John Gordon Weir was born less than a year after Germany signed the armistice ending the First World War, a war that had scarred the life of his father, Colonel James Gordon Weir. The elder Weir, a Presbyterian of Scottish descent, served on the front lines in the trenches in a machine gun battalion. By the time the guns stopped firing, he had been gassed twice, awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, and risen, literally through the ranks, from trooper to colonel. After the war, he married a Canadian nursing sister, Mary Frederica (Freda) Taylor, and settled in Toronto, where their son John and daughter Nancy were born. Col. Weir went back to his former trade as a bond salesman, eventually helping to found McLeod Young Weir, which became part of Scotiabank in 1988. Unlike his father, John grew up in an affluent household and went to Upper Canada College. School was a humdrum part of a much larger education, orchestrated by his father: How to survive in the natural and political wilderness. As the 1920s turned into the 30s, Col. Weir was convinced that fighting a second world war against the old foe was inevitable. He wanted his son's survival and strategic skills honed, as Blake Heathcote illustrates in a forthcoming biography of F/O Weir. As a youngster, John spent time in Algonquin Park under the tutelage of an Ojibwa fishing guide; as a teenager he was sent to France during school breaks to learn the language and customs; and every couple of years his father took him along on European business trips, where he observed the rise of Nazism in the mid-1930s and, on a couple of occasions, carried covert messages to desperate clients who were trying to escape from Germany. Finally, Col. Weir sent his son to Timmins in northern Ontario in July 1938, to work underground in the gold mines to earn tuition money for university and get toughened up with hard physical labour. On Sept. 4, 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, Mr. Weir, barely 20, enlisted in the nascent and ill-equipped Royal Canadian Air Force Fighter pilot, prisoner of war, and a key tunneller in the Great Escape, Scruffy Weir never spoke about his war experiences - at least not until he decided to collaborate with Blake Heathcote. In dozens of interviews over two years, Weir gradually revealed his whole incredible journey - from his travels in pre-war Nazi Germany to the final days of the war, evading enemy agents who were hunting him down. His memories, wartime journals, letters, and photographs - many reproduced for the first time in this book - come together to deliver a spellbinding account, not only of what is arguably the most legendary wartime escape of the 20th century, but also of an astonishing life, well-lived. "Scruffy Weir was a charming, articulate man. But under his modest veneer was something quite different. Watchful and shrewd, with a gift for assuming the bland persona of a face in the crowd, he always operated below the radar. His keen mind made him an ideal spy catcher," says Heathcote. "In my 15 years of working with Canada's veterans, questions and conversations kept leading back to this man known as Scruffy. While many are reluctant to speak about their war, few are as guarded as he was. Now we know why. It was a privilege to work with this distinguished veteran, and I am honoured that he chose me to tell his story." What makes a survivor? Most of us can only guess. In this remarkable book, Scruffy Weir breaks his silence of almost 70 years, telling how brains, grit, and a lifetime of training brought him safely through the darkest years of the war. The result is Blake Heathcote's The Survivor: Scruffy's War, a moving and affectionate portrait of Scruffy Weir, an extraordinary man, and a true survivor. Great interview;
The man in the lower left of the last photo is none other than Wally Floody. His Spitfire was shot down on 27 October 1941 near Saint-Omer. While at Stalag Luft III he joined the "X-Organization", headed by Roger Bushell, who put Wally in charge of digging tunnels and their camouflage. Before the war Floody had been a hard rock miner at the Preston East Dome Mine in Timmins, Ontario. He later served as a technical adviser to John Sturges on the Great Escape film. He is popularly considered to have been the real-life counterpart to that film's fictional "Tunnel King", played by Charles Bronson.
