Copyright © 2014 Colin Castle

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Castle, Colin, 1936–, author
Rufus : the life of the Canadian journalist who interviewed Hitler /
Colin Castle.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-926991-33-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-926991-38-2 (html)
1. Johnston, Lukin. 2. Journalists—Canada—Biography. 3. Foreign correspondents—Canada—Biography. 4. World War, 1914-1918—Canada—Biography. 5. Soldiers—Canada—Biography. I. Title.
PN4913.J64C38 2014 070.92 C2013-907881-9

Editor: Kyle Hawke
Cover designer: Omar Gallegos
Index consultant and proofreader: Renée Fossett
Maps design: Jamie Fischer

Granville Island Publishing Ltd.
212 – 1656 Duranleau St.
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6H 3S4
604-688-0320 / 1-877-688-0320

info@granvilleislandpublishing.com
www.granvilleislandpublishing.com
First published in May 2014

Contents

Family Good-luck Charm

Rufus’s good-luck bagpiper, a lead soldier that his son Derek pressed upon him ‘for good luck’ at the end of his first leave in 1917. Rufus carried him faithfully, through all the perils of Passchendaele and the later battles of Amiens and Arras.

The battered little bagpiper would have an extended life. In World War II, Derek was in the Canadian navy and carried the little soldier with him. It was in his pocket the day HMS Harvester, the British destroyer to which he was temporarily assigned, was sunk by a U-Boat in the Atlantic. He managed to swim to a Carley float and was rescued. Probably for Bee’s benefit, he always credited the bagpiper with keeping him safe.

Rufus’s Lukin Family Tree

Rufus’s Johnston Family Tree

Foreword

I was never Colin Castle’s best student. He once cut me from our high school debating team during a practice session before a big tournament. I had endeavoured to bluff my way through a speech, having failed to do any research or preparation beforehand. Colin taught me a valuable lesson that day; that glib charm will only get you so far. He saw no substitute for hard work, a lesson I have continually, vainly sought to disprove in the more than three decades since.

Colin was the best of teachers at our rural high school outside Kelowna on the west side of Okanagan Lake (rural no more — the fruit orchards have long since been paved over for suburban strip malls, condominiums and boutique wineries). His classroom lessons were enlivened by an erudite, Oxford-bred wit (how he came to be in our midst, we never knew), and that wit was augmented by an agreeably earthy sense of humour, on display in our more relaxed extra curricular work.

Our band of student debaters roamed much of the territory covered a half-century earlier by roving journalist Lukin “Rufus” Johnston. We borrowed a recreational vehicle from the family of a teammate for a tournament at a private boys school in Victoria. Colin drove while several of us sat at the table in back playing cards. On another occasion a convoy of teachers and students descended on Lethbridge, Alberta — a town you will come to know in this book as the setting for a low point in young Johnston’s pre-journalism travels — for a model United Nations session that drew students from throughout western Canada. Lethbridge was a low point for me as well; I woke up in a motel room after the weekend to find that I had overslept, and my entire team had left, each carload thinking I was riding with someone else. The weekend UN session was perhaps too much fun for me, owing to the more lax Alberta drinking laws, and the elusive charms of a female delegate speaking for France. Colin will be just learning this as he reads these words. It fell to Colin to explain to my mother why I would arrive home a day later on a bus. My belated apologies, Colin.

I saw Colin occasionally in the years after high school, less frequently as I busied myself in Vancouver with work as a reporter and editor at The Province newspaper. Earlier this year, one of my old classmates put me back in touch with Colin. He was nearing the end of three years’ work on this book about Lukin Johnston, a legendary Province reporter-editor of the 1920s and 1930s, and thought I might have something helpful to say about Johnston’s time at the paper, from 80 years’ distance.

I had the pleasure of a couple of telephone conversations with Colin, and discovered that the Castle wit was undiminished — he recalled a particularly pestilential suede jacket I wore throughout high school and beyond, and suggested the thing would have come if I whistled for it. I read his book and realized that his appetite for hard work was similarly enduring. His work here is thorough, enlightening and entertaining. At some point during our conversations, he sent me a note asking whether I might want to write a foreword for the book: “Most Forewords are pompous and overblown but I’m thinking of the opposite — something in your inimitable style, that nevertheless sounds reluctantly positive about both subject and author.”

Here is where Colin and I part company — I can muster no reluctance about either subject or author. Colin came to the story of Lukin Johnston — known affectionately as Rufus to his friends and family — through his Canadian-born wife Val, who was the granddaughter Rufus would never know, owing to circumstances that form the book’s central mystery. I will leave it to readers to discover that mystery for themselves in these pages.

