They were called the Barnbow Lasses: young women and girls working long hours in a munitions factory, helping to sustain the war effort far from the front lines.
On the night of December 5, 1916, that work turned deadly.
An explosion ripped through the Barnbow Munitions Factory near Leeds, killing 35 women and injuring many more. In the aftermath, the story was quickly contained; officially framed, quietly mourned, and rarely questioned.
But behind the headlines were lives interrupted, families forever changed, and truths that did not fully surface for generations.
In this episode, I speak with Antony J. Bell, author of A Penny a Shell, whose own family history is tied to the disaster through Sarah Ann Jennings. Together, we explore not just what happened at Barnbow, but how stories are passed down, reshaped, and sometimes lost.
This is not only the story of an explosion. It is the story of memory, silence… and rediscovery.
On the battlefields of Europe, nearly 4,000 Canadian soldiers were captured and marched into German prison camps. Their diaries describe starvation, forced labour, and the psychological weight of uncertainty. One POW wrote that “one moment we were fighting, the next we were herded like cattle,” while another recalled that “we were not men in that car. We were cargo.” These firsthand accounts illuminate a side of the war often overshadowed by stories of heroism at the front. But while Canadian soldiers endured captivity overseas, a very different — and far less acknowledged — system of confinement was unfolding at home.
Between 1914 and 1920, Canada operated 24 internment camps that imprisoned more than 8,500 civilians, many of them Ukrainian, German, Serbian, and other immigrants who had committed no crime. Under the sweeping powers of the War Measures Act, they were labelled “enemy aliens,” stripped of rights, and forced into labour that helped build parts of Canada’s national parks and infrastructure. As one internee later wrote, “We were not soldiers, yet we lived behind barbed wire.” This episode traces both stories — the soldiers captured in battle and the civilians imprisoned by their adopted country — revealing a complex portrait of fear, resilience, injustice, and the human cost of wartime suspicion. From escape attempts and survival strategies to family separations and the long shadows these camps left behind, Episode 19 challenges the way we remember Canada’s role in the Great War. If you’re drawn to history that goes beyond the battlefield and into the lived experiences of those caught in its wake, this is an episode that stays with you.
The Battle of Mount Sorrel was supposed to be a quiet sector. Instead, on 2 June 1916, the Canadian Corps was hit by one of the most devastating surprise bombardments of the war. Mines erupted beneath their feet, trenches vanished in seconds, and entire units were nearly wiped out as German forces surged across the shattered ridge.
This episode digs into the brutal reality of the fighting around Mount Sorrel, Tor Top (Hill 62), and Sanctuary Wood — the last high ground overlooking Ypres. We follow the chaos of the opening bombardment, the loss of senior Canadian commanders, the desperate early counterattacks, and the meticulously planned assault that finally clawed the ridge back on 13 June.
Through eyewitness accounts, battlefield analysis, and the hard numbers — more than 8,000 Canadian casualties — we uncover how this overlooked battle forged the reputation of the Canadian Corps and reshaped the fight for the Ypres Salient.
By 1918, the Canadian Corps had earned a name across the Western Front: shock troops.
They were sent where the ground was worst. Where the wire was thickest. Where the objective mattered most. British command relied on them. German reports warned about them. After Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Amiens, and the Hundred Days, a reputation took hold: that Canadians were ruthless.
But was it myth? Was it tactical necessity? Or was it something far more complicated?
Drawing on the scholarship of Dr. Tim Cook and the words of the soldiers themselves, this episode of Memory and Valour examines how that reputation was built, and what it cost.
This is battlefield reality. This is moral reckoning. This is Canada at war.
🎙️ Listen now on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon Music (or wherever you get your podcasts). 🌐 Visit www.memoryandvalour.ca for show notes and more.
**content warning: this podcast episode deals with difficult subjects: War trauma, shell shock and veteran suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (WWI) In this episode of Memory and Valour, we explore shell shock within the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War — long before the condition was understood as PTSD.
As trench warfare intensified across France and Belgium, thousands of Canadian soldiers experienced tremors, paralysis, nightmares, memory loss, and emotional collapse. Military authorities debated whether shell shock was caused by exploding artillery, moral weakness, or psychological trauma. Canadian medical officers struggled to treat it effectively, while stigma and misunderstanding often followed men long after they left the front lines. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Canadian hospital records, and contemporary medical thinking, this episode examines how shell shock was experienced and treated within the CEF — and how those early responses shaped our modern understanding of operational stress injuries.
The wounds were not always visible. But they were real.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio. Full show notes and sources are available at http://www.memoryandvalour.ca�.
The Canadian Cavalry Brigade in the First World War In the early months of the First World War, when the world still imagined the conflict would be fast and mobile, Canada sent a cavalry brigade overseas—horsemen trained for a kind of war that was already slipping into the past. By the time the Canadian Cavalry Brigade reached the Western Front in 1915, the trenches had carved the landscape into a static maze of mud and wire. The brigade’s troopers, drawn from regiments like the Royal Canadian Dragoons and Lord Strathcona’s Horse, found themselves fighting dismounted, rifles in hand, learning the grim arithmetic of trench warfare alongside the infantry.
Yet the cavalry never disappeared. They waited. They trained. They kept their horses ready for the moment the front might break open again. And when those rare opportunities came—during the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, or in the final months of 1918—the brigade moved with a speed and violence that seemed almost anachronistic amid the industrial slaughter. Their charge at Moreuil Wood in March 1918, often described as one of the last great cavalry charges in history, was a desperate, close-quarters fight that helped blunt a major German offensive. It was the kind of action that felt ripped from another century, yet it unfolded in the shadow of machine guns and poison gas.
