Remembering: Adopted mascot returned to N.B. with 8th Hussars Regiment
Louise after helping to rescue the wounded filly in Italy
during the Second World War.
SUSSEX - Princess Louise - the horse, not Queen Victoria's daughter - is buried beside a war memorial in a pretty little park outside the community centre in Hampton.
Rescued in 1944 from a battlefield in Italy by a battalion full of New Brunswick farm boys, Princess Louise was as sweet-tempered as a sugar cube and able to count out her age with her hoof. Adopted as a mascot by the 8th Hussars Regiment and named after the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, she was secreted around Europe by soldiers as they fought the Germans, and smuggled into Canada following the Second World War.
care of the Hussars' mascot horse Princess
Louise, stand in front of a mural on the side
of a building in Sussex.
"She loved the troops and the troops loved her," says Gordon Bickerton, 91, sitting at his kitchen table in Sussex, a rural town east of Saint John where an equestrian centre and sports park carries the horse's name, and a mural of her is painted on the side of a building just off its main thoroughfare. "She was very kind and easy to look after."
Assigned to take care of Princess Louise after she was brought to Sussex to be reunited with the 8th Princess Louise's Hussars, Bickerton drove her to military parades across the Maritimes, where she marched at the front and was saluted by soldiers.
"Sometimes, during the parades, she fell asleep," says Bickerton, who joined the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps in 1941 and in 1948 joined the Hussars as a tank and truck mechanic, a position he held for 25 years. "Eventually, I'd have to tug on her ear and say, 'Princess Louise, wake up!'?
On a day for remembering fallen soldiers, aged veterans will gather around the cenotaph in Hampton today and think of their comrades and, undoubtedly, Princess Louise. They have never forgotten the horse who brought a touch of humanity to the killing fields of Europe.
Amidst all that bloodshed and chaos and agony, she reminded them of New Brunswick's rolling countryside and the things they cherished back home.
"At the time, we were soldiers doing a difficult job and mostly thankful that we were still alive," Frank Gaunce, 99, says as he sits beside his hospital bed in Sussex, where he is recovering from a broken hip. A member of the 8th Hussars Regiment, he was on the battlefield on the sweltering night of Sept. 16, 1944, when Princess Louise was discovered, months old and crying with a belly wound and walking circles around her dead mother. "Having that horse around helped raise our morale."
A battle unit based in Sussex with ties to Canada's oldest cavalry regiment, the Hussars retrieved Princess Louise from the front lines with artillery above their heads. They then took her to a company medic, who treated her wounds, and after that they took turns changing her bandages to prevent infection.
As the war ground on, they concealed her in a truck in which they had built her a stall and took her everywhere they went, through Italy, France and Holland.
When they war ended, they placed her in a pasture in Holland and, against orders, arranged for her to be shipped to New York aboard a Dutch liner.
A few months later after crossing the ocean, Princess Louise was met by one of the Hussars in New York, and then placed aboard a train and taken to Saint John, where she arrived on March 27, 1946 and was greeted by a military honour guard, the city's mayor and thunderous cheers.
The following day, children were let out of school to watch as she was paraded through the streets of neighbouring Rothesay, and then was taken to the courthouse steps in Hampton where she was given a bale of hay, bag of oats and a shovel, and made a naturalized citizen of Canada, a free woman of Kings County and a full-fledged member of the local Branch of the Royal Canadian Legion.
Her last pair of horseshoes are displayed at the Legion hall in Hampton, a short distance from where she lays at rest beside the cenotaph along with her daughter, Princess Louise II. Princess Louise was 29 when she died in 1973, and Princess Louise II, who assumed the role of the Hussars' mascot after her mother, died at age 27 in 1981.
whim served as mascots for the 8th Hussars Regiment are
buried together near the cenotaph in Hampton
A piece of history, the beloved filly was written about in a children's book by Ana Dearborn-Watts and chronicled by the Reader's Digest. A hit everywhere she went, in parades she was dressed in Hussars' regalia and, occasionally, she misbehaved.
Once, she ate a bouquet of flowers intended for the guest of honour at a ceremonial parade, another time she left a deposit at the legislature. Often, when she was supposed to be standing at attention, she was digging through the pockets of Bickerton's wife, Mary, searching for sugar cubes.
Always, she ate like a horse, favouring equine staples, as well as tobacco, whiskey and beer.`
"She ate just about anything," says Mary Bickerton, 85, who on Nov. 20 will celebrate her 68th wedding anniversary with Gordon. "The only thing she didn't eat was cheese."
On Princess Louise's 25th birthday, a party was thrown in Sussex, the home of the Hussars. The chef at a local military base baked her a cake out of oatmeal and cigarettes and layered it with icing and raw carrots.
Gordon Bickerton presented it to Princess Louise, who eyeballed it for a second.
"Then she drove her nose into the middle of it, nearly up to her eyes," he says. "She nearly knocked me down. She split the cake in two."
A native of England who moved to New Brunswick as a baby, Bickerton enlisted in the Second World War. He was in London, walking in Trafalgar Sqaure, when he and an Army buddy met Mary and a friend.
In no time the boys were chatting them up and the couples paired off. Later that night, they thought better of their choices, and switched - and now the Bickertons have been together seven decades, have three children, six grandchildren and six great-great grandkids.
A native of London, Mary moved to rural New Brunswick following the war, to Millstream, near Sussex.
"I knew there was no water in the house and I knew there was an outhouse way out back with catalogues that weren't there for reading, but hearing about it is one thing and living it is something else," she says.
Now, of course, that seems long ago, and it is. But they share a lifetime of memories, and a love for a horse that was rescued from a battlefield in Italy.
One time, while trying to apply for a military medal for Princess Louise, the Bickertons chased her around a field in Sussex trying to get her to step on an ink pad because the form required her signature.
"She looked at us like we were crazy," Mary says.
A former member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps, she helped her husband in the keeping of Princess Louise.
"The children used to call me 'the horse's mother'," she says. "They could have called me something worse."
SOURCE: The New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal (Saint John, NB) - November 11, 2011.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: Princess Louise made numerous appearances at Camp Utopia during the 1950's.
