Three names were missing for over a century from Belleville’s First World War memorial. With city council’s approval, the names are finally going to be added, with a dedication ceremony taking place this July. Photo by Evan McClelland, QNet News
BELLEVILLE – Three names are going to be added to Belleville’s memorial to its war dead this summer. But who were Ellis Reid and David and Florie Forneri?
All three were born in Belleville, and all three served and died during the First World War. Florie Forneri was a nursing sister who, to help the soldiers, worked through the illness that would kill her. Her brother, David Forneri, was an infantry officer who was wounded twice but kept coming back to the front lines, only to be killed. Reid, an ace pilot, served with the second-most-successful Canadian ace of all time.
The fact that their names are missing from the cenotaph in Memorial Park, at Cannifton Road and Station Street, was raised shortly after last November’s centennial of the end of the First World War. John Geen of Belleville, a first cousin once removed of the Forneris, visited a display about the centennial at the Belleville Armouries, and told Neil Burrell, a Belleville historian who had put together the display, about the missing names of his family members. Shortly after, Burrell and another local historian, Loyalist College graduate Robyn May, started some research. Once they learned that Reid’s name was missing as well, they named their work the Reid/Forneri Project.
It was Allan Miller, a Quinte-area retired United Church minister and reservist who researches personnel files from the First World War, who informed Burrell and May of the absence of Reid’s name, after they sent out a message to local veterans’ organizations about their research. Miller works to ensure that local veterans are remembered.
May says the most likely reason for the names of the Forneris and Reid being left off Belleville’s cenotaph is that their families moved away from the city before the war broke out. So the families, she said, would not have thought to submit their fallen loved ones’ names when the Belleville monument was being built.
Geen told QNet News he was delighted when he learned that “somebody was prepared to do something about” the missing names.
“The retelling of this, a hundred years hence, is kind of … a thank you to those people.”
Nursing Sister Florie Forneri died just nine months before the First World War ended. Photo courtesy of Robyn May
Agnes Florien (Florie) Forneri was born in Belleville on April 18, 1881. She was the daughter of an Anglican canon, Rev. Richard Forneri, and her family moved from Belleville to Adolphustown in the Napanee area early in her life. It was there that her father helped set up a church for the descendants of United Empire Loyalists – Americans loyal to Britain who fled the U.S. to this area and other parts of Canada during and after the Revolutionary War.
Florie attended school in Adoplphustown, Merrickville and Kingston, later attending the Lady Stanley Institute for Trained Nurses in Ottawa from 1903 to 1906. From there she took up private nursing in the U.S. before coming back to Canada in 1913. When the war broke out, she was in Vancouver. She made her way back to Kingston to enlist on Feb. 22, 1917, as a nursing sister.
She would have received a military training course, most likely at Valcartier, Que., May said. All nursing sisters required this course to prepare them to treat injuries that would be more devastating than anything they had seen before.
Florie served in military hospitals in Canada, England and France, where she arrived after the Battle of the Somme and where she served during the Battle of Passchendaele. She then returned to England where, on April 17, 1918, while working at the Canadian Army Medical Corps hospital at the village of Bramshott, she was admitted to the hospital.
She had been coughing up blood for some time, but had worked through her illness – something that was common for nurses in the war, May said. Everything was “for the boys,” as the nurses called the soldiers, she explained. One nurse didn’t seek treatment for a lump in her breast until it went around to her back and broke the skin, and even then, the nurse only came forward because people noticed the open wound, May said. In Forneri’s case, it wasn’t until she fainted on the job that people realized how ill she was.
Nursing Sister Florie Forneri died from multiple bleeding peptic ulcers – breaks in her stomach lining – on April 24, 1918. She was 37. She was one of 18 Canadian nursing sisters who died of illness during the war.
She was buried with full military honours in the Bramshott Cemetery. Her name is on the Women of the Empire memorial in York Minster, England, and closer to her home, in Kingston City Hall’s Memorial Hall, which pays tribute to those who served in the First World War, and on the Kingston Wall of Remembrance, a monument to fallen Canadian servicemen and women. And as of this coming July, her name will be on Belleville’s cenotaph as well.
