Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Five years later, Creelman became WHO’s chief nursing officer, replacing her British colleague Olive Baggallay. She held the position for the next fourteen years, spending nine months of the year in Geneva developing nursing standards, planning missions to developing countries, and preparing responses to outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and other epidemics. The other three months, she put theory into practice in developing countries. Even after she retired in 1968 she wasn’t ready to quit; she accepted a WHO appointment to study maternal and child health services in Southeast Asia.

  Afterwards she settled on Bowen Island, near Vancouver, where her apartment became a place of respite for friends, colleagues, family, and nurses she had mentored from across the country and around the world. In the late 1980s she moved into Hollyburn House, a seniors’ residence in West Vancouver. Despite two strokes that impaired her ability to walk and speak, she maintained an elegant appearance and a lively social life until she died of pneumonia on February 27, 2007, at age ninety-eight.

  Israel Halperin

  Mathematician and Human Rights Activist

  January 5, 1911 – March 8, 2007

  MOST MATHEMATICIANS FIND their calling early, when their minds are uncluttered, their vision sharp, and their energy boundless. So it was with Israel Halperin, the son of Russian immigrants, who studied under the legendary Johann von Neumann at Princeton in the 1930s.

  Halperin was being quietly celebrated among scholars for his work on operator algebras when treachery intervened during the Cold War and yanked him out of the ivory tower and into the mire of realpolitik. Unjustly accused as a spy by Canadian authorities, Halperin was suspended from his academic job and brought to trial.

  Albert Einstein, his former professor at Princeton, was one of the scholars who came to his defence. Instead of making him bitter, the ordeal confirmed Halperin as a human rights activist. Until the end of his life he campaigned relentlessly for others, especially wrongly incarcerated Jewish dissidents, such as Anatoly Sharansky, in the former Soviet Union.

  ISRAEL HALPERIN WAS born in Montreal on January 5, 1911, but grew up in Scarborough, an eastern outlier of Toronto. After Malvern Collegiate, Halperin entered Victoria College at the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1932, having won a mantelful of awards that included top marks in mathematics and physics. Two years later he had earned his master’s degree and was at Princeton University, registered for his PhD.

  Princeton was an academic mecca for refugees fleeing from Europe, especially mathematicians, who were drawn to the university’s Institute of Advanced Study. Among them were physicist Albert Einstein and mathematician Johann (John) von Neumann, the father of computer science and inventor of robotics and game theory. Naively but boldly, Halperin asked Neumann if he would direct his doctoral thesis, not realizing that the man had such an exalted research position that he was not required to supervise graduate students. Nevertheless, Neumann, who was doing work on operator theories and continuous geometries, took him on, giving Halperin the distinction of being the great Neumann’s only PhD student. After completing his doctorate, Halperin worked at Yale as a research fellow in 1936–37 and spent the next two years as the Benjamin Pierce Instructor at Harvard University.

  He wanted to come back to Canada, so he accepted a position in the fall of 1939 as an assistant professor of mathematics at Queen’s University in Kingston. He was twenty-eight and had already published several mathematical papers on operator algebras (a combination of algebra, geometry, and quantum mechanics), a field that he established here and kept alive for the next thirty years. It became a hot topic internationally in the 1960s in non-commutative geometry, mathematical physics, and numerical analysis.

  Shortly after embarking on his research and teaching career at Queen’s, he married Mary Esther Sawdey, the sister-in-law of a Harvard colleague, physicist Wendell Furry. The Halperins eventually had four children, Stephen (1941), Constance (1944), William (1945), and Mary Elizabeth (1948).

