Home>> Homefront>> The Plan in Alberta >> RAAF>> First Hand-Impressions

First Hand Impressions

Coming from the southern hemisphere, some things about Canada seemed absolutely backwards to Australians like Gordon R. Clift. "Customs were so different. Christmas is summertime in Australia. Homes never needed heating. The lowest temperature 
I ever saw before Canada was about 25º F. In Claresholm in Jan/Feb 1943 we 
had a five day blizzard with winds up to 50 mph. For two days the temperature 
was –56º F."

Colder than Down Under, the Aussies didn’t let the new climate prevent them from enjoying local attractions. William F. Belford and company, exploring Edmonton, made sure that "when we ventured out we had to be properly rugged up and wear rubber ‘overshoes’ to stop our feet from freezing. In fact when we first ventured in to Edmonton we found it necessary to make frequent visits to the heated shops to warm ourselves up before again facing the icy blasts of cold air and snow out on the sidewalks as the Canadians called their footpaths." Some never got the opportunity to discover the capital city, although that didn’t seem to matter to William de Boos. "We worked Sunday", he said in a letter to his mother back home in Australia, "and got no overnight leave. That doesn’t matter because Edmonton is an awful dump of a town, and I’d far sooner stay at the camp."

Belford also had no problems with life at the station (No. 36 Service Flying Training School, Penhold), describing it as "very pleasant. The trainees lived in long huts which accommodated 66 men. We slept in two-tiered bunks set along the walls leaving a walkway down the middle. Each hut was connected to a similar one by a set of showers and toilets which were shared by the occupants of both huts. The overall effect was that of an H shaped hut, double glazed and centrally heated. We used the hot water pipes of the central heating system to dry any washing overnight." There was, nevertheless, the odd difficulty: "The Australians were shower happy, not so our English friends next door, so when we used all the hot water one morning they complained to the Admin. Section that they had no hot water for shaving."

Other problems with life in Alberta were summarily dealt with, like the legal drinking age. "The Government ran liquor stores at Edmonton and Calgary where you could purchase a fixed amount of bottled alcohol each month. To do this you had to be in possession of a Liquor license, which were available to anyone over the age of 21 years. As most of us were born in 1925 it was necessary for us to alter the year of birth as shown on our Air Force Identity cards to 1923. This we did, so on 1st June 1944, I obtained my license and all was well."

While the Australians bore most of these challenges with good humour, they could only be pushed so far. Certain Canadian Air Force regulations, for instance, provoked some serious Australian outrage. One such regulation dealt with acknowledging the Canadian flag. Explains Belford, "The flag flew beside the main path which skirted the parade and was passed every time we went to or from our huts to the administrative buildings. On the path opposite the flag were painted two white lines about 10 metres apart and anyone marching between those lines had to salute the flag. We had enough of having to salute any officer who crossed our paths without this and we did our best to avoid that path. One morning the flag party arrived to raise the flag and found that the flagpole had been cut down. There was a great uproar in the camp and the Australians were blamed. They cancelled our leave until the ‘culprit’ owned up. Nobody did and the situation was only defused when the senior Royal Australian Air Force officer in Canada came from Ottawa and sorted things out."

The Australians seemed generally flexible, though; Belford even taught himself how to skate in Sydney before coming over. He did, however, find other lesser-known winter activities to be somewhat puzzling. "[A] strange, to us, activity was the sport of ‘curling’. Here a large flat circular metal disk was pushed off from one end of the ice runway towards the target engraved in the ice at the other end. The players in the team whose disk was gliding down the ice were allowed to brush the ice with special brooms to enable the disk to keep it moving at a better rate, or to slow it by brushing snow back on to the disk’s path if it looked like going too fast and might sail past the target. It seemed a fairly crazy sort of game but the contestants and the audience seemed to be very excited about the efforts to speed up or slow the disk as was deemed necessary during the glide."