ERNEST ALVIA SMITH was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, on May 3, 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the “war to end all wars.” The elder son of John Alvia and Barmarie Smith’s four children, he grew up in a working-class family. His father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker.
After elementary school he went to T. J. Trap Technical High School. Sitting behind a desk was not nearly as interesting to him as athletics, especially track and soccer. His nickname “Smoky”(which later became “Smokey” in the popular press) may date from those days because of the speed with which he left rivals in his wake, or smoke, as he raced around the track. On the other hand, he was a smoker who only gave up cigarettes in his fifties, although he continued to indulge in a nightly cigar. Smith, who knew the value of a smokescreen, always claimed he didn’t know how he acquired the moniker.
Smith entered the workforce just as the Depression had ground the economy into dust. He worked sporadically in a cannery, a cedar shake mill, and an electrical shop and even rode the rails from one community to another looking for work. The Second World War offered him an opportunity to serve his country and earn a steady paycheque. He enlisted in the Seaforth Highlanders in Vancouver on March 5, 1940, at the age of twenty-five. After basic training he was shipped overseas and was stationed in England and Scotland in the early years of the war. His real fighting came with the bloody Italian campaign.
The Seaforths landed in Sicily on July 10, 1943, as part of the First Canadian Infantry Division attached to the Eighth Army. They spent the next eighteen months pushing German forces back up the boot of Italy. Smith suffered a shrapnel wound in the chest in the fighting and spent two months in hospital in North Africa before he was back in the line.
By October 1944 the Seaforths had made their way as far north as the Savio River. That’s when Smith entered the history books. The Canadians needed to establish a crossing over the river but the enemy and the weather were against them. Torrential rain had caused the water to rise some six feet in five hours and turned the riverbanks into mush.
To advance, the troops would have to wade or swim through the raging current and rising water levels and then fight the Germans without the protective cover of their tanks. “It had been raining for days and the rain pelted down in sheets,” Smith said in a CBC interview in 1956, one of the few times he talked publicly about his wartime experiences. “The ground was one big bog.”
That was the situation on the eastern bank of the Savio late in the afternoon of October 20, when the first troops were sent into the river. A shower of gunfire and grenades came from the opposite bank, pinning down the troops until they were able to retreat under cover of darkness. The next morning the enemy began pounding the Canadians on the eastern approaches to the river. That night another group of soldiers, including Smith, made it across the river and took cover.
That’s when Smith learned that the forward company was under attack from three German Mark V Panther tanks supported by two self-propelled guns and some thirty infantry. With cunning ingenuity, he led his PIAT (a British-designed anti-tank weapon that had been introduced only the year before in the Sicilian campaign) team of two men across an open field, positioning the weapon in a ditch alongside the road so it could be trained on the enemy. Leaving one man there, Smith crossed the road with his comrade Jimmy Tennant and obtained another PIAT. At that moment a German tank came clanking down the road, firing its machine guns into the ditches and wounding Tennant.
Showing defiance and a complete disregard for his own safety, Smith started firing his PIAT, scoring a direct hit and putting the tank out of commission. Ten German infantrymen jumped off the back of the tank and charged him with Schmeisser submachine guns and grenades. Undaunted, Smith moved out onto the road and started mowing them down with his Tommy gun. He killed four Germans and drove the rest back. Another tank rumbled into view and opened fire, and more infantry were closing in on Smith. When he ran out of ammunition, he ran back to the ditch and grabbed some of Tennant’s and held the enemy at bay while protecting his comrade.
In the melee, Smith had destroyed one tank and two self-propelled guns. Yet another tank appeared in the distance, sweeping the area with a longer-range gun. Still under fire, Smith helped his wounded comrade to cover behind a nearby building and obtained medical aid for him before returning to his position beside the road to combat further enemy action. None materialized, so the battalion was able to consolidate its bridgehead and await the arrival of its own tanks and anti-tank guns. This led to the capture of San Giorgio di Cesena and the advance further north to the Ronco River. Later Smith was hailed as a “one-man army” for the way he had single-handedly fought off the German tanks.
King George VI bestowed Smith’s VC medal at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace in December 1944. Smith’s superior officers were so concerned that he would appear dishevelled, or worse, at the ceremony that they locked him up in a jail cell in Italy the night before he was supposed to board the plane taking him to London for the investiture. That’s another story, like the tale about his nickname, that Smith refused to confirm or deny, although he did allow in one interview that he was kept in custody in London before meeting the King. “There’s a town full of women out there and here I am in jail,” he said with mock chagrin. “It’s only because I was good-looking.”
After receiving his VC, Smith retreated from the front lines and spent what remained of the war drumming up support for the Canadian War Bonds drive. He was demobilized in April 1945 and returned to Vancouver. Two years later he married photographer Esther Weston. Together they operated a photography studio in New Westminster and raised two children, David and Norma-Jean.
Smith re-enlisted in the Armed Forces in 1950 to serve in the Korean War. He was promoted to the rank of sergeant but was not sent into combat because of his legendary status. Instead he served as a recruiting agent in Vancouver until he retired once again in 1964, at age fifty. He was given the Canadian Forces Decoration for his dozen years of service.
