Dr. C.M. Johnston's Project

Robert L. Telfer

On 25 October 1915 Humboldt, Saskatchewan, in the fertile heart of the prairie West, was the birthplace of Robert Lloyd Telfer, the second son of Robert Adam Telfer and the former Alice Olivia Paul. Lloyd was a so-called Great War baby, making his appearance in the second horrific year of what had come to be regarded as the worst conflict ever to have convulsed Europe. He had two siblings, an older brother, Walter, who later served in the Canadian Army, and a younger sister, Muriel. They grew up in a warm, close knit family.

Their caring parents were a cultural and civic force in the community. The father was a newspaperman, the proprietor and editor of the weekly Humboldt Journal, which he had founded in October, 1905, after gaining the necessary experience at newspapers in Saskatoon and Prince Albert. His granddaughter recalled a “wonderful, gentle man who excelled at sports, including golf, tennis, and curling”. His athletic sons would follow suit. The mother, who came from an academic family in Ontario, was a trained opera singer, a teacher of voice, and a gifted pianist. In her own distinctive way she helped, in the words of her granddaughter, to shape the “cultural landscape of those early prairie years”. She produced, among other offerings, well received Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

Two years after her husband founded the Humboldt Journal, he was joined in the venture by his brother, William. The weekly's appearance was well timed because it shortly followed the creation in 1905 of the new province of Saskatchewan, soon to be the acknowledged breadbasket of the Dominion. The Telfer brothers had come by their calling honestly. Their first cousin, Walter Scott, a self-educated printer and reporter, had also become the owner of a newspaper eventually known as the Regina Leader Post. More than that, the energetic and politically ambitious Scott had served as a Liberal MP and become the first premier of Saskatchewan when the new province was born. He also played a large role in the establishment of the University of Saskatchewan, which would be attended by Robert Telfer's sister-in-law, Muriel Paul.

Robert, who named his first son after his famous cousin, could not be persuaded to follow in the latter's political footsteps. Nonetheless, given his own background and calling, he too had strong ties to his community and that included serving as town counclllor and then mayor. He was also active in Humboldt's Westminster United Church, where he and his family regularly worshipped and where young Lloyd enrolled as an enthusiastic Boy Scout. The enthusiasm shown on this and other occasions was matched by the optimism and positive outlook on life that became his hallmark.

Dinner table conversation in the Telfer household may well have been seasoned from time to time with discussions of the news of the day, both domestic and foreign. The father, to name just one of his larger interests, was a keen advocate for the League of Nations, the organization created after the Great War to derail hostilities in the world. As the peacetime ‘twenties were drawing to a close, he editorially lamented that many Canadians were too self-absorbed and too caught up in their own daily activities to pay proper heed to the important work that the League was undertaking world-wide. Not surprisingly, he would within a few years have cause to agonize over the rise of right wing European and Asian dictatorships that threatened the very life of the League and plunged the world into another jittery pre-war period. The problem would be compounded by the Depression that struck in 1929 after what Robert Telfer and other editors called the “worst panic”” ever to have struck Wall Street. Once again dinner table talk might have fed on events that would have a profound impact on Saskatchewan and the rest of the country.

Meanwhile, Lloyd, like his siblings, was being educated at the Humboldt Public School and the Humboldt Collegiate Institute. In the long summer vacations they frequented a nearby lake where, his sister Muriel recalled, Lloyd, a keen outdoorsman, became an “excellent swimmer”. When his schooling and chores permitted he also took up tennis and skating in season. Years later, on his RCAF service record under the heading Education, Lloyd wrote “Sask.” after the entry, Senior Matriculation. Actually his secondary education was continued far from home in southern Ontario. He had been invited East to stay with his maternal aunt, Muriel Paul, a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan who taught French at Hamilton Central Collegiate Institute (HCCI). Her credentials were impressive. Besides gaining her BA, she had in the early ‘twenties studied for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, her sojourn coinciding with the Olympic Games staged in the French metropolis. This news she relayed in a postcard to her nephew Walter. She was a determined and accomplished teacher and as well helped to direct the efforts of HCCI's Dramatic Society. A former student clearly remembers her teaching qualities and her custom of driving about accompanied by her ubiquitous dog.

Before her nephew, Lloyd, took Form V (Grade 13) classes at HCCI, Muriel Paul enrolled him in a private boys' institution, Lake Lodge School, located in nearby Grimsby, in the heart of the Niagara orchard country, a far cry from the prairies he had left behind. The school had operated since before the turn of the century in a pioneer ancestral home on a scenic stretch of the Lake Ontario shore. Like most private schools of that time it aped English practices and saw to it that its properly uniformed charges were educated in what were perceived to be all the manly virtues as well as in the conventional scholastic curriculum. By the time Lloyd appeared on its doorstep it was seeking to groom its students not only for collegiates and boarding schools but for undergraduate life at university.

