by Brian Vallee
“Come on!” they would shout. “Get to work! It’s not that cold out here.”
Among the dozens of inmates outside the walls, friendships formed, and friends usually worked in small separate groups. Ed’s group included a Native Canadian and two other men. “We liked each other and kind of hung around together.” All of them hated working outside in the cold, and after three or four weeks Ed came up with a plan to get them back inside.
In the prison there was a drop box where inmates could leave notes for the administration. Ed wrote an unsigned note, purportedly from one of the outside workers, stating that four inmates had been overheard plotting an imminent escape. As the culprits, he listed his own name and those of his friends. “An hour later the four of us were working inside with brooms. They never said a word, but the warden was a retired army officer and he didn’t wait any time at all.”
The only other event of note during Ed’s stay in the penitentiary was the loss of four front teeth from years of neglect. The prison dentist, who had his own practice in Prince Albert, would make periodic visits to look after the inmates’ dental needs. Besides losing his four front teeth, Ed suffered through numerous fillings, all of them done without freezing. “He butchered me. He kept hitting the nerves and the pain was awful.”
With the loss of his top four front teeth, Ed had trouble speaking properly, and his fellow inmates made fun of him. It wasn’t until he returned to Toronto after his release that he was fitted for the partial plate that would restore and improve his trademark smile.
While his son was serving time in penitentiary, Glover Boyd, a respected police officer with fifteen years on the Toronto force, was working to get him released on parole. He wrote to the warden stating that he had found a job for Ed, and that upon his release he could live at home with the family.
His efforts paid off, and on March 15, 1939 – three weeks before his twenty-fifth birthday – Edwin Alonzo Boyd was released on parole7 from Saskatchewan Penitentiary after serving two-and-a-half years.
He had experienced a lot in the nine years since he first left home to work on a farm, but his progression to adult maturity had been stunted. His formal education had ended in eighth grade; he had spent almost three years in jails and prison; and although he rode the rods almost continuously for four years, his travel was largely restricted to Ontario and the three prairie provinces. And other than furtive encounters with the opposite sex – as a boy under the back porch, and as a teenager on the farm – he’d had no meaningful relationship with a woman.
Ed was quite aware of his deficiencies. “I roamed back and forth across Canada, but I didn’t get to Vancouver – I didn’t even get past Calgary. I really hadn’t been anywhere until I went overseas.”
And the few women he’d met riding the rods were prostitutes or were travelling with someone else. “I wasn’t somebody that they’d bother with anyway, because I was just travelling and didn’t care one way or another.”
If Ed had a blind spot, it was his unresolved conflict with his father: his emotions would forever be tainted by the early death of his mother. “He thought my going through the penitentiary system would make a big difference in my life, but all it did was teach me how to handle myself under authority.”
The warden provided Ed with a train ticket to Toronto and a ten-dollar bill. He was also given a stiff, ill-fitting suit and a new pair of shoes – modified army boots that continually slipped off his heels. He was driven to the train station in Saskatoon. There was a lengthy wait for his train, so he took in a movie next to the station. It was Typhoon, set in the South Seas and starring Dorothy Lamour, wearing her trademark sarong as she wooed Robert Preston.
A few weeks after Ed was settled in Toronto, his friend Jake was released from the penitentiary and stopped to see him on his way to Nova Scotia, his home province. Ed suggested they resume their hobo life.
“No,” said Jake. “Going to jail finished me. I’m going home to get a job.”
The two men never saw each other again. “He said he would write,” says Ed, “but he never did.”
6
Getting By
A lot had happened in the Boyd family since Ed left for the farm in 1930. Glover Boyd had changed postings since his first one at No. 10 Station on Main Street, and the family had moved twice, first to 24 Yarmouth Gardens and then to 141 Roxborough Street West. Glover and Minnie had married, and first Gord and then Norm had gone to England and signed on with the Royal Air Force (RAF). Harold had long since moved out on his own. Only Ed’s youngest sibling, Irene, was still at home when he arrived from the penitentiary.
