Edwin Alonzo Boyd

by Brian Vallee

  Boyd was transferred to the army’s 3rd Division, which was made up largely of newcomers from Canada. “They decided to send me to the first unit that would be going into France. So I was just a sitting duck waiting to be plucked.”

  But after three months in exile, it was the Provost Corps that plucked him, recalling him to duty at the end of March 1944. He was promoted to lance-corporal, the usual Provost rank.

  Boyd was with the 11th Company of the Canadian Provost Corps when it was sent to Dover on the English Channel a few days before D-Day. Because the German resistance was stronger than expected, that company wasn’t sent into France until July 26, 1944, seven weeks after the invasion.

  While waiting in Dover, the Canadians had to keep close watch on their equipment. “The Americans were awful thieves,” Boyd says. “They were always stealing our motorcycles and jeeps. Six of us shared a jeep in our unit and one night it vanished. We knew who took it but we couldn’t prove it. The Americans would steal a jeep, run into London or somewhere, and ditch it on the way back. We retaliated by stealing their jeeps. It was one hell of way to run a war.”

  In the Canadian and British section of Normandy, the key Axis stronghold was the town of Caen. German resistance was ferocious, and it was not until late July, after weeks of bombing raids and frontal assaults that killed thousands of infantry and civilians, that the Germans were driven out. And it was only then that Ed Boyd’s 11th Provost Company was brought in.

  “There were Canadian, British, and German soldiers lying dead in the fields around Caen,” he says. “There were bodies everywhere, and nothing was being done about them at first because everybody was trying to move ahead.”

  The Provosts’ job was to keep the roads open for troops heading to the front line. They would set up in a town or its outskirts and keep the stream of men and equipment flowing as smoothly as possible. “Whenever you went into a town that was all shot up and the buildings flattened, there were always snipers shooting from church towers or whatever. Sometimes we were the only Canadians in sight. We expected to be shot down at any time. But we were lucky, I guess. I had a few bullets whiz by, but I was never hit.” He would have more bullets whiz by him on the streets of Toronto a few years later.

  His unit within the Provosts had just a half-dozen men with a single jeep and a motorcycle. His sergeant, from Timmins, Ontario, was easygoing and handsome and often slipped women into his bed at night. Nobody seemed to mind. When he didn’t have a woman with him, he would tell jokes and stories in the darkness. “He had us laughing all the time,” says Boyd.

  In October 1944, Boyd’s outfit was nearing the German border when a troubling letter arrived for him at divisional headquarters. The letter was from a Canadian soldier at Aldershot. “He said don’t worry about your wife and children, I’m looking after them, and all this crap. I don’t know if he was trying to ingratiate himself with me, or what.” Ed concluded that Dorreen was having an affair.

  His sergeant-major was concerned because the soldier was known to army command as a troublemaker and womanizer. He urged Ed to return to England as soon as possible. Ed was furious and left immediately, loading his .45 and slamming it into his holster. The English Channel was rougher than usual and he vomited most of the way across.

  He went to their house in Aldershot and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He assumed, rightly, that the children were in York with Dorreen’s grandmother. He waited at the house for about half an hour, until his wife’s twin, Joan, arrived.

  “Where did you come from?” she said, her surprise obvious.

  “We were up near Germany when I got sent back here to find out if Dorreen is living with some guy. Is it true?”

  “She’s my sister. I don’t want to tell you right out, but I have to say yes. You’re going to find out anyway.” Dorreen was expected momentarily. Joan and Ed agreed that he would hide under the dining room table while she asked her sister about the affair. “They sat and talked for a while,” says Ed, “and her sister asked her leading questions, trying to draw Dorreen out. And Dorreen admitted that she had been seeing this guy, but he had gone back to Canada.”

  “Are you going to tell Ed about it?” asked Joan.

  “Oh, I couldn’t tell him that.”

  “But he will probably find out, and that will make it worse.”

  “I can’t tell him, he’d never forgive me.”

