The Courage of the Early Morning

by William Arthur Bishop

  During one of these late discussions the Prime Minister paced the room, delivering one of his well-known discourses on war policy then abruptly stopped and waited for unanimous confirmation of his views. My father recounted: “Of course I had to be the one stupid ass to speak up and say I didn’t agree with him when I could just as easily have kept my mouth shut. Winston immediately turned on me. Sholto Douglas and Harris and the others looked at me as if to say ‘Thank God someone else is getting it for a change.’”

  But it was the kind of language Churchill respected. Later that evening when he and my father were alone the Prime Minister fingered Bishop’s row of ribbons somewhat in awe and said, “This row should be preserved.”

  Back on this side, he continued the relentless pace of travelling, inspecting and speaking. He was swamped with thousands of letters, all of which he insisted on answering. These were from parents whose sons had been killed in action, from young men wanting to enlist, others who wanted transfers, from well-wishers and from American critics who blamed propagandists like Bishop for their country’s entry into the war. He arranged for appearances in the United States, notably as the principal speaker at a Veterans’ Day in Chicago where his speech was credited with winning over two powerful newspaper publishers with isolationist leanings, Joe Patterson of New York and Bertie McCormick of Chicago, to the cause of American entry into the war.

  My father had never before worked so hard. He kept going by sheer willpower, aided by the stimulus of convivial after-hours activities. It was obvious to his family and friends that the pace was taking a terrible toll. The pace finally caught up with him on November 7, 1942, as he made a speech to air cadets at Scott Park in Hamilton, Ontario. Midway through his talk he felt an agonizing pain in his stomach. He thought he had been shot, but continued the address.

  When he had finished he quickly made his way out of the park, helped by another officer. The cramp in his stomach made it difficult to walk. He was near to the exit when a man with a maniacal look in his eyes stepped in front of him and in a hysterical scream shouted, “I’m going to kill you.”

  My father stopped dead as the man lunged, his fist aimed at his stomach. Just in time someone managed to push the assailant aside. It probably saved his life.

  He was flown to Montreal and rushed to hospital semi-conscious. His condition was diagnosed as an acute inflammation of the pancreas. The family doctor, Guy Johnson, explained the situation to my mother: “If it bursts he will live only a matter of days. If we take it out, he will last at the most for six months. Only hope and a miracle will help him now.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  MY FATHER’s critical illness was reported in the London papers and letters from old acquaintances poured into the hospital. Puddin’, the flower man outside the Berkeley Hotel, from whom he habitually bought his boutonniere when he went out on London town, wrote laboriously: “I learned that you had been ill in the paper. I hope you will get better soon so that you can continue your great work.”

  Corporal Walter Bourne, his guardian angel of World War I days, wrote from an RAF base where he was serving out his second war: “Get well soon, Sir. Train us the men and we will beat them as we did in the old days. Here is good luck—I am enclosing something which has travelled with me all these years. Remember the time your gun jammed (April 30 1917 in the attack against the Gothas) and you had to get away. Well, Sir, here is the bullet that might have ended your career. You can see the mark on it where I gripped it in the vise to get it free.”

  My father, restless in confinement to bed, did his best to negate the “get well” wishes. Guy Johnson declared he was the most restless and unco-operative patient he had ever had.

  One morning he decided to get up and shave himself. His knees felt wobbly at first but by the time he had finished he felt much better and decided he needed some exercise. He performed a few knee bends to loosen up a bit. Then he got down to serious business. From the door to the window he paced back and forth across the room, gradually gaining speed. He had just completed the third lap when the door opened. The angry face of Guy Johnson glared at him. He ordered him back to bed and warned him bluntly: “You are so near to being dead that it is a miracle you are breathing. We couldn’t operate even if the thing burst—and you want exercise. You will stay in bed until I tell you to get up.”

  Reluctantly my father obeyed the doctor and endured a prolonged convalescence. And even by the time he was discharged from the Montreal Hospital in January, 1943, he was still in no condition to return to duty. He took a long period of sick leave.

  He had been warned by Guy that any recurrence could be fatal and that the illness had taxed his entire system and had weakened his heart. Even when completely recovered he would never again be able to renew his previous pace.

  But my father was just as contemptuous of this warning as he had been about anything that restricted or limited his actions. And soon after he returned from leave in March, 1943, he attacked the job of recruiting with more vigour than he had ever done. But inevitably it took a heavy toll.

  On February 8, 1944, he celebrated his fiftieth birthday. He looked twenty years older. A certain vitality remained, and the cheerful manner. These concealed the fact that he was close to total exhaustion in body and soul.

  But the task of recruiting was nearly over. After D-Day, although victory was still to be won, recruiting for aircrews ceased. Myfather, who had spent twelve and a half years in uniform and had devoted as many more to the cause of aviation, asked to be relieved of his duties by the end of the year. In accepting his resignation, Honourable C. G.Power, Canada’s Minister of Air, wrote:

  By your untiring efforts and your unbounded enthusiasm you have been singularly successful in accomplishing a very difficult and important task, the manning of the RCAF with the finest of Canada’s young men. Your magnificent record in the First Great War fired the imagination of our Canadian aircrews in this war and has inspired them to deeds of courage to rival your own.

  In the King’s Birthday Honours that year he was made a Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath—an award generally referred to as the C.B. This was a fitting climax to his military career in two wars, but he rather regretted that the C.B. ranked after the Victoria Cross, thereby breaking up his perfect “fighting row”—V.C., D.S.O. and Bar, M.C., and D.F.C. Officially this closed his career as an airman. But as a kind of epilogue to that career, he set out his views on the future of aviation in a volume entitled Winged Peace.

