Working the Dead Beat (43 page)

John Weir

Flier and Prisoner of War

July 22, 1919 – September 20, 2009

I
N A SKY
as azure as a line from “High Flight,” a Lancaster bomber, one of its port engines cut and propeller stilled, flew in sunlit silence over the playing fields of Upper Canada College in midtown Toronto on an afternoon in late September 2009. It was chased by a perky canary-yellow de Havilland Chipmunk, a flypast that was an idiosyncratic but moving tribute to John (“Scruffy”) Weir, a veteran of the Second World War, a pilot who loved to restore heritage planes, and a man who had thwarted his German captors as a prisoner of war.

Above all, he was a survivor. A Spitfire pilot who crashed and burned in France in 1941, he endured four years as a German
POW
, underwent horrendous plastic surgeries without anesthesia, helped plan the “Great Escape” from the infamous Stalag Luft
III
, and withstood a forced march across Germany in the dying days of the war.

Few people knew better than John Weir how to cherish life.

JOHN GORDON WEIR
was born in Toronto on July 22, 1919, less than a year after Germany signed the armistice ending the First World War, a war that had scarred the life of his father, Colonel James Gordon Weir. The elder Weir, a Presbyterian of Scottish descent, served in the frontline trenches in a machine-gun battalion. By the time the guns were silenced, he had been gassed twice, awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, and risen through the ranks from trooper to colonel. He was a genuine military hero.

After the war, he married a Canadian nursing sister, Mary Frederica (Freda) Taylor, whom he had met in a convalescent hospital. After Weir's discharge, he and his wife settled in Toronto. He resumed his former trade as a bond salesman, eventually helping to found the brokerage firm McLeod Young Weir (now part of Scotiabank).

Everything that Weir had absorbed and accumulated — affluence, the horrors of trench warfare, Germany's festering imperial ambitions — he expended in structuring a training and survival framework for his only son. Young John was sent to Upper Canada College, an elite private school, but the classroom was merely a humdrum part of a much larger education orchestrated by his father: how to survive in the natural and political wilderness. As the 1920s turned into the '30s, Weir was convinced that a second world war against the old foe was inevitable.

He wanted to hone his son's wilderness and strategic skills, so he sent the boy to Algonquin Park in the summers under the tutelage of an Ojibwa fishing guide. He sent him to France during school breaks when he was a teenager to learn the language and customs, and took him along on European business trips in the mid-1930s to observe the rise of Nazism.

On a couple of occasions, Weir had his son carry covert messages to desperate McLeod Young Weir clients who were trying to escape from Germany. In the final stage of this idiosyncratic boot camp, he sent his son to Timmins, in northern Ontario, in July 1938 to work underground in the gold mines. Ostensibly the teenager was earning tuition money for university, but the real goal was to toughen him up with hard physical labour.

On September 4, 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, John Weir, then barely twenty, enlisted in the nascent and ill-equipped Royal Canadian Air Force. He was called up in November, sent to a civilian flying school in Winnipeg, and then shipped back east. He was eventually posted to Trenton, Ontario, to train on fighters. After he appeared on dress parade wearing a uniform stained with the engine coolant glycol, a visiting
RAF
group captain observed that Weir was “rather a scruffy looking individual” — and “Scruffy” he remained.

About this time he met Fran McCormack on a blind date. They danced together like champions and she brought out the playful side in him — although it never was far from the surface. On at least two occasions he “bombed” her with notes in handkerchiefs dropped from training planes over her Forest Hill neighbourhood, a courting ritual that today would rouse the institutional ire of aviation authorities.

Weir shipped out in August 1940, arriving on the south coast of England in the middle of the Blitz and at the apogee of German invasion fears. He was posted to 401 Squadron, which had sustained heavy losses in the Battle of Britain, and was then reassigned to Thurso, Scotland, to regroup while protecting the skies over Scapa Flow, the main British naval base.

By October 1941, Squadron 401 had been posted to Lancashire and re-equipped with Spitfires, which were faster than Hurricanes and more agile than Messerschmitts. By then Weir had accumulated a thousand hours of operational flight time, far exceeding the life expectancy for new fighter pilots, which was approximately six combat hours. But his luck was about to expire.

Flying sweeps over Abbeville, one of the main Luftwaffe bases in Picardy, he was shot down by a covey of Messerschmitts. When the Spitfire's cockpit and fuel tank burst into flames, he bailed out at 26,000 feet, a dangerously high altitude without an oxygen mask, and landed — burned, battered, and bootless — about thirty kilometres southwest of Caen.

