Have You a Tiger In Your Family?

Rank : 2nd Lieutenant

Army Number : 82066 (Canadian Inf)

Unit : 11th Bn

Biography :

With his family originating in Thurlaston, Leicestershire, Bernard Trotter was born in Canada in 1890. He attended the Horton Academy in Wolfville, Quebec, and completed his high school work at Woodstock College. In the autumn of 1907 he went to California to improve his health. He first worked at a lemon ranch and then taught privately for two years before returning to McMaster at the University of Toronto in 1910. In the late summer and autumn of 1912 he helped design and build 'Valhalla', the Trotter summer place on Lake Cecebe. In 1914 he joined the Canadian Officers' Training Corps and obtained his B.A. from McMaster in 1915 and began graduate work at the University of Toronto studying English Literature. He joined 32nd Canadian Infantry. Ill-health had prevented him from being accepted for a commission in the Canadian Army, but the call came for Canadian university men to apply for commissions in the Imperial Army, which he did and sailed for England in March 1916. On arrival he undertook officer cadet training at Shorncliffe in Kent, and was commissioned into The Leicestershire Regiment as temp 2Lt (on probation) on 25.10.1916. He began in a Pioneer Battalion of the Regiment, and later joined 11th Bn in France in December 1916, where he was employed as Transport Officer, which mainly entailed bringing ammunition and supplies to the front line ach night. On 7.5.1917, aged 26, he was Killed in Action by a shell just as he and his men were completing their final transport convoy of the night. He is buried at Mazingarbe Communal Cemetery Extension, Pas de Calais, France.
Trotter had been active in student life, serving for a year as editor of the McMaster Monthly, the journal in which some of his poems first appeared; a poem was accepted for publication in Harper's Magazine in 1914. His themes were often chosen from nature; they evoke the Nova Scotia of his boyhood, California and Northern Ontario. His father, the Baptist minister and McMaster Professor Thomas Trotter, collected his poems and they were published in 1917 by McClelland and Stewart as 'A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems of War and Peace'. Link to the book: https://archive.org/details/canadiantwilight00trotuoft/page/14/mode/2up

Date of Birth : 16.6.1890

Place of Birth : Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Date of Death : 7.5.1917

Place of Death : France

Civil Occupation : Teacher

Period of Service : 1916-17

Conflicts : WW1

Places Served : France