Colin took on this book project as a labour of familial love, meant to give Rufus’s grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren a full picture of their ancestor. But the resulting book should draw a much wider audience. Colin has taken Johnston’s letters, diaries and published writings, added his own extensive research and insight, and crafted from that a meticulously detailed portrayal of one extraordinary man’s life, from modest childhood in a British country vicarage at the turn of the last century, to his last trip as a veteran foreign correspondent criss-crossing Germany and central Europe in 1933, talking to power brokers, ordinary folk, and fellow journalists in a half-dozen countries.

Johnston, an extraordinarily prolific writer, filed regular dispatches on those travels to Canada’s Southam newspaper chain, and would no doubt have followed that work with a book-length analysis of mid-1930s Europe under the looming shadow of fascism and war had he lived longer. His earlier work included books detailing his travels in his adopted home of British Columbia and in his native England.

In retelling Johnston’s story, Colin Castle has also given us a vivid picture of Rufus’s Canadian life and travels, from his arrival in Canada as a teen, his wanderings and various jobs — banker, farmer, cowboy, miner and finally reporter. Landscapes vividly depicted along the way include the desolation of Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley in a record cold winter, the rugged B.C. interior before highways, Okanagan Lake via steamboat, the oddly British enclave of Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley, and the nascent city of Vancouver, still hemmed in by thick rainforest.

Johnston’s front line service as an officer during the First World War is also brought starkly to life, with a soldier’s-eye view of death and fighting at Vimy Ridge, Avion and Passchendaele.

Back in civilian life in the 1920s, he emerges as a major figure in the development and maturing of the newspaper scene in Vancouver and Canada. Self-taught but a remarkably quick study, he soon rose to the top of his chosen profession. His natural ease with people and his relentless curiosity, coupled with the experience gained in various pre-journalism fields, earned him the confidence of interview subjects that included workingmen, barons of industry, scoundrels, privates, generals, princes, presidents and prime ministers.

In recounting Johnston’s decades in Vancouver, Colin has given us as well a rich portrait of Vancouver seen through Rufus’s eyes. One of his first Province assignments as a tyro reporter before the First World War involved a trip to remotest Deep Cove on the north shore of Burrard Inlet, where a small development was being carved from the dark forest. I write this from my home in that very neighbourhood, now a 20-minute urban drive to downtown when traffic is light. When Rufus was looking to build a home for his own family in the 1920s, his attentions fell to Point Grey, where roads were just then being cut through the woods. The metropolis’ limits have since sprawled southwards to Delta, north to Squamish and east past Langley and Mission.

As well, the newspaper and the metropolis it serves have changed in that white men from Britain no longer run things. Johnston’s own youthful British chauvinism was tempered by his years in Canada and abroad. Judging from Rufus’s later writings, I suspect that if he were to see today’s Province newsroom, with its cosmopolitan mix of men and women from every continent, it would be a change that the erstwhile British public schoolboy would appreciate. Well, the sight of women journalists would give him pause. He was a man of his time, after all.

From a remove of eight decades, one can see that some things never change in the journalism racket. I can identify with Rufus’s perennial inability to manage his finances, a common fault among those in the profession. The enthusiastic alcohol consumption also rings a bell. His work at its best vexed those in power, as the best journalism still does today, even as publishers then and now worry about keeping powerful advertisers. My current newspaper work involves features on entertainment and culture — where Rufus also spent some time in his career — but working across the newsroom are the Lukin Johnstons of our day, still doggedly irritating the comfortable. The tools have changed — video and the Internet now augment print on paper but the basic job is the same: get out there, get the story, and get back. Few ever did that better than Lukin “Rufus” Johnston.

Glen Schaefer

The Province

Vancouver

Preface

I have wanted to write Rufus since 1998 when I retired from teaching. It became a practical project, however, only after the death of Rufus’s son Derek in 2009. In writing his own Personal Memoir, Derek felt he had done enough to satisfy the curiosity of family members about his father’s life. It was clear to us all that he wanted no book written in his lifetime. Derek — and Bee before him — must have dreaded having to relive the misery of Rufus’s sudden death, the inevitable consequence for them of any such attempt.

