Their young love may have been snuffed out by an ocean’s worth of distance, but two lovebirds who met on the streets of Barrie during the Second World War went on to live full, rich lives, each blazing their own trails.
Over the past several weekends, BarrieToday has run a series of wartime letters written by Peggy Newman to her parents in the U.K., sent after she moved to Barrie in July 1940 at 16 years old during the Second World War. Included in the correspondence was mention of a budding romance with Barrie-born-and-raised military man Ted Rodgers.
To end this series, BarrieToday caught up with descendants of Ted and Peggy, to find out what happened after the letters.
Peggy returned to the U.K. in 1943 by way of an Atlantic convey.
“She went without her sister (Joan). Looking back now, I’m really quite surprised my grandfather pressed for that to happen because initially, she wanted to join up with the Canadian forces,” said Diana Strachan, Peggy’s daughter, who lives in the U.K. “His view was that, no, she had turned 18, so she needed to come back to the U.K. and join up there.”
Upon her return to the U.K., Peggy joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, serving on the south coast of England based in Gosport, working in signals.
After the war, Peggy left the service and took up secretarial work in London.
“I think it was a wonderful, bachelor-girl-type life for a few years,” said Strachan, adding that Peggy did some more travelling in her early 20s, spending some time in South Africa.
“She was quite independent for a woman of that time,” she said.
In her late 20s, Peggy met her husband, John Parker, who was a lawyer, marrying in 1957. Peggy and John had three children.
“Through all that time, she never lost touch with her Canadian friends. She was always writing and phoning them and visiting them whenever she could,” said Strachan.
Strachan said she still keeps in touch with her mother’s friends’ children in Canada and have built long-lasting friendships.
“It’s gone down through the generations and it’s been a lovely link for us all,” she said.
Strachan said Peggy spoke regularly about her time in Canada and Barrie.
“She talked about all the people she met. She was always a very social person. I think it made a really big impact on her. Toward the end of her life she had Alzheimers, and one of the things she would talk about very clearly was her time in Canada. She didn’t lose those memories in the way she lost memories of her later life,” said Strachan.
Peggy died at the age of 93 in 2017.
When sorting through her mother’s belongings after her death, Strachan found the letters and correspondence, and sought to connect with the Barrie Historical Archive so they could have a record of that piece of Barrie’s history.
She also asked Barrie archivist Deb Exel for help in getting a personal letter sent by Ted to Peggy to Ted’s family.
“I just thought they might like to have it,” she said. “They were clearly quite fond of each other.”
Exel managed to track down Ted’s family and facilitated an introduction which led to the heartfelt letter being reunited with Ted’s relatives.
“It was lovely, because they had photographs of Ted and Peggy. I had no idea there were photographs, or that Ted’s family would even be aware of Peggy. Apparently he had spoken about Peggy a bit,” said Strachan.
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Ted was born in 1923 in Barrie and attended high school there. After finishing high school, Ted went straight into the military, taking after his father who was a First World War veteran stationed at Base Borden.
“He never went overseas to fight in the war,” said Sean Rodgers, Ted’s grandson, who currently lives in Newmarket. “We think what probably happened was, because his dad was a senior officer, there may have been a bit of an old-boy’s network where they kept him in Canada. He did boot camp training for the rest of the war.”
After the Second World War, Ted stayed in the military, getting an engineering degree.
“I believe that’s where he met my grandmother in 1949, Stella,” said Rodgers. “After they got married, he was sent to Korea to fight and run a machine shop there.”
Stella and Ted had two sons in 1953 and 1955. The family was then posted to Germany for a few years before they came back and settled in Ottawa in the 1960s. Their third son was born there in 1961.
Ted remained in the civil service until about 1970, when he left the service and purchased the tennis club at the Rideau Club, which he ran every winter.
“He met the Trudeaus there, so Pierre and Justin Trudeau when he was a kid,” said Rodgers.
Around 1980, Rodgers said his grandfather retired. He and Stella would spend summers at a cottage in Almonte, Ont., and the winters in Florida.
Ted died in 1995 of pneumonia he contracted after a hip injury. He was 72.
Rodgers was 14 when Ted died.
“I wasn’t surprised when I read some of the letters Peggy sent. He was a very charismatic type of guy,” said Rodgers. “He was very interested in other people. He could talk a mile a minute, and was very well-read.”
Rodgers said Ted had mentioned Peggy a few times to his sons in passing and he also held on to pictures of her throughout his life.
“They were obviously quite serious. I don’t think it was casual dating,” said Rodgers. “I knew it was a relationship he took very seriously.”
For Rodgers, he said he only knew his grandfather as an old man, so the man he learned about through the letters offered him more insight into his grandfather’s life as a whole.
“He certainly had a good life. He’s been gone for 25 years, so for me to get this piece of his life that I had known nothing about, and even my parents had known very little about, is just wonderful,” said Rodgers. “To see him as a teenager in love who had his heart broken – it was interesting to see another side of him that I had never really thought about.”
“This is something we can pass down in our family now,” he added.
After Peggy moved back to the U.K. in 1943, Ted sent one letter to Peggy. According to both families, neither have any further correspondence between Ted and Peggy after this letter.
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UNDATED
Hello again darling,
So you are leaving our fair country and going home. You are lucky; you've come and stayed for a short while (far too short I think); made everybody either love you or like you and now you are leaving us behind for a while.
But enough of this philosophising (this is a damned hard letter to write). I do wish you could have stayed for one more week – perhaps then I could have spoken to you before you went. These phone calls are so dead and mechanical.
I suppose you are feeling pretty low too but as I said before chin up, you are lucky to have come here and perhaps when this dirty business is all done you will come back and we will see more of Canada.
I'll miss you the way I have never missed anyone before. You did wonderful things for and to me Peg; I don't believe you'll ever know just how much you did do.
Please keep just the way you are – kind, loving, pure – I could go on for the rest of the page but that would be boring for you.
I will see you again in a few months and then I hope you can make my stay in England as happy as I hope I have made yours here.
You know to quote and old phrase 'War is hell' you can't plan beyond the immediate future. But it has it's good points for if the war had not come along I probably would never have met you and I would have missed the most beautiful part of my life.
I don't (in reading this over) seem to be able to put all my feelings into words. There is of course sadness at your leaving but joy that I will see you again soon and this leads me to fear that something will happen and I won't so my poor thick head goes round and round and the old heart jumps and sinks.
Please don't change kid whether I see you again or not if you stay the way you are God alone knows what good you will do but I know what good you can do. I can think of nothing more that I can run all the way down my arm and onto this paper. I do wish we were together so I could tell but that is impossible.
When you get back don't fall for any of those rough Canadians camped at your front door. You probably will; I say that not from national pride but you are used to them now and probably will feel lonesome for a while.
I'll continue to write to you darling and I'll always be thinking of you.
Ever yours
Ted