His eyes were almost fused shut and the skin on his hands, face, and neck was seared. A French farmer led him, nearly blind and in shock, to a tree stump and told him to wait for the Germans. That's how he began his nearly four years as a
POW
, first in a German hospital and then in Stalag Luft I, on the Baltic. After a couple of short-lived escapes followed by brutal beatings, he, along with three hundred other prisoners, was transported by rail to Stalag Luft
III
, the allegedly escape-proof camp near Sagan, Poland (about 160 kilometres southeast of Berlin), in mid-April 1942.

He immediately joined the X, or escape, committee. Hatching escape plots was a universal conversational currency for bored and frustrated
POW
s. Carrying out these brave but often foolhardy schemes — sneaking under the wire, jumping from trains while being transported from one camp to another, or tunnelling under the prison walls — was as commonplace an activity as stamp collecting in peacetime. But Stalag Luft
III
had been specifically designed to thwart tunnelling. The barracks in the four compounds were raised two feet off the ground so guards could observe covert digging; the sandy subsoil, which was structurally fragile, was bright yellow and easily detected against the grey surface soil; and seismograph microphones had been embedded around the perimeter of the camp to amplify the sounds of digging.

But the Germans hadn't anticipated the determination and organizational skills of
RAF
squadron leader Roger Bushell, who later became immortalized in print and on screen as the mastermind behind the Great Escape. Since being shot down in May 1940, Bushell had survived at least four
POW
camps and several escape attempts before arriving at Stalag Luft
III
in October 1942. He immediately developed an ambitious master plan for three tunnels — Tom, Dick, and Harry — and an escape strategy to spring more than two hundred men, equipped with civilian clothes or tradesmen's uniforms, identity papers, and travel documents.

Weir's pal Wally Floody, whom he knew from Toronto and the mines in Timmins, was also a
POW
at Stalag Luft
III
. He became the X committee's master tunneller and quickly recruited Weir as a digger. The summer that Weir spent in the mines of northern Ontario had taught him the significance of shoring up tunnels so they wouldn't collapse and bury the diggers.

Floody's first decision as master tunneller was to use Klim tins (containers of powdered milk sent in by the Red Cross) as scoops to dig straight down for thirty feet (thereby making a smaller sound field for the guards) before levelling out and extending horizontally. The tins were also modified and strung together to form ducts to bring fresh air from the surface into the tunnel. The row of tins provided a directional marker as well, which was a bonus for Weir, who was inclined to veer left and downwards. They helped keep him from digging in a circle.

Despite the ingenuity and perseverance of the
POW
s, the Great Escape was stalled more often than not. In December 1943, with Tom and Dick abandoned and all the obvious dumping grounds exhausted for the mounds of yellow sand coming out of Harry, the ambitious escape plans were put on hold. That's when Wally Floody persuaded his Ontario pal to consult a visiting Red Cross doctor about his deteriorating eyesight. Because Weir's eyelids were gone, he did everything — including sleeping and digging — with his eyes wide open, leaving them vulnerable to disease, damage, and fatigue. The doctor convinced him that he would eventually go blind if he didn't seek treatment. Consequently, Weir agreed to be transferred to a German hospital for plastic surgery.

He thought he would be away for a couple of weeks. In fact, he was there for several months, serving as a guinea pig under the experimental care of David Charters. A Scottish ophthalmologist serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Charters had been captured in Greece in 1941. By 1943, having turned down an opportunity to be repatriated in a prisoner exchange, he was the chief medical officer of Stalag
IXB
, at the spa town of Bad Soden, near Frankfurt. The Germans had so few medical supplies and medical personnel by then that they used qualified Allied
POW
s to treat civilians and perform experimental surgeries on prisoners.

Charters did a series of experimental skin grafts on Weir, slowly rebuilding his upper and lower eyelids — without anaesthetic. Before operating, he trained Weir in self-hypnosis, as that was the only way the patient could withstand the pain of the scalpel and keep his eyes still enough to avoid being blinded during the multiple surgeries. It took until late spring 1944 for Weir to heal enough to be sent back to Stalag Luft
III
.

Charters saved Weir's sight, and probably also his life, for without the long hospitalization in Bad Soden, Weir would have been crawling through Harry on Friday night, March 24, 1944, in the Great Escape. Of the seventy-six men who slithered through the tunnel before the Germans discovered the escape attempt, only three made it to safety. Defying the Geneva Convention, fifty captured prisoners were executed, either singly or in pairs. Weir arrived back in Stalag Luft
III
in early June (about the same time as the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy) knowing that many of his fellow prisoners had been murdered.

