Sidney Thomas Hampson was 22 when he started fighting on the Western Front during the First World War.
In his letters home, Sid, as he refers to himself, writes of disliking the endless mud and rain in the trenches, dodging shells and bombs, working on listening posts and losing his best friend.
Sid’s wartime letters, which span from August 1915 to January 1919, tell a compelling story of a young infantryman going off to serve his country fresh off training and how he is affected by his experiences. He is gassed, he loses friends, and he feels sad for his mother when his brother joins the fighting in Europe.
Sid was born in 1893 in England, he immigrated to Canada as a young child and grew up in Moose Jaw, Sask. When the First World War broke out, he enlisted in January 1915 with the 46th Battalion in Moose Jaw. He trained in Sewell Camp in Manitoba before taking the train to Montreal and taking a ship overseas. He arrived on the front lines at the end of summer 1915 and was transferred to the 10th Battalion, serving in most of the major battles of the Canadian Corps from that time, including in the first wave of attack during the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
In late July 1918, Sid was shot through the shoulder on a trench raid, and he spent the rest of the war in hospital in England.
Sid’s letters can be found online through Vancouver Island University’s Canadian Letters and Images Project.
“We are out the trenches at present having our 5 days rest but believe me we get very little of it because they take us out every night on working parties,” Sid writes in November 1915. “So we can just content ourselves that we won’t get a good rest until it is all over with & I sincerely hope it will be by this time next year…”
In January 1916, Sid writes about spending Christmas and New Year’s Eve on the front line, star shells dropping all around them.
“Well I want to impress upon your mind that I am the only member of the Hampson family in Flanders & I think that is enough,” he writes. “We were in the reserve trenches Christmas week it rained like the merry D____ [damn] every night but that didn’t stop us from going on working parties even on Xmas night. Oh it was rotten digging trenches up to our knees in mud & water.”
In his letters, Sid writes about being on the front line, only 40 yards from the Germans’ front line, about exploding mines and heavy fighting, and he shares updates about boys and men from Moose Jaw his brother would know who are also fighting in Europe
In January 1917, Sid writes of his best friend, Arthur Taylor, dying.
“Sorry to tell you I lost my best pal,” he writes. “That is Arthur Taylor. We have been together since we joined the army & everybody used to take us for brothers. I don’t know whether you know him or not. He lived quite a while in Moose Jaw. No doubt Mother will tell you about it in her letters. I think it is about time this game was over. I know I have had enough of it, 18 months is long enough for anybody & I think by the time you get this letter you will notice in the papers where we have been at Fritz again.”
Sid’s last letter, written in January 1919, was sent while he was recovering in hospital.
“ … they certainly have had a good four years out of me, all the same I’m feeling none the worse for it, only my D_ _ _ [damn] memory has very much gone,” he writes. “I think anybody’s would where they have been to that H_ _ _ [Hell] Hole. It’s a god send it’s finished. The people have no idea what the boys went through, everybody is fed up with it.”
Sid returned to Moose Jaw after the war. He married, raised two sons and worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway, for whom he had started working at the age of 16 long before he went to war. He was very involved in his community and served as president of his local Royal Canadian Legion branch and as a school trustee.
Sid’s letters have been shared by his grandson, Brad Hampson of Ottawa, who submitted Sid’s photograph and story for this year’s Remembrance Row, a feature we have been presenting in partnership with The Royal Canadian Legion since 2017 to honour our participants’ family members and friends who served their country.
Brad, a Veteran himself, took part in this year’s in-person Canada Army Run 5K as a member of the “GGFG (not so) Old Guard” team, members of the Governor General’s Foot Guards from the 1980s. Brad wore his grandfather’s identity discs, which Sid wore in the first wave of the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, throughout the race, and he was able to stop at his grandfather’s Remembrance Row photograph in downtown Ottawa on September 22, 2024.
We are so grateful for participants like Brad who share their loved ones’ stories and photographs so we can help keep their memories alive and ensure their service and sacrifice are never forgotten.
The virtual version of Remembrance Row can be found online here.