The Smiths opened a travel agency called Smith Travel in 1969, which they operated for more than twenty years, with Smith often taking clients on tours to sites connected with the Second World War. They couple retired in 1992, the year he turned seventy-eight. His wife died four years later, in 1996.
As other veterans died, Smith became iconic as the last surviving recipient of the VC. He was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 1995 and a member of the Order of British Columbia in 2002. He also made many appearances at veterans’ events, Remembrance Day ceremonies, and significant military milestones, including the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion in 1995, and the consecration ceremony of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa in May 2000.
Smith died at his home in Vancouver on August 3, 2005, at ninety-one, his body was flown to Ottawa to lie in state in the foyer of the House of Commons on August 9. The government flags were flying at half-mast, an extremely rare honour for a citizen who was neither a former prime minister nor a governor general.
Smith’s coffin made the long journey back across the country for a second vigil, at Vancouver’s Seaforth Armoury on August 12, before a full military funeral the following day. As per Smith’s wishes, his ashes were sprinkled at sea, presumably so that his grave could not become a shrine, although friends suggested a different reason: he didn’t want to be put in the ground because he had buried too many of his friends.
As a final act of remembrance, he left instructions in his will that his medals, including the VC, which could have been sold for a huge sum, be donated to the Seaforth Highlanders. The regiment has replicas on display in its museum and exhibits the genuine medals on special occasions only, as a memorial to its most celebrated member.
Kay Gimpel
Secret Service Agent and Art Dealer
August 14, 1914 – March 19, 2009
KAY GIMPEL FLED the restrictive imperatives of the Depression on the Prairies for the cultural capitals of England and France. She was seeking culture, excitement, and a larger, more independent life. What she found was danger, treachery, and sacrifice, working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) — a wartime British sabotage organization set up by Winston Churchill in July 1940 — as an interpreter and liaison for Allied agents behind enemy lines.
Life in wartime London was acute and fragile. Social niceties such as chaperones had been suspended, but death was a concrete, full-frontal reality. As Gimpel said later, “most of the agents who went overseas never came back, so you lived for the moment.” That toll included her friends Frank Pickersgill and Ken Macalister, Canadian SOE agents in France who were captured by the Germans, tortured, and hanged with piano wire from meat hooks at Buchenwald concentration camp in September 1944. Their bodies were then incinerated.
Salty of tongue in both French and English, which she tended to speak interchangeably, Gimpel was short, intense, and very sharp. During the war she roomed with two friends, Mary Mundle, a Scot, and Alison Grant, a Canadian and the future mother of public intellectual and former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.
All three young women worked for various branches of the secret service; their flat, located three floors above a dairy at 54A Walton Avenue in Knightsbridge (just behind Harrod’s and very close to the SOE veterans’ club), was dubbed the “Canada House Annex.” Approved as a “safe house” by SOE, it became a meeting place for many agents looking for conversational ease before going to the Continent, or for friendly solace after returning from a mission.
Gimpel, who became Ignatieff’s godmother, was his mother’s “best, truest, closest friend.” He described the war years the two women shared in London as the “the most important” in either of their lives. “There was a strong sense of being where history was happening, bombs were falling, ultimate things were on the line and they were there working with extremely brave men and they were extremely brave women. It was the making of them both. They never glorified it, they never romanticized it; they didn’t even talk about it that much.”
Initially, the flawlessly bilingual Gimpel was a junior officer in RF, the section of SOE that worked with the Free French Forces supporting General Charles de Gaulle. Her job was to brief agents about what they could expect to find on the ground in France. “This was mere routine, but from the agents’ point of view it was jolly useful,” said M. R. D. Foot, the official historian of SOE.
As the war progressed, Gimpel moved on to AL (Air Liaison), eventually heading the section, the only woman to hold such a senior position. “Her job, which was very difficult, was to provide the link point between SOE’s demands for air help and what the air forces could supply,” according to Foot, the acknowledged expert on the organization. “There were two squadrons of Bomber Command practically entirely devoted to working for SOE and eventually four squadrons of the United States Army Air Force,” he said in an email after Gimpel’s death in London, England, on March 19, 2009. She had “to tell the air men precisely where to go, and when I say precisely, I mean which field in which to drop their stores. Scores of thousands of Resisters in France and Belgium and Holland owed their weapons and their supplies to arrangements made by Kay.”
KATHLEEN (KAY) MOORE was born in Strathcona, Alberta, on August 14, 1914, just as the guns began to blaze in Europe in the First World War. She was the middle child and only daughter of Harold Henry Moore, an Irish-born journalist, and his wife, Katherine Helen Chapman. Her parents, who had met at the Mail and Empire newspaper in Toronto — he was a reporter and she a secretary — eventually settled in Winnipeg, where he worked at the Winnipeg Free Press as a reporter and then as an editorial writer. When Kay was eight, her younger brother died of diphtheria. Not long afterward, her desolate mother began a slow, painful decline from kidney disease, taking to her bed and sometimes holding Kay in her arms as she fantasized about embracing her dead son. She died in an institution in 1930.