  Joan went upstairs, and Boyd came out from under the table. “Dorreen had the awfullest look on her, shaking like anything. Of course she started crying like she always did, and she made up some cock-and-bull story. She always said she was sorry. I guess because she was brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, she thought that was all you had to do – say you’re sorry and let it go at that.”

  When asked about that incident more than fifty years later, Dorreen laughed. “Oh, he remembered that, did he? Those were the days, my friend. It’s true, it’s true, but crumbs … I wasn’t seventy-six like I am now.”

  She says that even though Ed was never a violent man, he was so angry on that occasion that he slapped her. Ed denies that. “I wasn’t the slapping kind. I never, ever, slapped her. That’s just her guilt talking.”

  Dorreen’s lover had been shipped back to Canada two days before Boyd arrived in Aldershot. “I had it in my head that I was going to shoot the guy right there. But I’m not sure what I would have done.” He pauses for a moment, then: “Ten to one I would have put a bullet through his head.”

  Ed forgave Dorreen, and they were able to salvage their marriage, but he says he never felt the same about her after that. Eighteen days later, on November 6, 1944, he was back in France, but there was no one there to meet him. He had no transport and, like his days riding the rods, he had to bum his way back to the German border, inquiring as he went if anyone knew the whereabouts of the Provost Corps. “I finally found them up at the German border. The sergeant-major hadn’t expected to see me again.”

  Two months after the confrontation in Aldershot, Dorreen was packing up the three children to sail to Canada with hundreds of other war brides. Kate Hunter accompanied her granddaughter and great-grandchildren to Liverpool, where the troop ship Mauritania was waiting to take them to Canada.

  The Mauritania landed in Halifax on December 17, 1944. “All I could see were housetops and snow,” remembers Dorreen. “It was one of the worst snowstorms ever. They had to dig the train out all the way to Toronto.” It would be nine more days before she and the children arrived at Union Station.

  10

  Toronto

  Glover Boyd was at Union Station to meet Dorreen and the children. It was a week before Christmas, and four days before the twins’ first birthday. Glover and Minnie, both devout evangelical Christians, now had their own son, Howard, and had moved into a grand, three-storey house at 53 Chestnut Park Road in Toronto’s exclusive Rosedale neighbourhood. Glover was providing a large room at the front for Dorreen and the children. Dorreen’s impression of Glover was favourable, although she found him somewhat “gruff and rough.” Her positive impression of Glover didn’t extend to his wife and their nine-year-old son. She thought Minnie was snobbish, and considered Howard a monster (he sometimes spat at her).

  Boyd was posted back to England from the front on January 25, 1945. Three weeks later he was headed home to Canada. His assigned ship was carrying war brides as well as returning troops. Boyd was placed in charge of policing the troops on board. “I guess they figured they could trust me to keep them away from the women. I was married and most of the other guys weren’t.”

  In Boyd’s duffle bag, carefully wrapped in clothing, were a torn-down Thompson sub-machine-gun and a Luger he had taken from a dead German in France. “The guy was upside down on a two-seater wagon that should have had a horse in front of it. The horse was dead, about ten feet away. The Luger was right there where I could see it, so I just took it and put it in my pack. The tommy gun was American – service issue. Somebody got killed, and a gu
y offered it to me, so I took it.”

  Since he was in charge of the security detail, there was no problem bringing his duffle bag and the guns on board, where he kept them safely stowed. “I was able to get away with it, and I’m sure a lot of others did the same.”

  When Boyd arrived at Union Station on February 17, 1945, his father met him and took him to the house.

  Glover was proud that his son had turned his life around and served his country well. And although it was never discussed, he probably felt a special pride that Ed too was now a policeman, albeit a military policeman. But Ed had not volunteered for the Provosts out of a love for police work. He saw it simply as an opportunity get out the Royal Canadian Regiment, which he believed had treated him unfairly.

  After a thirty-day leave with Dorreen and the children at Glover’s house, Ed reported to the huge military de-mustering encampment on the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition. The CNE had been cancelled since 1939, because of the war, and the grounds had been transformed into the No. 2 District Depot. All of the permanent buildings were now military offices or barracks for thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, as well as the women’s army corps.