Roxborough was a pleasant, leafy street between Avenue Road and Yonge, north of Bloor. The Boyd house was on the south side, where it backed onto sprawling Ramsden Park. Kitty-corner from them was evangelist Charles Templeton’s8 church. A few years later, Templeton would introduce the Youth For Christ movement to Canada. The Boyds attended Templeton’s church, and Glover and Minnie were deeply involved in Bible study, having signed on for a course through a Pentecostal school.
Living at home gave Ed a chance to get to know his sister Irene, who was now a serious teenager studying to become a missionary. One day, returning from one of his runs downtown and back, Ed noticed her sitting by herself in the front room. “She was looking kind of lonesome, so I bought a brick of ice cream and we polished it off together. We sat and talked for a long time. For some reason she never forgot that.” Irene would later spend years as a missionary in rural Haiti, where she lived in considerable hardship. Ed says his sister had the necessary perseverance for that kind of life, but he felt she wasn’t strong enough physically. She became very ill and was sent back to Canada. She married but had no children, and Ed believes her health problems in Haiti led to her early death in the 1970s.
The job Glover Boyd had arranged for Ed was at Caulfield’s Dairy on Howard Park Avenue. It was owned by Samuel Caulfield, who had been overseas in Glover’s regiment in the First World War. At first, Ed was enthusiastic about the job, which paid $18 a week and involved off-loading cases of empty milk bottles to a conveyor, then stacking cases once the bottles were filled. There were eight quarts in each case. “They had to be stacked eight cases high, so I must have been in good shape because they were heavy, and I had to throw the last one up over my head to get it on top.”
He liked the work because it was a day job, and because it was physically demanding, which kept him fit. The Roxborough house was three miles from the dairy, and he always walked to work – both ways.
Life got even better for Ed when Bill Underwood, an expert in unarmed combat, invited him to do some instructing at his judo studio in the evenings. The studio was on the second floor of a building on King Street a couple of blocks west of Yonge. Underwood ran judo classes during the day and in the evenings. He had several instructors and called on Ed whenever he needed him. Ed liked the studio and began showing up after work and on his days off. Besides helping out as an instructor, he was learning more advanced techniques. He was also doing weight training to improve his strength and muscle tone.
Ed and one or two other part-time instructors often laughed about Underwood’s promises to pay them. “I never got a damn cent, and I don’t think the other guys did either. I didn’t mind at all, because I liked the exercise.”
On any given night there might be four instructors and twenty or so students at the studio. Many of the students had won six- or eight-week courses from various competitions, including the Miss Toronto contest. Ed had fun teaching them. “The only trouble was, I didn’t get to throw them, they always threw me.” Through his training he knew how to fall without getting hurt, no matter what hold was put on him.
At that point in his life, Ed was health-conscious in the extreme and read anything he could find about physical fitness and nutrition. Besides walking to and from work at the dairy, he would run from home to the judo studio and back in the evenings.
Things began to go wrong for Ed when his
boss at the dairy assigned him to a different job – on the night shift. Now, instead of hoisting milk cases, he was cleaning the large vats that held the milk before it was funnelled into the quart bottles. “It was a dirty job. The vats would be scummy from the milk and they had to be cleaned with lye and boiling water and sprayed with a hose. The lye was pretty potent stuff. I don’t know if it was dangerous for me or not.”
His main complaint about the new job was that it provided much less exercise. Also, working nights reduced his time at the judo studio. “I should have gone to the boss and asked him to put me back piling cases, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the confidence to do that.” Ed worked at the new job for a month and then quit. A few days later, Glover approached him at the house.
“How’s the job going?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I quit.”
“What! That was a good job.”
“I know it was, but the minute I got good at it, they moved me to something else. Something I hated. I stayed as long as I could, and then I quit.”
