Lest we forget Dorothy Chambers

I was very saddened to hear last week that we lost Dorothy Chambers. Dorothy was a well-known and well-loved resident in Thunder Bay, and was best known as a proud veteran and advocate for men and women serving our country in uniform, past and present. As we enter Remembrance Week in Canada it only seems to appropriate to remember Dorothy in this week’s column – an excerpt of her own life story via www.thememoryproject.com
“Number one, my future planted a diamond ring on my finger, actually, he mailed it to me, when he got to his basic training in Calgary, he feared he was going to lose me. And so he asked permission to mail me a diamond ring, which I was thrilled to pieces. I had fallen in love with him at 17 years of age. As the months went by and I missed him terribly, I came home for lunch one day and heard Prime Minister Winston Churchill say on the air, “come on women, we need you”, you know his voice? And the next day, I joined the service. Those were the two reasons, I thought, why wait for my husband when I could do as Winston Churchill requested. So I joined the services as a stenographer - and nowadays I say steno and the young students do not know what steno means - but I wanted to type and shorthand and switchboard in office work for the RCAF.
The enlistment officer in our Royal Edward Hotel in the city of Fort William [Ontario] said to me, I wish you could drive a car. And oh, I was thrilled, twenty-one and driving a car. I was thrilled. And so I ended up as a military driver, drove ambulance, drove high-ranking officers and by the way, they treated me with one hundred percent respect and I spent close to three years being a military driver. The whole message was, and the motto was, “we women join so that men could fly”. Meaning so men could be released to go overseas and continue on with the orders from defeating what was going on during those war years. And so that was the message and that’s what they told me in the enlistment office, if I was capable of being a driver, I would release maybe one or two men and I saw it happen when I landed in Guelph, I saw two men go.
I just drove the ordinary four-door sedan and now and then I had to drive the ambulance to take messages and the padre or someone ill to the hospital. And I often by the way drove a padre -that was my main duty usually - to messages to families. Just had to wait outside for him and he came out with a drooped head, I knew then that he had taken sad news to a family. But under confidence, no, he never said boo to me. And it wasn’t too often. But that part touched me.
I think of that a lot today, taking news to a family that their son had been injured or even lost his life. There wasn’t a daily paper that we saw. Now that I’m sitting here thinking about it more, there wasn’t, like you and I go to our door and read the news of the day and so we just moved along with our orders and tried not to upset anyone and we did parades. And I by the way was in a precision squad, the overdress was a white belt and white gloves and we went down in the States now and then and demonstrated beautiful precision marching. And we didn’t get to upset about what was going on, war-wise. We just simply did our duties and tried not to be upset about anything. Not reading a daily paper perhaps was the reason why we just obeyed our orders and moved along to have the training on these various stations run smoothly.”
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You can read Dorothy’s entire story and hear some of her audio clips at: http://www.thememoryproject.com/stories/1540:dorothy-mary-chambers/
Thank you Dorothy, and thank you to all of Canada’s proud men and women in uniform – past, present, and future – for your hard work and sacrifice on behalf of Canada and Canadians.
Lest we forget.