The Courage of the Early Morning Read online

  Bishop made one of the rare good landings of his career. Somehow the plane threaded its way between deep craters and came to a stop undamaged. He leaped out of the plane and ran for the nearest shell hole. Seeing four drab figures slogging their way toward him, Bishop grabbed hold of his Very pistol. He had no intention of resisting capture—but he also had no intention of being shot by his captors without putting up a fight.

  When the infantrymen were within a few feet of him, Bishop gave a shout of joy. They were not German infantrymen in fieldgrey uniforms, but English soldiers in mud-stained khaki. They helped him out of the crater and explained that the field had been captured from the Germans only a few hours before. The enemy trenches were only three hundred yards away, and already the Germans were pot-shotting at Bishop’s exposed Nieuport with rifles and machine-guns.

  After his four rescuers led him through the barbed-wire entanglements to the British trenches, counter-fire from those trenches silenced the German gunners and saved Bishop’s plane from further damage until darkness came.

  He sent a message to Jack Scott at the airfield explaining his plight and asking for a tender to bring back his mired plane. But by nightfall on the first day no help arrived. This is Bishop’s own description of the events of the next few days.

  The first night was frightful. I slept, or rather tried to sleep and failed, on the ground in the pouring rain. A battle started before sunrise and the guns—Oh Lord! You can’t imagine the row. At first light I saw the cavalry forming up for a charge, and remembering that not many months before it had been my ambition to gallop into battle on horseback, I murmured to myself “there but for the grace of God . . .” It was ironic, too. There I was, crowded in the mud helplessly looking at my helpless ultra-modern airplane while nearby men on the oldest of all battle transport were carrying on.

  It was a cruel scene, too. The cavalry could not penetrate the enemy lines through the wire entanglements. The brave beautiful horses struggled eagerly and then desperately to get through. Riders and mounts were sitting ducks for enemy fire and many went down and lay struggling in the mud and wire. Then the cavalry got the order to withdraw and those who could helped their wounded horses to their feet and led them back at a plodding run while the infantry on our side covered the retreat as best they could. This must have been one of the last times cavalry was used in battle.

  As the sun came up two enemy scouts criss-crossed overhead and Bishop suddenly realized “They’re looking for me!” They were indeed. When one of the German pilots spotted the bogged Nieuport he dived at it with his guns chattering. A few bullets tore through the Nieuport’s fabric skin. The German had to pull out of his dive low over the British trenches. The Tommies threw everything they had, including a chorus of derisive shouts. Bishop saw one officer deliberately aim and empty his service revolver at the belly of the swooping Albatros.

  The plane escaped, signalled the second plane which had been circling at a safe distance, and together they flew off toward their own base. Bishop was sure they would return with reinforcements and he decided to try to start his Nieuport. To his surprise and joy the engine roared into life at the first swing of its propeller. (His mechanic later explained to Bishop that the long dive and sudden pull-out had flooded the cylinders with oil, which drained out during the night.)

  Bishop climbed into the cockpit, revved up the motor and picked his way among the shell holes, seeking a stretch of level mud long enough for a take-off. He spotted such a stretch and pushed the throttle wide open. The Nieuport strained forward as if eager to free itself of the clutching mud. The plane gained speed, bounced once, bounced twice . . .

  Bishop’s shout of triumph was drowned by a horrible grinding crash. The second bounce of the wheels had dislodged a lump of mud and thrown it into the wooden propeller, which smashed into splinters. Disgusted, Bishop switched off the motor and climbed out of the cockpit.

  He trudged through the mud until he stumbled on a British anti-aircraft battery. When he told the young lieutenant in charge what had happened, the latter said cheerfully: “Oh, yes, we saw the Hun crash and confirmed the kill. Then they asked us what happened to you. Seems you’re on the missing list.”

  “Looks like it,” said Bishop gloomily, “I sent a message asking for a tender to come up for the plane, but I suppose they didn’t get the message.”

