Brigadier-General W.F. Sweny
4th Bn., Royal Fusiliers (City of London)

The marriage of my father to Alice Roy took place October 28, 1885, and would have occurred at an earlier day had not opposition been made to this step on the ground of the deceased wife’s sister’s relationship, which in England, though not in Canada, was then a legal bar … [she wrote] “I consider that for me there can be no higher ideal than to become a mother to my sister’s two boys and to make their home what no other woman in the world could make it.” She always called herself our mother, instead of our aunt. 

(W.F. Sweny quoted in Montreal Gazette, 20 Feb 1925, 6)

Born in Belfast on 25 June 1873, William Frederick Sweny was the son of Colonel George Augustus Sweny, a veteran of the Indian Mutiny. After the death of his mother in 1880, he and his brother were cared for by his aunt who married his father in Toronto in 1885. After Sweny graduated from RMC, in 1893, he was commissioned in his father’s old regiment, the Royal Fusiliers (City of London). He served in South Africa and Egypt before he was attached to the Canadian militia in January 1914. He transferred back to the British Army at the outbreak of the Great War.

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