113330 Cpl. John Duncan Jones was born in Peterborough, Ontario, on the 9th of August, 1899. He was the second of five children and would have been a second generation Canadian.
As a boy he would have lived and played around the construction site of the world famous Peterborough Hydraulic Lift Locks which opened in 1905 - lifting boats 65 feet - the largest of its kind in the world.
His father was a tinsmith at the DeLeval company in Peterborough, where production consisted mainly of dairy milk cans. John's mother died when he was 13. John was apprenticing as a draftsman when the war broke out.
At the age of 15 he was declared medically fit and 10 days after his 16th birthday, on August 19th, 1915, he was enlisted with the 8th Canadian Mounted Rifles. His Attestation Papers had his birth date listed as August 9th, 1896, suggesting he was 19 years old.
His training in Canada was completed at Barriefield Camp near Kingston, Ontario, and he was shipped out to England in October 1915, where further training was conducted at the Bramshott Camp. In December 1915 the 8th CMR was broken down and re-assigned to the 4th CMR.
With the 4th CMR on the front line in February, near Ypres in Belgium, on March 28th, 1916, he "was hit by a rifle bullet in the left side, just below the ribs, bones not injured." - this from his Casualty Report. While recovering from his wound back in England, his older sister was so upset that her younger, under-aged brother, was overseas and now wounded, that she advised the authorities of his true age. As "punishment" he lost his rank of Corporal and his pay was put back to Private's pay (you would think that being wounded would be punishment enough for a 16 year old boy.) He continued to serve until the end of the War and then departed for Canada and was discharged in Toronto on the 20th of March, 1919.
On his return to Canada he worked at DeLeval in Peterborough, the General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ontario, and the Ideal Bread Company in Toronto. At Ideal Bread he was a delivery man with a horse drawn bread wagon. Once again he got to work with horses. He eventually began a long and successful career with Ontario Hydro. At his retirement in 1964, after 36 years, he was the Operating Superintendent for the Toronto region.
John was married twice with two children from each marriage and six grandchildren in all. His favourite pastime was building, expanding, and maintaining the family cottage at Lake Simcoe, Ontario. He was a long time member of the Masonic Lodge and passed away at the age of 78 in 1978.
Many thanks to Brian Jones for the above biography.