Manning Depot

And then once I had been accepted then of course they told me to pack my bags and get up to Toronto as fast as could. They gave me travel money and that sort of thing to get there.

Well the purpose of Manning Depot is to have a collection point where you could bring in people from all across, well I say all across the country. I think there was a Manning Depot somewhere out west, I'm not exactly sure whether it was Regina or something like that. Comparable to the one in Toronto but not as big, the one in Toronto was pretty massive, it was down on the old grounds, what do you call them? Down by the water front anyway, it was the old exhibition grounds and there was lots of big buildings there so they were able to cram in just piles of these upper lower bunks and that sort of thing. And those are the sort of things we were sleeping in. I remember the food was absolutely horrible. Everybody was complaining about the food and there was almost a strike over it, not that it would have done us much good. But I think they had hired, taken on some caterer and he just was skinning them, the government blind, because he just turned out slops, it was terrible.

Well, this was only the beginning. Manning Depot was really to collect these people, to put them into uniform, to give them inoculations and to do all the things, all the administrative things that had to be done in order to sort them out. And then they, in order to off load the tremendous numbers they would take a group, quite a large group, perhaps fifty, sixty and they'd say, "Okay you sixty guys are going to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia on guard duty."