As the war shifted in its final hundred days, the brigade finally found the kind of battlefield it had been built for. The front began to move, villages were liberated in rapid succession, and the Canadians captured prisoners, guns, and ground at a pace that would have been unthinkable earlier in the war. They scouted ahead of advancing infantry, exploited breakthroughs, and—when needed—dismounted to fight on foot with the same determination they had shown in the trenches.
The Canadian Cavalry Brigade’s story is one of adaptation in a war that punished tradition. They were relics of an older military age, yet they carved out a place for themselves in the most modern conflict the world had ever seen. Their legacy lives on not only in regimental histories but in the vivid paintings of artists like Alfred Munnings, who captured the grit, exhaustion, and strange beauty of mounted soldiers fighting a mechanized war.
The 107th Battalion — known as The Timberwolves — was one of the most remarkable and overlooked units in Canada’s First World War history. Made up largely of First Nations soldiers, these men brought extraordinary skill, resilience, and cultural strength to a war that demanded everything from them… and then asked for more.
In this episode, we uncover the story Canada rarely tells: how Indigenous soldiers carved roads through the impossible, built the very infrastructure of the Western Front, and fought with a loyalty that was never fully returned at home. Through history, testimony, and truth, we explore who the Timberwolves were, what they endured, and why their legacy matters now more than ever.
This is the story of courage in the shadows — and the fight to bring it into the light.
Trinity Church was built in 1841 to serve the Anglican community of Christieville, later Iberville, and stands today as one of the clearest reminders of the English-speaking Protestant families who helped shape the Richelieu Valley in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside the church, the cemetery became the final resting place for generations of parishioners whose lives were bound to the church through worship, work, and family.
Trinity Church, Iberville
Among those families were the Milburns, McCaigs, Chapmans, and Proctors, names woven into both the parish and the burial ground behind it. Trinity was not only a place of faith, but of community continuity where children were baptized, marriages solemnized, and loved ones laid to rest.
One of the most enduring memorials within the church honours my great-grandfather Sapper Alexander Richardson Milburn, a parish member and stonemason by trade, who served with the 1st Canadian Engineers and was killed in action at Hill 70 on August 15, 1917. Though he has no known grave overseas, his memory is powerfully preserved at Trinity. In 1934, his children commissioned three stained-glass windows in the church, dedicating them to their father’s sacrifice.
The inscription urges future generations to remember: “Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.”
Alexander’s family — including his daughter (my grandmother) Maggie Jane Milburn — is buried in Trinity Church cemetery, anchoring his story firmly to Iberville soil. Together, the windows and the graves link the cost of war abroad with the quiet endurance of family and community at home.
Today, Trinity Church and its cemetery stand not only as heritage landmarks, but as a testament to the families who built, sustained, and remembered — ensuring that names like Milburn, McCaig, Chapman, and Proctor remain part of the living history of Iberville.
The 107th ‘Timber Wolf’ Battalion was founded by Lieutenant-Colonel Glenlyon Campbell, but its story also belongs to Indigenous men who volunteered to fight for a country that denied them equal rights.
They served without the vote. They returned to fewer rights than they left with. Yet they volunteered anyway.
This story is the next episode of Memory and Valour. Stay tuned!
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When the air turned poisonous the Canadians didn’t retreat; they stood and fought.This episode dives into the first poison-gas attack at Ypres and the brutal legacy it left behind. From the shock of the areen cloud to the lifelonc scars of gas exposure, we follow the Canadians who faced a weapon the world had sworn never to use. A viscera iournev into terror. survival. and the moment modern war crossed a line it could never uncross.
During the first gas attack at Ypres in April 1915, John “Jackie” Lynn found himself in a collapsing line as chlorine gas rolled across the battlefield. With no warning and little protection, Lynn manned his machine gun as the green cloud closed in. He fired continuously into the advancing enemy, holding his position even as the gas burned his lungs and blinded his eyes. At a time when gas masks were scarce or ineffective, Lynn fought without one, refusing to abandon his gun while others around him fell choking to the ground.
Lynn’s stand helped stem the German advance at a moment when the front should have broken completely. But the cost was immense. Prolonged exposure to the gas left him permanently damaged, and he would later die as a result of the injuries sustained during the attack. Awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage under unimaginable conditions, John “Jackie” Lynn’s story is a stark reminder of what gas warfare demanded of those who faced it—men who held their ground not just against the enemy, but against the air itself.
Gas Warfare in the Great War
World War I introduced chemical warfare on an industrial scale, turning the battlefield itself into a weapon. The first gas widely used was chlorine, released in vast clouds that drifted with the wind. Its sharp smell offered little warning, and once inhaled it burned the lungs, causing suffocation and panic. As soldiers adapted with crude gas masks, deadlier agents followed. Phosgene was far more lethal and insidious—often odorless or smelling faintly of cut hay, it could be inhaled without immediate effect, only for the lungs to fill with fluid hours later. Mustard gas, introduced in 1917, did not always kill but left lasting damage. It blistered skin and eyes, burned airways, and contaminated ground for days, ensuring that even survivors carried lifelong injuries. Together, these gases left a legacy of suffering that extended far beyond the armistice, shaping international law and forever changing how war was fought.
