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SARNIA REMEMBERS: Red's legacy

As part of our Sarnia Remembers series — now in its ninth year — The Journal is publishing a series of stories honouring veterans and fallen soldiers from Sarnia-Lambton.
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Red Clements, Army, RCSC (sitting in chair)

Terry Clements admits that he didn't know his grandfather that well since he was only seven when his grandfather died in 1975; in fact, Terry didn't even know his grandfather's real name. He called him “Grandpa” but knew him as “Red” because that's what everyone else called him, probably because of the auburn hair he had as a youth. 

Terry, however, still recalls the times his parents, Gerry and Jean, took his brother, Greg, and him to visit his grandparents in Welland.

“My grandfather was always very quiet and I remember him sitting in a living room chair, just smoking his pipe. He never said much at all. But it was at my grandparents' house that I first noticed the photo albums that my father brought to our house in Sarnia after my grandfather had passed away.  I knew he had been in the war, but he never talked about it, not to his grandchildren anyway. I found out later that he never discussed his wartime experiences with my dad or my uncles—not even with my grandmother.”

After Red died, his father kept those photo albums for decades in Sarnia, and just before Gerry Clements passed away this August, he gave Terry strict instructions not to just throw them out. Gerry considered these photos to be a century-old family treasure.

And he was right.

What Terry had inherited from his father was his grandfather's collection of personal photos that he had snapped in the late stages of WWI.  Before he enlisted in January 1917, Red had always loved taking pictures, so the 19-year-old amateur photographer brought his camera with him overseas. Smaller portable cameras and flexible film with shorter exposure times were now available. This meant photographers could carry cameras closer to the fighting than ever before and could even take action shots.

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Partially destroyed Dury Windmill near Arras, France

The war ended nine months after he arrived in France, but Red managed to capture dozens of powerful images during his time with the Royal Canadian Signal Corps.  The Signal Corps was responsible for providing communication to troops from the front to the back lines so when the troops moved, the Signal Corps moved with them.

A chronology of Red's photos shows that he was with the Canadian Army throughout the Hundred Days Offensive, a coordinated series of attacks across the entire front that began on August 8 and ended on November 11. Historians consider the success of this offensive to be the reason the Germans surrendered.

As the Canadians advanced through northern France and eventually into Belgium, Red never stopped taking pictures. He took photos of ruined houses and the once majestic and now collapsed cathedral in Arras, France; just south of Arras, he snapped the historic Dury Windmill that the Germans had partially demolished.  In the battles at Amiens, at Scarpe, at the Drocourt-Quéant Line, at the Canal du Nord, at Cambrai, and at Valenciennes, Red took photos of German prisoners of war, shelled roads, destroyed canals, bleak landscapes, concrete pillboxes, thick rolls of barbed wire, tanks and howitzers, and neatly stacked shoulder-high piles of German gas shells.

He also captured moments of calm and leisure, a welcome respite from the horrors men were witnessing daily: of soldiers tenderly holding stray puppies they had rescued and of men behind the lines playing cards, getting their hair cut, or enjoying a game of baseball.

Not every photo came from Red.  In a German trench, he found some negatives and had them developed. The unknown photographer had captured stills of German soldiers, most very young,  posing alone or in groups and staring proudly at the camera.

After the war, Red returned to Galt and organized and labelled his wartime photos and placed them in albums. What he had done during the war was technically illegal. At the outbreak of the war, British Army commanders had disapproved of any kind of photography on or near the battlefield, for fear that images might fall into German hands and provide potentially valuable information to the enemy. And images could affect morale on the home front.

So the British High Command outlawed any photography at the front in March 1915. By the summer of 1916, the Canadian government had commissioned official photographers to document the war. The visual images were essential in connecting the home front to the Western Front and had the power to persuade audiences to support the cause.

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Soldier holding rescued puppies in Belgium

For the same reason, British authorities decreed that no soldier was to keep a diary lest these personal accounts provide the enemy with valuable information.

Soldiers typically ignored both edicts.  Many men, from commanders to the lowest ranking soldiers, documented their experiences in words. And some soldiers like Red snuck cameras behind the lines and in trenches and snapped pictures.  In doing so, they left behind a valuable historical record.

Red might not have spoken about his experiences to his family, but his photos speak for him and through him. In this era of glossy staged photos, Red's pictures are not perfect—they are small, some are faded, and all are in black and white—but they remain powerful and jarring. More than a century has passed, but his collection still captures the stark horror of The Great War and the vulnerable human side of those involved.

Red continued to take photos for the rest of his life and became a newspaper printer. He passed his love of photography onto his four sons who, according to Terry, “all ended up in related careers.”

A job opportunity brought Gerry Clements to Sarnia. For many years, he was a print press operator with the Sarnia Observer and became an active member of Lambton Wildlife. And Gerry took great pride in preserving his father's historic photo albums.

Terry wants to honour his father's wishes and to let others know about his grandfather's wartime photos. For these reasons, he recently approached Nicole Aszalos, the supervisor of the Lambton County Archives in Wyoming. Nicole, in turn, has let Terry know that she is extremely grateful to the Clements family. 

“We'd like to digitize the photos first,” Aszalos stated, “and then catalogue them to make Red's invaluable photos accessible to people online and at the Archives.” Eventually, the Archives would like to complement the people, places, and battles depicted in these photos with stories that provide a local context and connection to the photos. 

Red's albums have found a good home.

 


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