TO OLDER RESIDENTS of Owen Sound, Billy Bishop, his brother Worth, and his younger sister Louie were not so much the children of Registrar Will Bishop, as the grandchildren of “Old E. W.,” the laziest man in town. It was a constant source of wonder that any man as shiftless as Eleazar Wilson Bishop could produce a son as energetic as Will and grandchildren as lively as Billy, Worth and Louie. The only explanation could be that the second and third generations took after Grandmother Sarah Bishop.
In the nineteenth century many a Canadian community had its remittance man, a character in which the town took a wry pride, a feckless younger son of a titled, wealthy or merely proud English family who banished the black sheep to “the colonies” with an allowance large enough to keep him alive but small enough to ensure that he could never pay the fare back to the ancestral roof. In Owen Sound Eleazar Bishop assumed the role of the local remittance man, but it was a fraudulent title. In the first place he was not English, but of German Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, and in the second place his remittance came not from abroad but from his wife’s dogged capacity for hard work.
In the small town of Unionville, northeast of Toronto, there was no accord between the emigrant Pennsylvania Dutch and the United Empire Loyalists who had fled to Canada rather than support the American Revolution. So when Eleazar Bishop, the German leatherworker’s son, eloped with Sarah Kilbourne, the English loyalist’s daughter, both families disowned them.
The young couple tried their luck in the North—and found none. In 1855 they settled in the boom town of Owen Sound, Ontario. This port on Georgian Bay, the world’s largest freshwater bay, had been founded only fifteen years earlier with the arrival of the railroad connecting Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior ports with Toronto, Southern Ontario and Montreal. The first Welland Canal was not built until 1870, and at this time Owen Sound was a link connecting by rail and ship the world’s trade with the Great Lakes and the interior of Canada and the United States. The town’s boosters were beginning to call Owen Sound “the Liverpool of Canada.”
It was difficult for any man with a minimum of energy and enterprise not to succeed in Owen Sound in the eighteen fifties. But Eleazar Bishop was uniquely equipped to be the exception. First he tried operating a hotel. But his casual attitude toward collecting the accounts of his guests, plus a tendency to treat friends at the hotel bar, soon put him into bankruptcy. Next he opened a saddlery and leatherworking shop—the trade he had learned from his father.
Eleazar was a skilled leatherworker, but impatient of the drudgery of catering to customers’ wants. Instead of stocking utilitarian saddles, bridles and other items of farm and home-stable use, he devoted his time to designing and making elaborate pieces of luggage that had no market in the frontier lake port of Owen Sound. When Eleazar’s leatherworking shop went into bankruptcy too, a masterpiece of leather craftsmanship in the shape of a gentleman’s hatbox was one of the few assets salvaged. It was to become Billy Bishop’s sole legacy from his grandfather, and although he never used it as a hatbox it served a useful purpose in his later life, as we shall learn.
When Eleazar failed for the second time his wife, Sarah, took over as the family breadwinner. She let it be known in town that she would accept any domestic work, however menial. She sewed and scrubbed, mended, cleaned and cooked from dawn until late at night to support her husband and three children. Eleazar accepted this turn of events philosophically. He spent the rest of his long and happy life on the porch of his home, whittling, cultivating his magnificent crop of snow-white whiskers, and dispensing good advice to the many townsfolk who paused to pass the time of day with him.
Sarah not only supported her family by hard work, but when her youngest son, Will, graduated from high school she was able to send him to Toronto to study at Osgoode Hall, the famous law school of Upper Canada. Before he left Owen Sound, Will Bishop became engaged to a girl who undoubtedly reminded him of his mother.
Margaret Louise Greene was born in New Orleans. In 1855 William Greene, her father, had graduated from Dublin University with a medical degree and returned to County Down to practise. But the disease that lay like a blight over the county and over most of Ireland was one no doctor could cure: the effects of the potato famine which in eight years had caused the death of a million Irish men, women and children and had driven nearly two million to seek new lives in the Americas. In 1855 the exodus was still on, and Dr. Greene and his bride, Sarah Crothers, joined it, intending to settle in Canada. But when their ship reached New Orleans Sarah could go no further. She was ill from the hardships of the nightmare voyage, and she was pregnant.
