John Henry Foster Babcock (July 23, 1900 – February 18, 2010) was, at age 109, the last known surviving veteran of the Canadian military to have served in the First World War and, after the death of Harry Patch, was the conflict's oldest surviving veteran. Babcock first attempted to join the army at the age of fifteen, but was turned down and sent to work in Halifax until he was placed in the Young Soldiers Battalion in August 1917. Babcock was then transferred to the United Kingdom, where he continued his training until the end of the war.
Having never seen combat, Babcock did not consider himself a veteran and moved to the United States in the 1920s, where he joined the United States Army and eventually became an electrician. In May 2007, following the death of Dwight Wilson, he became the last surviving veteran of the First World War who served with the Canadian forces. From that point he received international attention, including 109th birthday greetings from Queen Elizabeth II, the Governor General of Canada and the Canadian Prime Minister, until his death on February 18, 2010.
Early life
Babcock was born on July 23, 1900, into a family of thirteen children on a farm in Frontenac County, Ontario. According to Babcock, the barn where he was born (which no longer exists) was located off Highway 38 in South Frontenac Township. His father died in 1906 after a tree-cutting accident, when Babcock was only six years old. As described in his account given to Maclean's, while his father was cutting down one tree, another dead tree fell on his shoulder. Although he was brought into the house on bobsleigh, he only survived another two hours. Babcock said that this was an "awful blow" to the family.
School was never a concern for Babcock, and he did not earn his high school diploma until the age of 95. On growing up in the area, Babcock claims that he "didn't do very much," although he admits that "[i]t was a fun place to grow up." Babcock partook in fishing, hunting, and swimming—especially around the local Sydenham Lake—in order to pass the time with the other kids his age. He would return to the area in 1919, after his wartime experiences, but soon after left for the United States. Nevertheless, Babcock's relatives continue to work at the Crater Dairy farm (named after the Holleford crater, a remnant of a meteor strike) and the community grew to greatly respect John.
World War I
At the age of fifteen and a half, Babcock was impressed at Perth Road by two recruiting officers, one a lieutenant and one a sergeant, who quoted from the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade". He was also enticed by the offered salary, which was $1.10 per day, as opposed to the 50 cents he could have made through physical labour. Babcock was recruited in Sydenham, Ontario and joined the 146th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was then sent to Valcartier, Quebec. There Babcock underwent a physical, where it was discovered that he was underage. He was designated status A-4: physically fit, but underage. At the time, the minimum age for combat was eighteen. Babcock was turned down, but managed to make it all the way to Halifax by train before he was stopped by the company commander.
In Halifax he was sent to Wellington Barracks, the city's peacetime barracks, where he wrestled freight onto large army vehicles and dug ditches. Tired of the work, Babcock took the opportunity to volunteer for the Royal Canadian Regiment when fifty recruits were called on, claiming that his age was 18. Officials quickly discovered that he was only 16, however, and they placed him in a reserve battalion known as the Boys (or Young Soldiers) Battalion in August 1917. Babcock then undertook an ocean voyage to England and, in Liverpool, he was stationed with the 26th Reserve and sent to Bexhill-on-Sea where he trained with about 1,300 others, about a third of whom were veterans from battles in France.
The Young Soldiers Battalion trained the recruits for eight hours a day. In his spare time Babcock went on leave to Scotland, where he met his first girlfriend, a woman from the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. He was also introduced to the pleasures of beer and the horrors of war that some of the older veterans had come across. Babcock asserts that he would have fought in the conflict, given the chance, but the war ended before he could be brought to the front lines. For this reason, Babcock claims that he never felt like "a real soldier" and rarely talked of his experiences until his centenary. He also never joined any veterans associations.