  Bunk beds had been installed in the Horse Palace, and two servicemen had been assigned to each stall. The stalls had been thoroughly cleaned out, but the smell of horses lingered. One of the buildings, near the Dufferin Gate, housed Webb Hall, the largest mess hall in the British Empire. It could feed three thousand at one sitting. The Navy had taken over the Automotive Building near the Princes’ Gate, and at the Flower Building the only beds were for the troops. It was the same at the Pure Food Building and all of the others.

  Boyd presented his leave documents at the long reception table and was assigned a bunk in the Horse Palace. It would be almost two months before he was officially discharged from the army.

  By the time Glover Boyd met his son at the train station he had been with the Toronto police for twenty-four years, and was a year away from retirement. Although he had never been promoted, he was a respected constable working out of No. 6 Station at Cowan and Queen in Parkdale. In June 1945, Jack Webster10 joined the force fresh out of the army, just as Glover Boyd had done twenty-four years earlier, and was partnered with the older policeman. “He was assigned to show me the ropes,” says Webster, “and we walked the beat together many times.”

  It didn’t take Webster long to realize that Glover was a very religious man. “I called him Mr. Boyd, and he was always very kind to me.” Webster didn’t have a car, and after work, Glover would go out of his way to drop him off near his parents’ home at Shaw and Dupont. On one of those rides, Glover bragged about his son Edwin, who had been in the army overseas since the beginning of the war.

  In July 1945, Glover and his protégé were on duty at Sunnyside, the waterfront amusement park and beach that between June and September attracted people from across Toronto and beyond. Gasoline and tires were both rationed at the time, and streetcars were the preferred mode of transportation. The Lakeshore line ran right through the middle of Sunnyside.

  Besides the beach there was an imposing outdoor swimming pool, known simply as “the tank” to Parkdale locals; the famous, all-wood roller-coaster, “the Flyer”; two merry-go-rounds; and a Ferris wheel. Concession booths offered Sunnyside red-hots, ice cream waffles, Honey Dew, and Vernor’s ginger ale. There were restaurants, games of chance, a rifle range, bumper cars, and miniature golf – called Tom Thumb Golf. You could even have your weight guessed or record your voice on a paper disk.

  On Sunday nights crowds sat on benches outdoors while Art Hallman’s orchestra provided the music for the People’s Credit Jewellers’ sing-along concerts, which were broadcast over CFRB radio. There was also dancing outdoors at the Seabreeze, or indoors at the Palais Royale or the Palace Pier.

  In the last summer of the war the Sunnyside crowds were swelled by the thousands of military personnel at the nearby Exhibition grounds. The enlisted men had their own canteen – in reality a huge beer hall, where draft beer sold at ten cents a glass. One soldier described it as “ankle-deep in suds.” And for senior ranks there was the officers’ mess.

  The servicemen often spilled out of the Exhibition grounds into the pubs and hotels along King Street West, or into other soldiers’ hang-outs like the Edgewater Hotel at Roncesvalles and Queen. The combination of beer and postwar euphoria created a surreal, carnival atmosphere that intensified as they made their way towards Sunnyside, with its music and bright lights.

  Glover Boyd and Jack Webster were patrolling Sunnyside in the uniform of the day – which included the traditional bobby helmet – when a man ran up to them.

  “You’d better get over to the weight-guessing stand,” he said. “There’s a fight.”

  The policemen were there quickly to find a uniformed airman shouting obscenities at the weight guesser. Two of the airman’s buddies, also in uniform, stood quietly watching.

  “Cut that stuff out now,” said PC Boyd in his deep, measured voice.

  “Who’s gonna make me? You, Pop?”

  Glover, who was fifty-two, tried calmly to coax the airman into settling down, but instead he became nastier.

  “Come on, Mr. Webster, take hold of his arm,” said Glover, who reached for the other arm.

  The airman became violent, and in the struggle that followed, both police helmets went flying. “Those old helmets were always the first thing that came off when you were in a fight,” says Webster. They managed to handcuff the airman, and took him to No. 6 Station, where he was later turned over to the Military Police.