Dr. Greene tried to obtain a licence to practise medicine, but was told that he would have to serve an internship and pass an examination in American medical procedures. So while his wife awaited the birth of their daughter, Margaret Louise, and slowly recovered her strength afterward, Dr. Greene, a tall, rugged and handsome Ulsterman, worked at any casual job he could find in the bustling city of New Orleans.
Sarah was still far from strong when the couple and their infant daughter set out on the long journey to Canada. They settled in the pioneering farming district of Jackson’s Point, fifty miles north of Toronto on the shores of Lake Simcoe, and William Greene became a country doctor.
One night in the second winter after their arrival, Dr. Greene was summoned to attend a woman in childbirth. It was a difficult delivery, and when it had been accomplished successfully the doctor and the new father celebrated with a few glasses of Irish whiskey. Belatedly anxious to return to his own ailing wife and infant daughter, Dr. Greene decided to take a short cut across the frozen Black River. Midway across the ice broke under him, and the icy water soon stilled his struggles. When his body was found Sarah collapsed. She never recovered from this final misfortune, and died within the year. A sister who came from Owen Sound for the funeral took the infant Margaret Louise back to live with her.
Margaret Louise, an Irish pixie of a girl, and Will Bishop, son of the town’s “remittance man,” grew up together. They were married soon after Will returned to practise in Owen Sound and Will staked his future by building an elegant Victorian home for his bride. They moved into it just before their first son, Worth, was born in 1884. A second son, Kilbourne, was born two years later. He died suddenly at the age of seven and the Bishops mourned until, on February 8, 1894, their third son was born, an eleven-pound baby with a full head of blond hair and bright blue eyes. They named him after his father, William Avery. The last child, Louie, was born a year later.
In 1896 Will Bishop’s fortunes took a sudden turn for the better. In the national election of that year he worked as an organizer for Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal party. When Laurier won, Bishop was rewarded with the post of county registrar.
He took the position, and the dignity that went with it, seriously, and dressed the part in dark coat and waistcoat, striped trousers, cutaway collar, pearl-grey bow tie and soft pinched black homburg hat. His manner was stern and overbearingly correct, but many an Owen Sound youngster who followed the dignified figure on his way to and from the white stone courthouse knew that he had a habit of filling the pockets of his immaculate coat with deliciously sticky sweets. And one grateful Owen Sound mother credited Will Bishop with smuggling poison into the cell of her condemned son so that he could take his own life and save her the shame of having him die on the gallows. Will vehemently denied it, but the legend remained as long as he lived.
Billy Bishop grew up so absurdly like his father in appearance, posture and even mannerisms that it was inevitable that his proud mother should turn him out as a replica of his father, in neat dark suits, white collar and tie. That was enough to give Billy a rough time from his schoolmates, who invented a game known as “tearing off Billy Bishop’s tie.” But Billy’s behaviour provided them with other reasons for victimizing him: he scorned rough sports like hockey, football and lacrosse in favour of swimming and riding. Moreover, he spoke with a slight lisp which seemed to fascinate the girls, and—worst sin of all—he actually seemed to enjoy feminine company and attention. He was undoubtedly the only pre-teenaged boy in Owen Sound who enjoyed attending classes at Miss Pearl’s Dancing School.
If Billy Bishop had grown up a generation or two later he might well have become a prime example of what child psychologists would call a victim of mother-possessiveness or father-fixation— or worse. Not to mention a younger brother complex. But there were no child psychologists in Owen Sound at the close of Queen Victoria’s reign, and the only effect on Billy of a temperament that other boys regarded as “sissy” was that he learned, of necessity, how to defend himself stoutly with his fists against his tormentors.
On one memorable Monday morning he had to defend himself against the resentment of no fewer than seven boys whose parents had held him up as an example of virtue by reading an item in the Owen Sound Sun: “A concert was given at the residence of Mr. W. A. Bishop on Saturday afternoon last. An excellent musical and literary program was carried out and a speech filled to overflowing with good humour was delivered by little Billy Bishop.”
