Monthly Archives: August 2023

Korea, Peacekeeping

National Peacekeepers Day

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On 9 August 2023, members of the Association gathered at Peacekeepers Park in Angus.

Following the Second World War, the Regiment’s next major historic event was the 2nd Battalion’s deployment to the United Nations Korean Mission in 1954 which followed an armistice.

Some of the young soldiers who participated in the mission were Lieutenant-General Charlie Belzile, Frank Sypulski and Joe Byatt.

There were seven fatalities from the Regiment attributed to the Mission:

  1. Rifleman N.P. Ferland– 31 March 1954 – Accidentally killed by a vehicle
  2. Sergeant G.W. Koch– 4 August 1954 – Drowned during recreational swimming
  3. Lieutenant N.M. Anderson– 25 August 1954 – Accidentally killed in an airplane crash
  4. Lieutenant M.C. Vipond– 18 March 1955 – Died in barracks fire
  5. Rifleman G.P. Reid – 11 June 1955 – Killed in a car accident in Saskatchewan while on leave
  6. Major P.E. Gower– 9 December 1956 – Airplane crash in the Rocky Mountains while returning from Korea

Association members at that day s event are: Peacekeeper Don Mitchell, Association Toronto Branch President Brian Budden, Major-General Lewis Mackenzie the reviewing officer, Association Padre John Howie and Robert Chan.

General Mackenzie laid a QOR wreath with the Association members at the Wall of Honour.

Archives, Cadets, Regular Force

Access to Archival Materials

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One of our goals is to provide access to archival materials that may have potential interest to researchers. We have been doing some of this through pages on this website.

In the past year, however, our collections management database has been upgraded to allow us to add documents such as pdfs which can also be made available in the Public Access view – the one any visitor can see. So where we have scanned certain documents, we can now provide the scans to researchers rather than just describe that record.

We recently scanned the seventy-three issues of the “Regimental Newsletter” (talk about monotonous!) which were published by the Regimental Depot between 25 November 1959 and 30 June 1970.  These varied in size from the first issue of 2 pages to the last which was 88 pages. They cover more than half of the cold war period when the regiment consisted of a regular force training depot, two regular force battalions, and a militia battalion. These supplemented the annual “Powder Horn” publications (1960-1970) and provided information about and often letters from officers deployed or posted externally to the battalions, various postings, promotions, obituaries, cadet corps updates, museum reports, cartoons, and a host of other tidbits.

Another example of recently scanned material is several scrapbooks of news clippings of the 1910 Trip to England which have recently proved valuable to a researcher writing a book on the trip:

From a 1910 Trip Scrapbook

In addition, we can also add URLs to the record and again make them available in the Public Access View. That means if we’ve already uploaded scans to our website, we can just link to that from the collection record. We’ll be working on updating those links in the future.

In the meantime, you can find a variety of materials on our Research and our Archives page with past issues of the annual Rifleman Magazine and the Powder Horn newsletters (not the annual publication from 1960-1970 yet), nominal rolls, 19th Century Regimental Orders, diaries and memoirs, etc.

We hope you’ll find these useful and/or at least interesting reads!