Volume 2 - ElectricCanadian.com

360 HISTORY OF THE BANKIn view of the extent to which its staff had already beendrained by voluntary enlistment, 1 the bank asked all thoseof its officers who were supposed to be medically unfit toapply for exemption and to report the result, and announcedits intention to apply for the exemption of a certain number ofofficers, to be designated later, whose services were deemedindispensable. Had sufficient time been available to ascertainhow many members of its staff would be classed as medicallyunfit and were therefore likely to be exempted from militaryservice, it would have been possible to reduce the number ofexemptions applied for, but this could not be done under thecircumstances. In October the branches were advised that,at the suggestion of the chairman of the Military ServiceCouncil, a special committee had been appointed by theCanadian Bankers' Association to which each bank mightsubmit a list of officers for whom exemption was required, thecommittee to make a finding on the merits of each case for usebefore the local tribunals. The committee consisted of fivemembers, from as many banks, and included a representativeof The Canadian Bank of Commerce.The actual call for service came on October 13, 1917, themen called out being, as expected, those in Class I under theMilitary Service Act.The necessities of the military situationrequired prompt action, and the interval between the proclamationcalling out the men and the date on which they were'The following details as to the composition of the staff about this time will beof interest. The total male clerical staff (excluding messengers, who were in mostcues men of more advanced years than those called out under the Military ServiceAct) at the outbreak of the war numbered 2,580. At the end of September, 1917,the number of enlistments from the bank's staff had reached 1,379, in addition to 805men who had resigned for other reasons, many of them subsequently enlisting. Theproportion of men on the staff whose service antedated the war, and who might thereforebe regarded as trained officers, was less than half the number of the staff at theoutset of the war;while during the interval the volume of business had increasedenormously, as may be judged from the facts that the bank's deposits were thirty percent, greater than in 1914, and that the clearing-house figures of all the banks (indicatingthe volume of their daily business) were nearly fifty per cent, greater. In addition,the Victory Loan campaign, with all the immense burden of work it placed upon thebanks, was just pending.