By late fall, as the Allies advanced through France, the Germans were clearly facing defeat. Camp conditions deteriorated, and Red Cross parcels of food and medicine frequently disappeared into German mouths. Open hostility erupted between the guards and the prisoners. As the Soviets marched from the east in the bitter January weather, the Germans, fearing retaliation for earlier atrocities, forced the hungry and ill-clad prisoners to march westward, deeper into war-ravaged Germany.

Weir, his survival instincts in overdrive, decided that making a break for freedom would greatly increase his chances of staying alive until the end of the war. He bribed a guard to organize a cart and horse and to pretend he was escorting four
POW
s to a prison camp near the coast. In exchange, Weir invented an amnesty agreement, scribbled it on a piece of paper, had his three pals sign it, ripped it in half, and gave one portion to the guard.

If they made it to L
ü
beck, on the Baltic, the
POW
s would rejoin the pieces of paper and vouch for the guard. After a horrific march through war-ravaged and SS-infested Germany, Weir nonchalantly tossed the other part of his fake amnesty to the guard after they linked up safely with the invading Allies.

After the war, Weir, like many veterans, was reluctant to talk about the horrors he had witnessed or what he himself might have done to survive that trek. Considering that he left the
POW
camp near Sagan weighing 124 pounds and had gained nearly 40 pounds by the time he was liberated by the Allies in Lubeck three weeks later, he had clearly drawn upon his father's enforced training in survival techniques.

Weir returned to Canada, married his sweetheart Fran, cashed in nearly four years of back pay from his truncated flying career, and embarked on a profitable career as a bond salesman for Wood Gundy — his father's strict rules against nepotism meant that the doors of McLeod Young Weir were firmly closed to him.

The Weirs eventually had three children. In an extraordinarily close marriage, they travelled extensively and enjoyed weekends and vacations at a large farm they bought in the mid-1950s, in the Mulmur Hills north of Toronto. By the time Weir finally retired from Wood Gundy, long past the age when most people call it quits, he had helped found the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton and African Lion Safari, near his father's birthplace in Flamborough, Ontario. He died at home in Toronto on September 20, 2009, at age ninety.

 

Lucien Saumur

February 6, 1921 – March 22, 2007

&

Glen How

March 25, 1919 – December 30, 2008

Jehovah's Witnesses and Civil Rights Activists

W
E LIKE TO
think we live in a tolerant society, but many of the rights we take for granted only became enshrined after dogged legal battles against bigoted politicians and censorious bureaucrats. As Jehovah's Witnesses, Lucien Saumur and Glen How may seem unlikely champions, but these two men, in fighting for the right to worship according to the tenets of their faith, helped ensure that religious freedoms were encased in the Bill of Rights and subsequently in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Saumur was arrested more than a hundred times for distributing religious tracts and canvassing door to door for converts in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Quebec. How was a lawyer with only one client, the Jehovah's Witnesses. From the time he was called to the bar in Ontario in 1943 until the day he stopped practising, well into his eighties, he spent his entire professional career protecting, defending, and promoting the interests of the Jehovah's Witnesses, all the way to the Supreme Court. In the 1950s, he acted on behalf of Witnesses, including Saumur, who were routinely arrested,
especially
in Quebec, for going door to door proselytizing their faith and criticizing the Roman Catholic Church and its priests.

After Canada declared war against Germany in 1939, the War Measures Act was invoked to empower the government to take whatever actions it deemed necessary to confront its enemies abroad and at home. Less than a year later, Prime Minister Mackenzie King's government, terrified by the fall of France in June 1940, fearing the German invasion of England was imminent, suspicious that fifth columnists might be operating in Canada, and wanting to placate generally anti-conscription and Roman Catholic Quebec, passed an order-in-council outlawing a number of organizations in Canada, including the Witnesses. “This ban ranks as the single most serious interference with religious liberties by the state in all of modern Canada's history,” argues William Kaplan in
State and Salvation: The Jehovah's Witnesses and Their Fight for Civil Rights
.

At the time, Nazi Germany was the only other country to have issued such an edict against the Witnesses. After the war, Maurice Duplessis — who was both Quebec premier and attorney general — actually declared “a war without mercy against the Witnesses of Jehovah,” a faith he saw as a serious threat to the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

Duplessis feared the Witnesses for a number of reasons. Many of them spoke French, so they melded into the majority population, unlike Protestants and Jews, who were mainly English-speaking and so easily identified as the “other.” Yet the Witnesses were also outsiders in that they studied the Bible rather than the Scriptures and they refused to acknowledge temporal authority. Finally, they were strident in their condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church, its nuns, priests, and Pope, and relentless in their proselytizing on street corners, preaching in people's homes, and assembling in large gatherings.

