The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Canadian Army 1943
Canadian troops stationed in Yorkshire get a civic reception before a tour of the county, including a typical textile town and watching a typical wartime football match.
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Overview
Before taking up their duties in defending the country, newly arrived Canadian troops get to sample the delights of the Yorkshire countryside as well as see a typical mill town landscape of endless factory chimneys. The film shows one of the Canadian officers settling in with a local family that is putting him up, as well as a trip to a football match, possibly Huddersfield playing in the Northern Regional League.
A total of 368,263 Canadian troops arrived in the UK during the course of the war. These were chiefly based in Aldershot and deployed in the defence of the UK, while most of the British soldiers were away. The troops in this film may well have left from Halifax on the east of Canada, and possibly here visiting its, rather different, Yorkshire namesake. In Yorkshire Canadian troops were based at Allerton Hall, west of York, and the Canadian bomber 405 squadron was based at the Pocklington airfield. In 1943 they were, coincidently, flying Halifax bombers. Regional football leagues replaced national ones for the duration of the war.
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