  Along with his academic work, Halperin was active politically in those twitchy times. In the United States he and Furry were both actively involved with the American Association of Scientific Workers, a liberal and progressive organization founded during the Depression with the aim of involving scientists directly in debate about social and political issues. (Later Furry ran afoul of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts of the 1950s and was indicted for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee.) At Queen’s, Halperin was developing a reputation as an agitator. He wrote eloquently, publicly, and futilely in defence of geophysicist Samuel Levine, a classmate from his undergraduate days at the University of Toronto. Under the far-reaching powers of the War Measures Act, Levine had been arrested, jailed for six months for possessing subversive literature, and dismissed, in 1941, from his teaching job at U of T.

  In 1942 Halperin took military leave from Queen’s to enlist in the Royal Canadian Artillery and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Mostly he worked at the Canadian Army Research and Development Establishment in Ottawa on artillery problems, explosives, and secret intelligence research into rockets and other issues. He attained the rank of major before being discharged at the end of the war and resuming his teaching career at Queen’s, moving his family back to Kingston and building a house in the west end of the city.

  That’s when his life went haywire. Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, defected in September 1945, bringing with him a list of names of alleged spies and fellow-travellers. One of them, a left-leaning British immigrant and advertising copywriter named Gordon Lunan (about whom I wrote in Rogues, Rascals, and Romantics), fingered Halperin as a Soviet spy.

  The two men had met in Ottawa late in the war. Lunan, a sympathizer of anti-fascist causes, a friend of union organizer and communist MP Fred Rose, and a lieutenant in the army, worked on Canadian Affairs, a newsletter that provided a summary of news and editorials for troops stationed here and abroad.

  The Communist Party had been banned at the outbreak of the war but had re-formed as the Labour Progressive Party. Rose had run under its banner, won a by-election in 1943, and retained his seat in the working-class riding of Cartier in Montreal in the 1945 election. Through Rose’s connections to Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, head of military intelligence at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Lunan was recruited as a low-level spy. He covertly supplied his handler, Colonel Vasili Rogov, with information gleaned from casual encounters with scientists and mathematicians.

  One of Lunan’s sources was Halperin, whose Soviet code name was “Bacon.” Lunan mentioned him in four reports to his Soviet spymaster, although never as a source of any secret information. On the contrary, Lunan wrote in frustration to his handler in July 1945: “this fellow is a mathematician, and not a chemist or physicist, which may account for his remoteness from the details of explosive research.”

  Halperin was probably known to the RCMP because of his previous political activity and his work with organic chemist Raymond Boyer, president of the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers, an offshoot of the American organization. They swooped down on Halperin on February 15, 1946, raided his office, and whisked him away in a shocking abuse of civil liberties, especially as it was peacetime. The War Measures Act had expired at the end of the Second World War, but the Mackenzie King government had secretly extended one of its provisions — giving the prime minister and the justice minister the power to arrest and detain people suspected of passing secrets to the enemy — in a special order-in-council, PC 6444, in October 1945, a month after Gouzenko’s defection.

  At the time, Canadian, British, and American military officials were worried that key scientific discoveries were being shipped to the Soviets. Their main quarry was the British physicist Alan Nunn May, a genuine Soviet spy — like the notorious Kim Philby, he had been recruited at Cambridge — who was w
orking at the Anglo-Canadian Laboratory in Montreal and at the atomic research plant in Chalk River, Ontario. Instead of apprehending May and turning him over to the British, the RCMP went after Canadians, most of them guilty of nothing more than sharing already published scientific information and harbouring sympathy for our former ally against the Nazis.

  Halperin, like the other accused, was held incommunicado, without access to legal counsel or his family, by the RCMP at its Rockliffe Barracks in spartan accommodation — even the windows were nailed shut — pending an appearance before the Kellock-Taschereau Royal Commission. The commission, headed by two Supreme Court judges, Roy Kellock and Robert Taschereau, had been struck on February 5, 1946 (ten days before Halperin’s detention), to investigate Gouzenko’s allegations that a spy ring of Canadian communists was handing over state secrets to the Soviets.

