It was for Brian Josling’s second birthday that his dad wrote him the letter, the one explaining why he had gone off to war.
And it was on Dec. 23, 1944, just four days after that birthday, that Josling’s father died on a training flight.
Apparently the port engine failed as the Mitchell bomber took off from the airfield at Boundary Bay, near Vancouver. Only the pilot survived the crash, and that was with a broken back that left him paralyzed from the waist down for two years.
The pilot’s name was Robert Clothier. You might remember him as Relic from The Beachcombers.
The other three crew members, including former Vic High student Tom Walmsley, Josling’s father, died.
“I don’t have any memories of Tom,” says Josling, 79, nursing a coffee in the Broadmead Starbuck’s.
But that doesn’t mean his father didn’t have a major influence. That letter became his blueprint.
“He formulated my core values,” Josling says. “He has had a huge impact on my life, even though he wasn’t there.”
Josling thinks about that on Remembrance Day, just as he thinks of the families of the other 45,000 Canadians who never got to come home from the Second World War. His story is really about them, their losses and their resilience, he says.
Walmsley was born in Victoria in 1914, attending Vic High before going to work for the Daily Colonist’s circulation department. In the mid-1930s, he moved to Toronto, where he did the same job for the Globe and Mail.
At the end of 1942, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, though instead of shipping him overseas, the RCAF kept him around Toronto to teach navigation. That meant he got to see a lot of his wife, Catherine, and their infant son, Brian.
In November 1944, Walmsley was shipped to B.C. for training prior to deployment to India. The weather was lousy when he got to Boundary Bay, though. It didn’t lift until Dec. 23, when he climbed into that two-engine Mitchell with Clothier, an experienced combat pilot who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his courage in Europe.
Josling still has the telegram that Catherine received that night, saying there had been a crash and Walmsley was unaccounted for. Another telegram confirming his death appears to have reached her on Christmas Day. She somehow managed to make dinner for 12 that night.
It wasn’t until Josling was eight that she showed him the letter from Walmsley. Handwritten on five pages of flimsy airmail stationery dated Dec. 14, 1944, it was intended to arrive in time for the boy’s second birthday five days later.
“Dear Brian,” it began, “So you are two years old today. Many happy returns of the day. Although you will not understand this letter, I just felt I should put in writing my feelings regarding you.
“It is just two years ago since you came into your mother’s and my life. In that two years we have come to know you very well and love you very much.
“You have made our life very happy and since that December morning the two of us have had only one thing in mind. That was to see that you had a happy life. I think we have succeeded so far but in so doing you have also made our life very happy in just seeing you grow up and enjoy life so.
“I have belonged to the Air Force since you have been with us, and up to last month had the good fortune to be right around home so that I could see you and your mother quite often. Now, it has been decided that I should go away for about two years.
“You are a little young to understand what this war is about. I shall give you my feelings in a few words. Some men in another part of the world decided that they should rule the world, so with this object in mind went to war. Their aims were to change all people to their way of thinking. If they had succeeded, it would mean as you grew up you could not have freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and a lot of other things.
“I have grown up taking these things for granted but now that they are threatened, intend to fight with many millions of others to see that these freedoms shall not be taken away from little fellows like you.”
After pondering the idea that his son might have to serve some day (“God grant us the power so that this day will never come”) Walmsley turns to thoughts of home: “You know, Brian, I get quite homesick at times now thinking of you, how you used to climb up on my knee, your enjoyment out of me taking you out for a walk and then buying you a cone, going downtown for a streetcar and bus ride and a million other little things that all add up to make a little boy like you so precious to his mother and dad.”
After wishing his son a happy birthday, he leaves the boy with some instructions: “Well, Brian, I will have to close now. Remember, for the next couple of years you will be the man around the house and to look after that swell girl you call Mother.
Then some day I hope to come home and relieve you of the job.
“Keep on enjoying life in your own way and may you have many happy and prosperous birthdays, and luck in all you undertake in your life.
“Goodbye for now son.
“Your loving Dad.”
And those were the last words from father to son.
What Josling took from the letter was that his dad was a straight-up guy, someone who put others first, believed in doing the right thing, wasn’t governed by ego. “Basically what he’s saying to his son is: ‘I went to war so that you wouldn’t have to.’ ’’
The letter became Josling’s road map. “It has driven me,” he says. “It was a very, very clear statement of what I was to do, and I did it.”
“I was going to be honest. I was going to be educated. I was going to be successful. I was going to work hard.”
He also, he says, benefited from a lot of good fortune. That includes his mother’s decision to marry a good man, RCAF veteran Cec Josling, in 1948. “Cec and I were the best of friends for 60 years,” he says of the stepfather whose surname he took.
Still, he says, he feels close to Walmsley, the father who has been gone since he was two. “I talk to him. When I go to church, I talk to him.”
He also does so at his dad’s grave whenever he’s in Toronto, or at the RCAF memorial garden in Stanley Park when he’s in Vancouver. When in Ottawa, he looks up his father’s name in the book of remembrance that resides in the Peace Tower.
Josling grew up to have a successful business career, including 15 years as a music-industry executive and a dozen as Rogers Wireless’s western Canadian president.
He moved to Vancouver in 1982, then to Saanich four years ago. His beloved wife of 42 years, Marg, is gone now, but their three great kids and five wonderful grandchildren are all in Victoria.
He makes a point of sending them cards or letters on their birthdays — handwritten ones that they’ll be able to keep forever, even when he’s gone.
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