William Arthur Peel Durie 1881 - 1917

WWI Officer with a harrowing story

William Arthur Peel Durie was born in Toronto in 1881.

He was destined to an uneventful life as a banker, but WWI broke out in 1914 and changed all that. Being from a military family – his father was Lt. Col. William Smith Durie – Arthur enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915.

Arthur’s mother, Anna Durie, wasn’t at all pleased to see her son going to war and tried to pull all the strings she could to get him out of it or at least out of harm’s way.

We eventually find him on many of the great WWI battlefields: Vimy Ridge, Avion, Passchendaele. In May 1915, he was wounded at Ypres. Once healed, he returned to the front.

On leave just before Christmas 1917, he met his mother who bought him a new pair of boots. He is back on the front just after Christmas.

On December 29, 1917, Arthur is killed in combat near Lens in France. He is quickly buried in the Corkscrew Cemetery nearby.

This is only the beginning of our story.

For obvious practical reasons and also by tradition, fallen soldiers were buried near where they fell. Anna would have none of it. She tried again to pull all the strings she could to bring her son’s remains home. Unsuccessfully.

Anna was stubborn and a woman of action. in 1925, she took advantage of the move and re-interment of remains from the Corkscrew Cemetery to the nearby and larger Loos British Cemetery to “steal” her son’s remains. She did it in the middle of the night, with help from a couple of local people. Arthur had been in the ground for a few years already but Anna recognized the boots she had bought him a few days before his death. She was able to smuggle Arthur’s remains, in a suitcase, back to Canada, on an ocean liner.

Captain Arthur Durie was finally buried in Cabbagetown’s St. James Cemetery in May 1925.