Page 35 - December 2019

Meanwhile, heavy casualties among aviators in
Roland Groome Chapter, Regina
RFC Training in Canada 1917-18
The story behind Bill Hunt’s new book on the Royal
Flying Corps’ astonishing training establishment in
southern Ontario during the First World War originated
from this long-time history buff’s interest in rum-
running between Canada and the prohibition-era U.S.
That research put him in touch with a number of
Canadians with parallel historical interests, including
wartime RCAF airman Al Smith of Trenton, who’d been
interviewing local folk about the First World War
training station at nearby Deseronto, and prevailed on
Hunt to write this story.
Hunt took a look at the material and soon became
fascinated by the subject of RFC/RAF training in Canada, fewer than 600 women were employed, earning the
expanding his research to the other stations used in this same wages as men doing the same work.
work: Beamsville, Leaside, Camp Borden, Rathbun,
North Toronto and Mohawk. In the course of about 30
years’ part-time research, he and his brother read
around 3,000 old newspapers and reviewed many other
documents and articles. The long-time high school
history teacher even found some of the old airfields.
The result was his book Dancing In The Sky: The Royal
Flying Corps in Canada (Dundurn Press, 2009).
Hunt said an interesting point at which to start is with a
historical question: why did Canada, unlike other self- surprise when their arrival in Texas was greeted by
governing dominions, like New Zealand and Australia,
did not have its own independent air force during the
First World War — despite having had a tiny,
ramshackle “Canadian Air Corps” led by the quixotic
Capt. Ernest Janney in 1914-15?
Hunt said the answer lies in the emphasis the Canadian
government of the day put in creating a Canadian
Expeditionary Corps of a half-million men for the land
war in Western Europe.
1916 caused the British government to approach
Canada for the training of additional Canadian
airmen. The British officer sent to Canada in early
1917 to handle this project was an inspired choice:
Lt. Col. R.G. Hoare was personable, yet determined,
intelligent and persuasive. He also had certain
contempt for bureaucracies; his attitude seemed to
be that “the best thing to do with bureaucracies
was to ignore them; they don’t care what gets done
if nobody takes responsibility.”
Within weeks of the arrival of Hoare and his small
party, contracts were being let for the construction
of aircraft, airfields and camps. Senior Canadian
military officers, noting how enlistments into the
CEF’s units had slowed as the war dragged on, were
pessimistic about the ability of Hoare to attract
recruits and the tradesmen needed to operate the
aircraft and the camps. But the “romance” then
attached to aviation drew in substantial numbers of
men — and women, too, for substantial numbers of
women worked as nurses, clerks, drivers and
mechanical workers. At Mohawk, for example, no
Hunt noted that a substantial number of Americans
came north to enlist, especially in the period before
their own country entered the war and its aviation
war effort became organized. Hoare was able to
follow this up by going Washington in 1917 and
striking a deal under which RFC cadets would be
transported to camps in Texas to train in winter,
when flying in Canada would have been disrupted
by cold weather and storms. (Imagine the cadets’
a snowstorm!) So persuasive was Hoare that he not
only got the Americans to accept this novel
approach, but to pay much of the cost. “They were
happy to do it because they were able to take all
the plans and develop their own air force,” Hunt
said.
That was not the only legacy of Hoare’s work. The
University of Toronto was highly supportive of
Hoare’s work and set up a school of aviation to train
cadets in the theory of flight.