  That night he borrowed a Ford from the anti-aircraft lieutenant and tried to drive back in the general direction of Filescamp over roads that at best were axle-deep in mud, at worst a seemingly endless series of shell holes. For twelve of the most exhausting and frustrating hours of his life he tried to find a way through the labyrinth of destruction, but when the grey dawn broke he and the battered Ford were back at the anti-aircraft position. He arrived just in time for the opening barrages of another artillery battle. The gunners helped Bishop drag his crippled plane to a safer position under the guns.

  It was a thoroughly depressing day for Bishop. By now his replacement would have arrived at Filescamp, and he and his plane were apparently written off ingloriously. He was among strangers who were too busy fighting their own war to give much time to this grounded and pathetic aviator.

  Bishop could not know, of course, that things were not as dark for him as they seemed. Just over the horizon, as sundown approached, a rescue convoy was picking its way towards him. And over the transatlantic cable the Canadian Press news service was sending a report that would appear in Canadian newspapers, including the Sun of Owen Sound, Ontario, which modified it slightly to read:

  “Lieutenant William Avery Bishop, son of our respected County Registrar, Will Bishop, has been credited with shooting down an enemy fighter plane in France.”

  TWO

  CADET

  TO OLDER RESIDENTS of Owen Sound, Billy Bishop, his brother Worth, and his younger sister Louie were not so much the children of Registrar Will Bishop, as the grandchildren of “Old E. W.,” the laziest man in town. It was a constant source of wonder that any man as shiftless as Eleazar Wilson Bishop could produce a son as energetic as Will and grandchildren as lively as Billy, Worth and Louie. The only explanation could be that the second and third generations took after Grandmother Sarah Bishop.

  In the nineteenth century many a Canadian community had its remittance man, a character in which the town took a wry pride, a feckless younger son of a titled, wealthy or merely proud English family who banished the black sheep to “the colonies” with an allowance large enough to keep him alive but small enough to ensure that he could never pay the fare back to the ancestral roof. In Owen Sound Eleazar Bishop assumed the role of the local remittance man, but it was a fraudulent title. In the first place he was not English, but of German Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, and in the second place his remittance came not from abroad but from his wife’s dogged capacity for hard work.

  In the small town of Unionville, northeast of Toronto, there was no accord between the emigrant Pennsylvania Dutch and the United Empire Loyalists who had fled to Canada rather than support the American Revolution. So when Eleazar Bishop, the German leatherworker’s son, eloped with Sarah Kilbourne, the English loyalist’s daughter, both families disowned them.

  The young couple tried their luck in the North—and found none. In 1855 they settled in the boom town of Owen Sound, Ontario. This port on Georgian Bay, the world’s largest freshwater bay, had been founded only fifteen years earlier with the arrival of the railroad connecting Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior ports with Toronto, Southern Ontario and Montreal. The first Welland Canal was not built until 1870, and at this time Owen Sound was a link connecting by rail and ship the world’s trade with the Great Lakes and the interior of Canada and the United States. The town’s boosters were beginning to call Owen Sound “the Liverpool of Canada.”

  It was difficult for any man with a minimum of energy and enterprise not to succeed in Owen Sound in the eighteen fifties. But Eleazar Bishop was uniquely equipped to be the exception. Fi
rst he tried operating a hotel. But his casual attitude toward collecting the accounts of his guests, plus a tendency to treat friends at the hotel bar, soon put him into bankruptcy. Next he opened a saddlery and leatherworking shop—the trade he had learned from his father.

  Eleazar was a skilled leatherworker, but impatient of the drudgery of catering to customers’ wants. Instead of stocking utilitarian saddles, bridles and other items of farm and home-stable use, he devoted his time to designing and making elaborate pieces of luggage that had no market in the frontier lake port of Owen Sound. When Eleazar’s leatherworking shop went into bankruptcy too, a masterpiece of leather craftsmanship in the shape of a gentleman’s hatbox was one of the few assets salvaged. It was to become Billy Bishop’s sole legacy from his grandfather, and although he never used it as a hatbox it served a useful purpose in his later life, as we shall learn.