But even the most cynical of Billy’s non-admirers had to admit there was one thing in his favour: he was no teacher’s pet. He was, in fact, an indifferent student. After a string of bad reports Billy’s parents, deeply concerned, consulted Thomas Murray, his school principal. Their concern was particularly deep because their oldest son, Worth, had been the top student at Owen Sound high school, later graduated from the Royal Military College at Kingston with the highest standing ever attained by a cadet, and became the youngest engineer ever to enter the federal government service.
Principal Murray, who was no admirer of Billy Bishop, told the latter’s parents: “As far as I can see, the only thing your son is good at is fighting.”
Will Bishop decided that if his younger son’s talent was physical rather than intellectual he should be encouraged to develop his athletic side. He bought Billy a life membership in the YMCA on Poulet Street. Billy tried to work up some enthusiasm for athletics, and even entered the Y’s cross-country race and trained quite strenuously for it. But when he could finish no better than second, he abandoned strenuous sports.
Meanwhile, though, he had discovered a much more desirable facility at the Y—the billiard room. He began cutting afternoon classes to sharpen his skill with the cue, and occasionally picked up pocket-money by playing pool against habitués of the town’s disreputable pool halls. The Bishops’neighbours shook their heads and murmured gloomily that young Billy was a chip off old Eleazar, and wasn’t it sad for Will, who had worked so hard to make something of himself. Of course there was the compensation that Billy’s older brother, Worth, was a prodigy for learning, and his sister, Louie, was growing up a fine young lady and moved in the town’s best society.
Billy’s boyhood pursuits were not all decadent, of course. A few years later when Billy Bishop became the Allies’ greatest air hero and millions of people heard the name Owen Sound for the first time, the townspeople forgot his early love of playing pool, and reminded each other of his uncanny skill with a gun. Billy’s father had given him a .22 rifle one Christmas and offered him twenty-five cents for every squirrel he shot. Will Bishop did not expect the offer to cost him much. He knew it was extremely difficult to kill a wary squirrel high on a tree with a single, low-powered .22 bullet, but the very difficulty would give Billy good practice, and might even scare off some of the squirrels that damaged the fruit trees in his garden by gnawing their bark.
That offer was to cost Will Bishop many dollars. Soon Billy could boast modestly that his rate of slaughter had reached “one bullet—one squirrel” accuracy. When the surviving squirrel population no longer invaded the Bishop garden, Billy expanded his operation into other gardens and orchards, at the standard rate of twenty-five cents per squirrel. The Sun recorded the phenomenon of the scarcity of squirrels in town, and dubbed Billy “the Pied Piper of Owen Sound.”
Another appropriate recollection of the people of Owen Sound was “the time Billy built and flew an airplane.” It was rather less an achievement than that, but it contained enough of a grain of truth to justify its recollection by his admiring fellow residents. The modest fact was that in 1909 the papers were full of the achievement of John McCurdy, who flew an airplane off the frozen surface of Baddeck Lake in Nova Scotia, and thus became the first British subject to fly a powered heavier-than-air machine. Billy decided to build a plane of his own. He studied newspaper photographs of McCurdy’s Silver Dart and assembled his own version, using boards, bedsheets, an orange crate, cardboard and much strong string.
Laboriously he hauled it to the roof of the family home, took his place in the orange-crate cockpit, and skidded down the steep roof into space. His descent was more a nosedive than a flight. The 28-foot fall demolished the machine, but Billy scrambled out of the wreckage with no more than a bruised knee and a scratched ear. Actually the incident is worth recording only because it happened to be the first of many violent contacts between the earth’s surface and aircraft piloted by William Avery Bishop, near-disasters which became known simply as “Bishop landings.”
The only witness to Billy’s first flight was his sister, Louie, his long-suffering supporter-defender in various adventures and misadventures. She helped him out of the wreck, tended his bruises, and helped him hide the scattered remnants of his aircraft before it could be discovered and lead to punishment.
A few weeks later Louie asked Billy for a favour in return for hushing up the airplane incident. A girlfriend of hers would be entertaining a house guest from Toronto next weekend. Would Billy take her dancing on Saturday night?
“I don’t need any more girls,” said Billy ungallantly. “I’ve got enough.”
