Comité historique Saint-Gabriel de Valcartier Historical Committee’s

This is a story of passionate creativity, one that spans over 100 years of
Quebec’s history. At each end of the story is a proud English and French-
speaking Canadian, linked by a bond unique to artists.

The first of these is a farmer named James McCartney, born in 1889, who
lived and worked in the small cluster of communities surrounding Saint-
Gabriel-de-Valcartier, northwest of Quebec City. He died at the age of 41, in
1931, but in the years between, he left a beautiful legacy: his poetry.
The only formal literary education he brought to his work were the strict
poetic structures he had learned in his basic schooling. He shaped his works
into 4-line rhyming stanzas, telling tales that laid bare the emotion and
fervor hidden in the lives of the farming community of Quebecers around
him. 

As he found his poetic voice, he also developed a resilience to obstacles that
now seem foreign to us. Large and easily-available supplies of paper, for
example, were not available to him. So James improvised, even scribbling
his poetry on the backs of old wall calendars, of the kind that can be still
discovered in abandoned barns and antique markets across Quebec. Even
the blank endpapers of books became manuscripts for his poetic art. With
this combination of inventiveness and artistry he eventually turned out
enough poetry that even a century later he is locally remembered as “The
Bard (Poet) of Valcartier”.

But history moves on, and as for many millions of others, James’s life was
profoundly changed by the Great World War of 1914-1918. Canada’s army,
then known as the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was faced with the task of
quickly assembling, equipping and training over 35,000 volunteers before
shipping them overseas to fight.

Valcartier, close to the port of Quebec City, was determined to be the ideal
place to locate a large military staging base. Thousands of acres of farmland
were expropriated for the site that, to this day exists as Canadian Armed
Forces (CFB) Valcartier. Canada’s War effort trumped all else, including the
livelihoods of the local farmers. With their lands expropriated, many had to
earn a living and some of them embarked on “excursions”. These were
months-long seasonal trips to the Prairies of southern Manitoba and
Saskatchewan, where they had been transported by train to work the wheat
harvests.

James McCartney cast a poet’s eye on these life-changing events. He not
only wrote of the hardships and isolation of the Prairie excursions, but also
about the adventures and joys that enticed young men of the time. And as
the roster of casualties lengthened in 1915, he began to write about the
wider scope of the War, as seen through the eyes of ordinary young
Canadian soldiers and local Valcartier families. That body of work, written
from 1915-1918, is still recognized as the high-water mark of his poetic
artistry.

It was after the War that his work descended into obscurity, lying virtually
unnoticed for a century. Some of his original rough manuscripts did survive,
and in 2025 they were rediscovered by the second artist of our story:
Quebec City native Linda Dacres.

A singer-songwriter, Linda had begun to launch a career in popular music
from her late teens. Besides her voice, the guitar became her instrument of
choice and she relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a recording contract.
She recorded and released a record of two of her original songs: “Ma p’tite
chanson d’amour” (A Side) and “Tu m’envois” (B side). Following her debut
record, Linda had composed enough songs to produce several record
albums. But the unpredictability of the music industry forced Linda’s record
company – a subsidiary label of A & M Records – to shut down in the midst
of recording her first album. More than a little dejected, Linda wrapped up
her guitar in bubble wrap and reinvented her life.

She became a Toronto-based, self-employed marketing and advertising
consultant, specializing in campaigns for non-profit fundraising. Her
expertise, creativity and plain hard work led to her receiving 11 international
awards for excellence. She has been credited through her work with Concert
Productions International, on video productions such as Rush’s “Grace Under
Pressure”, “Tears Are Not Enough” for African famine relief, and Bryan
Adams’s “Somebody”.

It was during this time that she was introduced to the official fundraising
arm of the Catholic Church in Toronto. She was hired to create and produce
a yearly multimillion dollar fund-raising initiative – ShareLife – that
supported and maintained a wide range of social services for the
disadvantaged and needy throughout the Greater Toronto Area.
In the course of this large-scale project she met a Scottish Catholic priest,
who was a member of a missionary Society based in Rome. The priest had
been repositioned in Toronto to fundraise for their African missions.
He had an innate understanding of media as a powerful tool, and saw that
working with Linda would be a great asset. When he returned to one of his
society’s mission stations in war-torn Uganda, he arranged a fact-finding trip
for her to see first-hand their work in both northern Uganda and Kenya. This
resulted in highly successful media campaign. Two years later, she
undertook a similar journey and travelled to one of the Society’s remote
mission stations in the southern African nation of Malawi. Linda’s
experiences with the desperately poor people of the African bush energized
the healer and helper facets of her character. This experience inspired her to
fast-track into a new career in nursing that she described as a “vocation and
a calling”.