  Halperin’s situation only became known to the public after he covertly sent a letter to John Bracken, the Progressive Conservative Party leader, which was read in the House of Commons on March 21, 1946. “For the past five weeks I have been held in solitary imprisonment, denied access to legal counsel and newspapers; in short, cut off from the outside world,” Halperin wrote. “I charge the minister of justice with using his authority in a way which sets a dangerous precedent, one which should alarm every Canadian citizen.” He then described himself as coming from a family “whose concern for our country was sufficient to put two sons in uniform. One of them is writing this letter; the other is at the bottom of the ocean.”

  When Halperin was summoned to appear before the royal commission, he refused to make any statement without legal representation. His hearing was adjourned until March 27, 1946. Meanwhile, Halperin’s wife, Mary, and his sister, lawyer Clara Halperin (later Muskat), presented a habeas corpus petition to Mr. Justice Walter Schroeder in his chambers at Osgoode Hall in Toronto, arguing that Halperin’s detention was “irregular, illegal, defective, insufficient.”

  On March 26, 1946, the judge granted the writ and Halperin was released, but he was required to appear in Ottawa Weekly Court four days later, where he was represented by A. H. Lieff, a Jewish lawyer who later became a renowned family court judge. When Halperin’s hearing before the commission was reopened, he refused to answer what he described as a “cross examination.” A month later he was charged with conspiracy and violating the Official Secrets Act and was committed for trial in December 1946.

  Halperin’s trial came to a halt when the Crown called Lunan as a witness and he refused to testify, pending the outcome of his appeal against his own conviction on spy charges. When the court reconvened in March 1947, the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence when Lunan again refused to testify.

  After thirteen harrowing months, Halperin was legally a free man, but he was still under suspicion in the groves of academe, where several of his colleagues wanted him fired. The person who came to Halperin’s defence was Robert Wallace, principal of Queen’s, who quickly moved to reinstate his salary, academic status (coincidentally, Halperin had been on unpaid research leave since October 1946), and sabbatical privileges. When a member of the university’s board of trustees wrote to the principal declaring that “some Alumni” felt that “a Communist fellow-traveller” was not the “the type of individual who should be teaching in a Canadian university,” Wallace replied that “until a man is proved guilty, he has to be deemed as innocent.”

  Nevertheless, Halperin’s continued employment at Queen’s was only happily resolved after a heated debate of the board of trustees in May 1948. Among the testimonials sent on Halperin’s behalf was a letter from the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, signed by Albert Einstein and eleven others, describing him “not only as a mathematician of high standing but also as a man of greatest integrity” and finding it “impossible to believe” that he could be guilty “of any real breach of trust or honour.”

  For the rest of his life Halperin refused to discuss his ordeal with family, colleagues, or historians working on academic freedom. He concentrated on his academic work and on helping others whose rights had been trampled by overweening authority. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1953 and given its Henry Marshall Tory Medal in 1967. He continued to teach at Queen’s until 1966, when he was hired away by the University of Toronto. At least one of his Queen’s students — George Elliott, now a distinguished mathematician — followed him down the road to Toronto.

  During Halperin’s long career — which extended far past mandatory retirement at sixty-five — he published more than a hundred papers and influenced waves of younger mathematicians, including Peter Rosenthal, who was attracted to the University of Toronto largely because of Halperin’s work on Hilbert space (a kind of infinite dimensional space). Halperin also completed two substantial manuscripts that his mentor Neumann had left in an inchoate state when he died in 1957: Continuous Geometry (1960, 1980) and Continuous Geometries with a Transition Probability (1981).

  In the late 1960s, Halperin founded an international newsletter to broadcast and monitor developments in operator algebras and established the first Canadian Annual Symposium on Operator Algebras and Their Applications in 1972. Many of the participants who gathered for these informal discussions were former students. Eight years later, those same mathematicians set up the Israel Halperin Prize in honour of his seventieth birthday; it is given every five years to a younger mathematician who has done significant research in the area of operator theory or algebras.