Louie knew this was true, but she wheedled. “Margaret is a lovely girl and belongs to a prominent Toronto family,” she said. “We have to see that she enjoys her visit to Owen Sound.”
Billy was unimpressed. “I’ll take her for two dollars—provided I like the look of her.”
Louie arranged to have the girls over for tea on the veranda of the Bishop home. Billy could look at Margaret from behind the curtains of the dining-room windows without being seen.
Billy liked what he saw. Margaret Burden was a vivacious girl with auburn hair and hazel eyes, quietly but beautifully dressed. “She’s class,” Billy told himself, peering at her from behind the curtains. But later when Louie confronted him he assumed an air of indifference. “She’s not so much,” he said. “It will cost you five dollars.”
Thus unromantically did Billy Bishop meet the girl he was to marry. It was a strangely democratic confrontation of the grandson of the least successful merchant of Owen Sound and the grand-daughter of the most successful merchant of all Canada. In the same year that Eleazar Bishop was opening his doomed leather shop, Timothy Eaton was taking over the bankrupt stock of a dry-goods merchant in Toronto and opening his own small store on Toronto’s Yonge Street. At the time when Eleazar’s grandson took Timothy’s granddaughter dancing, Eleazar had not earned a dollar for many a year—and Timothy had ceased counting his millions.
On his seventeenth birthday, in February, 1911, Billy decided to apply for entrance to Royal Military College, the Canadian equivalent of England’s Sandhurst or the United States military academy at West Point. Billy had no desire for a military career, but he chose RMC rather than a regular university for several good reasons.
In the first place, entrance to RMC was by examination instead of general academic standing and Bishop felt he might be able to pass a test even though his scholastic record was mediocre. Furthermore, Billy’s brother, Worth, had achieved the highest standing of any cadet in the history of RMC, and he felt that this would reflect to his credit. He was a superb rifle shot, and surely this should be an asset at a military school. Finally, he could ride a horse well, which should be an advantage in cavalry training. But an even more pertinent stimulus was Louie’s needling: “You’ll be lucky if you end up as a foundry hand. More likely you’ll always be a grocery delivery boy.” This was a reference to the fact that Billy had worked summers as a delivery boy for the local Loblaw store.
Tom Murray, the school principal, was even more discouraging. When Billy told him he planned to try the RMC entrance examinations, Murray told him bluntly that he hadn’t got the brains.
But two or three of Billy’s teachers did not share the principal’s low opinion of Billy—or, more likely, the latter persuaded them into helping him after school. At any rate Billy left for Toronto, where the exams were held, so crammed with “instant knowledge” that he passed the tests and was accepted as a recruit at RMC.
Late one evening at the end of August Billy and forty other nervous recruits entered the ancient complex of stone buildings on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where the mighty river flows out of Lake Ontario, across the harbour from the city of Kingston, Ontario. The college buildings had originally been the main dockyard of England’s Great Lakes fleet in the War of 1812. The dormitory to which Billy was assigned had once been a storehouse for the shipbuilders. Later, when it was used as the winter quarters for sailors, it was fitted out with all the accoutrements of a land-borne warship and named “the stone frigate.”
Billy soon learned that there was nothing romantic in being a recruit at RMC. “We are, ”he wrote home gloomily, “the lowest form of military life—of any life, for that matter.”
A recruit has no privileges, he was informed by senior classmen. A recruit will run at all times when on the parade square. In Kingston on his afternoon off (there were to be few of these) he will march, but always at attention, eyes front—no loitering or window-shopping.
Infractions—and apparently almost everything a recruit did could be interpreted as an infraction by ever-watchful upper classmen—earned a sharp blow from a swagger stick across the rump, or extra drill at six o’clock in the morning. And on the theory that even the vigilant seniors must have missed some cadet crimes during the week, each first-year man was soundly trounced every Friday night.
A recruit was assigned to a senior as his “fag” or batman; in effect a servant who tidied the senior’s room, made his bed, looked after his wardrobe and generally catered to his comforts. For Billy this servitude took on a weird aspect. The senior who was his master was Vivien Bishop. They were not related, but because of the coincidence Billy was required to kiss the older Bishop on the forehead and bid him “Goodnight, Daddy” every night.
