WAR BRIDES AND 1943 AUDIENCE MEMBER
ATTEND SHOW AND MEET CAST

Krista Leis (left, playing Sally) chats with war brides (left to right) Margaret Eaton and Dorothy Scott while Michael Dufays (playing Bill) listens to Joyce Sherwood as Marjorie King and Sarah Joy Bennett (playing Olive) look on.

War Brides (left to right) Margaret Eaton, Dorothy Scott, Joyce Sherwood explain their own experience of World War II to actor Michael Dufays on the set of The Voice of the Turtle. 

WAR BRIDES AND 1943 AUDIENCE MEMBER ATTEND SHOW AND MEET CAST

BY MATTHEW BEHRENS

The cast and crew of “The Voice of the Turtle,” the Classic Theatre Festival romantic comedy running through August 29 in Perth, had a pair of unique meetings with history last Wednesday when a number of audience members shared memories of the Second World War period in which the play is set.

Following the matinee, Dorothy Schuthe of Ottawa, originally a WREN with the Canadian Navy, recalled how, in 1943, she received a 72-hour pass to go to New York City. It was her first and only trip there, during which she saw a musical, “Song of Norway,” as well as the original production of “The Voice of the Turtle” (which would go on to become the 9th-longest running play in Broadway history).

Schuthe found the 2010 Perth production “thoroughly enjoyable,” and said seeing the play “brought back a lot of memories of the war years. Although I didn’t think the play was racy at the time. Maybe some of the older audience members did, but I thought it was lovely.”

Schuthe recalls that the war years “were a time when women began to be liberated from the house” by working in factories and for the military. She  herself took up a post at a secret radio signals outlet in Ottawa where, with a group of other women, she listened for German submarine transmissions.

“I loved being in Perth last week, it was great fun, and such a pretty town. We had lunch at Grandma’s Lunch Box!” Schuthe said.

Later, following the evening show, the cast invited onstage a group of Brockville-area war brides who had come to see the show. One of them was Dorothy Scott, who also enjoyed the show and meeting the actors afterward, whom she found “delightful people.” Scott says that the play’s story of romance during the war – a time when attachments were often fleeting, or avoided because there was no guarantee of a long-term relationship– rang especially true for her.

“In the play, the young couple fall in love over a very short period of time, and that happened a lot during the war,” she recalls. “It happened to me. My husband Burt and I had met while I was working as a nurse in the hospital in England, and after 5 or 6 brief meetings, he asked me on a Tuesday if I would marry him, and I replied, ‘OK, how about Thursday?’”

Burt was a wireless air gunner during the war, and also had three other brothers in the military, two of whom married British women as well.

Dorothy and Burt eventually moved to Montreal and then to Aultsville, where they bought a long neglected home that had been damaged in an earthquake and had no running water. They eventually dug a well, but were forced to move when the area was flooded for the St. Lawrence Seaway. The couple moved to Stittsville and ran Scott’s General Store, selling hardware, clothes, china, and various sundry goods, but history again caught up with them when a new highway came through, bypassing Stittsville’s main street and killing lots of local businesses.

Bankrupted, they eventually moved again to the St. Lawrence corridor where they raised thoroughbred horses, one of whom ran in the Queen’s Plate. But getting there was a challenge, and Dorothy recalls “picking up empty bottles in baseball parks so we could get the money to buy hamburger and milk.”

Dorothy and Burt still live in Brockville, and recently celebrated the fact that their daughter, Deborah, was named the first woman to be made Chief Crown Land Surveyor of Ontario. Dorothy was joined at “The Voice of the Turtle” by a number of her fellow war brides, with whom she shares a special bond.

One of them is 91-year-old Margaret Eaton, who married one of the first Canadians sent to Britain at the outbreak of the war. They met in a Northamptonshire park band concert, “and I never saw him in anything but a uniform until he was liberated from a prisoner-of-war camp,” she recalls.

Married in November, 1940, Eaton says her husband played a role in the infamous Dunkirk expedition as well as the D-Day landing. Shortly afterwards, she received a telegram that he had been killed in action, a shock that was met with equal measures of relief when she learned three months later that he was in fact a prisoner of war.

Eaton moved to Canada in March, 1945, with two young children, aboard a fully loaded troop ship also carrying some 300 women and children, and settled in Chatham, where she awaited her husband’s return. The family eventually moved to Ganonoque, where Eaton still lives today at age 90.

“It was a difficult time then, but I was 25, and we managed to get through it,” she says of the war years. Her life story is on deposit with Halifax’s Pier 21, where she landed in 1945.

For all three women, “The Voice of the Turtle” proved not only entertaining, but a worthwhile trip down memory lane.

“The Voice of the Turtle” runs until August 29 in Perth, with shows Wed,-Sat. at 8 pm, and 2 pm matinees Wed., Sat. & Sun. Tickets are available online at www.classictheatre.ca or by calling 1-877-283-1283 ext. 1, or in person at Tickets Please (located inside of Jo’s Clothes, 39 Foster Street).