The Ted Barris Interview: Part 1 | The Miramichi Reader

Ted Barris, Canadian writer, journalist, professor, and broadcaster is the author of twenty-two books, many of which focus on Canada’s military history. His most recent book Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen in their Finest Hour explores the history of the Canadians who were involved in the Battle of Britain. He is currently working on a new book about the history of the Avro Arrow.

We sat down on June 3rd for a delightful online conversation about his career, his latest book, and about the 80th anniversary of World War II. Here is part I of my interview with Ted Barris. This interview has been edited for length and for clarity.

Christina Barber
Your career parallels in many ways journalist and storyteller Pierre Berton’s. Reading your work, I am often reminded of his ability to find a good story, and to present the Canadians at the heart of that story. In your earlier career as a writer your focus was more centred on non-military history: Steamboats, Hockey, Music, and Cowboys. How did you find your way to writing these stories? And what was the catalyst that led you to write so extensively on WWII in the last ten-fifteen years?

Ted Barris
I was hosting a show on CBC Radio called the Saturday Morning Show, and of course it was on Saturday morning and every once in a while because he had a new book coming out, Pierre Berton would roll through. And nobody wanted to talk to Pierre because he’s a force. Or he was. I mean, the man was tall, broad, sometimes loud and always, always authoritative. And so you didn’t want to challenge him on any of his knowledge or his research or his books. I relished the idea of delving into how he got his stories and why he did all this stuff anyway.

By that time, around 1980, I had published my first book called Fire Canoe and it was published by McClelland & Stewart. This is the story of the extraordinary link between the four original provinces that came just before confederation, and how steamboats were that magic link between the eastern provinces and the amalgamation of the West; kind of like our own Manifest Destiny.

Anyway, I pitched the idea to the Canada Council who thought this is really kooky, we’ll give him $5000, in 1974, to travel across the Prairies to talk to people about the steamboat era that lasted from 1859 into the early 20th century. Anyway, so I get this grant. I start toddling around interviewing all these wonderful people about steamboats in the late 1800s. All of a sudden I got a call from McClelland & Stewart office West.

There was an office in Calgary and I talked to a guy named David Scollard. He was the then editor in the McClelland & Stewart office West, and he said “We’ve heard about your getting a grant to do a book about steamboats. Have you got a publisher?” I said “No.” I sent them some samples, and lo and behold, McClelland & Stewart decided to publish the book.

Now I didn’t know this at the time, but apparently it had to go from Calgary to Toronto, in front of an editorial board, which meant that Jack McClelland and a bunch of his editors and a bunch of his writers, including Margaret Atwood and others. I can’t remember who else, I think Farley Mowat. It was connected anyway. Berton was on the board, and when Berton read the proposal for this wacky book about steamboats, he said to Jack, “We have to publish this book!”

So years later I got the chance to say to him, “Pierre, I owe you a great deal.” And he said, “What do you mean?” And I explained and he said, “Oh yeah, I have a memory of that.” And so he and I became fast friends.

He was a contemporary of my dad’s, Alex Barris. Dad and he were writers, journalists, broadcasters, authors but had different paths, but they had crossed each other’s paths because Dad wrote a show called Front Page Challenge and Pierre was one of the panelists. Anyway, that friendship lasted a long, long time. Until, you know, just before he passed, but I am always indebted to Pierre and indebted to the kind of writing he did.

Now I don’t write the same way as Pierre. In Pierre’s approach to history, he is a presence in every one of his books. You know that it’s like Pierre is sitting you down and saying, “I’m going to tell you a story, you’ve probably never heard of and you won’t believe, but I’m gonna make you believe it. And he would tell that story, whether it was Klondike or War of 1812, or The National Dream. And what he did was he took you into the boots and the clothes and the houses and the battlefields and the trains and all of the experiences that the people in his books lived. And you had a sense that you could close your eyes, reach out and touch the people that Pierre’s stories were about.