As one might expect, Lake Lodge School laid great store by athletic pursuits and before long Lloyd found himself recruited for the cricket team, pictures of which duly appeared in the pages of the school magazine, The Lake Lodge Record. Teacher Paul must also have been pleased with his efforts beyond the cricket pitch. Lloyd was pleased too when he won the Seniors' spelling prize and for his success was awarded a book, Tales from Shakespeare. Perhaps his father's spelling proficiency as a newspaper editor rubbed off on the son. In any event, Lloyd's aunt may have reasoned that the school's regimen both in and out of the classroom might better prepare him for post secondary education.

Apparently by the close of 1932 Muriel Paul had concluded that Lake Lodge School had satisfactorily discharged that responsibility and that it was time for her protégé to enroll briefly at the collegiate where she taught. Lloyd registered at HCCI for the winter and spring terms and took up residence in his aunt's home. Armed with additional high school credits, he matriculated in June, 1933 and with Muriel Paul's blessing, he was , as reported by Vox Lycei, Central's yearbook, one of a sizeable group of the school's graduates who applied that year for admission to nearby McMaster University. A Baptist institution, it had recently re-located from Toronto to Hamilton's fashionable Westdale district.

On the application form, made out in September 1933, Lloyd indicated that he wanted to pursue dentistry as a career. He was assured by his faculty advisor that, in the absence of a formal pre-dentistry program at McMaster, Course 17 (Science Option) would in all likelihood suffice. The unidentified official who interviewed him obviously enjoyed the occasion, sending a message to his colleagues that he found Lloyd “a good boy and not dull”. Although the newly admitted freshman duly registered in the prescribed course the arrangement did not pan out and after one year he withdrew from McMaster. He then returned to Saskatchewan and the welcoming embrace of his family. Among other forms of employment, he clerked in a Humboldt drug store for some three years.

In this interval Lloyd again found time for the outdoor life, readily accompanying his father on welcome camping and fishing trips. On one, taken in the summer of 1934, he wrote a postcard to his brother, Walter, telling him about the “swell” experience he was having and jokingly urging him to behave himself. The easy family camaraderie clearly shone through. So did something else. Appropriately the reverse of the postcard showed a picture of the purported Indian, “Grey Owl”, that generation's personification of the great and unspoiled outdoors. The engaging raconteur and nature writer, however, was later unmasked as an English impostor.

In 1938, Lloyd seemed to go in pursuit of something like the “Grey Owl” lifestyle on the wilderness edges of civilization. He scraped together his savings and with his family's support took ownership of a “five and dime” in the remote Northern Ontario community of Larder Lake, the dramatic scene of Ontario's first major gold rush after the turn of the century. Lloyd's move was well timed. A few years before his arrival the Larder Lake area had enjoyed a revitalization and restructuring of the mining operations that had flagged in the ‘twenties. The region soon became, in the words of a helpful local history, a “beehive of activity” and by early 1938 Larder Lake saw additional town lots sold, a bank materialize, and a hardware store make its debut.

These well received arrivals were soon joined by what its eager owner called and advertised as “Lloyd's Store, 5 cents to a Dollar”, one of many such establishments spawned by the penny-pinching Depression ‘thirties. Besides minding the store, Lloyd found time to indulge his first love, the outdoors on a genuine frontier far from the cramped confines of urban life in the south. He readily took to skiing on the slopes of the surrounding hills and to his favourite diversion, swimming, that is when he could find unpolluted water in the expansiveness of Larder Lake. It was routinely on the receiving end of mine tailings, a cause of concern not only to him but to the local authorities anxious to promote tourism. Lloyd did not forget Humboldt, however, making periodic trips home to visit family and to cement relations with his future wife, Marvel Joyce Baker, a local girl.

In April 1940, however, Lloyd pulled up stakes at Larder Lake, closed down his store, and returned to Humboldt with a mission on his mind. He had resolved to become part of the war and proceeded to enlist for active service with the RCAF. His motives may have sprung in part from the ugly turn the war was taking overseas. The Germans were in the midst of overrunning Denmark and Norway, a scenario that brutally displaced the “Phoney War” that had hitherto characterized the dormant state of affairs in Europe (that is, if the sideshow Soviet -Finnish “Winter War” is excluded).

When Lloyd received his Air Force call and formally enlisted in Saskatoon on12 Sept. 1940 the aerial Battle of Britain was approaching its crescendo. It had followed hard upon astounding military events on the Continent. Within a year of the outbreak of the war it almost abruptly came to end with the dramatic German conquest of the Low Countries, the destruction of the French Army, the forced withdrawal of a defeated British Expeditionary Force (BEF) at Dunkirk, and the threatened invasion of England itself. This shocking turn of events were duly reported in the Humboldt Journal.