The Quebec premier waged his campaign against the Witnesses with all the authority in his administrative and legal arsenal. Between 1946 and 1953, Witnesses were involved in more than 1,500 criminal prosecutions, ranging from disturbing the peace to sedition, even though there were fewer than five hundred Witnesses in the province. Three legal cases — one of them Saumur's — involving basic rights to freedom of speech, of religion, and of association made it all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Witnesses emerged out of the Bible Student movement, led by Charles Taze Russell in the 1870s in Pittsburgh; the religion spread through the evangelistic Watchtower Society, which was formed a decade later. Russell's successor, Joseph Rutherford, expanded the group and its theological basis. He gave the name Jehovah's Witnesses to Bible Students who were faithful members of what later became the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

Witnesses believe that two worlds exist simultaneously. There is Satan's old world, to which the vast majority of humanity belongs, and Jehovah's new world, to which the Jehovah's Witnesses, the chosen people of God, belong. Witnesses deny the existence of the Trinity and believe that Jesus established his kingdom in heaven in 1914 and ousted Satan, who came down to earth to live amongst us. They use the Bible to interpret the past and predict the future and believe that the world will be destroyed, as the Bible states, at Armageddon, in a conflagration whose anticipated date has shifted from 1925 to 1975 and then to an indefinite time in the future.

While waiting for God's kingdom, Witnesses recognize that they must live in Satan's world, but they do not consider themselves citizens of any particular country, as their loyalty is to God alone. They pay taxes but choose not to vote, salute a national flag, or serve in the armed forces. Once a year they meet at huge international conventions that form the highlight of their religious year, similar in importance to Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah for Jews and Good Friday and Easter for Christians.

LUCIEN SAUMUR WAS
born February 6, 1921, in the Gatineau Hills in western Quebec, north of Ottawa, one of fourteen children of an illiterate Roman Catholic farmer and his wife. He grew up attending Mass, taking Communion, and confessing his sins to the parish priest in an era when the Church dominated most aspects of life in the province, including education.

When he was eighteen, he left the farm and moved to Ottawa. That's where he discovered the public library and shelves of books just waiting to be read. He began devouring the works he had been denied, and in the process he learned some of the more unsavoury aspects of the Catholic Church's long history, including the Inquisition. The more he read, the more his suspicion and mistrust grew, especially after a cousin introduced him to the Catholic Action movement, which he described later as a political group with fascist and anti-Semitic leanings.

In 1943, a Montreal friend showed him a newspaper article about a man named Hector Saumur, who had been given a three-month prison sentence in Timmins, Ontario, for being a Witness and thus a member of a banned organization. Recognizing the convicted man as his own brother — he had left home years before to work in the mines of northern Ontario — Saumur wrote to him and in reply received a Bible and some booklets about the Witnesses.

It was the first Bible that Saumur had ever seen, and he showed it to his parish priest, who promptly confiscated it. Undaunted, and fascinated by what he had been reading in his brother's pamphlets about the life of Jesus and the missionary work of the Apostles, Saumur bought another Bible and read it avidly.

He moved to Timmins to join his brother so that he could learn more about the Witnesses and improve his English. For some time he continued to attend Mass while studying with the Witnesses, but he incurred the wrath of his local parish priest when he began asking leading questions about hell, the Trinity, and the immortality of the soul.

After hearing his priest denounce the Witnesses from the pulpit, he gave up Roman Catholicism and resolved to commit his life to upholding the teachings of the Bible and modelling himself on Christ's early followers. Saumur was baptized as a Witness, probably in a secret ceremony, on July 1, 1944.

A year later he was in Montreal, witnessing from door to door as a missionary for the church, working mostly with Marcel Filteau, a bilingual Witness who had been educated in English Protestant schools after his father rejected Roman Catholicism and became a Witness. The two men were frequently harassed and arrested by the police. One autumn day they climbed the outside spiral staircase on a Montreal triplex and were speaking to the owners of the upper flat when the police showed up. One officer stayed at the bottom and the other climbed the stairs and arrested the two Witnesses.

Filteau descended first, with Saumur following and the policeman in the rear, administering kicks and blows on the way. Two steps from the pavement, Saumur, a husky guy who worked out with barbells, turned, grabbed the officer by the shoulders, lifted him up and put him down on the ground again, and said: “Be thankful that I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses.” The policeman, according to Filteau's account, went white as a sheet. That didn't stop the officers from throwing the two Witnesses in jail, however.