Over the next 30 years, first as a Registered Nurse and later as a Primary
Health Care Nurse Practitioner (NP), Linda fashioned a distinguished,
patient-centered and award-winning nursing practice. She not only worked
in a variety of both hospital and community settings, she also pioneered
multiple innovative and notable legislative, regulatory and educational
“firsts” in the NP profession. Her last family practice was a 5-year, 1000+
roster of patients in Cornwall, Ontario. But after the COVID-19 pandemic
came to an end, Linda decided that the time had come to transfer her
medical practice and retire from the profession in 2025.

For all these years, her still bubble-wrapped guitar stood in the corners of
various closets as she moved from place to place. Like many retirees, Linda
had to make decisions about how she could continue to live a creative and
productive new stage in her life. One day, almost on a whim, she unwrapped
her guitar and began to strum its deadened strings. Almost at once it was as
if she had been transported back to her early twenties: her love for music
called out to her again.

The loveable old instrument was somewhat the worse for wear, so she
obtained a newer version and began to refresh basic chords and techniques.
This led her to join various informal guitar classes and “jamming” groups
and it was here, in a way, that she finally met and creatively linked with the
spirit of James McCartney.

Not long after, at the local Royal Canadian Legion Branch’s Friday afternoon
jams, Linda struck up a casual “where are you from?” conversation with
another musician. They soon established that each had personal and familial
links to Valcartier. Drawing on her longstanding interest in history and
legacies, Linda started exploring Valcartier genealogies. She discovered that
some ancestors had not returned to Valcartier after the Western Canada
excursions; they had stayed on as part of the Quebec “diaspora” following
World War I.

This is how Linda discovered Robert Hicks, a native of Valcartier who moved
to Manitoba. Through his online postings she was introduced to James
McCartney’s poetry in the spring of 2025. Robert had been trying to find
ways to have the poems published, but his efforts to promote them in the
Western Canada were unsuccessful.

Linda was moved by the simplicity and wistful beauty of James’s poems. She
suddenly hit upon a possible game-changer: instead of publishing them in
print form, why not reconfigure and transform them into musically-
structured songs? Could this give second life to both his poetry and her
music?

Robert Hicks was intrigued, but clearly Linda knew it wouldn’t be easy.
James’s highly-structured poems, whose formulaic style and vocabulary do
not directly translate into more contemporary song formats. A song with a
“hook”, chorus and bridge must be carefully crafted, based on the limitations
imposed by the poems’ verses. Linda’s intention from the start was to stay
faithful to James’s texts, since her goal was to maintain fidelity to his poetry.
Linda set about the challenge with a vengeance. For the entire summer of
2025, she worked “obsessively” out of her basement, turning out an average
of a song per week. She later remarked that she could almost feel James
McCartney’s presence urging her on “like a demanding task-master”.
Of all the songs, there had to be a first, and Linda chose “Lord of the Soil”
(aka “The Farmer’s Lament”). James had written it in 1915, and its elegiac
tone recalls the pain of the first land expropriation for the army base at
Valcartier during WWI. However, she also chose it because there was a
second expropriation, in 1965, to accommodate an expansion of CFB
Valcartier. Linda described “feeling the pain” of her own great-grandfather
and extended family, who lost their land that year.

Linda began work on having “Lord of the Soil” produced as a recording.
Working with studios in Los Angeles and Ottawa, she recorded, and
released the song on Armistice Day, November 11, 2025. In the interim,
word of Linda’s work, which she now called “The Jimmy Project”, had spread
to the regional Valcartier area. Linda was invited to perform some of the
poems/songs in Valcartier on October 4, 2025 for relatives, municipal and
historical society members, and community residents. They received her
work with enthusiasm and encouraged her to continue to pursue the Project.
An interesting side note is that, in the course of The Jimmy Project Linda
uncovered old binders of her own song lyrics from decades ago. The
melodies that accompanied her lyrics are now lost, and Linda has started the
process of recomposing, bringing to bear the same creative energy and
originality that animates The Jimmy Project.

She builds upon the passion and creativity that James expressed in his
poems more than 100 years ago. Although he lived far from the public eye,
he was writing more then he knew. Like a small stone thrown into a pond,
his work rippled outwards in all directions, not knowing what the waves
would affect as they passed. But to our benefit, the wave of his poetry
eventually washed ashore in the Valcartier, Quebec and the Western
Provinces of our day and time. We shall forever be richer because of it.

Written by Stephen J. Connor
November 11, 2025

To listen to Linda’s beautiful rendition of “Lord of the Soil”, see the NEWS section of this website’s home page: