Jack Munroe
and Bobbie Burns
John Alexander “Jack” Munroe was one of
the most extraordinary and least known Canadians who ever lived.
He was born on a farm at Upper Kempt Head, 18 kilometres from Boularderie, Cape Breton, in 1873. He was a prospector, a hard-running star halfback on a championship football team in the highly competitive western United States high school conference, a five-year professional star in football-mad Montana, a professional boxer and wrestler, a World War I hero, a poet, a gifted author, and the reeve of boomtown Elk Lake in northern Ontario. He defeated the heavyweight champion of the world in a four-round bout in Butte, Montana, in 1902. In Ontario’s North, he is still remembered as the man who organized the fire brigade that saved Elk Lake in the great Porcupine Forest fire of 1911.
He may have been the very first Canadian soldier to set foot on French soil in World War I. Before the ship’s gangplank could be fully deployed, Munroe jumped from the deck onto French soil.
When he was 12 years old, he left Cape Breton with two of his brothers to seek their fortunes in Nevada and Montana. Butte was one of the toughest and most lawless mining towns in North America. Standard dress accessories were a pair of Colt revolvers and a Bowie knife. Even feared peacekeepers Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp gave Butte a miss.
On December 20, 1902, Munroe defeated world heavyweight boxing champion, James J. Jeffries, in a four-round bout in Butte. Munroe gave as good as he took for three rounds and then decked the champion for a count of nine in the fourth round. His purse was $250.
In February 1904, he gave top ranked heavyweight contender Tom Sharkey a fierce beating in a six-round bout in Philadelphia. Sharkey was still on his feet at the end of the fight, but both his eyes were closed. Munroe didn’t have a mark on him. In November 1904, Munroe knocked out Peter Maher, heavyweight champion of Ireland, in the fourth round in Philadelphia. Munroe had 20 major fights and won nine by knockouts. He lost only three fights. His last fight was in April 1906, in Lavigne’s Hall in Hull. He knocked out Ottawa’s Alf Allen in the eighth round. Munroe squirrelled away his wages and fight purses to invest in prospecting for base metals and precious metals.
In Mexico City, a fully-grown stray male collie dog adopted him. They bonded immediately and Jack Munroe and “Bobbie Burns” became inseparable. Jack told his friends that in another incarnation Bobbie Burns was Highland royalty. Bobbie was with Jack when he presented himself at Lansdowne Park, Ottawa, to enlist in the newly formed Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI). The unit was named after Princess Patricia, daughter of Canada’s Governor General, the Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s youngest son.
The Pats were formed in August 1914, after wealthy Montreal businessman, Hamilton Gault, pledged $100,000 for a volunteer infantry battalion. The regiment had the best equipment: Lee Enfield rifles, instead of the unreliable Ross rifles, and Penetanguishene boots, instead of the shoddy footwear issued to other Canadian troops. Bobbie Burns enlisted, too. Princess Patricia proclaimed him regimental mascot of the PPCLI. She presented him with an expensive jewelled collar inscribed: BOBBIE BURNS. PPCLI.
While the regiment was bivouacked at Levis, Quebec, awaiting passage to England, Bobbie was kidnapped. Frantic Pats fanned out and searched the countryside. He was found a week later, tied up, at Valcartier. He had refused all food and drink during his captivity.
Bobbie went everywhere with Jack. He was smuggled on board trains, carried onto a troop ship in a gunny sack, and slipped past England’s animal quarantine inspectors. He also followed Jack to the Western Front in the second battle for Ypres. Bobbie Burns was treated as a minor god from the colonel on down.
When the PPCLI crossed the English Channel to France they were 1,000 strong. The regiment was reinforced with drafts of 800 men. When the battle for Ypres was over, there were only 133 left. Munroe’s regiment fought off the Germans under the most appalling conditions — trench warfare, mud, rats, lice, the stench of decaying human and animal flesh, constant artillery barrages, German snipers with newfangled telescopic sights that enabled them to pick off a man 1,829 metres away, a shortage of food and ammunition, and two and three days on end without sleep.
Jack told his mining buddies that Bobbie Burns went out with him on “recce” missions. He said that even though Bobbie was a collie, he had all the instincts of a pointer. When he spotted an enemy soldier across no-man’s land, his body would go rigid and his tail stood straight out.
The Pats stopped the German advance in a heroic but costly stand at Pollegon Wood and carried the day. If the Germans had broken through, they would have taken Ypres and bullied their way through to Calais. Jack led a platoon that captured 90 German prisoners. He wasn’t awarded any major gongs for bravery in the living hell that was Ypres. Yet, he earned the highest award possible: he survived.
On June 16, 1916, Jack was shot in the right chest by a sniper near Armentieres. The bullet exited very close to his spinal column. Arterial blood spurted out until one of Jack’s comrades stuck his finger in the bullet hole and staunched the flow. The medical officer told Jack his life depended on remaining perfectly still, lest he bleed to death. Four days later he was invalided to Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley, 113 kilometres from London. The hospital commandant issued an order that Bobbie Burns be permitted to stay at Jack’s bedside and have the run of the hospital. Despite further surgeries, Jack’s strong right arm would hang useless at his side for the rest of his life.
Queen Mother Alexandra, the widow of King Edward VII, visited the wounded soldiers in hospital. Jack noted later in his mini-classic book, Mopping Up, that the Queen Mother met Bobbie and had some “kind words” for him. “Bobbie was pleased,” Jack noted. The dog liked attention, but he was not overwhelmed. Mopping Up was a book Jack wrote in 1918. It was a stark, sensitive, and extremely well written first person story told through Bobbie’s eyes.
After the war, Jack was prospecting unsuccessfully in a remote region near Hurst. He caught a train “at a lonely station” and took it for granted that Bobbie was under his seat. But Bobbie missed the train, and Jack believed he had seen the last of his beloved companion.
The train carried Jack to Porcupine. Ten days later, “Bobbie trotted into Porcupine.” He had covered 322 kilometres of “as rough, unbroken country as there is in the world.” Bobbie was “somewhat thin and not a little weary” but he “upreared and flung his forepaws upon my shoulders, the happiest, wriggling, home-coming prodigal son of a collie in Canada, or in all the world.”
Jack and Bobbie came home to Canada to dull desk jobs in recruiting offices. Jack was commissioned a lieutenant and given permission to join the Liberty Bond speaking tour in the United States, where he was a popular drawing card. He was discharged in December 1918.
Jack and Bobbie went to Nova Scotia to visit his ailing mother and family. Their next stop was northern Ontario, to claim his fortune in goal and silver mines. Jack got extremely rich selling claims, but he hadn’t fallen off a turnip truck from Boularderie. He kept a small percentage interest in each claim. He parlayed his riches into hotels and commercial realty in Ontario’s northland. In 1923, at the age of 50, Jack married Lina, a Toronto concert soprano, who was 10 years younger. He died on February 12, 1942, at the age of 69. He is buried in his wife’s family plot in Acton.
Bobbie Burns was 16 years old when he died in 1919. One day he simply failed to meet Jack’s train at the station. He had crawled off into the woods to die. Munroe refused to search for Bobbie. He reasoned that Bobbie knew his time had come and he chose not to disturb his final resting place. Jack mourned for Bobbie Burns and could never bring himself to replace him with another pet.
Immortalized in The Ballad of Jack Munroe, an anonymous piece of war poetry published in 1918, Jack Munroe was inducted in the Canadian Boxing Hall of Fame; he is an Original Member of Nova Scotia’s Sport Hall of Fame.