Description
Mr. Smith explains the rules that affected one’s permission to go on leave.
Raymond Smith
Raymond Smith was born on July 31st 1920 near Niagara-on-the-Lake. Mr Smith lost his mother as a young boy and during the Depression he worked raising hogs and cattle. When war broke out he decided to join the army, which gave him a much needed raise from five dollars a month breaking horses, to a dollar thirty a day. He got the call for training camp in Regina where he became a driving instructor. He recalls arriving from training camp to England on July 31st 1941. Mr. Smith was an army tank sergeant during the war when he met his wife and they married in 1943 while he was on leave in Manchester, England. After the war, Mr Smith returned home on April 2nd 1946 and worked as a truck driver and later at O'Keefe Brewery.
Transcript
You were entitled to one every three months provided you had the cash, because we had some gamblers and so on, and they’d take their leave and they went away and they was bumming and stealing and so on. So they set up a, when you got a leave, put in for a leave, you had to show how much money you had before they let you out of camp. If you didn’t have enough money to go away for seven days well, they just took your pass away from you or cut it down for two days or.... That was the way they controlled that. It worked all right, I never lost any time.