I wanted to do the same thing, so he was in many ways my fairy godfather guiding me; and he had no other guiding influence on my work aside from that moment when he gave my first book the blessing. Then, years later, we actually met when Fire Canoe, that first book was published. I was allowed to join the Writers Union and I worked with Pierre on making sure that nonfiction writers had as good a shake in the contract world as fiction writers did. And I was really, you know, coasting on his coattails, working with the Writers Union of Canada, campaigning for nonfiction writers.

So, he was a dear, dear friend, a great influencer of my work, and gave me the entree into nonfiction writing of a military nature. Because Fire Canoe does have military overtones that I would never have otherwise had.

Christina Barber
Your father, Alex Barris, was also a journalist. What was that like growing up privy to such a milieu and what effect did it have on your choices? You also co-wrote a couple of books with him, including the first edition of Days of Victory. What was that experience like for you?

Ted Barris
It was great fun. It was wonderful. Let me tell you about the last chapter of creating it. Dad and I actually launched the book on VE Day 1995, the 50th anniversary of VE Day on the deck of the HMCS Haida in Toronto Harbour, where they allowed us to fire the gun over Toronto harbour. And we had many of the men and women whom we’d interviewed for the book on the deck with us, enjoying champagne and hors d’oeuvres while we fired these guns.

And then literally the day it was published, May the 8th 1995, it hit #1 on The Globe and Mail bestseller list. So there was Alex Barris and Ted Barris Days of Victory: Canadians Remember 1939 to 1945, best seller, The Globe and Mail number one with our names on it and there’s no more thrilling moment than to be honoured with your old man.

Now to go back. I got curious about veterans when I was in public school. I had a great school teacher, a grade five teacher named Mike Lock. In fact, Days of Victory is is dedicated to him. He got me excited about reading history, listening to history, his stories about history, and he actually got me interested in veterans as a kid.

But my first real foray into military was a book called Behind the Glory, which is a book about instructors in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). And again, it was a kind of a quirky book because nobody knew anything about the BCATP. Most people knew even less about instructors who had actually trained a quarter of a million men in this country for aircrew trades. And I went off on this wonderful tangent to search all this stuff out.

The book was a sleeper; It sold out within the first printing in September of 1992. And they couldn’t print the new second edition fast enough for them to keep up with it. It was published by Macmillan at that point and Macmillan thought that’s a quirky little book. Well, you know, we’ll print a few thousand copies and it’ll be fine. Well, they ran out of copies within weeks and they had to rush a new printing.

Dad didn’t realize how fascinated I was with veteran stories. Dad and I were fast friends. We were best pals and he had intimated that he had some of his own experiences in the war. What he realized with the publication of Behind the Glory was how deadly serious I was about listening to the veterans whose stories were the heart of my books. When the follow up book to Behind the Glory, which was Days of Victory, came up, it was actually Dad’s idea.

Dad said, hey, why don’t we do a book together? We’ll spread out across the country. You know, most of Western Canada. I’ll go to the east and we’ll do a bunch of interviews and we’ll come back and we’ll write this book. Well, we sold the idea to Macmillan. This was for the first edition of the book, and dad went off and, you know, went from Montreal to Saint John’s and I went from Winnipeg to Victoria and we came back with hours and hours and hours and hours, I mean, I already had lots to begin with, but we had hundreds of hours, and then the two of us sat down and we thought, what have we done?

This is extraordinary, but it’s madness and the other mad part about it was that he didn’t know how passionate I was about these stories, and I didn’t know how much he knew about these stories. And then the marriage of the two writers, all those voices and all that history in one room created Days of Victory and I think the magic of it was we got closer to veterans’ experiences than anybody else had bothered to do at that point (1995).

And we illustrated together the power of those voices. And I think we were both blown away by that, but the joy of the book was watching Dad not just paint the pictures of the stories he gathered from the veterans, but I recognize that his voice was gluing this all together, that his experience as a veteran of the Second World War made those voices he’d listened to all the more powerful. Whereas mine being a fresh, you know, wet behind the ears, military historian chasing across the prairies, I came back with just as much energy in the material I had. And I learned from Dad as to how to interpret their stories, and he learned from me how to spin them into the stories that people of that particular time would pick up and read.