  When Eleazar failed for the second time his wife, Sarah, took over as the family breadwinner. She let it be known in town that she would accept any domestic work, however menial. She sewed and scrubbed, mended, cleaned and cooked from dawn until late at night to support her husband and three children. Eleazar accepted this turn of events philosophically. He spent the rest of his long and happy life on the porch of his home, whittling, cultivating his magnificent crop of snow-white whiskers, and dispensing good advice to the many townsfolk who paused to pass the time of day with him.

  Sarah not only supported her family by hard work, but when her youngest son, Will, graduated from high school she was able to send him to Toronto to study at Osgoode Hall, the famous law school of Upper Canada. Before he left Owen Sound, Will Bishop became engaged to a girl who undoubtedly reminded him of his mother.

  Margaret Louise Greene was born in New Orleans. In 1855 William Greene, her father, had graduated from Dublin University with a medical degree and returned to County Down to practise. But the disease that lay like a blight over the county and over most of Ireland was one no doctor could cure: the effects of the potato famine which in eight years had caused the death of a million Irish men, women and children and had driven nearly two million to seek new lives in the Americas. In 1855 the exodus was still on, and Dr. Greene and his bride, Sarah Crothers, joined it, intending to settle in Canada. But when their ship reached New Orleans Sarah could go no further. She was ill from the hardships of the nightmare voyage, and she was pregnant.

  Dr. Greene tried to obtain a licence to practise medicine, but was told that he would have to serve an internship and pass an examination in American medical procedures. So while his wife awaited the birth of their daughter, Margaret Louise, and slowly recovered her strength afterward, Dr. Greene, a tall, rugged and handsome Ulsterman, worked at any casual job he could find in the bustling city of New Orleans.

  Sarah was still far from strong when the couple and their infant daughter set out on the long journey to Canada. They settled in the pioneering farming district of Jackson’s Point, fifty miles north of Toronto on the shores of Lake Simcoe, and William Greene became a country doctor.

  One night in the second winter after their arrival, Dr. Greene was summoned to attend a woman in childbirth. It was a difficult delivery, and when it had been accomplished successfully the doctor and the new father celebrated with a few glasses of Irish whiskey. Belatedly anxious to return to his own ailing wife and infant daughter, Dr. Greene decided to take a short cut across the frozen Black River. Midway across the ice broke under him, and the icy water soon stilled his struggles. When his body was found Sarah collapsed. She never recovered from this final misfortune, and died within the year. A sister who came from Owen Sound for the funeral took the infant Margaret Louise back to live with her.

  Margaret Louise, an Irish pixie of a girl, and Will Bishop, son of the town’s “remittance man,” grew up together. They were married soon after Will returned to practise in Owen Sound and Will staked his future by building an elegant Victorian home for his bride. They moved into it just before their first son, Worth, was born in 1884. A second son, Kilbourne, was born two years later. He died suddenly at the age of seven and the Bishops mourned until, on February 8, 1894, their third son was born, an eleven-pound baby with a full head of blond hair and bright blue eyes. They named him after his father, William Avery. The last child, Louie, was born a year later.

  In 1896 Will Bishop’s fortunes took a sudden turn for the better. In the national election of that year he worked as an organizer for Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal party. When Laurier won, Bishop was rewarded with the post of county registrar.

  He took the position, and the dignity that went with it, seriously, and dressed the part in dark coat and waistcoat, striped trousers, cutaway collar, pearl-grey bow tie and soft pinched black homburg hat. His manner was stern and overbearingly correct, but many an Owen Sound youngster who followed the dignified figure on his way to and from the white stone courthouse knew that he had a habit of filling the pockets of his immaculate coat with deliciously sticky sweets. And one grateful Owen Sound mother credited Will Bishop with smuggling poison into the cell of her condemned son so that he could take his own life and save her the shame of having him die on the gallows. Will vehemently denied it, but the legend remained as long as he lived.