Like most newspapers, metropolitan as well as small town, Robert Telfer brought the bad news along with whatever good tidings he could bravely muster to comfort the alarmed public. It was a difficult balancing act. Thus the Journal 's editor wrote of “thousands upon thousands of British soldiers, grimy and exhausted, [returning] proudly to Britain after an epic fight for 20 days in Belgium and Northern France”. To intensify the troops' misery, the paper added, they had been constantly strafed by the Luftwaffe while awaiting their deliverance at Dunkirk. The Journal also spoke, however, as other papers did, of the stiff losses which the BEF had supposedly inflicted on the Germans. Though a heroic Dunkirk myth would soon be concocted, there was no masking the awful truth that Britain had suffered an appalling defeat and was now open to invasion,

Against this ominous backdrop Lloyd soon found himself on the way to his first RCAF posting at Brandon, Manitoba, home of 2 Manning Depot (MD), where he arrived on 13rh Sept. in the company of six other recruits. There he was introduced to the workings of the Air Force and the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, the bold Anglo-Canadian venture launched after the war's outbreak to provide a host of combat aircrew. Like Murray Bennetto [HR], another McMaster airman who trained in the same place, Lloyd learned his airmanship in the Winter Fair Building or so-called Horse Palace, the Western equivalent to the East's “Cow Palace” housing 1MD on the grounds of the CNE in Toronto.

Some years older than the regular recruit fresh out of high school or university, and familiar with the hard knocks of the workaday world, Lloyd probably took the Depot's regimen in his stride. He wrote in the diary he had started to keep that the meals were “fine” and that all was proceeding “OK”, A month after his arrival in Brandon and with a round of lectures and musketry and drilling exercises under his belt the novice airman was returned to the familiar surroundings of his home province. There he would undergo the rest of his training, with the first important stop at No. 2 Initial Training School (ITS), based in Regina. Obviously Lloyd was not obliged to put in a stint of guard duty at a station, as so many other recruits suffered through while waiting for places to become available further up the training food chain. In his case apparently space was available at 2 ITS, and there he was put through a series of aptitude, skills, and psychological tests and procedures designed to determine his trade in aircrew, be it piloting - invariably the most coveted - navigating or wireless operating and air gunnery.

Lloyd had hoped against hope to be cleared for flying so he must have been elated when he was selected for the role and underwent his first real test, the one that could make or break an aspiring pilot's career. This experience unfolded at No. 6 Elementary Flying Training School (EFTS) located in Prince Albert. He arrived there on 4 November and for the better part of two months he was instructed on biplane Tiger Moths and monoplane Cornell trainers. He took instinctively to flying, passed the required tests, and was dispatched for advanced instruction to No. 4 Service Flying Training School (SFTS), Saskatoon, not far from his home town of Humboldt.

En route to Saskatoon he was allowed, in a manner of speaking, to sidetrack when he was granted a short Christmas leave, which he and Marvel Baker put to good use. Having already become engaged before he went for his elementary training, they were married on Boxing Day, 1940 at the Westminster United Church in Humboldt. After a brief honeymoon the groom reported for duty at Saskatoon for the next stage of his training. In due course Marvel bore him a son, Robert Edward (Robbie), whom the father, by that time overseas, was fated never to see, the same sad circumstance that befell two other McMaster servicemen, Robert Dorsey [HR] and Robert Edgar [HR].

Meanwhile Lloyd's training at Saskatoon, which commenced on 3 January 1941, was undertaken on the much deployed twin-engined Avro Anson. Again he successfully completed the requirements and on 17th March he was awarded his wings at a colourful ceremony on the station. It was attended by a proud Marvel and family members, who made certain that the occasion was captured on film. Lloyd was also promoted from Leading Aircraftsman to Sergeant as all successful trainees were. What probably mattered more, however, was that Marvel stayed over at a nearby hotel where he joined her after the wings ceremony. The following day he put the formal finishing touched to his SFTS training and then rejoined his wife.

On 19th March they both returned to Humboldt where Lloyd started a pleasant cum poignant eight-day embarkation leave. After it ended he was posted to Debert, Nova Scotia, the traditional marshalling point for an overseas departure. In Ottawa en route he was met by his brother, Walter, who accompanied him as far as Montreal, where at noon on the 27th March he boarded a special troop train bound for the East Coast. He arrived in Debert the following afternoon and along with some 500 other airmen was housed in a large hangar where he awaited further instructions. Excitement and tension must have been doing battle at this point in the cross country odyssey. Several days passed in this holding position before he was moved on to Halifax on 6th April. In his diary he reported that he soon boarded what he called, using one of his favorite adjectives, “a swell big ship … the MV Georgie”.

Lloyd was obviously pleased with the shipboard accommodations, a stateroom which he shared with another airman. Two days later the ship “pulled out” and for Lloyd it was not a minute too soon. Though not eager to leave Canada he nonetheless wanted to be on the move again, and it was an impressive move. With great satisfaction he noted the presence of the battle cruiser, HMS Rodney, and a flotilla of destroyers assigned to safeguard the crossing of some 6000 servicemen, Lloyd included. They would need all the protection they could get if a certain Lord Haw Haw's predictions came true. Lloyd learned that this supposed English aristocrat was traitorously working as a radio broadcaster for the Nazi Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. To that end he had startlingly announced every detail of the convoy assembling to take Lloyd and his comrades to the UK, and moreover, had warned of the dire fate awaiting it on the high seas. What Lloyd and his fellow passengers did not know was that the irksome Lord Haw Haw was in fact Brooklyn-born William Joyce, the son of an English mother and an Anglophobic Irish-American father.