  Webster says Glover Boyd held his own in the fight. “He was a strong guy, sort of chunky, with high cheekbones and a ruddy face.” It was Webster’s first fight as a policeman, and they talked about it over lunch.

  “Gee, that was quite a scrap we had, Mr. Boyd.”

  “Son, if you intend to stay in this job, that’ll be the first of many you’ll be in.”

  Glover Boyd would retire from the police force on September 7, 1946, after twenty-five years on the job.

  Dorreen and Ed’s stay at Chestnut Park Road was to be temporary. They had been assigned a wartime house across from the streetcar barns on Eglinton Avenue near Yonge Street. The house was under construction and would be ready in a few weeks.

  Ed had been back in Canada a month when Dorreen received news from England that Kate Hunter, her beloved “granny,” had died. Kate was a diabetic who hadn’t watched her diet as strictly as her doctors advised. “She had a wonderful garden outside her house,” says Dorreen, “and one day she cut her foot on a spade and, because of the diabetes, gangrene set in. They told her they would have to amputate her foot, but she said, ‘A woman of my size? I’m not going around on crutches the rest of my life.’ She wouldn’t let them amputate and she died.”

  In August 1945, Ed and Dorreen moved with the children into their house at 44 Eglinton Avenue West. The rent was $90 a month.

  Many of the soldiers returning from overseas were being allowed to work in civilian jobs while waiting to be discharged from the army. They would spend their nights at the Exhibition grounds, sign out in the morning, and go to work. Boyd found a job at Canada Packers, filling sacks with fertilizer. At the same time, he applied to the Toronto Transit Commission for work. The TTC investigated potential employees carefully, and knew he had been in prison out West. They decided that his early troubles with the law were precipitated by the Depression and his youth, and that he had redeemed himself with his five-and-a-half years in the army. He was officially discharged on May 24, 1945, two-and-a-half weeks after the war ended in Europe. Eleven days later he was hired by the TTC.

  Boyd was thirty-one when he left the military. That part of his life was over: he put away his medals and his souvenir tommy gun and forgot about them. But he kept his German Luger close at hand.

  Three days before he left the army, he attended an interview at the Exhibition grounds with Captain W.G. Porter. The interview
was required discharge procedure. Afterwards, Porter wrote of Boyd: “Looks like a man who should be able to take care of his own affairs and have few rehabilitation problems.”

  11

  Frustration

  The TTC trained Boyd as a streetcar motorman and conductor, and he was soon working the Yonge Street line. Because he had been overseas, he was granted an extra year of seniority for every year he worked. If he had stayed with the TTC he would have been one of the first to drive the new subway trains when the Yonge line was completed in 1954.

  Boyd’s job with the TTC was soon a family affair: both Norm and Gord signed on after they left the air force. Each had been in the military since the age of seventeen; neither had any adult experience with, or knowledge of, civilian life. Both felt the TTC was a good place to begin re-entering society. From there they would decide what to do with their lives.

  In those days every main streetcar had a trailer car, and sometimes all three Boyds worked together at the same time on the same cars. “Sometimes you would be driving the streetcar,” recalls Norm, “and other times you would be a conductor, depending on what shift you were on. You could be driver for part of a day and conductor for part of a day. It was whatever they assigned you.”

  With the streetcar barns across the street from their new house on Eglinton, it took Ed just minutes to get to and from work. The house itself was a small, solid bungalow with an elevated front lawn facing Eglinton Avenue, and had a front porch and two bedrooms. The kitchen stove was coal-fired, and the rest of the house was heated with an oil-burning stove. The coal was stored in a back shed, where there was also an icebox, for which ice blocks were delivered twice a week. Ed built a fence around the backyard, and a sand-box with a small roof for the children. On the front lawn he built a double play-pen for the twins, who had great fun tossing their toys out to the street, where passers-by would toss them back.

  The Boyds lived just down the street from Miss Wickson’s ballet studio; next to it was a real estate office that Dorreen cleaned for $47 a month. She received another $50 a month for cleaning Wickson’s studio and doing her laundry.