181 Though the Second World War brought grief and loss to many Canadian families, it also brought together couples who otherwise would never have met. My parents were one such couple. My father was born in 1914 in Kerrisdale, now a district of Vancouver. My mother was born three years later, nearly 4000 kilometers away in Montreal West. Before the war, my father had been working as an accountant with his father’s firm, Foster & Barrett-Lennard. He was studying to qualify as a chartered accountant, but the war intervened and duty called. Dad enlisted in the Vancouver Division of the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR) on 17 December 1940, listed as a probate sub-lieutenant. He was appointed to HMCS Royal Roads (Royal Roads Military College) in Esquimalt on Vancouver Island on 1 May 1941. In 1940, the Government of Canada had purchased Hatley Park and Castle to house HMCS Royal Roads, a training facility needed to address the shortage of junior officers in the RCN. A total of 600 sub-lieutenants were trained at HMCS Royal Roads, receiving a 90-day course in signals, torpedo, gunnery, navigation, seamanship, and asdic. After completing his training at HMCS Royal Roads, Dad was appointed as a lieutenant to HMCS Protector (Point Edward Naval Base) in Sydney, Nova Scotia, on 22 August 1941. The Sydney naval base took its name from Patrol Vessel Protector, an RCMP ship attached to the port. During the war, HMCS Protector saw intensive use as a convoy assembly port, particularly for the SC (slow convoy) series, and served as a home base for many of the escort warships. As a vital port, it was heavily defended against German U-boat attacks. On 30 March 1942, Dad was appointed as gunnery officer to HMCS Morden (K170), a Flower-class corvette built for convoy duty in the North Atlantic. Morden had been launched in Port Arthur, Ontario, on 5 May 1941 and newly commissioned in Montreal on 6 September 1941. The corvette designation was created by the French for classes of small warships. The Royal Navy borrowed the designation for a period but discontinued its use in 1877. As part of the hurried responses to war, Winston Churchill reactivated the corvette name to apply to a new type of smaller warship to be employed in an escort capacity. The construction of these new corvettes was based on a whaling ship design, and the generic name flower was used to identify the class of these ships, which, in the Royal Navy, were named after flowering plants. In the Royal Canadian Navy, the corvettes were named after Canadian communities. HMCS Morden took her name from a town in the Pembina Valley region southwest of Winnipeg. Hatley Castle
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