In his own grief, Moore’s father, who had served as a major in the Forestry Corps in the First World War, tried to run the household on a military model. He used his teenaged daughter as an unofficial second-in-command, a role that she, a high-spirited and independent girl, found onerous. Porridge was only one of the issues that divided them — he insisted there was no better way to start the day, while she loathed the stuff.
Moore went to the University of Manitoba in the early 1930s, where she studied French language and literature. She graduated with such distinction that in 1936 she went to Paris on a scholarship to the Sorbonne. After completing her studies, she stayed on in Paris, working at the British embassy and living in the Hotel Lenox with her colleague Mary Mundle. After Germany invaded France in May 1940, the embassy was evacuated and Moore and Mundle sailed for England.
Moore joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), which was really a front for her involvement with SOE. She and Mundle, who also worked for the RF Section of SOE, soon met up with Alison Grant, who had arrived from Toronto in the mid-1930s to study art on a Massey family scholarship. After war broke out, Grant had become attached to Military Intelligence Section 5, known more familiarly as MI5.
During the day, Moore worked in Dorset Square, where, besides briefing her friends Pickersgill and Macalister, she also worked with a young man named Ernest Gimpel, a Jewish resistance fighter for the Free French whose code name was Charles Beauchamp.
Born August 5, 1913, in France, Gimpel was the elder son of René Gimpel — an art collector and dealer and friend of Monet, Proust, and Renoir — and his wife, Florence Duveen, the youngest sister of English art dealer Joseph Duveen. After doing his French military service in North Africa as a trooper in the turbaned Chasseurs d’Afrique, Gimpel lived in London, where he worked for an interior design company. After France and England declared war against Germany in September 1939, he went back to France, enlisted in a French tank regiment that November, and was wounded in the defence of the Maginot Line. After the fall of France in June 1940 he joined the Resistance, but he was soon arrested and horribly beaten by the Germans before he managed to escape his captors, only to begin the brutal cycle over and over again.
Through the Resistance network, Gimpel was brought to England by submarine in September 1942. There he joined the Free French Forces, and was briefed by Kay Moore before he returned to France on November 25, 1943. During that fourteen-month respite in London, the two became friendly and fell in love, according to Chrystel Hug, author of the forthcoming book, RF Is for Real Friends: Snapshots of soe, the Free French, and the Alliance Française in London. Two months after Gimpel returned home, he was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and sent to Germany, where he was sent successively to the Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Flossenbürg camps. When he was released on April 24, 1945, by the advancing Allied troops, his first words were, “Where is Kay Moore?”
Not too far away, as it turned out. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, she had gone back to France with a contingent of Allied personnel and begun the task of sifting through the avalanche of materials about Allied prisoners of war.
“My mother’s memory is of Kay going to find Charles and he being down to skin and bones, with the number 185663 tattooed on his left arm,” said Ignatieff. The tiny Moore and the towering but emaciated Gimpel were married in London on August 29, 1945. As a honeymoon she took him to see cousins in Westmeath, Ireland, where he began to recuperate from his physical and emotional wounds.
In November 1946, Charles Gimpel — he had retained the first part of his code name but reverted to his original surname — and his younger brother Peter opened the Gimpel Fils gallery on Duke Street (later South Molton and now Davis Street) in honour of their father, René, art collector and author of Diary of an Art Dealer. The senior Gimpel, who had also joined the Resistance, died in Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg in 1944.
/> Before the war, the brothers had stored some of their father’s inventory — he specialized in French eighteenth-century, Impressionist, and non-representational painting — in a locked garage in a London mews. Amazingly, the London garage was neither bombed nor looted during the war, and the canvases had suffered nothing more serious than several years’ accumulation of dust and dirt. This artistic stockpile became the basis of the brothers’ first show, “Five Centuries of French Painting,” and was then used as collateral to acquire new works and artists. Over the years the gallery showcased postwar avant-garde paintings and sculptures by artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Alan Davie.
Kay Gimpel “was the mainspring of the Gimpel gallery” in the early days, according to her former SOE colleague M. R. D. Foot, who pointed out that it was she who insisted that all gallery transactions be conducted in Swiss francs. “No other currency was accepted,” he said. “In the period of ups and downs with the pound sterling and for the dollar, the Swiss franc remained dead steady and the Gimpel gallery’s income also remained dead steady.”
Almost certainly she was the one who sparked her husband’s interest in the Canadian Arctic. Only four years after the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Montreal had its sensational first sale of carvings brought from the North by artist and collector James Houston (for more information about Houston, please see Builders), Gimpel Fils celebrated the coronation of Elizabeth II in June 1953 by presenting the first exhibition of Inuit sculpture anywhere in Europe. Along with a hundred pieces lent by the Handicrafts Guild, the show included Mother and Child, a carving by Cape Dorset artist Mannumi Shaqu that had been presented to Princess Elizabeth on her tour of Canada in 1951. And that wasn’t a one-time commitment: from the late 1950s through the 1990s, the gallery held an annual exhibition of Inuit prints and sculpture. Charles Gimpel himself made six treks to the Canadian Arctic, beginning in the late 1950s — “rambling with my camera,” as he described it.
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