05 May 2018

John Burleigh Carling: CWGC Beechwood

Lieutenant John Burleigh Carling, the youngest of four sons of Fred W. and Eva C. Carling, of 354, Sparks St., died of scarlet fever at Shirley Park Hospital outside London, England, on May 5, 1918. He had lied on enlistment claiming to be 20 years of age; he was only 18.

He has served with the Royal Flying Corps and was waiting to return home for a three-month furlough following seven months of flying bombing missions over Germany.

According to an article After the War: Equality in death by Ottawa Citizen writer Brian Deachman, his body was one of 65 war dead from Europe returned to Canada contrary to the policy of burying the dead nearby where they fell.

John Burleigh Carling was a grandson of Sir John Carling, of the Carling Brewery.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sorry to be picky John. The article was by Bruce Deachman, who I have met and corresponded with several times. I met him through his mother, Helen Deachman, a local writer who wrote the marvelous book "Letters to Muriel: A Search for Kin," about her search for her birth parents, as she had been adopted as a child. He had done an awful lot of the research for his Mum's birth parents, with the help of Harriet at the City of Ottawa Archives. Cheers, anyway, BT