Betty and Ross in 2006 celebrating 60 years of marriage.
Betty and Ross during their service, 1944-1945
A visit to the Automotive Building at the Ex in Toronto would become a turning point in the life of my mother, Elizabeth Agnes Smith of Seaforth, Ontario. On January 5, 1943, “Betty” joined the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service. After 861 days of duty, she had made dozens of new friends, visited parts of Canada she had never seen before, survived explosions, riots and even bed bugs. Above all, Betty served her country with distinction during the Second World War. In the midst of the conflict, she met a handsome young pilot from Hamilton who would become the love of her life (and my father, Ross Finlayson).
In July of 1942, the Canadian government gave their approval for the creation of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (W.R.C.N.S.) or in short, the “Wrens”. The air force and army had already admitted women. Females everywhere in the country were doing men’s jobs to free them for combat. It was time the navy followed suit. Betty was full of enthusiasm and a desire to help in the war effort. The young women who signed up were ready to show the country and the world what they could do. Traditional female roles were being challenged....marriages were put on hold, teaching, nursing and office jobs were left for others. Canada was given notice that the Wrens were here to stay and ready to serve their country. To allow more seamen to be on active duty at sea, women were permitted to serve the navy, “on shore.” Training programs for cooks, wardroom assistants, sick berth attendants, laundresses, motor transport drivers, photographers, coders, visual signalers, teletype operators, and telegraphers began almost immediately.
The first class of Wrens were sent to Kingsmill House in Ottawa for basic training. Later in October 1942, a large training base was opened in Galt, Ontario.
When Betty arrived at the Wren Base in Galt, she had to learn that everything was spoken in navy terms as if they were on a ship: bathrooms were “heads”, stairs were “ladders”, waking up was to “hit the deck”, a lounge was a “forecastle”, lights out was “darken ship”, floors were “decks”, halls were “gangways”, leave was “going ashore”, and the kitchen was the “galley”.
After a few weeks of basic training, Betty was shipped off to Halifax, Nova Scotia to be stationed at H.M.C.S. Stadacona. The building was in a pre-war naval base. Stadacona, or the “Stad” for short, was a formal looking three-story red brick building with many windows and bed bugs! Betty arrived at Stadacona on May 12, 1943, and ten days later was signed up for “Coder Training”. She would be learning the secrets of producing and receiving coded messages from the ships at sea. She had to learn pages and pages of short forms and abbreviations for naval terms and detailed information about ships. For example, “AA” meant Anti Aircraft, “DAMS” - Defense Armed Merchant Ships, “DOI”- Died of Injuries, “MPD” - Missing, Presumed Dead, and “N/M”- Nautical Miles. While they were learning their craft the Coders were not allowed to carry any papers from their training sessions around with them for security reasons. Betty and the other Coders were picked up by bus and taken to Operations Headquarters. There they worked with signal women and plotters who kept track of all the shipping in the North Atlantic. The girls must have felt very close to the war and all the tragic news that came into headquarters. Many ships were lost at sea and the names of the dead were passed on through the Coders to the navy.
All messages coming into Operations Headquarters in Halifax were handled by coders like Betty. When messages were sent to Halifax they were in code and had to be ciphered using codebooks. She had to convert these into plain text messages before passing them on to the Navy.
Much of the work was routine and very tedious but there were some very stressful moments. The times Betty and her fellow Coders dreaded were when the teletype machines began to clack and long lists of names came out. It was then they knew that a ship had sunk. What the ship was they did not know until another signal would come in (coded and secret) and when that happened it was their responsibility to see that the information got to the right Navy department so the next-of-kin could be notified as soon as possible. As the war dragged on there were many Canadian ships lost on the Atlantic like the Athabaskan (128 dead), the Esquimalt (44 dead), the Regina (30 dead), or the Valleyfield (125 dead). Many more reports of loss from other Allied ships poured into the Operations Headquarters in Halifax and the Wren coders had to process the information.
After a brief transfer to Wallis House in Ottawa, Betty returned to Halifax a month before the war ended. She was present the evening on May 6, 1945, when Wren Anne Bryden received the coded message, “B-I-G-O-T”. She knew it preceded a top-secret code which was immediately passed on to Ottawa. The end of the war was announced Monday morning, May 7. Betty and the other Wrens at the Stad were overjoyed with the news when they woke up to in the morning. What followed were celebrations inside including a conga line dancing its way through the barracks and toilet paper streaming from the Stad’s windows. The girls inside were having a great time. Outside things were going to be very different.
A lot of people predicted trouble at the end of the war. Halifax was a small city and the large influx of military men and women during the war put a tremendous strain on its housing and other services. Relations in the port of Halifax between its civilians and the tens of thousands of military personnel were never good. The Hamilton Spectator reported a week after the riot that, “The men landing at the dockyard for a few hours leave after days and weeks of discomfort on the North Atlantic were given plenty to gripe about. They talked openly about what they were going to do to the ‘slackers’ (naval parlance for the people of Halifax) when the war was over. What they were going to do was tear it apart. And they did.” (from the Hamilton Spectator, May 12, 1945).
Betty and her fellow Wrens at the Stad knew nothing about the troubles until they noticed that shore patrol was bringing in people from downtown. They could hear the sound of sirens from ambulances and fire trucks. One by one Wrens came in, out of breath, but full of stories of riot and destruction. They told of dashing along Barrington Street past broken windows, through sidewalks of shattered glass and smashed produce. The girls saw overturned police cars and a streetcar on fire. Worse still they reported seeing drunken sailors and civilians looting store after store. The Wrens at Stadacona were ordered to stay inside. No one was allowed to leave the base for 48 hours.
In early July, Betty received her orders to pack up her belongings within the week and leave Stadacona for good. Before she returned home she was part of a mass evacuation of the Stad when a huge explosion rocked the Halifax area. An ammunition barge blew up at the naval magazine jetty on Bedford Basin in the harbour. A chain reaction of fire, explosion and concussion rocked Halifax. The girls were marched off to RCAF Gorsebrook Station to spend the night.
Betty survived the second Halifax explosion and one week later left the port and headed back to Toronto. In early August, Flight Lieutenant Ross Finlayson, her husband to be, was sent home from England. He was a Mosquito pilot in the 409 Night Fighter Squadron. They would be married in September of 1946.
My mom and thousands of other women who served their country in the war were not the same people they had once been. At war's end, Lieutenant Commander Nancy Pyper of the Wrens said it best. “How much they had learned! How greatly their small horizon had widened! Now they knew that they could never again return to the old life of 1939. They had seen sorrow and suffering walk hand in hand with courage. From this time forward they would work for the betterment of the Canada they loved. The service had taught them to accept responsibility, taught them that they had the right to citizenship. In this quiet moment, they looked back while getting ready to go forward.”
Donald Ross Finlayson
Queens ’74
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