Nevertheless, the preparation and writing has taken four years — an unconscionably long time for which there are two main explanations. The first is the nature and volume of the most important sources — thirty years of family letters and seventeen years of Rufus’s diaries. Almost all were hand-written, and although people wrote clearly a century ago, for such material to be accessible when writing the book it had first to be typed into computer files to make it retrievable by computer-search. The transcription itself took well over a year, a process not speeded by Rufus’s preference for pencil, the blunter the better, for making diary entries.

The second reason for slow progress was the intense interest for me of everything I was reading and transcribing. For a history buff the temptation to explore each of Rufus’s references to people, plays, and events was irresistible. I hope that this spontaneous research produced a more interesting story for readers — it certainly ate up the hours, and I had fun! If you add to that the slower pace at which we seventy-somethings work, remembering that we also like to smell the flowers, then four years seems more reasonable — a shorter time, I’m told, than the average student takes for a PhD.

I hope Rufus proves to be an enjoyable read for those who pick it up. It is not intended as more than that and the many references to the Vancouver Daily Province — a still-thriving newspaper for which Lukin Johnston wrote in sixteen of his twenty years as a journalist — are just parts of his life story. They are not an attempt to tell the Province’s story and I apologize to those associated with that paper who may find its treatment herein less complete or rigorous than they would have liked.

I have tried to resist the temptation to editorialize on points of history and have done so only when absolutely necessary. For some of the more significant people Rufus knew or met, I have included brief biographies in the end-notes as the least obtrusive way of providing such background. Outside sources are recognized in the end-notes; footnotes are reserved for explanations of the text. There is a short bibliography.

As Rufus’s papers lay in Johnston family basements for eighty years, it seems a pity that this book was not written earlier, while the readers and admirers of Lukin Johnston, the journalist, were still in our midst. However, Derek had organized the papers into files and boxes, each with contents neatly described, and had had many of his father’s letters typed. It is a fair assumption, therefore, that he expected this book to be written after his own death – possibly with his posthumous blessing.

I have many people to thank for their help in the research, writing, publication and marketing of Rufus. Top of the list is the late Derek Johnston himself, who so carefully preserved his father’s effects. My wife Val, Derek’s daughter and Rufus’s granddaughter, has been my research partner. She typed all of Bee’s letters and some of Rufus’s, researched her grandmother’s story, was a reliable interpreter of smudged pencil-writing and a provider of sensible advice. She has always encouraged me and has been selflessly tolerant of my irregular work habits and unpredictable moods. Our son Geoff Castle has given good advice and masterminded Rufus’s sensational latter-day appearance on Twitter, while Jessie Johnston, our niece, talked me through the intricacies of creating and running a website and blog, followed by weekly chats about its further development. Kim Plumley, of Publicity Mavens, is ensuring that news of Rufus’s publication reaches those who matter. And last of all Glen Schaefer, The Province’s entertainment writer, the only person in BC with links both to the author and to the newspaper that taught Rufus his trade, was kind enough to write the Foreword to Rufus.

Finally there are the people at Granville Island Publishing: the boss, Jo Blackmore, who held the ring, persuaded me to cut the manuscript to publishable proportions, provided sensible advice, and talked me out of defeatist moods; copy-editor Kyle Hawke, who patiently coaxed this balky author to adopt commonly used punctuation standards and was always ready with good alternative wording; Renee Fossett, copy-editor and proofreader, whose experience and knowledge have saved me from committing too many horrors and whose advice was ever sound; Omar Gallegos, who has designed this pleasing book; and Jamie Fischer, who has converted my jottings into maps.

Colin Castle,

West Kelowna

Edwin Harry Lukin Johnston was born with a halo of flaming red hair to Nellie Johnston and her husband Ted, on August the 8th, 1887. They lived in Surbiton, England, where Ted — more formally the Reverend Robert Edwin Johnston, M.A. — was an Anglican curate. He and Nellie, whose maiden name had been Ellen Jane Lukin, chose to call the baby, their second son, Harry.

As he became old enough to care about such things, young Harry may not have liked this name much but he liked ‘Ginger’ even less, the nickname bestowed upon him by his older brother Roy and gleefully picked up by every boy in the neighbourhood.

He was four when the family moved to Folkestone in Kent, whence the name Ginger followed him as closely as his shadow. One afternoon after they had been there for some time, he was with Nellie doing errands in town, when a group of soldiers from the barracks came swinging down the sidewalk towards them. One soldier, also with bright red hair, spotted Rufus as they passed.

“Hallo, young feller,” the red-headed soldier said, cheekily ruffling the boy’s unruly mop.

“What do they call you then, with all that red hair?”

