If the walls of the Old Armoury could talk, they would certainly have some interesting stories to tell of the Lorne Scots Regiment and its time there.
One of the Lornes to parade out of the building on Georgetown's Park Avenue was Barry Timleck, who joined the unit in the 1950s. When he entered the Old Armoury, one of the first things he noticed was how out of place it was even in that era.
He remembers the building – which dates back to the 1860s before Canada was a country – being drafty and cold. It needed to be heated using a coal furnace located in the back corner, off the parade square.
“It was tall - it was a big barn,” he said, adding that it was rather difficult to insulate.
The coal furnace, the rifles, the mess club and other vestiges of the military are gone.
But some still remain and they are not hard to spot if one knows where to look.
Beyond the odd plaque noting the location's history, a visitor needs only to look up inside the armoury to see the remains of old rope. One of the walls in the storage area of the historical edifice has a myriad of holes in it as well.
Timleck confirms that the ropes were for hanging gymnastics rings, which the troops used for exercising. The perforations in the wall are bullet holes from .22 LR firearms due to the fact that the Lorne Scots did target practice indoors during an era when something like that would not be frowned upon.
Mark Llewellyn, who is the president of Globe Productions – the current occupants of the armoury – worked with his wife Nanci to save his theatre company’s new home over a decade ago.
When renovating the building, his contractors had to remove several structures that made the building safe to store weapons and ammunition.
“When we first moved in, there was a concrete enclosure here that was used to store the ammunition and their rifles. Prior to that, even, there was a room in the back corner here that had, simply put, steel plates in the floor and triple layers of plywood in the walls,” Llewellyn remembered.
One of the more surprising finds was two iron rings that were part of the gymnastics rings. Timleck remembers being too short to reach them.
“People used to swing on them, but nobody used them the way we were supposed to be,” Timleck joked.
Timleck stayed in for four years, between 1953 to 1957. But William Adcock, the current honourary colonel of the regiment – a ceremonial role – arrived at the armoury in 1965. The building was still heated using a coal furnace and they were still shooting rifles indoors.
But perhaps one item from the armoury acts as an enduring symbol of Lorne Scots’ Georgetown company: the one telephone that was in the building. A mundane item anywhere else, it was the company’s lifeline to regimental headquarters. If the phone lines in rural Halton Hills went down during a storm, backup was out of reach.
“We were pretty well on our own. We called ourselves the ‘hill tribe,’" Lt. Col. Adcock quipped in recalling his time at the Old Armoury. “We were very proud of our independence. Sometimes a little more independent than we should have been.”
“I was used to adapting to strange situations. It was a different group up there,” he said further. “We were always competitive with the other companies (Oakville and Brampton). So, we always wanted to win the competitions.”
The building all three men so love is located at the doorstep of the Georgetown Fairgrounds (1 Park Avenue). It was built in response to the Fenian Raids in an era when Canada was still becoming a country.
It started life as a drill shed where local militia went to train for the coming wars. Eventually, it was taken over by the Lorne Scots, who trace part of their origins Georgetown. Col. William Allen, an Actonian, assumed command of the 20th Halton Battalion, shaping it into a highland regiment. The unit amalgamated with two others to form the Lorne Scots of today.
Alarmed by the impending demolition of the armoury, the Llewellyns and others stepped in to save the historic building. They took possession of it in 2010, headquartering their community theatre company there. They had their first rehearsal there in 2011 for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.
