exspy,
Ask and you shall receive. A number of years back a friend and I set out to research the Motor Machine Guns. I have the nominal rolls on sailing to the UK of the 1st and Borden Batteries, but not the Eaton and Yukon Batteries, I asked him for info and he provided the following. It is interesting, but does not answer your question. (I have asked him for anything he has on the original officers.)
The Eaton Machine Gun Brigade
The birth of Brutinel's unit was difficult but not unduly so. The novelty of the concept, the energy and commitment of Brutinel himself as well as the political patronage he enjoyed made the process of creating Automobile Machine Gun Brigade Number 1 a straightforward event. Brutinel's brigade would have siblings, but their creation followed more tortuous paths.
The next unit, in chronological terms, was the Eaton Machine Gun Brigade. On 21 August, just weeks after Brutinel's note to Sam Hughes was written, John Craig Eaton of the famous Toronto department store-owning family, made an offer to the government of $100,000 for a machine-gun unit similar to Brutinel's. i The offer was accepted and arrangements made to recruit, in the Toronto area, the 25 officers and 281 other ranks deemed to be required. The unit's 15, later raised to 40, armoured cars and nine attendant staff cars, would follow. The cost of these vehicles was later computed to be $260,207.53. ii
The designated commander was Major William Morrison a veteran of the South African War in which he had served as a lance corporal with the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles. His association with the Eatons would not be a long one as his duties were detailed as "be employed as first assistant in the organization of the Eaton Machine Gun Battery." iii The organization that Morrison devised and took overseas consisted of one major, himself, one captain, and no less than twenty-three lieutenants! Unlike The Automobile Machine Gun Brigade No. 1, this unit at least had a sergeant-major, Battery Sergeant-Major Frank Bosher.
Many of the men who joined were employees of the T. Eaton Company who, in addition to their military pay, were granted an allowance from their employer of half the salary they were making at their time of enlistment. They were evidently of good quality, as 18 of the 281 would subsequently be commissioned from the ranks. The allocated block of regimental numbers was 601-1000.
The unit's table of organization called for four batteries of ten armoured cars each. iv Based on the distribution of ranks every second armoured vehicle was commanded by an officer with a sergeant commanding the other car. The unit thus could be broken down into 20 two-car patrols.
When the Eaton battery sailed for Europe in June 1915, it had, in addition to its 306 personnel four Colt machine-guns, but it had no vehicles and therein lies a story.
Photo of Eaton Motor Machine-Gun Battery cap badge
The cap badge was in the form of a maple leaf with a Crown above the letters E.M.G.B. [Eaton's Machine Gun Brigade], a beaver and the word Canada. The collar badges were smaller versions of the cap badge. The shoulder badges, produced later, took the form of an oval plate with the initials E.M.M.G.B. [Eaton's Motor Machine Gun Brigade] over a depiction of an armoured car, all above the word Canada.
Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, (minister of defence in modern terminology) for some reason was not impressed with the idea of machine-gun units, and after encountering Brutinel and his Autocars in Britain in February 1915 (as will be recounted below), he took the step of informing Ottawa, through the Governor-General, that no further armoured car units were to be dispatched overseas. Major-General Sir Willoughby Gwatkin, the British officer serving as Canadian Chief of the General Staff, was in agreement with Kitchener. v He contrived to dispatch the Eaton Battery to Britain without its vehicles in the expectation that the personnel could more easily be absorbed into the Canadian overseas force as reinforcements. vi In this plan he was destined to be disappointed.
The story of the vehicles intended for the Eaton Battery turned into a strange saga. After the minister had accepted the generous offer of John Eaton, The Russell Motor Car Company of Toronto was selected as the manufacturer for the vehicles. Like the Autocars, they were based on an existing pattern, in this case that of the Jeffery four-wheel drive chassis with a Packard, later replaced by a Buda, engine. Unlike the Autocars they were completely enclosed vehicles and carried a rotating machine-gun turret on top. They were more than weapons carriers; they were actual armoured fighting vehicles.
