Continued from Page 1... Canada sent 619,636 troops to the first World War and they fought at Second Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele and the Hundred Days in 1918 that led to the Armistice, in which they were part of the vanguard.  60,000 Canadians were sacrificed for these battles.  Several of Canada’s polo players were in the hellish icy mud of the trenches.  When they got home they plunged into the pleasures they had been cut off from – travel, the Jazz Age, fun and polo, and the Montreal Polo Club was revitalised.  The members of this club came from British, mostly Scottish, families, including the Acers, Dobells, Hamilton Gaults, Gordons, Col. George Hooper, the MacDougalls, McMasters, Molsons, Ogilvies, Philip Oslers. Pitfields and Patersons.  Most of them had originally taken up residence around Cartierville for the hunting, the Montreal Hunt being the oldest in North America (1829), and my mother was a keen follower to hounds between the wars.  The older men, who were all close friends or related and had been active in the first World War, now restocked their stables near the Ottawa River and resumed their favourite sport, teaching the game to the younger men, the sons who had been too young to fight.  The Gordons, however, our cousins, a generation later chose to build their establishment away from the river, because my aunt was afraid of children drowning.  Instead, they built a swimming pool near the woods, ensuring a tremendous hatchery for mosquitoes, which tortured the humans. 

Each polo house had a copy of Kipling’s ‘The Maltese Cat’, as Lord Birkenhead put it, ‘the finest description of a game [polo] in the English language.’  The club had proper polo ponies, mostly from the States or Argentina, though the three Gordon brothers, our uncles, began with cheap mustangs from the Wild West.  The wives and girlfriends didn’t know the difference and our future aunt Meg, who later became engaged to Howard Gordon, commented on the ugliness of one steed and was sharply corrected by a MacDougall daughter: ‘Meg!  That is my father’s best pony!’ (It was, in fact, one of a brilliant pair from Argentina, Poquito and Son of Honour.)  This could have come straight out of ‘The Maltese Cat’, for ‘The Cat’ was a small grey pony with ‘flea-bitten withers’ who, as Kipling writes, ‘had drifted into India on a troopship, taken, with an old rifle, as part payment for a racing debt.’
 

No women played polo in those days, but Meg Gordon, who rode side-saddle through the woods on her horse March Cloud, watched every game and kept the memory alive by commissioning, with H.C. ‘Tommy’ MacDougall and his wife, the history of the Montreal Polo Club from the writer Iris Clendenning.  Between the two wars the Montreal Club won the Grenfell Cup more times than any of the other competing teams, and also competed in international tournaments.  One of their favourite venues was Aiken in South Carolina, the winter headquarters for polo in North America, where they could play against some of the best polo players in the States.  In the winter Aiken’s population was swollen by a large colony of Northern visitors.  Horse shows, parties, luncheons, dinners, picnics and concerts were all part of the season at Aiken.  But in 1939 all this came to an end as World War II took over everyone’s existence, and polo was halted for the duration.  

In 1940 the polo field was sold, and by 1941, when my mother and us three children left England to stay with our Gordon cousins, we knew that our father’s regiment would be serving in the Far East.  The Japanese wanted to swallow the outposts of the British and Dutch empires as Hitler was swallowing Europe.  When we got to Cartierville it seemed like a polo ghost village.  Our aunt tried to dwell on the happy past.  Three of the relations and friends of the polo men were in Hong Kong with the Royal Rifles of Canada, founded by Brigadier Jack Price, who was out there with his brother and brother-in-law Peter MacDougall.  But the Japanese were a formidable enemy, bombing the American fleet in Pearl Harbour on December 7th and capturing Hong Kong on Christmas Day, then proceeding south to take Singapore, where our father’s regiment was, on February 15th, 1942.  It took over a year to find out if our men were alive, and where.  The Canadians were prisoners in Hong Kong and our father’s regiment, including him, were slave labour in Burma, building the ‘death railway’ for the Japanese, immortalised in the film ‘The Bridge Over the River Kwai.’ Read More.. Click Here