As it turned out, Lord Haw Haw's dire predictions were badly flawed and Lloyd's ten-day Atlantic crossing was thankfully uneventful. All the same, he had periodically checked out the shepherding escorts. He observed, for example, that as the convoy arrived in the danger zone on the approaches to the British Isles the escorts were reinforced by a battleship and half a dozen destroyers as well as by a welcome umbrella of Sunderland flying boats. On 20th April the servicemen landed without incident at Greenock on the Clyde and enjoyed their first glimpse of Scotland. Lloyd, who had grown up on the prairies and lived briefly in the lake country of Northern Ontario, now beheld scenery, complete with “snow capped mountains”, the like of which he had never before seen. About a month after he landed a photograph appeared in the Humboldt Journal showing him cheerfully waving to onlookers as he walked down the “Georgie's” gangplank and entered yet another new experience and new adventure.

Instead of proceeding, as most new arrivals did, to the Personnel Reception Centre in Bournemouth Lloyd was dispatched to Uxbridge near London. From his train window he took in the “”beautiful English countryside”, which strangely showed no signs of war at all. It was a different matter, however when his party reached Newcastle and experienced its first blackout. The following day, 21 st April, they arrived at Uxbridge, were placed in the RAF Trainees Pool, and ushered to what Lloyd called “fine quarters in a house”. After settling in, he and his companions sent cables home assuring family members of their safe arrival. This duty done, they “celebrated on the town”, to quote Lloyd's happy diary entry.

The next day, while attending a dance, Lloyd got another taste of the war and a “thrill” when enemy bombers made their appearance on a “Blitz” raid. Though they did comparatively little damage Lloyd was brought face to face with the foe for the first time. On 24th April he was given time off to visit the historic sites and monuments of London, ordinarily a tourist's dream come true. But these were hardly ordinary times. While captivated by what remained of the visitor's London he was awestruck even more by the “terrific” devastation wrought by the Blitz Happily that first night in the metropolis was a quiet one and he and his companions made full use of their short leave. They repaired to a club and danced and drank the night away. After the club had to “kick then out at 4:30 in the morning”, they retreated undaunted to an all- night restaurant and continued the revelry.

By 26th April, with the short but action-packed leave already a memory, Lloyd was on the move again and probably glad of it, this time on board a train bound for what he called ‘School”, actually 23 Operational Training Unit (O T U), located near Worcester in the southwestern part of the country. After his arrival he collected his battle dress and flying kit at the “Stores” and with another airman was assigned to what he called a hut whose only source of heat was a small stove, which feebly battled the “cold as ice” air. Lloyd's was the first class assigned to this recently established O T U and he found the place still “in a mess” Yet he was pleased to catch his first sight of the station's mainstay, the legendary Vickers Wellington bomber, whose specifications he quickly learned and committed to his diary. On these battle-scarred veterans turned trainers his flying skills would be reinforced during his stay in Worcester.

On his second day at the O T U, Lloyd had a chance to make a closer inspection of the Wellington (or “Wimpey”, after the Popeye cartoon character). He was amazed that it was at least three times the size of the Anson he had trained on in Canada, remarking that this “big flying boxcar” was to the Anson what the Anson had been to his other trainer, the diminutive Tiger Moth. Lloyd also noted another important feature, that the “Wimpey” had double machine guns fore and aft and carried a crew of five. The diary entry scarcely hides his eagerness to go aloft in the aircraft though the “flying boxcar” would be dwarfed in turn by the “kite” he would ultimately fly, the four-engined Handley Page Halifax, a major weapon in Bomber Command's armoury.

The following days at Worcester were, as Lloyd put it, “filled up with lectures” but not alas, with the flying he yearned to do. The evenings were thankfully clear except when the occasional astro-navigation instruction was laid on for all trainees. At one of these sessions he learned that the “Jerries” had raided the station just days before their arrival but had caused no casualties or damage. On one of the free evenings he and some mates hitchhiked into Worcester, only to find “little to do” apart from drinking “Scotches” in a pub. They then trudged the four miles back to the station when no rides materialized on the blacked-out highway. The “little to do” continued. Over the next few days Lloyd tersely told his diary that there was virtually nothing to report, apart from the ongoing lectures and cockpits checks on the Wimpey.

