# Loaded with history



## Yard Ape (26 Mar 2001)

*Loaded with history*

By RAY CONLOGUE
Globe and Mail
Tuesday, March 13

Ottawa â€” Dan Glenney happened to be near the reception desk when the elderly lady showed up at the offices of the Canadian War Museum. There was something she wanted to donate, she said, as she reached into a shopping bag and pulled out a gun. "My Harry brought this back after the war. I didn‘t like having it in the house then, and I don‘t like it now."

Her husband had recently died, and now she felt right about ridding herself of his service revolver, a "big bullet" Colt .45. What transfixed Glenney, however, was that she was pointing it at him while chatting her way through its brief history. "I finally managed to ask if it was loaded, which she found amusing. ‘It‘s not loaded! I wouldn‘t let him have a loaded gun in the house!‘ "

Of course it was loaded, with a bullet in the chamber and several more in the magazine. And that, says Glenney â€” who has been director of collections at the museum for the past two years â€” is what it‘s been like as the weeks ticked down to the deadline on the federal government‘s new gun registration law.

"There are a surprising number of people with guns in the house for one reason or another who don‘t have an idea of what to do with them," he says. The gun registration act, C-68, with its deadline of Jan. 1 and its onerous, weeklong procedure (including a firearms instruction course complete with textbook and exam) made many of these people realize just how little they really wanted that piece locked in the sideboard drawer.

"I‘d guess we‘ve got over 400 of them in the past few months," says Phil White, an affable fellow with a preacher‘s soft face and voice, who runs the gun room in the museum‘s warehouse. He leads me past a wall full of Zulu spears, a rack of Lee Enfield rifles, down an aisle of shelves littered with revolvers and finally toward the stately brass work of a Gatling gun.

This is a roundabout route to the recently donated small arms, but White has a motive. He wants me to understand that, whatever people may feel, "Canada does have a military tradition, in a strong way."

The Gatling gun, for example, is one of three bought by Ottawa in the 1880s, after an enterprising company salesman from Indianapolis showed up with one during the North-West Campaign against Louis Riel‘s Métis fighters. It wasn‘t a sentimental age, and nobody agonized about cranking hundreds of bullets a minute at a motley army of buffalo hunters armed, at best, with breech-loading rifles.

There are also oddities, such as suits of armour. Breastplates and helmets were obsolete in Europe by the time Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec, but turned out to be very effective against Iroquois arrows and spears. So a quantity of old armour and chain mail was exported to New France, and a few pieces of it now reside quietly on a bottom shelf in the gun room.

But Canada came of age as a military power in the 20th century, when it geared up from a minor colonial economy to a powerhouse able to turn out two million rifles and 275,000 Bren machine guns by the time of the Second World War; not to mention 1,400 tanks, many of them made in General Motors car plants. Even the Inglis washing machine factory in downtown Toronto was converted to the production of Bren guns. "My grandfather said this gun won the war," says Glenney, inviting me to heft one. "Heavy, isn‘t it? But a 19-year-old didn‘t mind hauling it around. Not till he hit the mud, anyway."

But the small arms that arrived in a cascade in the weeks leading up to the registration deadline possess a cachet that anonymous battlefield weapons don‘t: They usually arrive in the hands of a family member, with a detailed history. "And the history," says Glenney, "is what makes the gun interesting to us."

One of the rarest is an 1861 militia rifle made by W. P. Marston, a gunsmith with a shop at 132 Yonge St. in Toronto. It has a stock of polished bird‘s-eye maple which glows like a tiger‘s-eye gem, and fine ornamental etching in the steelwork. It was an inducement to join the city‘s militia, whose members competed each summer in a shooting contest. This rifle was won in the summer of 1861 by a young man named Richardson, whose grandson brought it to the museum just before Christmas.

"The only way a kid could get a summer holiday back then was to join the militia," Glenney says. We‘re both looking at the gun, and my thoughts are running along the lines of: Was it really possible, in the little Toronto of 1861, that craftsmen produced objects as beautiful as this? And what Imperial, wilderness-civilizing fantasies were in that teenager‘s mind as he stepped out on the firing range to try and win it?

A few aisles away is a rifle rack containing a lifetime‘s collection by an 81-year-old Ottawa man who does not want his name used. The oldest is an 1841 "Mississippi," one of the first muskets to have a rifled barrel. It stands beside several Winchesters dating from the 1870s onward, their profile achingly familiar from 100 cowboy films.

Reached by telephone, the collector said he handed them in because he was "fed up" with the bureaucracy of the new registration law. "These rules make people who are interested in firearms seem crazy. So I said to hell with them."

He was, many decades ago, on a university shooting team. Shortly afterward, he began to buy old guns for $5 or so apiece and restore them. "They have good brass and good wood on them, and the maker‘s names. I fired one of them, a muzzle loader, and won a turkey shoot with it. I didn‘t actually shoot the turkey; it was the prize."

The war museum people support the registration law but, like the elderly rifle donor, they aren‘t terribly impressed with the way it works. "There‘s arguments pro and con," White says.

A big issue is that people who already have gun licences and a lot of experience are obliged to take a weeklong course whether they need it or not. Even a Defence Department weapons purchaser with 25 years experience was obliged to do so. "Technically," White says, "you can challenge the test. But there‘s a Catch-22. You need to read the textbook to do that, and you can‘t get the book without taking the course."

The new law, C-68, also obliges the war museum to inventory its thousands of weapons and reregister them. That involves close visual examination of each gun and the occasional fresh discovery, such as the faint inscription "Taken at Cut Knife Hill, 1885" on an otherwise nondescript Winchester: This one had been seized from one of Riel‘s fighters.

The museum is careful, Glenney says, not to glorify guns. But he is troubled that Canadians, who at one time made guns (the Lee Enfield was designed by a gunsmith trained in Toronto in the 1840s), knew them and used them with confidence, now rarely touch them and have the amnesiac idea that Canada has always been a non-violent country.

"When I was a kid, every farm kid in the country had a .22 rifle to shoot starlings. How many kids grow up on farms now?"

In the 1920s, any adult could purchase a revolver out of the Eaton‘s catalogue. Little wonder that, even though war correspondents weren‘t to be armed, the museum owns a snug little .25 calibre carried by a female reporter overseas.

It also owns a Colt .45 with an ivory handle, a First World War German Luger with a Bakelite plastic handle, and the personal sidearm of General Hughes, the military engineer who designed the Vimy Ridge monument. The Colt Government Model was passed on to his son and then his grandson, both army officers. It was turned in to the Perth police for destruction, but they gave it to the museum.

The magnetism of the weapons is very strong. They are, to begin with, beautiful, the Italian ones designed like heavy silvered ornaments, the Spanish ones covered with proud and fussy scrollwork. "And if it‘s a wartime relic, it might have saved that person‘s life," Glenney adds.

None of these weapons will go on public view until the new war museum is built, probably by 2004. There is no room for them in the current elderly facility, but they will have pride of place in the new one.

"Almost everything we‘re getting now is family heirlooms. Some of them would easily sell to collectors," Glenney says, "but if it belonged to an ancestor, most people would rather see it in a museum where its provenance will be recorded. And where their descendants can come and look at it."


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## ender (28 Mar 2001)

the above is why everyone should know how to do a safey precaution.


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