Sorrow a great leveller Whites killed in 1949 treated differently than Inuit, but all grieved

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/11/2009 (6113 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You meet some of the

most interesting

people in the obituary

columns, and hear

some poignant stories when you

dig into the tales

of the dead.

Such was the

experience when

I dug through the

archives of electronic

copies of

the Winnipeg Free Press of 1949.

I was looking to dig up living

relatives of 20 people who died in

August that year, when an RCAF

Canso plane dropped from the

skies over Northern Manitoba.

Last Sunday, I told the stories (57 years of

silence, at www.winnipegfreepress.com) of the

Inuit families who, in 1949, were told only that

their loved ones, like all those aboard, were

killed.

The contrast in how the federal government

treated the two sets of victims, divided by race,

was stark. The white remains were gathered by

recovery teams, flown south to Winnipeg and

then sent, to the West Coast and the East, for

burial in their hometowns. The remains of the six

Inuit, who were being taken to Winnipeg’s King

George Hospital for treatment of polio-induced

paralysis, were gathered by people from Norway

House and taken there for burial in a mass,

unmarked grave.

Now those families are starting to find each

other. I hope this story helps bridge a divide created

60 years ago by bureaucratic insensitivity.

There are similarities in their experiences. Sorrow

is a powerful unifier, a great leveller.

“ö “ö “ö

In 1947, a young father in a small southwestern

Ontario town called Glencoe was ordered by his

brutish boss to report for work hundreds and

hundreds of miles away, at a federal weather station

at Clyde River on Baffin Island.

Addison Neill didn’t make much as a federal

radio operator in Glencoe. The rent on the old

house the Neills lived in was $15 a month. They

had no refrigerator, no car. Addison left his wife

and four young sons believing he’d be back in a

year.

Then the cook there got “Arctic fever,” the

mental breakdown suffered by outsiders unable

to take the endless nights and the isolation in a

land entirely unlike the rest of Canada. Addison

was ordered to stay another year.

In August 1949, an RCAF Canso arrived with

replacement workers, and Neill and three coworkers

hopped aboard to head home.

That night, a storm brought the amphibious

aircraft crashing into Northern Manitoba’s lakedotted

terrain, just east of Norway House.

On Aug. 23, the wreckage was found near

Bigstone Lake. The Canso had cut a 300-metre

swath through the bush, its wings shearing trees

to within five feet of the ground.

Eyewitness reports described a gruesome

scene, body parts strewn about along with the

pieces of the plane.

A young Sterling Lyon, a Free Press reporter in

1949, dispatched from Lac du Bonnet the observations

of a Central Northern airways pilot, Ted

Coates, who landed at the crash site. Coates said

the Inuit “were easily discerned by their clothing.

Most of the bodies were quite recognizable.”

It took four trips by recovery crews to bring

out the bodies. The bush did not easily give up

the last body, that of navigator A.G. Eden. Eden’s

body was pinned under the wreckage, where it

would lie for seven days before being shipped to

Lac du Bonnet, then continuing on to Hammond,

B.C.

I spoke with relatives of 12 of the 20 who perished

in the crash.

The most difficult element of this assignment

was trying to describe the pain the Inuit lived

with following the tragedy, a translation muddied

by cultural and language barriers.

The names of the Inuit victims were never

published in news reports — I was led to them

through local lawyer David Newman, who was

asked by Arviat resident Annie Ollie to help find

information on the crash that killed her father’s

younger sister, Ubluriak.

Finding relatives of the white victims was

tougher, even though the Free Press reported at

length on the names, positions, addresses and

backgrounds of the seven RCAF crew members,

four federal weather station employees, the

young physiotherapist Ottawa hired that spring

to work the paralysed muscles of the Inuit polio

victims back to health, and the well-known Canadian

Press reporter Jack Aveson, who had made

a career out of writing stories about Canada’s

North.

Remarkably, one relative was listed at the same

address reported in 1949 for “weatherman” Cecil

D. McKenzie — 74 Fairbank St., Dartmouth, N.S.

Bev McKenzie, 74, had recently moved out of

his family’s original home when I called him in

March.

“He was our favourite,” McKenzie said of his

older brother, nicknamed Bimbo.

Cecil joined the Second World War at 16, survived

battles in Holland and Italy, got “a bunch of

medals.”

He, too, was a radio operator at Clyde River.

His siblings — a family of 10 — lived at the home

on Fairbank Street, along with Cecil’s wife and

his first child, Roderick, whom he had not yet

met.

“That pretty near killed my father,” Bev Mc-

Kenzie recalled of the news of the crash. “They

were devastated by it.” His mother was stricken:

“She was immediately bedridden.

She couldn’t stand

up.” McKenzie believes she

would have gone crazy had it

not been for the birth of his

brother Randy that year.

In Springside, Sask., on

the Yellowhead Highway

near the Manitoba border, a

telegram arrived, telling of

the death of RCAF co-pilot

Daniel Shumay. “It was a

big commotion,” recalled

Daniel’s brother Bill, who

was 18 at the time.

“In a week’s time, he

(Daniel) was coming home.

He was coming home

on his birthday.” That

year, his mother, too, had

another baby. She named

him Danny.

A number of bodies

went home to small towns

in Ontario.

Physiotherapist Constance

Beattie, 24, had

jumped at the chance

to go to Canada’s Far

North, answering a plea

in early 1949 from the

federal Health and Welfare

Department. The

polio epidemic in the Eastern Arctic

was flooding the St. Theresa hospital at Chesterfield

Inlet with patients, may of whom were left

with residual paralysis. Beattie was president of

the physiotherapists association, had served with

the Canadian Forces and was the head of a Toronto

hospital’s physiotherapy unit. In Chesterfield,

they called her Isuaksiajikulaq — young doctor.

Beattie sent letters and canisters of film to her

parents in Brockville, Ont., in the months before

she jumped on board the Canso. She was heading

home to marry Dr. Guthrie Grant of Brooklin,

Ont.

Days later, Grant was on his way with Beattie’s

father, Charles, to Winnipeg to identify her body

and bring it home for burial.

“Her parents, particularly her mother, never

really got over the loss,” Charles Beattie, the son

of Constance’s brother, Alan, wrote from Afghanistan,

where he was doing military contract work.

“For as long as she (her mother) lived, she kept

a room made up with my aunt’s things in it,” said

Charles’ sister, named Connie after her aunt.

“Our father never really discussed her or the

crash, as I believe it was too traumatic for him,

even after all these years,” she wrote in an email.

(Connie and Chuck Beattie sent me 177 of Constance’s

photos to take north in March.)

In Glencoe, fate had much more in store for the

Neills, a sequence of events the family would not

survive intact.

Neill Neill was almost nine, and the eldest of

the sons — including five-year-old twins.

“Oh gosh, she (my mother) was devastated by

it. There was lots of crying, lots of crying,” said

Neill, a psychologist in Vancouver.

The casket was sealed when it was brought

home by Addison’s brother. Closure eluded the

young boy; for months, he would have dreams

that his father was alive and coming home.

Even at eight years old, Neill had a part-time

job. When an uncle told him he had to be the man

of the family, Neill put his part-time jobs ahead

of all else, he said.

Eight years later, his mother died in a car

crash and the boys were split up, sent across the

country to relatives. The youngest, Neill said,

went to Vancouver Island with an uncle and later

attempts by the brothers to see him were spurned

by that man and his wife.

Eventually, his brother killed himself, Neill

said.

catherine.mitchell@freepress.mb.ca