This station tedium was occasionally relieved by special events. Thus as April was closing Lloyd excitedly wrote that he and his crew received a lecture from the station's Intelligence Officer. He marveled at how the “wonderful organization” that that officer represented managed to gather and make use of its vital store of information on enemy activities. As for his regular training, he had obviously performed ably on the periodic cockpit checks because on the afternoon of 1 st May he was pleased to be one of four aircrew selected to make a blindfold check of the Wellington and its controls. “If we could do that”, he exulted, ”we could fly tomorrow”. Clearly he passed the test for later that day he happily recorded: “Well, we [do] fly tomorrow. Golly it will be great to be back at it again”. When tomorrow came Lloyd met his instructor, and was pleased to discover that he was “a nice fellow and a hell of a swell flyer”. Though he thought the Wellington “heavy on the controls” he hugely enjoyed the experience aloft. That night he felt “on the top of the world”, particularly after he luxuriated in a bath and had a shampoo and shave.

The next day, the 3rd , he and another airman, after a morning of lectures, went on a short leave into Worcester, booked hotel rooms, downed some pub drinks and then ventured to a dance where they met two young women. What he called the “gay four” obviously had an enjoyable evening. The next day was Sunday and he joined a church parade followed by a rare full bacon and egg breakfast, his first taste of an egg since leaving Canada. Even so, he mused, “now if I could only get a nice thick steak”, a forlorn hope, of course, in ration-strapped Britain. After the memorable breakfast, he recorded in his diary that he joined a friend for an outing:

We got a bus and went out to the Malvern Hills. They are a long ridge of hills west of Worcester. It is an awfully pretty country and it was a swell day. I heard a cuckoo today but I guess it's nearly impossible to see one. We walked about eight miles along the hills and back. We had tea at a little Tea room on the side of the hill called “The Kettle Sings”. There must have been thousands of people out there in the hills that day.

The Canadian outdoorsman had clearly relished the hike, the climbs, and the chance for more sightseeing in the English countryside.

After returning to Worcester and parting with his friend, he spent the evening with some of his mates in a local cinema, featuring two Hollywood movies that admittedly he had seen before. The first, one of that generation's favorites, was a Tarzan film starring the athlete turned semi-actor, Johnny Weissmuller, and the second was “Maizie”, with the blond comedienne, Ann Sothern, in the leading role. After the cinema, which all enjoyed, Lloyd and the other airmen hitchhiked back to the station.

The next diary entries appear at mid-May and reported that his daytime flying was over and that he would henceforth be engaged in night flying exercises only, better to prepare him for Bomber Command's mounting nocturnal forays against enemy targets. He took readily and eagerly to the night flying, telling his diary that he was “really on the bit”. There was also time for rest and recreation and that again included savouring the local pub culture at the ‘Golden Lion'”, a popular watering hole.

After a heavy rain one day everything turned to mud at the station, “even worse than at Debert”. Among other things, it meant no flying so he and some mates took advantage of the lull and biked into Worcester where they took in a “funny movie”. He observed that “while [he] was laughing his fool head off” there phlegmatic English patrons around him were decidedly not. If the film had been shown to raise morale through laughter it plainly failed with the local war weary audience. Meanwhile the rains combined with cold weather continued and kept all aircraft grounded. As a result, Lloyd had little to report to his diary, apart from the poker playing most of the airmen indulged in to pass the time.

There then followed a three-month hiatus in his diary-keeping. When the rain-induced lull ended and good flying weather returned, life had doubtless become more complicated, more challenging, and certainly more dangerous, leaving little time perhaps for daily entries. But fortunately for future researchers, on 20th August Lloyd tried to make up for this by writing down a form of flashback to cover the neglected interval. Thus he recorded his departure from 23 O T U on 14 June and the subsequent enjoyment of an eight-day leave. After staying some time in London, he journeyed to Nottingham, where he had a “good time” with friends, before spending the rest of his leave doing what he often liked best, visiting the countryside, in this case the “beautiful country” of the Derbyshire Hills. He must have treasured it all the more, knowing that the days of reinforced training were over and that the real thing - combat operations - were just around the corner at his new posting, 103 RAF Squadron, Bomber Command, located at Newton in Nottinghamshire. The day he arrived at the station, 22 nd June, the war took another turn. He was greeted with the momentous news that the Germans launched their massive Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, an event that finally furnished Britain with an ally, albeit a reluctant and beleaguered one.

While this stunning news was sinking in, Lloyd was being introduced to his new home and his demanding responsibilities at 103 Squadron. With his customary enthusiasm he described its station as “wonderful”, boasting “fine meals and quarters, and a swell mess”, obviously a large cut above his previous billet at Worcester. The squadron he joined had been formed in the Great War and reactivated in 1936 when war clouds briefly gathered on the European horizon. It was initially equipped with twin-engined Vickers Wellington bombers, which Lloyd flew after he joined the squadron. It later received consignments of four-engined Halifaxes, which were among the new ‘heavies brought on stream in 1941.

