Read more
During the Second World War, thousands of woodsmen joined the Canadian Forestry Corps to log the Scottish Highlands as part of the war effort. Patrick "Pat" Hennessy of Bathurst, New Brunswick, was one of them. For nearly five years, Pat served as camp cook with 15 Company near the village of Beauly, Scotland. A middle-aged farmer and lumberman with a third-grade education, Pat saw more of the world than he had ever dreamed of, visiting ancient battlefields he had learned about as a child, travelling to his ancestral Ireland, and attending lectures in British history at Oxford University.
While in Scotland, Pat regularly corresponded with his family. Drawing from this unique collection of more than three hundred letters, as well as hundreds of archival documents and photographs, Melynda Jarratt provides a rare and unusual glimpse of what life was like for the men who served in the Canadian Forestry Corps and the families that stayed behind.
Letters from Beauly: Pat Hennessy and the Canadian Foresstry Corps in Scotland, 1940-1945 is volume 23 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
About the author
Melynda Jarratt is internationally recognized as the leading expert on Canada's war brides and is the author of three books on the subject. In 1995, Melynda wrote her master's thesis in history at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton on New Brunswick war brides, and went on to obtain a diploma in digital media and design in 1999. She has continued to document this fascinating chapter in Canadian military history for nearly thirty years. She is the co-author of
Voices of the Left Behind (Dundurn Press, 2005), which was a Book of the Month Club selection, author of
War Brides: The Stories of the Women Who Left Everything Behind to Follow the Men They Loved (Tempus Publishing, 2007; reissued by Dundurn Press, 2009), and of
Captured Hearts: New Brunswick's War Brides (New Brunswick Military Heritage Project and Goose Lane Editions, 2008). Melynda has also written on the history of Dutch immigration to Canada for Pier 21, and in 2012 she wrote the history of Bathurst's Brunswick Mines, entitled
The End of an Era. Melynda has been the curator and outreach officer for the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame in Fredericton since 2012.
