family-history – Beeshive

94 days

July 22nd, 1969 was 94 days prior to the worst peace time disaster in the Canadian Navy.

July 22nd, 1969 was when my father was photographed aboard Canada’s only French helicopter destroyer, the HMCS Ottawa.

He was a half Cree / half Irish boy from Fort McMurray.

He was born in Peterborough Ontario.

His father, Arthur Herman Gill abandoned grandma, so grandma packed up and moved back to Fort McMurray with Richard and his younger brother Doug in tow.

Richard attended a single room school house in Fort MacMurray.

Two of his three maternal uncles had been members of the Royal Canadian Army during WWII.

Jimmy Waniandy

Johnny Waniandy

George Waniandy

Trooper George Waniandy died in WWII in Italy. His brother John had been wounded in Italy as well.

Lance Corporal Jimmy Waniandy, a section commander, had been interviewed during the Korean war and been involved in stopping an attack.

Richard obviously had some pretty big shoes to fill.

As grandma lived with us from 1977 until 1981 I knew that she was an overbearing and domineering person.

In 1980, I had mentioned to a psychiatrist that I had been sent to for evaluation by military social worker Captain Terry Totzke that “my brain says that I’m going to kill myself unless grandma leaves the house”. My father would later tell Alberta Social Services that he blamed his mother for the issues my brother and I were having as she was “extremely cruel to his children, especially when she was intoxicated, which was frequent”.

I could see him volunteering to serve aboard the HMCS Ottawa to prove to his mother that he was just as good as George, Jimmy, and Johnny.

Just after the unification of the separate branches of the Canadian military into the Canadian Forces in 1968 he moved from the ships to the Sea King squadron on CFB Shearwater. The HMCS Ottawa was one of the Restigouche class destroyers that were converted to have a helicopter hangar. Richard could go to sea with his former shipmates on the HMCS Kootenay, but he would go with the prestigious submarine hunting Sea Kings. And even though he was with the Sea Kings, he could still go hit the local pubs and get shitfaced with his former navy buddies when the ships pulled into port.

And wouldn’t his mother ever be impressed with his ability to learn French? Learning French might also endear him to his wife who was part of the Dagenais clan from Province Quebec.

But, fast forward to October 23rd, 1969.

The HMCS Ottawa, HMCS Kootenay, HMCS Bonaventure, HMCS Saguenay, were amongst 10 ships that had sailed to the United Kingdom a few weeks prior as part of naval exercises and they were on their way back to Canada.

The HMCS Kootenay has just been instructed to fire its boilers up to full steam and the turbines had been ordered to full throttle.

Unfortunately the HMCS Kootenay had the original version of the Restigouche class reduction gearbox. This gearbox required that the bearings for the gear shafts to be installed in a particular direction to receive lubrication. The second version of the reduction gearbox allowed the bearings to be installed in either direction.

One bearing had been installed backwards and had starved for oil and was overheating. The stress of the full speed run didn’t help the situation.

The gears in those gearboxes were of the herringbone type. This design minimizes the axial loading on the shafts and gears, but leads to a large amount of oil shear which causes a large amount of vapourized / atomized oil.

This oil vapour came in contact with the red hot bearing and caused the vapour to ignite and then explode.

Three of the eight men killed in the explosion were friends of my father that he had served with.

The Sea Kings were called in to remove the injured off the Kootenay. This of course included the Sea King from the HMCS Ottawa.

It’s of no doubt that the HMCS Kootenay incident cooked my father’s noodle.

I can also see the Kootenay incident as sparking my father’s life long hatred of French. And I don’t mean he just didn’t want to speak French. Whenever the topic of French was brought up in the house, his full hatred came out. Even when I tried to practice French at home for school he would ridicule me for trying to learn French because French was, in his opinion, a complete fucking waste of time. Only fucking frogs spoke French was his constant refrain.

I can see his superiors on the HMCS Ottawa insisting to the point of complete idiocy that French and only French be spoken.

While my father’s drinking buddies were burning to death on the Kootenay I can see my father’s superiors yelling and gesticulating wildly “Arrêtez de parler anglais Gill! Nous parlons en Français sur ce navire”.

If that’s the one thing that I know about my father, he didn’t entertain “silly decisions by silly fuckers”.

Nothing screams Canadian Armed Forces like adhering to the “rules” during times of disaster, especially if the rules are petty and useless.

In 2014 I had returned to Halifax, Nova Scotia for the first time in my life since my father was posted to from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside in 1976. I met a man named Chris LeGier out by the HMCS Kootenay memorial at Point Pleasant.

He said something that stuck with me all these years later.

The Canadian Armed Forces turned their backs on everyone that was involved.

