I was thrilled to receive an email from Paul Fletcher last week. He wrote to tell me that he had read Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck and that his maternal grandfather was Tracey Harley Archer.
Lost wife and son:
In May 1914, 33-year-old Tracey Harley Archer was travelling on the Empress of Ireland to Liverpool with his wife, Ruth and their two-year-old son Alfred. They had left six-month-old Gordon with friends in Regina. Heavy fog descended while the Empress was still in the St. Lawrence River and she collided with a Norwegian coal ship. Archer was one of only a few hundred survivors, his wife and son sadly were not.
“Unfortunately, both my mother Verna Fletcher, and my uncle Douglas Archer have passed away. I know that your book would have been very important to them as they were always so interested in their father’s life,” he said. Paul says that most of what he knows about the sinking comes from his mother, which was little, because her father found it too painful to talk about.
Enlisted in WW1:
Almost two years after the sinking, Archer enlisted in the war as a driver with the 14th Brigade Canadian Field Artillery service # 328989. He shipped out to France in August of the following year.
On September 17, 1918, Archer was shot in the head and spent the next six weeks in hospital. His medical examination record says that he had experienced nervousness and likely “shell shock” for a few months after the injury but was “feeling completely normal” for the two months prior to his discharge in March 1919, when he was considered “healthy.”
Archer married Gladys Ross, a 25-year-old teacher in 1923 and they had two children. He retired from his position as secretary and treasurer for the City of Regina in 1937 and moved to Vancouver. Archer died at the Shaughnessy Military Hospital. He was 86.
“I was 12 when he passed away in 1967, but I remember him very well,” says Paul.
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