Nova Scotia Archives home to extensive collection of wartime posters, letters

The manager of the Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax gives a preview of its extensive collection of wartime posters and letters.

The Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax may be closed Tuesday for Remembrance Day, but people are invited to check out its extensive wartime collection other days of the year.

The building on University Avenue is home to about 130 posters that were used to recruit soldiers during the First World War.

“We usually think of the posters in terms of recruiting and promoting the idea that people should join the army or the navy or whatever, and certainly the recruitment posters are a big part of the collection of posters here,” says the Archives’ manager, John MacLeod.

One of the posters in particular is rare and specific to the Pictou County unit of the Nova Scotia Highlanders.

It features a depiction of soldiers riding horses on the front lines. It also reads – “The guns! Thank God! The guns!” – a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Ubique,” about the Royal Artillery.

“The image is from 1914 … the actual recruitment activity was in 1916,” says MacLeod.

“But it’s also interesting that it’s the only one in the collection that’s specific for a regiment and specific for Pictou, so the fact that they have survived is significant and that people thought enough for them to keep them gives us the legacy that we can share with everyone today.”

Nova Scotians have also given the archives letters over the years that they received from the front.

“We’re very proud to be able to have some of these letters with us, where it’s the people in the trenches in Europe writing back to their families in Halifax or elsewhere in the province, and you pick up the individual insight in what was going on in their minds, what the family wanted to keep them appraised of, and keep them up to date on,” MacLeod says.

One poignant letter is titled “When Lt. Howard Johnstone Fell: Story as Told by a Solider Who Was With Him.”

The letter was written by the colleague of Lewis Howard Johnstone, a Sydney, N.S., man who died in northern France on Oct. 1, 1916.

“The families felt enough about these – wanted to keep them over generations – and secondly feeling they were important enough that they should share them with the whole province,” says MacLeod.

“We’re very happy that over time many families they’ve given us these mementos of their family and their contributions to the First World War and to the nation.”

MacLeod invites anyone interested in the documents to visit the archives and ask to see them.

“There’s more posters, there’s more letters home from people in the trenches and there’s also an incredible newspaper collection that you can follow day by day what is going on in Europe,” he says.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Paul DeWitt.

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