Henry Morgan Jones

Henry Morgan Jones

Field inventory and biography on the life of a soldier in the no. 2 construction battalion.

1893 - Unknown

1893

Williamsfield Estate, Jamaica

Planter, Soldier

After finding no glimpse of Henry Morgan Jones in the US and UK archives as well as the ancestry website and the Creole, Barbados, Caribbean archives—I finally found him among the “Lives of the War” website which connected me to the Canadian Great War Project. The information I found was mostly all known to me after examining his PDF documents attached to the assignment. However, this page connected me to yet another source of information on him located at the Library and Archives Canada website (This brought me back full circle to the original PDF (54 pages) that I had examined previously). The Library Archives Canada website clarified Jones’ wedding date of January 3rd, 1917, which was listed in the PDF document as both January 3rd, 1917, and June 2nd, 1917. The Library Archives also shows that Jones at some point during the war changed his religious beliefs from American Friends to the Church of England. Being that his PDF shows him getting married in England it look as if Jones may have converted upon marriage. Henry Morgan Jones was a part of the no. 2 Construction Battalion, and as the Canadian Encyclopedia outlines, this was a labour battalion that began accepting black soldiers in July of 1916 (Ruck 2016). Jones enlisted only one month after recruiting began and was sent to England and France to train and do physical labour with no. 2 battalion. Something that I find very interesting is that all his medical documents declare him fit, but halfway through his documents (page 21) it states that he had bronchitis at the end of the war. His weight is also recorded several times as being consistently 160 lbs (pg. 15, 21) but it is recorded as 138 lbs on pg. 19. The Canadian Encyclopedia highlights that the “Canadian Forestry Corps urgently needed labour to support its forestry operations in the Jura mountains in southeast France.” (Ruck 2016) In theory, since Jones’s trade was a planter and his location was France, he was a necessity to the no. 2 battalion and therefore even though he was sick and lost a significant amount of weight was not discharged due to his useability. Chapter Six of the text tells us that other minority groups including Chinese and indigenous men were allowed to serve and even women (in certain positions) yet black soldiers were not “permitted to serve.” Therefore, the no. 2 battalion could be considered a glorified internment camp overseas and this is why they were easily forgotten after the war (6.4 Assessing Canada’s War, Ruck 2016). Furthermore, Ruck tells us that black soldiers encountered a lot of racism and poor treatment which helps me connect this theory back to why Jones was not discharged or hospitalized (2016).

Rethinking Modern Canadian History (Carleton HIST 1302)

Northwood, Taylor