Charles Johnson’s odyssey
In 1948-49 Charles Vaughan Johnson, my dad, set out on an adventure which took him to Canada, the USA and Mexico. In Mexico he met Betty Golding, my mother, so the trip was one which proved to be fundamentally life-changing for him. I came across a series of photographs which he took at the time, and presumably sent home to his parents, with comments written on the back, and as a result I can reconstruct something of his journey.
I will start with some background, based on what I remember Dad telling me. He was too young to see active service in the Second World War, and he took his A Levels equivalent during the blitz in London, often having to move into a bomb shelter to complete the papers. As the war was coming to an end he signed up in the Fleet Air Arm, where he did his compulsory military service. I gathered he enjoyed his time there and had had some flight instruction on Tiger Moth planes. He came out of the Fleet Air Arm in around 1946. There was then a bureaucratic error of some sort, and he was called up once again for military service. He then joined the Army for a couple of years. On discharge from the Army he applied for a post in the Burma Police, and was offered a place. However, shortly before he was due to leave for Burma the Burma Police were disbanded, and he was told that the job was no longer available, and some compensation was paid to him. He decided to use this compensation to pay for a trip to Canada.
I’m not entirely sure why he chose Canada. It doesn’t seem to have been his intention to emigrate there. There were family friends living in Ottawa: Sir Alexander Clutterbuck was the British high commissioner in Canada and I believe he was a friend of my grandfather’s. My mother told me once that my Dad had been friends with Sir Alexander’s daughter Anne, and there may have been a romantic element in Dad’s visit to Ottawa.
Charles, age 22, arrived in Toronto on June 13th 1948, having flown in on a Douglas C54 Skymaster (otherwise known as a DC4). I think he flew from London, but it is possible that he took a boat to New York and then flew from there. From Toronto he made his way to Ottawa, where he stayed at the High Commissioner’s residence, Earnscliffe, overlooking the Ottawa River, and also apparently spent some time at a cottage on a lake. It was while he was in Ottawa that he met Cyril Watney, who was attached to the High Commission, and who was later to become my godfather.
In the autumn, he decided to find a job for himself, and ended up working for a logging/timber company. He was based, I think, somewhere on or near Lake Simard in the Gatineau. There are a number of photos which he took during this time, including photos of the camp, of skidways for logs, of himself canoeing and one of a French Canadian Indian called Arthur Brussard who was his guide and whom he describes as ‘a most amusing companion’. He describes his job at this time as having to travel all over the area checking on logs piled up in the skidways. He had to check them for size and condition. His company’s logs were identified by a red painted blob, and had come on a long journey down the Gatineau. He says that by the end of November he had visited about 4,500 skidways. I’m not sure whether he did any actual lumberjacking, but I seem to recollect some photos (now lost) of him as part of a lumberjacking crew.
In March of 1949 he seems to have moved to Montreal, where he apparently had an office job, presumably with the same company. He lived at 3569 Lorne Ave, and according to one photo he worked in a ‘skyscraper’ building in downtown Montreal.
In May of 1949 he teamed up with three friends: Pierre Chatelanat from Switzerland, Peter Revell-Smith and Ken Morgan. They set off in a Chevrolet station wagon to explore the continent. I think the station wagon may have belonged to Pierre, but they may also have all chipped in to purchase it. I don’t know what route they took, but the photographs provide some idea of the main waypoints. On May 14th they are seen outside Columbia University in New York. Dad says on the back of the photograph “Rather liverish” from which one concludes that there was some partying the night before! On May 22nd they were sleeping out near Denver Colorado. On May 24th we see Charles floating on his back in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. On May 28th they were in San Francisco, and on June 4th they were in Los Angeles. They visited the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico on their way into Mexico proper. On July 10th they were in Cholula, Puebla, and then they went to Taxco and Acapulco. They were in Mexico City on Aug 21st to see a bullfight in the Plaza de Toros.
At some point in July or August Charles paid a visit to the British Council in Mexico City because he had run out of reading material and wanted to borrow a book (note on role of hazard). The librarian at the Council was someone called Betty Golding, and within a very short space of time the two had fallen in love with each other. There are photographs of Betty, her mother Dorothy and her brother John on the beach in Tecolutla on the Gulf of Mexico. No exact date is given, but this was also in August and Charles must have ingratiated himself with the family enough to be invited along on the family holiday. I do know that it wasn’t long after meeting Betty that Charles went to ask her father whether he could marry her. Harold, her father, must have been somewhat taken aback at the speed at which things had progressed, and of course he knew nothing at all about my father. He asked my father if he had a job, to which my father answered truthfully that at that moment he did not! Harold told my father that he couldn’t agree to the marriage until he was assured that my father could support Betty.
There are some photographs of Charles, Betty and her mother, as well as a mariachi band, taken on the patio of Kenneth Bannister’s house in San Angel. Kenneth was Betty’s uncle by marriage, and was making his fortune in the cement business in Mexico. I wonder whether the mariachi band were there to celebrate my parents’ engagement? At any rate, Kenneth used his connections in England to set my father up with a job as a trainee manage with Blue Circle, the cement company, and my dad returned to England late in 1949 to take up his job. He then returned to Mexico the following May. On May 27th, Charles and Betty were married in Christ Church, Mexico City, and then the two of them set off for England, where they lived first in Woodstock, Oxfordshire and then in Gravesend, Kent, while my father worked for Blue Circle. I was born in Gravesend on June 18th, 1951. I’m sure nothing could have been further from his mind when he set off from England three motnhs and 5 days years earlier!