One of the mainstays of the Witnesses during this period in Quebec was Frank Roncarelli, an Italian immigrant and affluent Montreal businessman who ran a Crescent Street café called Quaff that his father had opened in 1912. After Roncarelli posted bail for nearly four hundred Witnesses (including Saumur) who had been arrested for distributing religious pamphlets, the police cracked down and, on the orders of the premier, Maurice Duplessis, revoked his liquor licence in December 1946. Six months later he had to close the restaurant because his business had declined so precipitously. He sued the premier for damages with the assistance of legal heavyweights F. R. Scott and A. L. Stein. The case went to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled in Roncarelli's favour in 1959, some thirteen years later and long after he had gone bankrupt.

Meanwhile, Saumur was sent to Quebec City to minister with John (Joe) How. That brought him in contact with How's elder brother Glen, a lawyer and a prime defender of Witnesses embroiled in the justice system.

GLEN HOW WAS
born in Montreal on March 25, 1919, but moved to Toronto with his family when he was about a year old. His father, Frank, was an accountant and personnel manager at paint manufacturer
CIL
, and his mother, Bessie, was a homemaker. When Glen was five and his younger brother Joe was three, his mother answered the door of their Toronto home, fell into conversation with a Jehovah's Witness, and soon began attending meetings of the Bible Students, as Witnesses were called in those days. By 1929 she was a pioneer — a full-time minister — a calling she followed until she died in 1969. Initially Frank How was opposed to his wife's conversion, but he gradually condoned it, although he never became a Witness himself.

After graduating from Vaughan Road Collegiate in 1936, Glen enrolled at the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1940 before proceeding to Osgoode Hall Law School. By his own account, How was “not very interested in spiritual things” as a teenager. His conversion can be traced directly to Mackenzie King's use of the War Measures Act to ban Jehovah's Witnesses.

It was “the turning point in my life,” How wrote sixty years later in a biographical article in
Awake!
, a magazine published by the movement. “When the full power of the government targeted this tiny organization of innocent, humble people, it convinced me that Jehovah's Witnesses were Jesus's true followers.” He was baptized, also probably in a secret ceremony, on February 10, 1941.

Following his call to the bar in Ontario two years later, he began working as general counsel for the still-illegal Witnesses and subsequently qualified in Quebec, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. He relentlessly argued that ministers in the Jehovah's Witnesses, many of whom had been interned in labour camps, were, like other clergy, entitled to conscientious-objector status. He also defended the right of children of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse to sing the national anthem at school ceremonies. Some of those children were expelled from school and put into foster care. Late in 1943, he travelled to New York to seek help with his appeals from the wily and experienced Hayden Covington, the Watchtower Society's legal counsel, who eventually won thirty-six out of the forty-five cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The federal government rescinded many of its strictures against the Witnesses after the war ended, but there was one jurisdiction — Quebec — where religious freedom was still not observed. How spent so much time commuting to and from Quebec to act in criminal prosecutions, ranging from disturbing the peace to sedition, that he moved there in the late 1940s to set up a law practice. Every morning, his first job was to find out how many Witnesses had been arrested the day before and then try to arrange bail for them. A frequent client was his brother, Joe, who ministered with Laurier Saumur on the streets of Quebec City.

The provincial capital, which was Duplessis's political stronghold, had enacted a bylaw forbidding the distribution of “any book, pamphlet, booklet, circular, or tract whatever without having previously obtained . . . the written permission of the chief of police.” In response, the Witnesses produced “Quebec's Burning Hate,” a four-page tract listing names, dates, and places of violence against Jehovah's Witnesses, and began distributing it across Canada in late 1946.

Within days, Duplessis declared his infamous “war without mercy against the Witnesses of Jehovah” and ordered sedition charges laid against anyone caught distributing the pamphlet. In the first sedition case to go to trial, How, who had still not been called to the bar of Quebec, worked under Jewish lawyer A. L. Stein to defend a Jehovah's Witness named Aimé Boucher. Meanwhile, Saumur, who had been arrested some hundred times for violating the flyer bylaw, filed a civil suit against Quebec City and its bylaw restricting his right to canvass door to door.

The Boucher, Saumur, and Roncarelli cases went to the Supreme Court in the 1950s. The Boucher case, which used truth as a defence, eliminated an archaic Quebec law defining sedition as criticism of the government and led to the dismissal of nearly 125 sedition charges. The Saumur case, which relied on a defence of freedom of expression and religion, established that issuing licences to restrict a person's right to practise his or her faith went beyond municipal or provincial authority, and it led to the dismissal of more than a thousand bylaw charges. And the Roncarelli case established that publicly elected officials cannot arbitrarily invoke the law against individuals, as Duplessis had done in personally revoking the restaurateur's liquor licence.