A four-year effort to trace the life of a forgotten soldier killed in the First World War was a labour of love for Sean Clair of Campbellford, Ont., with the journey ending in Weyburn as he worked to uncover any details he could of the life of Ernest Cutridge.
The journey began in Campbellford when a plaque to Cutridge was found in a box, and Clair was upset to find that this veteran had been all but forgotten, so he began researching to find out whatever he could about his life before he died of injuries from the battle at Vimy Ridge a century ago.
“The plaque was covered with insect debris and obviously had been in an unforgiving place for some time. It turns out a local Women’s Institute building had relocated and the box and contents were turned into the Legion,” said Clair. After he was given the plaque, “I was hooked. Between my wife and myself and a whole degree of networking, after four years we had his story.”
Clair found out that Cutridge was initially born in England in Faversham, Kent, and was brought to Canada at 10 years of age as a “British Home Child” with Barnardo Homes in 1904, and was placed with a family on a farm to work, in Hastings County between Rawdon and Seymour Townships in Ontario. He was first recorded in the 1911 census as a “domestic”.
His adoptive family appears to have loaned him to a neighbor for work, and he later headed west to Saskatchewan, ending up on a farm in the Hume area.
When he was 22, he came in to Weyburn on Dec. 13, 1915, and enlisted with the 5th Battalion, 152nd Regiment, of the Canadian Infantry.
War records showed he was wounded in the stomach by a machine gun bullet while taking part in the attack on Vimy Ridge. He was evacuated to the No. 1 Canadian Field Hospital, but he succumbed to his injuries the following day, on April 9, 1917, just shy of 24 years of age.
Cutridge was buried at Quatre-Vents Military Cemetery in France.
This year, a friend of Clair’s, Bob Murphy, from the Legion branch where the plaque had been turned in, accompanied high school students from Campbellford to Vimy Ridge, and he found Cutridge’s grave and took a photo of it. The photo of the grave has been put up along with the restored brass plaque in the Vimy Room at the Legion Hall.
In July, Clair and his wife travelled to Weyburn and Hume, and visited the Weyburn Legion branch to drop off a photo of that gravesite and an information package on Cutridge, completing his four-year journey to “honour the memory of a forgotten young boy, given to a foreign land, loyal to his core, who returned to die in service of the King and fight for freedom.”
