Friends Forums

Guest Speaker – Dr. Ross N Hebb

“A Canadian Chaplain in the Great War – B J Murdoch’s, The Red Vineyard”

When Canadians think of the First World War they seldom think of the 500 men who served as Chaplains. This is more than an  oversight; it is a collective loss. Chaplains were older, more mature, better educated and experienced at the task of communicating concepts and experience to a diverse audience. As a result, Chaplains were better able to articulate both the War itself and what they saw during their service. Only two Canadian chaplains wrote detailed accounts of their Great War experience. One was the well known, indeed famous and well-connected Canon Fred Scott of Montreal. The other was a little-known Catholic priest from a small town in New Brunswick, Fr B J Murdoch. Murdoch’s account easily stands up in a comparison to Scott’s, The Great War as I Saw It. Murdoch’s work gives us something which Scott cannot – a Canadian Catholic perspective on the experience. Murdoch was a young, impressionable and devoted priest. His experience of the Great War did not remain external to his inner life. Murdoch uniquely and humbly relates both what he saw and did and how it affected him at the time. Murdock relates his experience of developing ‘shell shock’ or PTSD. He does so in an attempt to communicate to the Canadian public why their ‘boys’ were not the same as the men who, a few years previously, had left to fight for King and Country.

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