Christina Barber
When I read your work, I am always struck by the people you choose to represent events. Referring now to your most recent book Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen in Their Finest Hour, you have a real knack for finding the just so stories of ordinary people in extraordinary times; take the story of Jill Brown, the young girl who was to be sent to Canada to escape the bombing, narrowly escaping death three times, or that of Dorothy Firth, the young woman who served on the fire brigade, dowsing incendiary bombs before they could ignite everything around them.

When you’re researching, do you just know when you’ve found the right person? Or do you have to spend more time with them, deciding who gets into your book?

Ted Barris
I think it was in either Whitby or Oshawa and I think I had done a talk on maybe the Dam Busters or the Battle of the Atlantic, and I mentioned that I was doing some work on the Battle of Britain. And, you know, I asked if anybody in the audience maybe had a lead on somebody. Two women in that audience came forward and said, yeah, there was someone you might be interested in. And one of them was Jill. She was the one who lived on the Isle of Wight. She talked about how suddenly the war was on her doorstep and you know the barbed wire fences went up and the concrete blocks to keep an invasion from happening was happening right in front of her.

So she couldn’t go down to the beach anymore and all that stuff. Her dad ran a bus company on the island and she witnessed the attacks the Luftwaffe made in the earliest part of the Battle of Britain on the merchant navy and literally off her front porch kind of thing.

Christina Barber
Wasn’t it her Piano teacher’s house that was blown up?

Ted Barris
No, that was the other woman. That was the woman who grew up in London and she was in the place called Bartlett or something. She moved down to Kent and it was there that the woman’s house was blown up. But she was the other woman I met that day. Yeah, the two of them coincidentally had extraordinary stories. And what was fabulous about meeting them was not only that they were Canadians, they had become Canadians after the war emigrated here. Not only did they have an interesting Canadian perspective, they allowed me to give readers not just a sense of the Battle of Britain in the air, but the Battle of Britain on the ground.

So Jill’s family, recognizing that she’s sitting there literally at the front row of the Battle of Britain, They had to get her and her two siblings the hell out of there. And so they agreed to allow her to travel north, to I think Liverpool, where they got on the first of the ships that they left on and it was torpedoed off of the coast of Ireland, fortunately it didn’t sink, so they were brought back, all the way back down home to their homes.

She comes back to the south and they made arrangements to get her on the next ship, and the next ship is the City of Benares. And they all got the tickets to go. But one of the kids in the group, not just in Jill’s family, but in the group that had survived the first sinking. Somebody came down with chickenpox or something and they were quarantined and they missed the City of Benares. It’s a good thing because the City of Benares was sunk and all hands lost and so the family decided that’s it, we’ve tempted fate twice. You’re staying here, Jill. And so the only thing she regretted was on the first sinking, she lost her teddy bear.

These are stories that you don’t look for, they come to you, but people keep saying to me, Ted, you’re a magnet; you know, these things come to you because it’s destined to be. I don’t believe in any of that. I’m not into hocus pocus and fate and religion, I’m not a spiritualist, but somehow the flukes of the past lead you to the people you meet, the stories you write, the books that you publish, the speaking that you do.

But sometimes, as the case of Dorothy Firth you kind of miss the forest for the trees. I knew about Dorothy and her being a fire-watcher because her daughter is a friend of mine. She told me about going to work every day on the commuter train, which occasionally got bombed going into the city when she was on her way to Barclay’s Bank. She told me about how she worked down in the city at Waterloo Station, helping feed soldiers as a volunteer. When they were passing through the station she served up coffee and donuts and food. She talked about how when she got back home, she would work with an entertainment troupe. There was an anti aircraft battery near Richmond, Surrey, where she lived in London and so they would go out to the battery and there were probably fifty or sixty men there and so they entertained them with kooky songs, skits, jokes and clowning around to help entertain the boys. And all of that came to life in my conversation with her.

