Via the Hemmings Nation Flickr pool, we’ve been talking with Bowen Stead, who’s been posting photos under the aliases Rednewport and Flat-Black 66. A few months back, he posted these CMP shots taken by his father, Carey Stead, while with the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps at Camp Bowden, Ontario. Carey’s story behind these photos, courtesy Bowen:
I joined the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps in the fall of 1946. We had lectures one night a week on military subjects during the winter of 1946-7 and, the following summer, I was sent to the corps school of the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps (RCASC) at Camp Borden.
The Royal Canadian Army Service Corps supplied the Army with most of its drivers and mechanics, cooks, military clerks, water supply technicians. It was also responsible for the supply of food, ammunition and most other “goods” required by troops serving “on the front line” in battle.
In the drivers’ course, twenty six people in my platoon were marched over one day to the “vehicle compound” where about 22 standard military pattern trucks, pictured in the photographs, were lined up in a row, along a street and at right angles to the street. Some of the people in my platoon had never learned to drive. This became evident when we were told to get into the trucks ( in a few cases with two to a truck), to start them up and to drive them onto the street and to form a line as we were going to drive them to the Blackdown Driving Range. Several of the novices drove their trucks right across the street and into the ditch on the other side. After a certain amount of recrimination and basic instruction, we all set off and got to the driving range and, over the next six weeks we all learned enough to pass a military drivers’ examination. During that time, however, we wrecked several trucks.
Bowen’s been posting some excellent photos from his parent’s albums onto Flickr, including many car shots. Worth checking out.