Lloyd soon enough had his first taste of battle in a raid that took him to Bielefeld, a city in northwest Germany. At the time he might have reacted more excitedly to this crucial military rite of passage but writing over two months after the event and with subsequent operations under his belt, he merely told his diary:

My first operational trip was to Bielefeld on the 5th of July. It was a very quiet trip and we got a good hit. We were over the target 28 minutes.

In other words, it was “a piece of cake”, to recruit the RAF's popular parlance.

According to Bomber Command War Diaries ( BCWD ) Lloyd's Wellington was one of 33 that attacked the city and, among other installations, blew up its gas works, perhaps the “good hit” Lloyd recorded. All the attacking aircraft returned safely on this, his inaugural assault. He recalled that three days later the same target was singled out for attention by roughly the same number of aircraft. This time around Lloyd encountered much heavier flak over Bielefeld and his aircraft briefly came within range of it. As a result he was “shaken up a bit [though] otherwise OK”. In spite of the stiffer opposition, again no losses were suffered by the raiding force.

After a two-day reprieve, Lloyd and his squadron were again on the attack, this time targeting a more strategic objective, the city of Cologne. On this occasion they joined a much larger force made up altogether of 98 Wellingtons and 32 Halifaxes. Lloyd reported a “bad night” as weather conditions over the target forced his and other crews to abort the mission and return to base. All the same, on the way home they found a substitute target for their bombs, the railway marshalling yards in Brussels, where, in Lloyd's words, “some real nice fires” were started. As it turned out, only half the raiding formation actually succeeded in getting within range of the socked-in primary objective, Cologne, and did comparatively little damage. Ironically one of the industrial plants targeted in the city bore the same name as Lloyd's home town in Saskatchewan.

The following day, July 11th , 103 squadron was moved to Elsham Wold in Lincolnshire, a recently opened station on “a wide expanse of grazing pastures” – to quote a station history -- some nine miles from Hull on the east coast. It may have sounded quite bucolic and the base may have been “brand new” but Lloyd was not impressed with his new surroundings, which he bluntly described as “really terrible”, a stark contrast to the comfortable quarters he had enjoyed at Newton. But he did not have long to grumble over his new situation. Barely two days after their arrival Lloyd and his squadron embarked on an operation – probably to the heavily bombed city of Bremen -- that almost ended in tragedy. On his return he found his landing wheels jammed in the raised position and consequently he was forced to make an unnerving crash landing at the station. As a result he lightheartedly told his diary that he had “banged up his innards a bit”. More than a “bit” it would appear because he was hospitalized in nearby Cranwell for a two week period.

After Lloyd's release from hospital, he was assigned in early August to a training facility at RAF Mildon Hall, a bomber base in East Anglia. There he took an advanced course he designated LORENZ in his diary, though the writing is indistinct. It is more likely, however, that the program was in fact LORAN, an abbreviation for the long range navigational system designed as a substitute for the traditional celestial navigation, particularly on trans-Atlantic flights. The excited Lloyd felt “lucky to get it” since many crews did not. Indeed he saw the course and its possibilities as a means of providing him a “future life”, quite possibly as a commercial pilot in peacetime. Thus in spite of the danger, death, and destruction that had become so much a part of his life, he could still, thanks to his hallmark optimism, find time to contemplate a viable future.

After an intensive week at Mildon Hall he returned on 11 th August to Elsham Wold and what he called a normal life. That “normal life” resumed on 16 th May when he participated in a raid on the much targeted Ruhr industrial city of Duisburg. After the weary but unscathed Lloyd returned safely early the next morning and was debriefed, he wasted little time falling into bed and virtually sleeping the clock around. “Boy”, he told his diary, “was I ever slept out”. Three days later a restored Lloyd and his crew accompanied a force bound for the German naval base at Kiel, at the head of the strategic canal connecting the Baltic and North Seas. Bad weather and icing conditions over the target foiled the attackers and may have accounted for the engine trouble Lloyd encountered on the way, a malfunction that forced his return to base.

At this point, apart from the retrospective entry of 20 th August, the diary abruptly comes to an end, and this biography is the poorer for that. Presumably Lloyd spent the next several months, with the exception of periodic leaves, flying his Wellington on operational missions for 103 Squadron, a relentless and perilous round of activities that may have dried up his diarist's juices. What is known is that on 1 st October, part way through this series of operations, he was promoted Flight Sergeant and allowed to top his three stripes with a crown.

At the start of the New Year, 1942, Lloyd was dispatched to RAF Coltishall, also in Lincolnshire, though the purpose of the move is not made clear. Coltishall had started life as a bomber base just months before the war's outbreak, one of the varied though belated steps taken to prepare Britain for the worst should the troubled European situation deteriorate into open conflict. During the subsequent Battle of Britain in the harrowing summer of 1940 the station was speedily handed over to Fighter Command and soon produced some of the leading British aces of the air war against the marauding Luftwaffe. Lloyd's stay at Coltishall lasted a mere two weeks and again, his duties were not recorded. He then returned to Elsham Wold and 103 squadron, which was in the process of replacing its Wellingtons with Halifax heavy bombers.