And when I shut down my recording device and I left thinking I had all these great stories of how Dorothy had contributed as a volunteer, had battled through the war, unable to go to school because the schools and all the universities were all closed. She couldn’t get into the army, the Navy, Air Force. And so she did all this other volunteer work. And then I went back to a story that I had originally found on her to cross reference some of Helen’s suggestions, and there was a little reference to her having been a fire-watcher, and I didn’t ask her about that, so, I went back, and I said, Dorothy, you’ve been holding out on me. I want to know about this fire- watching stuff. Well, she gave me another hour on the fire watcher stuff, which was absolutely brilliant. And then I actually went back and did a video interview with her, which I use in my presentations. And there’s a wonderful moment in the interview when she talks about the horrible uniform she had to wear and how she had a bucket of sand and a shovel and a stirrup pump. And she was fighting incendiary bombs that would burn at, you know, 4500°F and she’s challenging them with a stirrup pump. And then, she said, but I wasn’t very good at that. And I thought if you lasted 57 days with a bucket of sand and a stirrup pump fighting incendiary bombs, 13,000 of them every night, you know, thrown down, you’re pretty special, that’s pretty courageous. You should have been getting the OBE for that.

Christina Barber
The stories of many of these people must have been a real gift to you as a writer. The Guinea Pig Club and their Canadian doctor who pioneered plastic surgery techniques during the war stand out, as does Elsie MacGill, ‘Queen of the Hurricanes’, and the perennially ambitious Lord Beaverbrook. What is it like for you to engage with these historical figures?

Ted Barris
Well, each one of the people you’ve mentioned [is a gift]. Take Elsie MacGill, I mean, I don’t understand why we don’t have a full course on her life because not only did she do what she did in the building of those forty Hurricanes in Fort William in 1938-39 and then deliver them in time for the Battle of Britain, she went on later, after the war, she was an educator, she was on the federal status of women committee. She was a force to be reckoned with, and yet largely ignored by Second World War historians, I came across with one exception. I came across a book and I should get the author’s name for you.* He did a book about her, and I got permission from him to follow a few of the leads and use a couple of references that he pulled. But for me, the story was how she had from nowhere in the 1920s emerged as an engineer in a man’s world. (*Dick Bourgeois-Doyle’s Her Daughter the Engineer)

Here was a woman who broke glass ceilings before we even knew the phrase.

And how could that story beautifully meld with the Battle of Britain? Because Lord Beaverbrook created what were called shadow factories for the building of fighter aircrafts in the lead up to and during the Battle of Britain. The big problem they faced in the Battle of Britain was losing pilots and planes and Beaverbrook turned the industry on its head. Going from a time when the monthly expectation for the production of Spitfires and Hurricanes was somewhere around 250 and they weren’t even getting as many as 150 built, and in literally in a month or two turning it around so he was exceeding the 250 desired and up into the three hundreds. To help to do that, he created these factories that the Germans didn’t even know about. I mean, there were two major factories in the South which were bombed all the time by the Germans, because they knew the Supermarine Spitfire factory and the Hawker Hurricane factories were not far from London. But Beaverbrook realized if he secretly had other factories building, and one of them was clearly the one in Fort William, across the ocean building Hurricanes, they could be done virtually unharmed. And so the job fell to Elsie MacGill, who was second in command and is the first woman in North America in 1929 to graduate as an aeronautical engineer, and then gets picked up by other companies and ends up at Fort William, essentially leading the assembly line building these Hawker Hurricanes in time to get them to the Battle of Britain. I mean, if she’d been an American, there would have been a Betty Davis movie about her, you know?

This is a story that I knew had to be part of this book because even though she’s 3000 miles from the battle in the air over Britain, she was an integral part of it because of what she did.

Ted Barris is an accomplished author, journalist and broadcaster. As well as hosting stints on CBC Radio and regular contributions to The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and various national magazines, he is a full-time professor of journalism at Centennial College in Toronto. Barris has authored 17 non-fiction books, including the national bestsellers Victory at Vimy and Juno. He currently lives in Toronto.

Publisher: Sutherland House Books (September 3, 2024)
Hardcover 9″ x 6″ | 424 pages
ISBN: 9781990823930

Christina Barber

Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.