The military stuck to the rules regarding PMQs on the base in that the housing could only be rented to serving members of the military, not their spouses. Accordingly non-serving spouses were told to move out of the PMQs.

Members that had been traumatized by the events were ignored by the military. And this makes perfect sense because back in the day mental health issues were pretty well a one way ticket to civvy street.

According to Chris, it wasn’t unheard of for traumatized members of the HMCS Kootenay event to hit the bottle, use heroin, or even cocaine. And no, drug use in the Canadian Armed Forces wasn’t unheard of. And he said that it wasn’t just the members on the Kootenay that suffered. CFB Shearwater and CFB Halifax were a tight knit community and they all knew each other.

A Blast from the Past

Here’s something that I never expected to see.

I had been going through searches on Newspapers.com when I came across a picture of my father from 1969.

The fact that Richard would have been a member of a ship’s company when that crew was expected to speak French at all times is fucking mind blowing to say the least.

He was a prairie boy growing up in Fort McMurray, AB before enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 at a stone frigate in Edmonton, AB. I can’t see him as ever having learnt French at home. When grandma came to live with us I can’t ever remember her speaking a single word of French, and I don’t think that she would have learnt French in the two years that she attended Indian Residential School.

When I was a kid, Richard had absolutely no time for French. Even though the schools on base were giving military dependents French classes, Richard would get upset if I tried speaking French in the PMQ.

The photo answers a bunch of questions. The HMCS Ottawa DDH 229 was fitted with a landing pad and a hangar for the Sea King helicopter. And the HMCS Ottawa was amongst the ships that had sailed to the United Kingdom and were involved with the HMCS Kootenay incident on October 23rd, 1969.

As Bill Parker had said to me in August of 1985 on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario, “I wish you had known your father before the Kootenay, he was a much different man then, I think you would have liked him”.

This photo was taken on July 22nd, 1969. That’s almost 3 months before the events of October 23rd, 1969 when the HMCS Kootney suffered a massive explosion due to overheated oil vapour in one of its reduction gearboxes. 9 men died that day, and according to Bill Parker in 1985, and my mother in 2013, three of those men were close friends of my father that he had served with in the Royal Canadian Navy before unification in 1968.

This photo was taken two years and two months before I was born. The man in the photo is not the man I grew up with. The man in the photo looks calm and inquisitive. The man that I grew up with was a piss tank alcoholic with rage issues and a hair temper trigger who had copious amounts of contempt for just about everyone else around him.

Looking at this photo I can only wonder what Richard would have been like had the HMCS Kootenay event not occurred. Or even if it had still occurred, I can only wonder what home life would have been like had the Canadian Armed Forces treated mental health as a priority instead of simply turning a blind eye to mental health issues and expecting the guys to deal with it on their own and self medicate through abusive behaviour, alcoholism, or hard drugs.

I know from my personal involvement with military social worker Captain Terry Totzke that the mental health and wellbeing of military members was the least of the military’s concern.

Does seeing this photo make me change my opinion of my father.

No.

He was still a broken inconsiderate self centred man who should never have been allowed to father children.

But what this photo does show is that Bill Parker and my mother weren’t lying when they said that Richard was a completely different person before the HMCS Kootenay disaster.

If only reality was like this

I came across this video on TikTok yesterday and it really blew me away as to how naive people, especially adults, can be.

I can assure you that this is not the way it worked on any military base in Canada. Especially not if you had the misfortune of coming from a dysfunctional family such as mine.

My mother left in 1977 while my father was stationed at CFB Summerside. It wasn’t her choice to leave.

Military housing could only be rented to the serving member, the non-serving parent had no legal rights to remain in the house if the serving member didn’t want them there. In fact the language in the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations meant that the non-serving spouses were only able to remain in the military housing so long as they had the “permission” of their serving spouse. If the serving spouse didn’t want the non-serving spouse there, the non-serving spouse had no options but to leave.

In the aftermath of my mother leaving my grandmother came to Summerside to live with us from the spring of 1977 until the spring of 1978. When she returned to Edmonton my father requested a posting to Edmonton specifically so that his mother could look after his children as his “wife had abandoned him”.

As I mentioned elsewhere in my blog, my grandmother had been through Indian Residential school as a child. She didn’t have much of a formal education having entered school when she was 13 and leaving school when she was 15.

From all accounts she was an alcoholic by the time my father was born in 1946.

When she came to live with us in the military housing in Summerside she was mostly drunk and would often haul my brother and I off to the Royal Canadian Legion or other pubs while she drank.

When my father received his posting from Summerside to Namao he brought her and her husband Roy (Andy) Anderson into the PMQ on Namao to raise my brother and I while he literally buggered off to who knowns where.

