By Paul Morden for the Sarnia Observer
(2014) George Stirrett, one of many young men from Sarnia-Lambton who enlisted a century ago to fight in the First World War, is still remembered. Sarnia’s armoury on Confederation Street is named for Stirrett, who returned home with the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Cross, and Petrolia’s Gene Smith remembers stories the veteran of the Great War would tell while visiting the mess of the First Hussars, a regiment he served in overseas.
Smith was a young officer with the First Hussars when he first came to know Stirrett many years ago. “We would sit around the table and he would tell anecdotes and small stories, and once in a while sad ones, but mostly the fun things,” Smith said. One of those is recorded in the book Billy Bishop: Canadian Hero, by Sarnia writer Dan McCaffery. Bishop, the celebrated fighter pilot, and Stirrett met up early in the war. Stirrett, born in Forest and raised in Petrolia, had enlisted in early 1915 in nearby London where he served under Bishop with the 7th Mounted Rifles.
In the book, McCaffery retells Stirrett’s story about a night when several of the soldiers had been drinking heavily and visited a London hotel where they decided to sneak out without paying their bill. Most made it out a bathroom window but Bishop lingered behind to flirt with an attractive waitress, and then got stuck when he tried to follow them out. The hotel owner walked into the bathroom while Bishop was stuck halfway out and began pulling on his legs while Stirrett, standing outside, pulled on Bishop’s arms. Eventually, the bathroom window gave way and the pair hobbled off with the window frame still around Bishop’s waist. When the police arrived at camp the next morning, Bishop was the prime suspect because of his past adventures, but he denied it all. “They couldn’t say anything because the hotel owner had never seen his face, just his backside poking out the window,” McCaffery quotes Stirrett as saying.
Stirrett later attempted to join the Royal Flying Corps with Bishop, but was turned down and remained in the cavalry unit that sailed for England in June 1915, and then to France later that fall. He led 60 stretcher bearers into enemy fire at the Battle of the Somme to retrieve injured soldiers, but only 16 returned to the Allied trenches. The rest were killed or were wounded.
Stirrett was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal after he went out again alone when he heard someone call for help from the battlefield. He eventually pulled eight men back to safety.
More than 60,000 Canadians died in the war, but Stirrett survived, reached the rank of major and was decorated again near the end of the fighting when his unit left the trenches and mounted up again to pursued the retreating German soldiers.
Smith, who came to know Stirrett well in the years after the war, wrote down many of his stories and assembled them years later into a booklet.
“He said, ‘We’d go out in groups of five or six and we’d look at a place, maybe a tree line, and thought they might be there,'” Smith said he remembers Stirrett telling him.
“He said, ‘We’d sort of saunter up to the treeline and then we’d rein up real quick, look and then gallop away. If they were there, they’d shoot at us, and we found them.'”
Stirrett returned from the war to live out his life in Sarnia, dying in 1982 at the age of 88. He was buried with full military honours in the Stirrett family plot in Petrolia’s Hillsdale Cemetery.
“He was a very quiet, religious and polite man,” Smith said. “I’m quite honoured to have known him.”
Smith’s history of Stirrett’s service during the war is posted in the military section of www.petroliaheritage.com, a website maintained by Martin Dillon.