  When the war ended in 1945 he returned to Montreal, to the oil business and to the large yellow stone house on Peel Street. But his resumption of business life—and normal family life—was frankly half-hearted. He could not readjust after the feverish activity and excitement of his role in building up the Allied air forces. He no longer had his old energy and enthusiasm. The great challenges which had inspired him in two world wars no longer existed.

  In public, he went through the motions. Each year, in a uniform decorated with the incredible array of his honours, he attended the major military anniversaries, the Battle of Britain Day parades, Warriors’ Day parades, Armistice Day parades.

  In private life he lived in semi-retirement. He spent hours reading in his library. His reading was largely adventure stories and history. His favourite character was Napoleon. He read every book on the French emperor he could lay hands on.

  In his library he could seal himself off from the rest of the family. The room contained a huge fireplace at one end, and at the other french doors that opened on a veranda overlooking the lawn. A few friends were admitted to the room, but mostly he preferred to be alone. Around the walls were hung framed maps he had used in his fighting days, as well as a collection of hunting prints. The entire room was dotted with trophies—the propeller and blue spinner of his Nieuport; the windshield with the hole in it that marked the day he became an ace.

  Photographs by the dozens adorned the walls and his desk—pictures
of him seated with Goering, talking to King George V., and autographed pictures of Roosevelt, Churchill, Beness, Hedy Lamarr. One held a special place on his desk and in his heart. It was small, cracked and in a silver frame—a portrait of Jack Scott, his commander in the days of 60 Squadron.

  Semi-retirement, however, did not end my father’s proclivity for new activities. He took a correspondence course in typing, and practised diligently for four hours a day until he perfected it. He explored unusual hobbies. Ice carving was one. Everyone in the family had to participate. Half a dozen blocks of ice would be piled up on the veranda. Then all the family got together and began to whittle away with picks. Later we graduated to soap carving and wood carving. But as quickly as he started such pastimes, once he either perfected them or lost interest in them he gave them up—to the great relief of the Bishop family. And yet we regretted it each time one of his enthusiasms was abandoned. For these were the things, we knew, that kept him alive.

  I am sure that many people thought that my father’s irrepressible behaviour made life unhappy for my mother. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Certainly my father was not easy to live with, but what very few people outside the Bishop family knew was that although my father’s eccentric antics often embarrassed her and sometimes even angered her a little, my mother understood and shared my father’s moods in her own quiet way.

  For example, if she were departing or arriving by train, my father would line up all the porters in advance and present her with a guard of honour—and she would smile through her blushes because she realized that my father was showing attentiveness to her.

  She shared his emotions. When he cried (which was frequently, because many things touched him deeply) she cried too. Apart from his more outlandish practical jokes, what amused him amused her too. She never forgot a piece of advice Grandmother Bishop had given before her marriage: “Don’t try to push Billy—you’ve got to lead him.”

  During these years following the Second World War my father and I became very close friends, more like pals than just father and son. Partly, I feel this was due to the fact that I had served as a fighter pilot in the RCAF and this established a comradeship between us.

  Deep inside, he was sad but not rebellious at the knowledge that the years of activity he had so enjoyed were slipping away. Reaching for a last hope that those years could be recalled, he volunteered for duty in 1950 when the Korean War started. His services were politely but firmly declined. Thereafter, his health and his spirit steadily declined, and soon the strain of making business decisions became intolerable. After a series of brief illnesses he retired in 1952.

  Disintegration came quickly. In the winters he lived in Palm Beach. He played a little golf and did a little writing. But he knew then that the days were running out. He watched the end approach without fear, indeed, almost with a sense of relief.

  The summer of 1956 he did not spend in Canada, as was his habit. He was too tired and ill to undertake the trip from Florida. Early in September my mother came up to visit me in Edmonton, where I was working. My father, attended by the faithful Leth-bridge, was nevertheless lonely. He always had been lonely when my mother was away. When he travelled without her, he would telephone, write or wire her every day. Sometimes he would use all those methods, even several times a day.

  On the evening of September 10 he had a drink and dinner, then read for a couple of hours before going to bed. Lethbridge offered to help him, but my father declined.

  “I’m feeling better than I have for weeks,” he said cheerfully.

  After midnight Lethbridge looked in on him before going to his own bed, as he always did. There was no faint sound of breathing, no slight movement of the body. My father had died painlessly and peacefully in his sleep.

  Never before had the death of a Canadian been recorded at such length in the press of so many countries; never before such widespread retelling of the events of a few months in the life of one man, now four decades ago.

  It was the largest funeral held in Canada within living memory. Thousands of people lined the route, and the procession took seventy minutes to pass. The service was held in Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, Toronto, where my parents had been married forty years before.

  As I knelt beside my mother and sister and listened to Rev. Dr. Andrew Lawson begin his tribute, “Let us talk about great men . . .” I remembered something my father had confided to me: “I may not be a religious man as most people understand that term. But I never took the air on patrol without a silent prayer: ‘God give me strength. God be with me now.’”

  Of all the countless tributes that were published—some were in verse—the one that moved me most, perhaps because I felt that it would have secretly pleased my father too, even while it embarrassed him, was written by John Bassett, publisher of the Montreal Gazette:

  “Death came to Billy Bishop in the early morning. He died at that chill hour before the coming of dawn—an hour when he must often have been making ready for his solitary flights.

  “Perhaps the very core of his courage lies in this very fact—that he showed it most at an hour when men feel it least. For his courage was not a thing of sudden inspiration, the surge of the moment, needing the support and cheer of others. It was a solitary thing, lonely as the dawn itself.

  “Perhaps if he had a choice, this would have been the hour he would have preferred. For he had that courage which Napoleon once said was the rarest—the courage of the early morning.”

  LIST OF VICTORIES

  1917

  1918