BRITTON, Dorothy Florence
Age at Death: 23
Rank Wren
Unit Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service
Service Number W3106
Place of Burial St. John’s Churchyard Cemetery, York Mills ON
Date of Birth 1920.07.13
Place of Birth Toronto ON
Enlistment June 2, 1943, Toronto ON
Date of Death 1945.03.28
Daughter of Arthur Hamilton Britton and Marjorie Florence Britton, of Toronto
Dorothy was born and raised in Toronto. Hoping to train as a nurse after the war, she enlisted in the Navy as a Wren in April 1943. Her evaluations hint at emotional instability, in the dated vocabulary and world view of the time: “…seems rather high strung. She seems so shy it is rather hard to tell whether she is intelligent or not. I think she would get rattled rather easily… says her mind often works backwards… Leaves sentences incompleted. Very vague in ideas and conversation. Laugh is queer, almost simple.”
In March 1945, while taking a break from dusting her barracks, Dorothy fell from a second-floor window, injuring her leg and head. This time the evaluation was more severe: “Her ego shows a lack of insight and a lot of self-deprecation and projection… Emotionally she shows no change to any sort of stimulation which normally should show happiness or sadness or in fact there is almost a dissociation of emotion.”
On April 2, she had another evaluation during which she admitted that her fall had been deliberate. Two and a half hours after this evaluation, in nearby Hillcrest Park, she slit her throat with a razor blade, and was declared dead later that day. A letter sent to her father the same day stated, “I trust it will give you a reasonable degree of personal pride and satisfaction in the knowledge that your daughter fulfilled the purpose for which she was engaged in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service.”
