The Lay-vee Light

HMCS Levis crew. Photo Catalogue No. VR2002.1.58

HMCS LÉVIS (2nd) was commissioned at Quebec City on 21 July, 1944. She arrived at Bermuda at the end of August to work up, and a month later left for Halifax, Nova Scotia, to join the newly formed Escort Group EG 27. LÉVIS spent the balance of the war with the same group, on patrol and escort duty out of Halifax, and on 04 June, she commenced being fitted for use in tropical regions at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The work was completed on 26 November and she sailed a month later for Esquimalt, British Columbia, arriving 30 January, 1946. LÉVIS paid off at Esquimalt on 15 February, 1946, to reserve there, was sold in 1947, and her hull was expended the following year as part of a breakwater at Oyster Bay, BC.

The shipboard newsletter of HMCS LÉVIS (2nd), titled The Lay-vee Light, is featured here. The publication appears to have been fairly short-lived, and we don’t have a full set of all the issues that were produced . Although very light-hearted, mainly featuring crudely drawn (and sometimes crude in content) cartoons, jokes, shipboard news, stories and chat, the newsletter also carried more serious news. One issue produced in August 1945 focuses on the disquieting process of demobilization and discharge for HMCS LÉVIS’s crew:

“V-J Day [Victory in Japan] has come and everyone is beginning to think. Their thoughts are not the frivolous care free thoughts of men in a happy efficient and contented ship, but are of the grave reality of imminent return to civilian life in a matter of months. Just how many months it will be, no one knows, but the fact remains that it will be so and we begin to think seriously of post-war careers ….. It is a mighty big problem and one well worthy of the serious thought that it is being given.”