and by 1920 she was determined to regain both his body and his legacy. She also constantly lobbied for Arthur to receive a posthumous award for bravery, her request for the award of a Military Cross went all the way to the Canadian Corps HQ where it was denied on 19 January 1919. Anna petitioned Canadian officials for permission to return Arthur’s remains to Canada, at her own expense, but it was to no avail. She had become obsessed with the idea that her son’s remains would be lost and believed that if the commission was charged with moving the bodies to another cemetery, they would only move the crosses, and leave the bodies where they lay.

So in June 1921 Anna and her daughter Helen went to France. Despite attempts by local IWGC officials to restrain this “quite unreasonable” woman, Anna and her daughter, aided by two local men, exhumed Arthur’s blanket-wrapped body from Corkscrew British Cemetery, near Loos-en-Gohelle, on the night of 30 July 1921. However, when the body, now placed in a zinc-lined coffin, was hoisted onto a waiting cart, however, the cart collapsed under the weight of the coffin and Anna had no choice but to return Arthur’s remains back to his grave, but she would not be defeated and vowed to return to “claim her son”. Anna actually confessed to this attempted robbery of the grave in a letter to the Imperial War Graves Commission in January 1925.

“When I exhumed my son’s body I found him only about 4 feet below the surface of the ground and now the top of his coffin is not more than 3 feet below. With the assistance of one of the two Frenchmen who were with us, I and my daughter laid him in this oak coffin, which is lined with metal of some kind and the coffin bears a leaden plate with his name and the number of his battalion.”

What is extremely interesting is that on the Canadian War Graves Register the fact that his remains were exhumed and returned to Toronto is actually recorded on the record cards.

(Library and Archives Canada; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; War Graves Registers: Circumstances of Death; Record Group Number: RG 150, 1992-93/314; Volume Number: 251)

(Canada, CEF Commonwealth War Graves Registers, 1914-1919 – Library and Archives Canada (LAC); War Graves Registry: Commonwealth War Graves. RG150, 1992-1993/314, Box 39-244; Box: 65)

Four years later the two women returned, just as Anna has promised herself she would, and tried again. In February 1925 Anna learned that those interred at Corkscrew had been moved to the Loos British Cemetery nearby, seemingly confirming her worst fears that her son would lie in an unmarked site. This was too much for Anna, so on 25 July 1925, under the cover of darkness, Captain Durie’s remains were once more exhumed and clandestinely removed to Canada. Anna had finally achieved what she had always set out to do, “Bring her boy home”. For three days Arthur’s body lay “in state”, in the front room of the St George Street house, before being buried on 22 August 1925, in the family plot in St.James’ Cemetery.

(Image courtesy of the City of Toronto Archives. Avec la permission des Archives de Toronto. Series 833, File 2 Item 2. Torontonian Anna Durie finds the grave of her son, Cpt. William Arthur, near Lens France, 1921.)

The announcement of Captain Durie’s Military Funeral in Toronto, on 22 August 1925, prompted an investigation by the Imperial War Graves Commission and the resulting report published on 4 September 1925 painted a gruesome picture. “The coffin was found to have been forced open, the timbers had been broken and the zinc shell had been cut open. The coffin was empty apart from a few small pieces of bone and fragments of clothing.”

In one last act of defiance, Anna even filled out a form to request a personal inscription for the headstone which was planned for her son’s grave at Loos, knowing full well that he was no longer there. The epitaph she wrote was:

“He took the only way and followed it unto the glorious end”

The French authorities never found the parties responsible for the Durie grave robbing. They wanted to come to Toronto to investigate their prime suspect, but the commission gently urged against this, they knew they would appear as the vindictive organisation, a “heartless tyrannical body still pursuing an unfortunate mother.” Captain Durie was carried to his final resting place by members of 58th Battalion and The Toronto Star reported:

“Nearly eight years after he made the supreme sacrifice in the firing line at Lens, the body of Captain W.A.P. Durie, 58th Battalion CEF was laid at rest in his native soil at St. James Cemetery this afternoon. His mother and sister who, after eight years of effort had succeeded in obtaining custody of his remains followed them to the grave in company with a reverent gathering of friends and former comrades”

Anna Durie succumbed to cancer in December 1933 at the age of 77. Her daughter, Helen, never married, she died in 1963. She is buried with her family, but not listed on the monument, overshadowed for eternity by her older brother Arthur. They are both buried next to William and Arthur in St James’ Cemetery. An eight-foot cross of sacrifice marks Arthur’s grave.

(Monument Honouring William Arthur Peel Durie. St. James’ Cemetery, Toronto. Photo by S. Abba, October 2020)

(Monument Honouring William Arthur Peel Durie. St. James’ Cemetery, Toronto. Photo by S. Abba, October 2020)

(Monument Honouring William Arthur Peel Durie. St. James’ Cemetery, Toronto. Photo by S. Abba, October 2020.)

(Memorial Plaque Honouring William Arthur Peel Durie. St. James’ Cemetery, Toronto. Photo by S. Abba)

Anna Durie’s story is told thanks to a manuscript of her son’s wartime letters held at Toronto Archives and almost 100 years after her son’s death, and 80 years after her own, Anna remains both the narrator and controller of his life. A woman true to her word, who despite the odds, managed to “bring her boy home”.

(Ann Durie – Image courtesy of the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1065, Series 833, File 3, Item 5.)

Special thanks to Veronica Maddocks who has generously allowed me to use some of her source material for the purposes of this blog.

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