Reminders of Arthur’s sons and daughters old and young dot this rural Ontario village.
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The further we get from World War ll, the more the patriotism flows into this village on Highway 6, 41 kilometres north of Guelph.

Old soldiers, sailors and airmen are of course dying and when they do, their families often wonder what to do with grandpa’s military uniform, medals and other paraphernalia he brought home from his days of marching.

For many it means shipping them off to Canada’s most patriotic community. This village has worn that title since 1942 when the Toronto Star reported Arthur had contributed Canada’s highest percentage of its local citizens to fight in the war.

With a population of 836, Arthur had 116 citizens in uniform overseas.

Plus, it also had the highest spending per capita in Canada for buying war bonds which helped Ottawa finance the war effort. This village bought $250,000 in war bonds, which is the equivalent of three-quarters of the community’s tax base.

And today one of Arthur’s W.W. II vets – 95-year-old John Walsh – operates a museum that records and salutes the war-time contributions of the people of Arthur and Area. The museum is a division of the Arthur and Area Historical Society because there’s more to the community than just its war efforts.

The village sits in the midst of Ontario’s finest agriculture lands. On Saturdays it hosts one of the province’s finest farm markets. Unfortunately the museum is open only on Wednesday afternoons from from 1 to 3.

There are Canada flags and banners hanging throughout the village on homes and businesses.

Walsh, a retired pharmacist, survived the Battle of the Atlantic as a sailor on HMCS Wallaceburg, a mine sweeper that hunted down Nazi submarines as it escorted convoys of supply ships across the Atlantic.

The Battle of the Atlantic was the biggest battle of the entire war, lasting six years from 1939 to 1945. More than 3,500 supply ships were sunk, plus 175 Allied warships. The Germans lost 783 U-boats, plus 47 surface raiders like the battleships Bismark and Tripitz.

Wallaceburg survived the war, spent 10 years as a training vessel for reservists and was then sold to Belgium in 1959 as a coastal patrol vessel. It was scrapped in 1969.

By that time Walsh had graduated from University of Toronto and was operating his successful pharmacy in Arthur, which is now in the hands of one of his five sons, plus a grandson. He also has three daughters.

You can still see Walsh’s warship. It’s depicted at sea on a huge wall mural on the Frederick St. wall of Sussman’s clothing store. Sussman’s is one of the largest and most popular men’s clothing stores in Southwestern Ontario. The 106-year-old store fronts onto Highway 6, which is also Arthur’s main street. The military museum is directly across the street.

Walsh now operates the military museum in Arthur’s chamber of commerce building, but has run out of room to display all the artifacts veterans and their families have sent him, mostly from the Arthur area, but also from around Ontario and across Canada. There’s plenty more in storage off site.

Among the most emotional documents are letters sent home to Mom by their boys overseas. Those letters were read and recorded by former CBC researcher Gail Donald, who grew up in nearby Kenilworth, worked 40 years in Toronto and retired to Arthur to help Walsh catalogue his thousands of artifacts.

Many of the letters and diaries read like young men enjoying fun times in Britain and away from the front lines, but many of them ended with a notation like . . .

“We’re back in the air tomorrow morning for a bombing run over Germany.”

. . . but that was the last entry.

By the end of the war there were 338 Arthur residents in uniform and 25 were killed in action.

Their names are carved into a large cenotaph just a couple doors further up main street from the historical society. It was the first war memorial cenotaph built in Ontario using field stones gathered on the farms where many of Arthur’s warriors grew up. Buying the land and the cost of construction was covered by local women, mostly the mothers, wives, sisters and girlfriends of those who went overseas.

In spring the cenotaph is awash with red tulips sent from Holland to thank Arthur for sending its men to help liberate Holland from Nazi occupation.

The museum also salutes a younger generation of Arthur veterans who recently served in the Canadian Armed Forces, like Captain Debbie (Mullin) Hynes. She was a flight nurse with the RCAF, who has served in Afghanistan and in Rwanda with General Romeo Dallairde during the Rwanda genocide. She is now a civilian and was recently teaching field nursing to cadets at the Royal Military College in Kingston until Covid-19 erupted.

Sergeant Tom Tennant of Arthur was the aide-de-camp for Lord Louis Mountbatten, British Admiral of the Fleet, during his two visits to Canada. He attended Mountbatten’s funeral who was assassinated by the IRA in 1979.

Walsh said he believes Arthur had such an impressive turn out of volunteers during World War Two because there as was a similar turn out of volunteers for World War One.

“We were the sons and daughters of local people who volunteered to defend Canada during the first world war. It just seemed to be the natural thing to do when our turn came,” said Walsh.

He said Arthur petitioned the Department of National Defence to have a new Canadian warship named after Canada’s most patriotic community. “They told us there is already a vessel named Port Arthur and it would be too confusing to have another.”

Arthur, near the top of Wellington County, is named after Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

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