A large portion of that time, however, he would spend in an isolation hospital with an unrecorded ailment, indeed starting the very day – 19 January -- he was to report for duty at Elsham Wold. He may have come down with pneumonia, which a number of aircrew contracted during their wintry English stay in ill-heated barracks or Nissen huts. In any event, it was not until the closing days of April that he was released from hospital and then apparently placed on a sick list for another two months, that is, until he was judged medically fit to rejoin his squadron on 30th June. His lengthy stay in hospital had been sweetened, however, by the news that he had been promoted Warrant Officer 2. For the better part of two months Lloyd appears to have served operationally on 103's newly acquired Halifaxes. For his efforts he received still another promotion, this time to Warrant Officer 1, the highest non-commissioned rank in the service.

The RAF's Operations Record Book indicates that on the evening of 27 th August, Lloyd was forced to turn back from a raid on Kassel when his outer port engine caught fire. Before he safely touched down in England he took the routine precaution of jettisoning his bomb load into the sea. Then the very next evening, Lloyd was given another bombing assignment. At 20:04 on 28 th August, presumably at the controls of a different Halifax, he again took off from Elsham Wold, Germany-bound. It was a fairly representative British Commonwealth crew on board. Besides the Canadian pilot, there were four British personnel (RAF) and two Australians (RAAF). The RAF crew members were Pilot Officer/Observer Ronald Bingham, Sergeant John Patch, Sergeant Squire Webster, and Sergeant N.T. Lewthwaite. The Australians who made up the rest of the crew were Pilot Officer R.L. Andre and Sergeant H. O'Neill.

As they settled into their positions Lloyd climbed to the prescribed altitude and then joined 112 other aircraft. Their target was Saarbruecken, a steel-making centre and transportation hub located in an extensive coal basin in southwestern Germany. According to Bomber Command War Diaries, the raid was an experimental one on a comparatively undefended target and made up of “a force of oddments”, mainly airmen being rested from major operations, a status for which Lloyd was obviously eligible. In any case, he and the others were not the only Bomber Command personnel in the night skies of 28th August. A larger and conventional attacking force also flew off to bomb Nuremberg.

On the Saarbruecken flight Lloyd and some of his crew would suffer a fatal misadventure, supposedly on their return from the target. In the light of certain facts, however, this seems untenable. His Halifax was shot down in Belgium barely three hours after leaving Elsham Wold, a time interval that would not have accommodated a run to Saarbruecken and a return journey to Belgian skies. What follows may be a plausible alternative scenario. After leaving English air space and reaching the vicinity of Ostend in Belgium, the Saarbruecken force soon ran into the expected flak. It was followed by an even more lethal obstacle, the intercepting night fighters operating out of the Luftwaffe base at Gosselies. As in other cases Lloyd had been briefed about this peril before his departure but no briefing could do justice to the ferocious reality that he and the others soon confronted. It was the Halifax gunners' role – particularly the mid upper gunner's -- to swivel in their turrets and search the night sky for incoming enemy aircraft and when they were spotted to shout orders to Lloyd to corkscrew, bank sharply, or otherwise try to evade or confuse the attacker. Indeed, evasion not engagement was the rule given the under-gunned Halifax's inability to return the kind of heavy cannon fire that a German fighter could unleash.

Lloyd must have sought to execute all the called-for evasive measures during the maelstrom of the night fighters' attack but to no avail. At approximately 23:00 hours, while flying at some 12,000 feet, his aircraft was mortally hit and set on fire by a German night fighter pilot later identified as Hauptmann Wilhelm Herget. Minutes later the crippled Halifax crashed at Hastiere (Namur) near Dinant but not before three crew members, Andre, Lewthwaite, and O'Neill, managed to bail out and parachute to safety-- even if they ended up as prisoners of war. Lloyd and the remaining crew members were not so fortunate. Killed alongside their pilot were P/O Bingham and Sergeants Patch and Webster. At the time of his death Lloyd was just two months shy of his twenty-seventh birthday.

Lloyd and his crew were initially reported missing but within the month their deaths were confirmed in a formal German report to the International Red Cross, which relayed the information to British authorities. As a granddaughter recalls, following the confirmation of Lloyd's death, his stricken mother, whose life had revolved around family, singing and music, could not bring herself to sing another note. Marvel was equally devastated and, moreover, left with the responsibility of bringing up a child, the same challenge that came to face two other Honour Roll widows. For his part, Lloyd's grieving father, as he had in other reported cases, took on the painful task of printing an obituary, but this time for his own son. It duly appeared with an accompanying head-and-shoulders photograph on the front page of the Humboldt Journal's issue of 22 October 1942. Though no reference is made to Lloyd's brief stay at McMaster the obituary is, for the most part, remarkably full and accurate, given the wartime difficulty of obtaining anything like definitive information. It was a testament to Robert Telfer's research skills and perhaps to his contacts with other newspaper heads and journalists who may have been in a position to supply him with the data he needed. Meanwhile Lloyd was also remembered in Hamilton. Some time after the Humboldt Journal obituary appeared the McMaster Alumni News duly noted his passing and added his name to the University's growing Honour Roll.

