November 11th at 11:00 a.m. The Armistice that brings the hostilities and horrors of the Great War to an end goes into effect. Private Dixon is a member of the 4th Canadian Reserve Battalion at Camp Witley in Surrey, southwest of London. Now, even though the war is effectively over, I guess it takes some time for the word to get out, and there are still things for the Canadian Expeditionary Forces to clean up. The men apparently still have to report for duty. Private Dixon didn’t see it that way. He had had enough. On November 21st he decides he is going to take some time off off to celebrate in London then go visit his family in Preston, Lancashire. Or perhaps his dad came and recued him from Camp Witley which was getting very crowded as Battalions returned to England. We don’t know. We don’t know where he went for those three weeks. . Maybe he was just in a London pub having a good time. Celebrating the end of the war. Celebrating being alive. Where ever he was he doesn’t feel the need to let the Canadian forces know. He just goes. And why not? He has given enough of himself. He is in the reserve battalion, he isn’t going anywhere and the war is over. The Allies won. He deserves a break. Goodbye war. He returns to service on December 13th. This results in a big hullaballoo in his records about him going missing. He even spends a 14 day in arrest at Camp Witley before a Court of Inquiry declares him illegally absent. He is docked 23 days of pay. Robert Dixon has had enough of this bullshit. Now you know where you get it from. Thanks Private Dixon.
And it is taking a long time to get the Canadians home. Private Dixon is then ( all this in document 36) attached for disposal to Regional Depot # 2 again back in Witley. And what the records don’t tell you is that a huge number of soldiers were there. Over 250,000 waiting and anxious to go home. A logistical nightmare if there ever was one. There aren’t enough ships available to take them all home to Canada right away. And who gets to go first? It is April 1919 and Private Dixon is still waiting in Camp Witley. He is then transferred to Ripon for demobilisation. Ripon is north of Leeds in Yorkshire. It is here he is given a final medical and dental exam on April 26 1919. The medical exam shows he is in good condition. He is now 30 years old, and 144 pounds, and as we know has a Basket of Flowers tattoo on his right forearm. His dental exam shows he has a large number of fillings and dentures which leads one to wonder whether he suffered trench mouth during his service. ( it also make me wonder if Claude Stacey did any Dental work during WW2?)
And he is now transferred one last time – to Camp Rhyl in Wales on May 5th. He is there for less than a week. He is transported then to Glasgow , Scotland . There awaits the SS Saturnia , the ship that will finally finally take Sergeant Dixon home on May 11th 1919. It has been exactly six whole months since the armistice that ended the war was signed on November 11, 1918.