“They call me ‘Ginger’,” Harry answered rather crossly. “And I hate it!”

“Ginger, eh?” said the soldier, “that’s what they used to call me till I put a stop to it!”

The boy’s interest suddenly awakened. “What do they call you now?” Harry demanded in his piping voice.

“Why, they call me Rufus like I tell ’em to,” the soldier replied with a chuckle, running off after his pals.

“But what does ‘Rufus’ mean?” Harry called after him.

The soldier turned and hollered, “Why, red-haired, silly — like the king,” before vanishing round the corner.

Harry remembered Miss Skidmore reading the story of the king William Rufus in the schoolroom. Rufus! That’s a fine name, he thought. That day at family tea, after breathlessly recounting the afternoon’s adventure, he announced, “No more Ginger! Everybody please call me Rufus, like the soldier!” At the time, Nellie may have smiled indulgently at this insistence, but her son’s determination stayed with him and he would get his way — by the time he was six not only did she herself always refer to him in her diary as ‘Rufus’ but she sometimes shortened it to ‘Rufie’ — even to ‘Rufe’!

Ted Johnston, or R.E. as he was referred to more formally, was an exceedingly sound man, as he revealed in his huge correspondence with his family. Most obviously, he was a man of faith — no placeman vicar he. His religious belief was the core of his being, and controlled his relationship with the world. This relationship comprised absolute honesty, a humility so complete that his own interests and comfort consistently took a back seat to those of others (of his children in particular), and a fatalism which ensured that his own fairly limited ambition would never raise enough steam actually to improve his circumstances.

Beyond faith, R.E. was a man of intellect who had enjoyed the university education that his children would do without. This was important for Rufus in many ways. His father, for example, seemed so well able to analyze his son’s various distant situations over the years — a tall order from parochial Kent — that he was able to offer advice that was usually wise, sometimes followed, and often even sought. Beset by the needs of his children for relatively modest subsidies over the years, R.E. had the brains and ability to write and publish a number of books for which there was still a large captive market, thus supplementing his meagre church income. These included The Eternal King and His Kingdom, 1908, and the six volumes of the Marden Manuals for the Graded Sunday School, and the Catechist’s Manual, all 1912. Excepting the last, these were written for children, in short sentences and simple language, full of compelling imagery and brimming with belief. They are totally charming. The manual for adults, practical and devoid of grandstanding asides, must have seemed a godsend to lay people charged with teaching Sunday School but with no idea where to begin. He also wrote a serious biography of his brother-in-law, Major General Sir Harry Lukin, published in 1929. He had access to Harry’s papers after his death, of course, but for a man of the cloth to have written such a good book about soldiering was in itself remarkable.

Another of R.E.’s strengths was his financial competence. It fell to him not only to have to referee the disbursement of money from two different sources — the Johnston Trust and what was referred to as ‘the Timson money’ — but to ensure that no individual be permitted to borrow more than what was eventually coming to them from either, that they pay realistic interest on borrowings, and that they pay their premiums on their life policies on time. The sums were not large but maintenance of interest from the funds affected his own financial survival and he waged a constant and successful battle with his sons’ urgent requests and financial naïveté.

As a father, R.E. was kind and loyal, and to him fell the total care of his family when his beloved Nellie died in childbirth in 1903 at age 41. At the time, he had five children: 18-year-old Roy, 16-year-old Rufus, 8-year-old Lyonel, 6-year-old Joyce, and newborn Peter. A housekeeper-governess was absolutely necessary and so Florence Bessie Taylor, a long-time parishioner known to all as Florie, entered their world. Not being endowed with the tact necessary in the situation, unfortunately, Florie quickly got on the wrong side of Roy and Rufus, a breach that only widened when she and their father decided to marry in 1905 — they saw their father’s second marriage as treason to their beloved mother. In spite of this sorry situation, R.E. managed to head off his sons’ hostility by his example and, overtly at least, they remained polite to Florie. Through the worst of it all he seems to have criticized no one, been attentive and loving to all, and to have retained the devotion of his children, though their persisting dislike of Florie must have caused him much pain.

R.E.’s father provided his heirs with welcome commercial genes, not that these seem to have reached Rufus — commerce, or even the ability to avoid losses, never being his thing. Robert Johnston, the grandfather Rufus never met, was a linen draper who lived over his shop at 425, the Strand, in London. The 1861 census finds him prosperous enough to maintain a household of fourteen, including his wife Julia, his widowed mother, an unmarried sister, a cook, a housemaid, a nurse for his three children, and four draper’s assistants. Grandfather Johnston died the year Rufus was born, but Rufus knew his grandmother Julia; she was often at the vicarage, was known as ‘old Mrs Johnston’, and lived to 83.

