44 FOCUS - SEPTEMBER 2016 44 FOCUS - NOVEMBER 2017 VETERAN STEWART W. BRAY resident of Port Perry for 10 years, Stew and his wife June celebrated 72 years of marriage on September 29, 2017. Stew farmed and worked at GM after the war. The Brays “helped increase the population after WWII,” Stew jokes. They had seven children, plus there’s 19 grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Stewart grew up on a farm in Raglan, along with nine siblings. As a young man, he worked making shell casings for the war at a factory in Oshawa. He was paid 35 cents an hour for 12-hour shifts. In 1941, he jumped a freight train to Manitoba for the harvest, and worked from daylight until dark, seven days a week, for $3 a day. Life was hard. On January 20, 1943, Stewart went to Toronto to join the army. Here are some excerpts from his fascinating, handwritten diary: IN HIS OWN WORDS… “It was 30 below zero. We were bil- leted in the horse box stalls in the horse palace at the Toronto Exhibition grounds. I was there four weeks. We caught the horse palace cough from the smell of urine and disinfectants. “I went to Brantford for eight weeks for basic training. It was a good camp but it sure was cold. We got a pass every other weekend. I went to Camp Borden for my advanced training. I hurt my foot there so I missed the draft. “I got back in A1 condition so I was shipped out to Windsor, Nova Scotia, in October for a week. We sailed for England on November 30, 1943. There were 12,000 of us. It was a rough cross- ing. We landed in Liverpool on December 7. We took the train to Aldershot. Man, it was dark, as we landed at night. We were billeted in the old barracks the first Proud veteran Stew Bray posed for this photo a few years ago. A Diary of local WWII vet Stewart W. Bray, Royal Hamilton Light Infantry Stewart Bray has 96 years of memories….