Based on some information he received, however, Robert Telfer had been mistakenly led to believe that on that fateful August evening in 1942 his son had taken part in a raid on the German-occupied Polish port of Gdynia. That operation, however, was actually carried out by a much smaller Lancaster force drawn from 103's sister squadron, 106. This strikes a poignant note. Had Lloyd somehow been assigned to the Gdynia raid his life would have been spared since all the engaged Lancasters and their crews returned without loss after a successful bombing run.

Robert Lloyd Telfer is buried in Gossalies Communal Cemetery, Charleroi, Hainaut, Belgium.

C.M. Johnston


ACNOWLEGMENTS: Muriel (Telfer) Budge, James Cross, Carol (Telfer) Cunningham, Kathleen Garay, Benjamin Hall, Margaret Houghton, Lorna Johnston, Colleen Laverdiere, Tod MacKellar, Kenneth Morgan, Frank Raeman, John Shore, Jean Spearin, Pat Sumak, Donald Telfer, Paul Telfer, Clark Thompson, Corrine Thoms, and Rose Ward, all made signal contributions to this biography. Lloyd Telfer's sister, Muriel Budge, his niece, Carol Cunningham, and his nephew, Donald Telfer, supplied important family data and documentation as well as illuminating recollections. Carol Cunningham's key contribution included her uncle's wartime diary entries as well as postcards and photographs. Frank Raeman, Chief Warrant Officer, Belgian Army, who was reached through Air Force Magazine, kindly provided details of Lloyd's last operation and confirmed that given the time frame, his Halifax would have been downed on its way to the target. Benjamin Hall, P/O Bingham's second cousin, responded to an internet inquiry and provided details of the Saarbruecken raid. John Shore, who generously came to the aid of the Stephen Goatley [HR] biography, did the same for this one by supplying relevant RAF Operations Record Book entries, which he researched at the National Archives at Kew. James Cross' unpublished memoirs of his service as a Halifax navigator were also invaluable (see below). Pat Sumak provided a lead to a local Humboldt history written by Lloyd's brother, Walter (see below).

SOURCES: National Archives of Canada: Service Record of Warrant Officer 1 Robert Lloyd Telfer; Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Commemorative information on WO1 Robert Lloyd Telfer; Les Allison and Harry Hayward, They Shall Grow Not Old: A Book of Remembrance (Brandon: Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum Inc., 1996, 2 nd ed.), 752 (this otherwise informative entry on Lloyd Telfer has two pardonable minor errors); Spencer Dunmore, Wings for Victory: The Remarkable Story of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995 ed.), 74, 349, 352; Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book 1939-1945 (London: Penguin,1996), 172, 177,178, 180, 193, 194, 304; W.R. Chorley, Royal Air Force Bomber Command Losses of the Second World War, Vol. 3: Aircraft and Crew Losses, 1942 (Hinckley, UK: Midland Publishing,1994), 198; James Cross, “From the Palliser Triangle to Confederation Square” (Nov. 2002), 29-53; J.A. Cole, Lord Haw Haw: The Full Story of William Joyce (London: Faber & Faber, 1987 ed.), passim.

Humboldt Library: Humboldt Journal , 24, 31 Oct. 1929, 28 May 1940, 22 May 1941, 22 Oct. 1942; communications from Muriel Budge, 7 April, 2 May 2005; Walter Telfer, The Best of Humboldt (Humboldt SK: Humboldt Journal, 1982), 511(for Telfer family data); Grimsby Museum: Lake Lodge School Collection, The Lake Lodge Record,1932 (Midsummer and Christmas issues), Tod MacKellar, “The Lake Lodge School for Boys, 1896-1933”, 2 pp; Hamilton Public Library / Special Collections: Vox Lycei, (HCCI yearbook), 1931, 26, 28, 1932-33, 28, 1933-34, 49; McMaster Divinity College / Canadian Baptist Archives: McMaster University Student File 5046, Robert Lloyd Telfer. McMaster University Library / Special Collections: Marmor (yearbook), 1934, 25, McMaster Alumni News, 20 Feb. 1943; Michael Hayden, Seeking a Balance: The University of Saskatchewan, 1907-1982 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), 5, 6, 12, 13; Vernon Dufresne and Clark Thompson, Canada's Forgotten Gold Rus h: The Gold Fields of Larder Lake (Larder Lake: Township of Larder Lake, 1999), 112-15 passim; Larder Lake Sun, 8 Dec. 1938 (reference supplied by Clark Thompson).

Internet: www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand/s4.html

“Elsham Wolds”; www.raf.mod.uk/rafcoltishall/history.html “The History of RAF Coltishall”

www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/lakenheath.htm

(RAF Mildon Hall).