Interesting Facts

Son of Henry T. and Ida Murray, who kept a general store on King St., Brockville. A cadet who grew up to be commissioned in the US Cavalry, where he was known as a "sharpshooter." On outbreak of war he resigned and enlisted in The Canadian Light Horse. He was gravely wounded leading a patrol into a French village on the days before the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Weeks later his mother received a letter from his CO telling her Murray was a PoW, whereupon she started a concerted campaign of letter-writing to get news of her son. After the war she received a letter from Kurt Staugl who told her of a former comrade of his who had sat with a dying Canadian officer in the French village to whom the officer had given his watch, asking him to send it back to his mother. It had been her parting gift to her son when he embarked. Staugl was able to return it to her. Copies of the typewritten letters she wrote to politicians, the army and shopkeepers in villages around Vimy, on the letterhead of HT Murray general store, along qwith her son's medals may be seen in the Brockville Museum.

Images

Credit: Terry Cottrell

Credit: Library and Archives Canada; War Graves Registers: Circumstances of Death; Box: 216

Credit: Ancestry.com. Canada, WWI CEF Attestation Papers, 1914-1918 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2006. Images are used with the permission of Library and Archives Canada.