  Halperin, who had always been a vocal defender of academic friends whose human and civil rights were being trampled, became a committed campaigner on behalf of a much wider community of scholars who were being repressed by their own governments. He was really a committee of one, acting on one case at a time and conducting his campaigns in a very dignified letter-writing mode. Typically he would write to Nobel laureates asking them to add their names to his campaign literature.

  With French mathematician Henri Cartan, he formed a committee of scientists and scholars at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver in 1974 to lobby for the release of Leonid Plyushch, a Russian mathematician who had been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and subjected to insulin therapy. Plyushch was released in 1976, at least partly because of the ten-thousand-name petition that Halperin helped to accumulate.

  He became secretary of the Canadian Committee of Scientists and Scholars and campaigned successfully for the release of José Luis Massera from prison and torture in Uruguay in 1984, and for Anatoly Sharansky’s discharge from a Soviet labour camp in 1986 and permission to immigrate to Israel. The New York Academy of Sciences gave Halperin the Heinz R. Pagels Award in 1999 in recognition of his work in advancing the human rights of scientists around the world.

  Halperin continued as an active scholar well into his eighties and was having “serious mathematical thoughts” until the last year of his life, when he decided to stop doing mathematics and gave away many of his papers. Complications from a genetic heart condition caused severe circulatory problems, forcing him to enter hospital, where he died of organ failure on March 8, 2007. He was ninety-six.

  Ernest Alvia (“Smoky”) Smith

  Winner of the Victoria Cross

  May 3, 1914 – August 3, 2005

  A ROWDY, SPUNKY fellow who liked drinking, smoking, and roistering, Smoky Smith wasn’t the romantic Victorian ideal of a dashing hero on a white charger. A private in the Canadian Army, he was promoted to corporal nine times and demoted back to private just as often, until he showed his mettle at the River Savio in the brutal Italian campaign of the Second World War.

  In real life, heroes typically don’t come off an assembly line. They are usually ordinary folk like Smith who step into the fire, driven by a mixture of guts, circumstance, and adrenalin. Instead of blustering, they willingly sacrifice their own safety for the benefit of others. That’s what Smith did. He single-handedly destroyed a Ge
rman tank, forced the enemy to retreat, and saved the life of a wounded comrade. That alone should have earned him a medal. But Smith’s bravery went further than personal valour: he inspired his fellow soldiers to demonstrate their own heroism.

  That’s why he deserved the Victoria Cross, the only private of the sixteen Canadians who won the award during the Second World War. The citation read in part: “By the dogged determination, outstanding devotion to duty, and superb gallantry of this private soldier, his comrades were so inspired that the bridgehead was held firm against all enemy attacks, pending the arrival of tanks and anti-tank guns some hours later.”

  Queen Victoria introduced the VC on January 29, 1856, to honour acts of valour during the Crimean War. Supposedly the medals were struck from metal extracted from Russian cannons captured at the siege of Sebastopol in 1854–55, but recent research has cast doubt on that swelling narrative. Be that as it may, the VC even now is the ultimate award for bravery in the face of the enemy. It was reconstituted in 1993 as the Canadian Victoria Cross, but no Canadian has received it since the end of the Second World War.

  Smoky Smith was famous in Canada because he was the last surviving recipient of the VC, but that is not why he was loved. He was loved because he wore his heroism simply and he didn’t glorify war. “Even Germans do not like to be shot,” he said sixty years after winning the medal. “I don’t take prisoners. Period. I’m not prepared to take prisoners. I’m paid to kill them. That’s the way it is.”

  There was no swagger about Smith as he attended Remembrance Day ceremonies and represented his country at poignant anniversaries both here and on the battlefields of Europe. He was the known soldier, to be sure, but he was also a regular guy who could relate to young and old with a quip and a wink and a modesty that did him and us proud. “I am not the hero,” he was fond of saying. “The real heroes are the ones left over there buried in the ground.”