Punishment at RMC was sometimes more macabre than merely physical. Once when he was late for parade Billy was ordered to clean out a Martello tower, a gun turret that was a relic of the old navy days. The senior who inspected the finished job discovered that Billy had overlooked a spider. He ordered Billy to eat it in the presence of his classmates.
Billy was profoundly depressed by the indignities of his first year, especially since he had been so much his own master until then. At any rate, he failed his examinations. Billy was too ashamed to face his family and friends in Owen Sound that summer. He begged his brother, Worth, then a rising young government engineer, to find him a job. Worth was then helping to build the unique lift locks at Peterborough, Ontario, on the Trent Canal navigation system. Billy worked there as a timekeeper, swallowed periodic doses of good advice from Worth, and promised solemnly to work hard and keep out of mischief when he went back to RMC.
He did too—for a full year. There were strong inducements, of course. Although he was accorded provisional second-year status, his failure in his first-year examinations meant that he would have to take an extra year to graduate, and a second failure would mean the end of his career. He passed that second test with something to spare.
But a whole year of good behaviour was all that Billy Bishop’s ebullient high spirits could endure. His third year was an epic of rules broken and discipline scorned. His regular sorties—legal and illegal—into Kingston town to rendezvous with girls became the talk of the stone frigate. The RMC yearbook devoted a page to Billy’s behaviour, with this opening scene:
Voice from cadet with telescope peering out of his window: “There’s a red coat on Fort Henry hill. There’s an umbrella too with a couple of people behind it. Wonder who it can be?”
Voice from the next room: “Come on, Steve, Bill Bishop is out. Let’s swipe his tobacco . . .”
One evening early in the spring of 1914 Billy and a classmate arranged to meet two Kingston girls at Cedar Island, just across Deadman Bay from the college. Before they had embarked for the island they had already broken two college rules and one criminal law: they had left RMC grounds after dark without leave; they carried, and had already taken a few drinks from, a bottle of gin; and they stole a canoe.
A quarter of a mile from shore the canoe overturned. By clinging to it and swimming desperately, they managed to reach shore and to sneak back to their quarters. The other boy was so thoroughly chilled that he told Billy he would have to report to the infirmary.
“Well, change into dry clothes first,” Billy told him, “and don’t say a word about this.” His companion promised, and Billy went serenely to bed. Unfortunately a staff officer had witnessed the whole thing. When the cadet in the infirmary was faced with this evidence, he assumed that Billy had also been informed that there was an eyewitness to the crime, and confessed. But Billy had admitted nothing. When he was unceremoniously routed from bed and paraded before Adjutant Charles Perreau he blandly denied the charge. When he was told that the other boy had admitted everything, he felt he was in too deep to change his story, and stoutly proclaimed his innocence. Perreau lost his patience and hurled at the defiant youth the most damning accusation that could be charged against a Gentleman Cadet: “Bishop, you’re a liar!”
For his offence Billy was assessed twenty-eight days’ “restricted leave,” the equivalent of house arrest. It was the longest penalty of its kind ever imposed on a cadet up to that time. But worse was yet to come. In May, 1914, when he sat his examinations, he was caught cheating. Actually, he caught himself. He had hidden crib notes up his sleeve, and when he turned in his paper he absentmindedly handed in his notes with it.
With Billy once more up before him, Adjutant Perreau had only a few terse words for the culprit; the punishment would be held in abeyance during the summer holidays. There is little doubt that the adjutant was intensifying the penalty by making Billy worry about it all summer long. It was almost certain that the verdict would be dismissal.
As it turned out, Billy did not return to Royal Military College. (Not as a cadet, that is; but three years later, with a breastful of medals including the Victoria Cross, he was the honoured guest of the staff officers who not long before had described him, with some justification, as “the worst cadet RMC ever had.”) Most of the senior cadets did not return, either. Before the start of the fall term, the First World War had broken out. Canada was woefully short of officers. Billy Bishop’s military training, albeit incomplete, and his ability to ride a horse won him quick acceptance into the Mississauga Horse, a Toronto militia regiment.