It was grandma’s and Andy’s drinking that landed Andy in long term nursing care when he slipped in the bathtub and cracked his skull open. It was because of this that my brother and I ended up in the care of the babysitter.

My father was asked by Alberta Social Services after we became involved with civilian social services in 1981 if he knew why my brother and I were having emotional and behavioural issues.

My father explained to social services that his mother was “extremely cruel to his children, especially when she was intoxicated, which was frequent”.

He would further tell social services on different occasions that his mother would not admit to being an alcoholic, and that she refused to seek help for her alcoholism.

There’s a couple of “not so funny things” about my father’s statements to the CFNIS in 2011 which serve to illustrate just how fucked up the military justice system actually is.

First, my father seemed to imply that my grandmother never lived with us, and even if she did it was just a very brief period of time.

The CFNIS in 2011 knew from my statement to them that grandma had raised my brother and I from the spring of 1977 until the spring of 1981 and that even before we moved to Downsview in 1983 we’d spend a lot of our weekends at grandma’s apartment.

And when I obtained a copy of my social service records from the Alberta government in August of 2011, I gave the CFNIS a copy of the entire set of records.

The CFNIS never attempted to question my father about the discrepancies between his statement and the contents of the social service records. Instead the CFNIS gave Alberta Crown prosecutor Jon Werbicki my father’s statement with absolutely no mention of my father’s statement to social services after Alberta social services became involved with my family.

This resulted in Jon Werbicki stating that “it was very significant that Mr. Bees never told anyone in a position of authority about the abuse”.

And of course in 2012 the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal did not make the existence of these records known to the Military Police Complaints Commission. So these records became “new evidence” that the MPCC wasn’t able to review. And these records became “new evidence” that couldn’t be introduce during my application for Judicial Review in federal court.

Long story short, unlike in the video there was no one at home that I could run to tell.

My father was living off base with whatever girlfriend he had at the moment. He honestly barely lived with us in PMQ #11 on 12th street on CFB Namao. He didn’t move back into the PMQ until August of 1980.

His mother came to live with us on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. She looked after my brother and I until the summer of 1981 when she moved out and got her own apartment.

My father’s drinking was just as bad as my grandmother’s drinking. And when the two got drunk together there would often be swearing, yelling, and shoving. If my uncle Doug showed up and the three of them were drinking things would really get out of control.

The thing was alcoholism on the bases in the PMQ patches back in the day was always seen as normal. “It’s a tough job”. “It’s a hard life”. “It’s camaraderie and cohesion building”.

It wasn’t until I moved off base and started living in the civilian world that I began to realize that not every weekend was supposed to be a booze fuelled festival.

The dirty secret of the Canadian Forces is that there was a lot of “trailer trash” living on the bases back then.

My new stepmother didn’t like any of this and she decided to try to put an end to my father’s drinking. She blamed my grandmother for my father’s drinking and the relationship between my stepmother and my grandmother was described as “frosty”. One of them had to go, and it wasn’t going to be my father’s girlfriend.

There was one time that I asked my uncle Doug why my father always believed everything that my stepmother said over what I had said. His response was that the father slept with her, not with me. It would be a few years before I would truly understand what that comment meant.

My grandmother lived by two maxims, and no doubt this was beat into her during her stay at Holy Angels in Fort Chipewyan. “Children are to be seen and not heard” and “Children only speak when spoken to”. And yes, Richard was the exact same. Richard did not under any-fucking-circumstance want to be disturbed. You only spoke when he said it was okay to speak. You stood silently beside him and waited for him to acknowledge you before you said anything. And when you said something to him, it had better not be a stupid waste of his fucking time.

Grandma was the same. If you talked at the kitchen table you either got rapped on the knuckles with the wooden spoon, or you got smacked across the mouth.

But yeah, tell me again who exactly I was supposed to tell about the abuse.

My alcoholic grandmother?

My alcoholic father?

My stepmother, who no no doubt had been told nothing about CFB Namao by her new husband, but had been told that his kids were acting up like they were because they liked their mother better than her?

And besides, with the comments of my father and Captain Totzke, everyone knew what had happened.

It wasn’t like I should have had to tell anyone. That base was a secured defence establishment. How the base chaplain and at least one of his altar boys could molest over 25 children for over 2 years is something that I will never understand.

But whatever. It doesn’t matter if my father lied to the CFNIS in 2011 or if the CFNIS guided my father into saying what he said, the CFNIS accomplished what it needed to do. And that was to sever any potential connection to myself and the babysitter as the babysitter and the babysitter’s documented abuse of young children on the base is what led to the discovery of Captain Father Angus McRae.