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Hughes Starts Recruiting, His Way
When Canada stepped up to participate in the Great War it had only a regular
army of 3,110 men and the early stages of a navy. Like other participants, it
was hardly ready for a world war. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Robert Borden
had offered 25,000 fight-ready men for the cause and it was up to Sam Hughes
to gather them from every corner of Canada.
Hughes took recruitment as a personal crusade and did things his way, ignoring
the recruitment and professional communications plans his own staff had carefully
prepared. The official plan was to screen enlistment through Permanent Force
military districts. Instead, on August 6, 1914, Hughes personally sent out 226
telegrams to militia commanders across Canada asking for any able-bodied volunteers
to report for duty - a shotgun rather than a rifle shot. The messages he sent
were often contradictory and caused chaos within his |
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department, much to the distress of his chief of
staff, Willoughby Garnons Gwatkin who had drawn up the government's mobilization
plan.
In Gwatkin's plan, what would become Canada's expeditionary force was to gather
and train a Petawawa, Ontario, which had long been a training site. Hughes had
his own camp in mind, in Valcartier, near Quebec City. Some volunteers would
also go to the old Camp Niagara, long a training ground for Canadian soldiers.
Valcartier was one of five different sites the department had evaluated for a
future training base years earlier. Five thousand acres of land was purchased
at first (later expanded to over 12 thousand acres).
The problem was, there was no training facility at Valcartier when Hughes began
his exhaustive recruitment drive. The contractors on the newly acquired sandy
plain had three weeks and their work cut out for them. |
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Recruiting
Stand in Hamilton
Ignoring
government plans and protocol, Sam Hughes energetically mounted a personal and
disorganized recruiting campaign across the country including at this recruiting
stand in Hamilton, Ontario.. |
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