She will be the first woman commemorated on that monument, May noted.
“I think anyone who goes and looks at that tablet at the Memorial Park is going to see a woman on there,” she said. “Hopefully that just piques their interest enough that they start doing research into it.”
Lt. David Forneri continued to serve despite being wounded twice early in the war. Photo courtesy of Robyn May
David Alwyn Forneri, Florie Forneri’s younger brother, was born on Jan. 10, 1883. He became a bank clerk in Montreal and spent three years in the 3rd Regiment Victoria Rifles of Canada-Canadian militia. On Sept. 22, 1914, about two months after the First World War broke out, he enlisted in Montreal with the 2nd Battalion as an infantryman. He was wounded twice in 1915. The first time was on April 24 at the Ypres Salient; a piece of shrapnel hit his leg. He recovered and went back to the front lines, only to be wounded again, on Nov. 11, also in Belgium. This time shrapnel hit his right forearm and left hip. He was admitted to hospital in Boulogne, France, for surgery the next day.
During his recovery from his injuries, Forneri took officer training. He returned to active service, now a lieutenant, in September 1916, when he was transferred to the 73rd Battalion, the Royal Highlanders of Canada – the Montreal-based Black Watch. He was involved in a raid on March 1, 1917, at Vimy Ridge, six weeks before the famous Canadian victory there.
The March raid was the first and last time that Canada used gas and infantry in a combined attack, Burrell said. The wind turned on the Canadian troops, blowing the gas back toward them and killing hundreds of Canadians. Forneri was severely wounded early in the attack and was last seen on a stretcher being taken back to the lines. His body was never found. May said he and his stretcher-bearers were probably directly hit by an artillery shell on their way back, and there would have been no remains. Forneri was 34 years old.
Lt. David Forneri’s name can be found on the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France and on the Roll of Honour at the former Merchants Bank of Canada building (now the St. James Hotel) in Old Montreal.
Sub-Flight Lt. Ellis Reid is assumed to have died on July 28, 1917. His body was never found. Photo courtesy of Robyn May
Ellis Vair Reid was born in Belleville on Oct. 31, 1889. His family later moved to Toronto, where he completed his elementary education and went to the University of Toronto to get a degree in architecture.
When the war broke out, Reid took private flying lessons. Canada did not have an air force at the time, so he joined the U.K.’s Royal Naval Air Service in January 1916 when it came to recruit in Canada. He became a certified pilot with the British on July 6 of that year.
During his training he met up and later served with Raymond Collishaw, a famous Canadian ace from British Columbia. The two completed their training in Canada, New York and England, and both would serve with the Larkhill, England-based No. 3 Naval Squadron. He then moved to the Farnborough-based No. 10 Naval Squadron after heavy casualties had the No. 3 broken up.
He was part of the squadron’s B Flight, also known as the Black Flight, which by then was commanded by Collishaw and made up entirely of Canadian pilots. Reid’s aircraft, a triplane, was called Black Roger.
The Black Flight was so effective that German High Command ordered Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, to combat it, Burrell said.
Reid was last seen flying his Black Roger above the Ypres-St. Julien front on July 28, 1917. He did not return from his sortie, and neither his plane nor his body were ever found. Burrell said it is possible that his unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked war grave. Reid was 27.
He was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, which pilots get once they become an ace, having shot down at least five enemy aircraft. Reid shot down 19 in the summer he disappeared.
Sub-Flight Lt. Ellis Reid is commemorated on the Arras Flying Service Memorial in France.
What is striking about the Forneris and Reid, May said, is that “all three of them continuously (went) into situations where they could lose their life any day.
“And they kept going back, kept going back. To me that’s what a hero is, and a hero deserves to be remembered.”
For a few months, Burrell and May dug through historical records to prove that the three had been born in Belleville and died while serving in the war. They presented their findings to Belleville’s city council last month, and a motion to have the three names added to the cenotaph was approved. Once the names have been engraved on the memorial, a dedication ceremony will take place at Memorial Park on Sunday, July 28, at 1 p.m.
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