  Billy Bishop grew up so absurdly like his father in appearance, posture and even mannerisms that it was inevitable that his proud mother should turn him out as a replica of his father, in neat dark suits, white collar and tie. That was enough to give Billy a rough time from his schoolmates, who invented a game known as “tearing off Billy Bishop’s tie.” But Billy’s behaviour provided them with other reasons for victimizing him: he scorned rough sports like hockey, football and lacrosse in favour of swimming and riding. Moreover, he spoke with a slight lisp which seemed to fascinate the girls, and—worst sin of all—he actually seemed to enjoy feminine company and attention. He was undoubtedly the only pre-teenaged boy in Owen Sound who enjoyed attending classes at Miss Pearl’s Dancing School.

  If Billy Bishop had grown up a generation or two later he might well have become a prime example of what child psychologists would call a victim of mother-possessiveness or father-fixation— or worse. Not to mention a younger brother complex. But there were no child psychologists in Owen Sound at the close of Queen Victoria’s reign, and the only effect on Billy of a temperament that other boys regarded as “sissy” was that he learned, of necessity, how to defend himself stoutly with his fists against his tormentors.

  On one memorable Monday morning he had to defend himself against the resentment of no fewer than seven boys whose parents had held him up as an example of virtue by reading an item in the Owen Sound Sun: “A concert was given at the residence of Mr. W. A. Bishop on Saturday afternoon last. An excellent musical and literary program was carried out and a speech filled to overflowing with good humour was delivered by little Billy Bishop.”

  But even the most cynical of Billy’s non-admirers had to admit there was one thing in his favour: he was no teacher’s pet. He was, in fact, an indifferent student. After a string of bad reports Billy’s parents, deeply concerned, consulted Thomas Murray, his school principal. Their concern was particularly deep because their oldest son, Worth, had been the top student at Owen Sound high school, later graduated from the Royal Military College at Kingston with the highest standing ever attained by a cadet, and became the youngest engineer ever to enter the federal government service.

  Principal Murray, who was no admirer of Billy Bishop, told the latter’s parents: “As far as I can see, the only thing your son is good at is fighting.”

  Will Bishop decided that if his younger son’s talent was physical rather than intellectual he should be encouraged to develop his athletic side. He bought Billy a life membership in the YMCA on Poulet Street. Billy tried to work up some enthusiasm for athletics, and even entered the Y’s cross-country race and trained quite strenuously for it. But when he could finish no better than second, he abandoned strenuous sports.

  Meanwhile, th
ough, he had discovered a much more desirable facility at the Y—the billiard room. He began cutting afternoon classes to sharpen his skill with the cue, and occasionally picked up pocket-money by playing pool against habitués of the town’s disreputable pool halls. The Bishops’neighbours shook their heads and murmured gloomily that young Billy was a chip off old Eleazar, and wasn’t it sad for Will, who had worked so hard to make something of himself. Of course there was the compensation that Billy’s older brother, Worth, was a prodigy for learning, and his sister, Louie, was growing up a fine young lady and moved in the town’s best society.

  Billy’s boyhood pursuits were not all decadent, of course. A few years later when Billy Bishop became the Allies’ greatest air hero and millions of people heard the name Owen Sound for the first time, the townspeople forgot his early love of playing pool, and reminded each other of his uncanny skill with a gun. Billy’s father had given him a .22 rifle one Christmas and offered him twenty-five cents for every squirrel he shot. Will Bishop did not expect the offer to cost him much. He knew it was extremely difficult to kill a wary squirrel high on a tree with a single, low-powered .22 bullet, but the very difficulty would give Billy good practice, and might even scare off some of the squirrels that damaged the fruit trees in his garden by gnawing their bark.

  That offer was to cost Will Bishop many dollars. Soon Billy could boast modestly that his rate of slaughter had reached “one bullet—one squirrel” accuracy. When the surviving squirrel population no longer invaded the Bishop garden, Billy expanded his operation into other gardens and orchards, at the standard rate of twenty-five cents per squirrel. The Sun recorded the phenomenon of the scarcity of squirrels in town, and dubbed Billy “the Pied Piper of Owen Sound.”