Ed saw his experience at the dairy as analogous to the violin lessons he took as a child. “I was playing the violin and winning all the prizes, and all of a sudden the teacher decided the other kids were not getting enough awards so she moved me to this advanced class, and I was sunk. I couldn’t handle it – I couldn’t even read the notes. And this guy was doing the same thing with the dairy. I was doing a good job, and it was good exercise, but he puts me on this bloody thing with the milk.”
The loss of the dairy job would soon be forgotten: world events were about to overtake Ed’s life. War was in the air, and his brothers were already overseas. He was bored and didn’t want to miss out.
To break the monotony, he had bought himself an AJS motorcycle. He liked the sense of freedom it gave him and he took to it naturally. He didn’t know it yet, but his ability to handle a motorcycle, and his judo and karate experience, would be valuable assets in the next stage of his life.
7
War
With all the talk of war, and time on his hands after quitting the dairy, Boyd decided to join the Queen’s York Rangers militia, which met twice a week down at the Exhibition grounds. He signed up August 26, 1939, and enjoyed the marching, the precision drills, and a short stint spent guarding the Welland Canal after rumours that foreign agents planned to blow it up.
In September 1939, six months after Boyd’s release from the penitentiary, Germany attacked Poland. Soon after, Canada was at war. His militia unit was dissolved, and most of its members scrambled to join the Canadian Army.
He was recruited by the prestigious Permanent Force, Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR), and signed up on November 12 at the Horse Palace on the Exhibition grounds. He was twenty-five and was joining thousands of others of his generation, many of them homeless and desperate and seeking an escape from the country’s crushing unemployment.
Boyd lied on his application, claiming he had completed Grade 10 at Oakwood Collegiate in Toronto and had been to Riverdale Technical School (which in his youth he had hoped to attend to learn a trade). He also stated that he was a motorcycle mechanic. “I wanted them to think I was better qualified than I was. I know that I lied sometimes when I was riding the rods and bumming houses, but I never lied about anything important, because I always figured once you started lying, you just kept on lying until nobody would trust you.”
Within two weeks of signing up, Boyd was sent to Valcartier, the military camp near Quebec City. When he told them he knew motorcycles, the authorities decided that would be the focus of his training
– he would be a dispatch rider. At first, however, there were no motorcycles. “When they finally arrived, they were all English Nortons. I learned to ride them and pretty soon they had me teaching others.”
For the freshly uniformed recruits, Valcartier was like one big summer camp – even more so for Boyd. His role as a motorcycle instructor wasn’t structured. He wasn’t included in roll call, and he wasn’t called for meals. “I was just a forgotten man. So I used to get on the bus and go down into Quebec City and mooch around there all day. I’d come back and nobody had missed me, so I went into my barracks and went to sleep.”
There were morning parades, but the name Edwin Alonzo Boyd was never called. “I thought, jeez, I’m really well off here.”
On one of his forays to Quebec City he met an attractive, dark-haired young woman with a strong French-Canadian accent. Boyd was shy, and when they ran out of small talk he offered to buy her a milk shake. Then they went for a walk, and when the silences grew longer, it was time for another milk shake, and then another, and another. “Finally, she didn’t want any more, so she walked out and left me. I had all these milk shakes in front of me – five or six of them. It took about an hour to drink them all, and I went back to my barracks, and again nobody had missed me.”
But he wasn’t overlooked when it came time to go overseas. “They marched me right out of my bed and onto the train for Halifax with all the rest of them.” From there, they boarded a ship for Britain.
The North Atlantic seas were rough, as they usually are in December, when Ed Boyd shipped to England in 1939. He spent most of the voyage in a hammock below decks. To add to his misery, his bunk was at the front of the ship, “where the bow curves together.” He was sick much of the time, but managed to twice read the Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People. “I did a lot of thinking about it, and I was pretty confident that now I knew how to get along with other people, because I’d been a loner all my life up to then.” The book apparently instilled enough self-confidence in Boyd that within the next six months he would ask three women to marry him. The first was a Canadian teacher on an exchange program; the romance ended when she returned to Canada. The second proposal was to a teacher from Guildford. “She said yes, and then this guy came back, and she changed her mind.”