Of Nellie, we know much less because of her early death. She was a much-loved mother and, from her surviving Rough Diary1, it is clear she devoted herself absolutely to her young family and the life of the parish. She may have had miscarriages in the eight years between the births of Rufus and Lyonel. We know that she lost Una Faith in 1902 and she died after giving birth to Peter in the following year.

On Nellie’s side of the family, Lukin family pride in their ancient lineage limited their occupations to a few professions, and remarkable characters are clustered on the branches of the family tree. Nellie and her brother Harry were the children of Robert Henry Lukin, a barrister, and his wife Ellen Watson. Ellen died young, as her daughter Nellie would do. When Robert Henry died in 1904, he divided his estate between Harry (in South Africa) and the late Nellie’s children, his grandchildren — thus providing the capital for the Johnston Trust in which Rufus and his siblings would share. Robert Henry, the grandpa they knew as Gappy, died when Rufus was 17.

Robert Henry’s siblings were less useful to Rufus but infinitely more exciting to boast about. The lives of this brood personified the tragedy and triumph of the Victorian empire. There was Major General William Windham Augustus Lukin who fought in the Crimea, an artillery officer in the brutal battles of Alma, Balaclava and Inkerman, as well as at the siege of Sevastopol. His unfortunate brother Villebois Stuart Lukin joined the navy as a midshipman and was killed at Gibraltar at the age of 12 when he fell 100 feet from the rigging onto the deck of HMS Formidable. Their sister Emma Charlotte Lukin may have lived a humdrum life though she married the remarkably named Drummond Bond Wingrove, born at Singapore. Finally, Colonel Frederick Windham Lukin, a cautious individual, was paymaster at Sevastopol and married his wife Amy Hay at Jobhulpore, India.

We can look back to Nellie’s great grandfather, the Very Rev George William Lukin, Dean of Wells. He and his wife Catherine had fourteen children — of these, six died as infants, two of their four surviving daughters lived into their eighties and the four surviving sons were so pleased with themselves that they had a picture painted of the group. They had their reasons, I suppose. The eldest, William Lukin, was a Vice Admiral; Captain George Lukin was the Marine paymaster for the East India Company in Bombay; and Robert Lukin became First Clerk at the War Office. The youngest, the Rev John Lukin (1783–1846), married four times and had seven children. He was Nellie’s grandfather and his third wife, Elizabeth Timson, was her grandmother. With his previous wives, the Rev John was also the grandfather of her cousins Katie and Lucy.

Rufus’s uncle Harry would be the Lukin relative with the most impact on his life, and his career was as remarkable as those of his forebears. In spite of being “mad keen on soldiering” and having attended a crammer, he failed to get into Sandhurst, Britain’s school for career army officers. His long-time friend Col. Judd explained. “He found the examination too much for him — he was a slow thinker. However, he went through the Knightsbridge riding school and completed a short course on infantry drill at Chelsea Barracks.” Thus prepared, he set off for South Africa and managed to wangle a commission in Bengough’s Horse, a native unit operating with the 17th Lancers in the Zulu war of 1878–79.

He was wounded at Ulundi but later did sufficiently well to be gazetted a lieutenant in the Cape Mounted Rifles, the only permanent unit in the Cape Colony at the time. After taking part in further wars against the tribes, in 1893 he returned to Britain for courses in artillery and machine-guns. He married Lily Quinn of Fort Hare in 1891 when he was 31, she 25, but, sadly, they would remain childless. By the end of the Anglo-Boer War in 1902, he was Colonel of the CMR and in 1910, when the Union of South Africa was created, he was promoted to Brigadier General and appointed Inspector General of the Permanent Force — basically, the Union’s top soldier. In Judd’s opinion, “Being quite fearless he was particularly successful as a regimental or small column commander. [But] he had no experience of independent command over large forces and might fairly be described as the very best type of conventional soldier whose day probably passed with the cavalry and horse artillery.” Nevertheless, in World War I he defeated the Germans in South West Africa, later commanded the South African Brigade at Delville Wood in France and then took command of British 9th Division.2

Many of Rufus’s ancestors were men of action, or of faith and words, who lived bravely in the face of difficulty and danger, while few made their living with numbers or through a technical skill. His own life would follow the example they had set.