The cars had a road speed of about 20 mph and travelled on three-foot diameter wheels on solid rubber tires. The armour was chrome-nickel armour plate. On the sides it was a full 3/16-inch thick and slightly less on the top and skirting. Rifle ports were provided in the turret and a hinged door at the rear permitted rearward firing. The main armament was a Colt .303 inch machine-gun. vii
Backing up the armoured cars were "a scout car, one truck equipped as a smithy; one armourer's lorry, one lorry for consumable stores; and 39 cases of spare parts, including Buda engines. The equipment list totalled no less than 22 pages." viii Manufactured just as quickly as the Autocars, the completed collection of new vehicles made an appearance at the Central Canadian Exhibition in Toronto in September 1914, before the unit's recruiting programme had even begun.
In December 1915, six months after the personnel from the battery had landed in Britain, the vehicles and stores were finally shipped from Canada. Upon arrival in the United Kingdom the Canadian Ordnance staff promptly asked the British to place them in storage "as a temporary measure." ix They sat at the Motor Transport Depot at Bulford until January 1917 when the depot commander contacted the Quarter Master General of the Canadian Forces in Britain to ask if they could be moved, as the space they were occupying was wanted for other purposes. The Quarter Master General, Brigadier-General A.D. McRae, then took it upon himself to offer the equipment up to the British on the grounds that "operations on the Western Front do not admit of the use of noted equipment by our Canadian Corps." x General McRae had not bothered to consult with the commander of the Canadian Corps or with the commander of the Canadian machine-gunners in France, Brutinel, who was looking for exactly this sort of vehicle. The vehicles ended up split between Ireland and India where they gave excellent service for many years. As Jack Wallace has pointed out in his excellent article on this lamentable saga, Brigadier-General McRae, having displayed his strategic acumen in the military, ended up in the Canadian Senate "and was last heard of in 1936 thundering about the way armament manufacturers were dominating governments." xi
When the Eatons left for Europe in June 1915, the senior appointments in the unit were;
Major William Morrison xii
Captain Edward Knight xiii
Lieutenant and Quartermaster A.S. Jarvis xiv
i John Eaton (1876-1922) was a son of Timothy Eaton. He was knighted in 1915.
ii A.F. Duguid, History of the Canadian Forces, 1914 - 19, The Kings Printer, Ottawa, 1938, note 716.
iii John F. Wallace, Dragons of Steel: Canadian Armour in Two World Wars, Dundurn, 1995, p 18.
iv John F. Wallace, Dragons of Steel: Canadian Armour in Two World Wars, Dundurn, 1995, p 19.
v Gwatkin (1859-1925) was CGS from 1911 to 1919.
vi John F. Wallace, "Have finally gotten rid of this outfit" ...and the sequel, Armour Bulletin, Winter 1990, Gagetown, NB.
vii John F. Wallace, The first armoured cars, a very Canadian story, Canadian Defence Quarterly, Vol. 11, No.3, Winter 1981/82.
viii John F. Wallace, The first armoured cars, a very Canadian story, Canadian Defence Quarterly, Vol. 11, No.3, Winter 1981/82.
ix John F. Wallace, Have finally gotten rid of this outfit" ...and the sequel, Armour Bulletin, Winter 1990, Gagetown, NB.
x John F. Wallace, Have finally gotten rid of this outfit" ...and the sequel, Armour Bulletin, Winter 1990, Gagetown, NB.
xi The first armoured cars, a very Canadian story, Canadian Defence Quarterly, Vol. 11, No.3, Winter 1981/82.
xii William James Morrison served in South Africa in the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles. Commissioned in the Canadian Army Service Corps in 1914 he rose quickly in rank. After taking the Battery overseas he went back to the Service Corps, filling depot appointments until being struck off strength in June 1917.
xiii Edward Lewis Knight Joined the Battery as a lieutenant in February. He was quickly promoted to captain and then major in June 1916. He would be killed in action 26 September 1916.
xiv Arthur Saddington Jarvis had no previous military service when he was appointed Lieutenant and Quartermaster of the Eaton battery in 1915. He left the unit in January 1916 for a series of staff appointments. He survived the war.