“This guy” happened to be her fiancé, back from a tour of duty with the British Army in Tunisia.
Boyd’s regiment was posted to Aldershot, southwest of London. By the time he arrived there, his brother Gord, then nineteen, had been in England for more than two years. And Norm, eighteen, had been there for over a year. Both had signed on with the Royal Air Force (RAF) for six years. Neither brother knew that Ed had been in penitentiary until after his release. The three Boyd brothers were able to spend Christmas of 1939 together and had their photo taken to mark the occasion.
In Ed’s Aldershot barracks, posted on the bulletin board, was a notice from a London couple inviting Canadian soldiers to stay at their home in Clapping Common during leave or on weekend passes. Ed thinks he was the only soldier who took them up on the offer. He visited sometimes, and sometimes brought his brothers along. “It was exciting walking around London. Every time we went down there, the air raid sirens were going and you could hear the bombs dropping.”
The couple, Olive and Bill Prior, not much older than Ed, were generous and interesting. Bill was a machinist who made all kinds of marvellous things with metal. In his spare time he created interlocking metal puzzles that were almost impossible to solve. Olive was a professional pianist who for years had played for the ballet. It was at the Priors’ house that Gordon Boyd met his future wife, a young Austrian woman who had been stranded in London when the war broke out.
There is a great deal of myth surrounding Edwin Alonzo Boyd, including the claim that he was a commando in the Second World War. The word “commando” conjures images of a soldier efficiently slitting throats behind enemy lines as his team tries to blow up a strategic target. There is no doubt that Boyd had commando training and was an expert in unarmed combat – so good that he was called on to teach others. But nowhere in his military record does “commando” appear. And he has never claimed to be a commando. He qualified as a Class III motorcycle driver and was a dispatch rider during his time with the Royal Canadian Regiment’s First Division. After that he was in the Provost Corps.
The one foray
Boyd’s outfit made into Europe before D-Day was a fiasco. On June 13, 1940, ten days after Dunkirk, with the Germans in control of much of France, they crossed the English Channel from Plymouth, landing the next day in Brest. They had moved inland about sixty miles when they were told that the Germans had broken through and were about to overrun them. “We were ordered to get out as fast as we could. I was on my motorcycle and we drove into this big, vacant field. They began smashing up the vehicles and there was gas all over. Somebody tossed a match in, and the next thing you know, there was thick black smoke rising everywhere. The Germans could have seen us a hundred miles away.”
The soldiers piled into trucks and roared back to the Channel. It was a small-scale replay of Dunkirk, up the French coast, where 340,000 Allied troops had been evacuated to England by a flotilla consisting mostly of small boats. But there were no boats waiting for the Canadians at Brest, and they had to linger on the beach with several retreating Permanent Force English units. In their haste many of the Canadians had thrown away their weapons, and the Brits, their rifles and packs in place, eyed them with disdain. Boyd’s motorcycle was gone, but he had kept his service revolver.
The Canadians discovered several barrels of wine on the wharf and broke them open. “The soldiers were very undisciplined,” says Boyd. “Half of them were drunk, and the other half were holding them up. Some of them even threw their weapons into the water. The English were very stiff, and never left their weapons. The Canadians didn’t give a shit.”
Back in Aldershot, the commanders did give a shit. The troops had been away less than four days, but most of their equipment was lost. They were confined to barracks, and it was weeks before they were outfitted with new weapons and vehicles.
Until then, Boyd had been driving Nortons. The replacements were Harley Davidsons. They were much heavier machines, but Ed soon mastered them and was instructing others. He was still a private, but he was enjoying himself and feeling successful.
