Three families, one war, and a book

Life history of a signed copy of Matthew Halton's Ten Years to Alamein

A few years ago, browsing in a local thrift shop, I found a copy of Matthew Halton’s 1944 Ten Years to Alamein, signed by the author, “with best wishes to Mrs. M.O. Cox.” On the opposite page is one of those old-fashioned, elaborate papers “From the library of” in the name J.D. Cottrell, Mill Bay, B.C. This is a book with a complex history.

Matthew Halton was a prominent Canadian war correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Winter War in Finland (1939-40), and the Second World War (1939-45), among others. He wrote personal, engaged, and sometimes emotional reports of those conflicts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and the Toronto Star.

He was born in 1904 in Pincher Creek, a small community in southern Alberta, on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, near Crowsnest Pass, at the border of British Columbia. There is now a Matthew Halton High School in Pincher Creek.

Around 1929, Thomas and Margaret Cox (the M. O. Cox of the dedication), moved from Wales, with their nine year old son Ronald, to Fernie, a small town in British Columbia, across Crowsnest Pass from Pincher Creek.

Around that time, the parents of Jack Cottrell (“from the library of”) moved from Kingsley Iowa to Calgary, Alberta, a larger city to the northeast of Pincher Creek. The parents of Hazel Boggs, Jack Cottrel’s future wife, moved from Lawton, Iowa, about a 20 minute drive from Kingsley, to Daysland, a small community in central Alberta. The stage was now set for the adventures of this copy of Ten Years to Alamein. The main actors were ready to play their parts.

The book itself begins with a conversation between Halton and Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Constantinova Krupskaya, in Moscow in 1933. It ends with the successful conclusion of the British Eighth Army’s North African campaign.

It charts the prelude to a war that, according to Halton, those who used their senses could see coming. He credits his ability to chronicle those tragic events to the Toronto Star, who “paid me for ten years to go round Europe almost as I wished.”

While Halton was roaming around Europe, chasing the story he saw, covering the gathering clouds of war, and eventually the storm itself, in 1940, young Ronald Cox, at the age of 20, was joining Princess Mary’s Royal Canadian Scottish Regiment. 

That same year, Hazel Boggs received her certificate in Performance and Teaching from the Royal Conservatory of Music, and she became a teacher in Alberta schools. Jack Cottrell was a medical student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. 

Jack and Hazel were married on May 15th 1944, when Jack graduated from medical school. He then joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps until 1946, a year after the end of the war.

Three weeks after Jack and Hazel were married, on June 6th, Ronald Cox landed with the first wave on Juno Beach as part of the 7th Infantry Brigade, 3rd Canadian Infantry Division. His particular unit was tasked with taking out a bunker on that day. Somehow, like some of the others, he lived through it.

Matthew Halton was following the Canadians in the Fall of 1944, as they cleared the Scheldt estuary in Holland. Sometime in October or November, he met up with Ronald Cox. In a piece published in the Toronto Star Weekly in 1945, he tells of Corporal Ronal Cox and another Corporal volunteering to accompany a Lieutenant to attempt the flanking of a German machine gun position to rescue a man trapped behind the enemy line.

About a month before the end of the war, Cox was wounded and captured in a firefight in Germany. Shortly after the war, when he had been liberated and when he’d made it home, Matthew Halton, gave Ronald’s mother Margaret a signed copy of his new book, probably at one of the many events to honour veterans that he would have attended at that time.

In 1946, Ronald Cox moved to Nelson, BC, and met Sheila Horswill. Sometime during the summer, presumably, he took her out for an ice cream. They were married on November 16th of that year. They were both avid square dancers, and continued living in Nelson. They were married for nearly seventy years.

By May 1986, the book is in the library of Dr. Jack D. Cottrell and his wife Hazel, in Mill Bay, British Columbia. Jack’s name is in the book, but I suspect it may primarily have been Hazel’s. According to her obituary, “books were her favourite Christmas gifts.”

After the war, Jack and Hazel moved to the small town of Provost, then to the small city of Lethbridge, and finally to the big city, Calgary, in 1967. Jack qualified as a Pathologist in 1971 (after completing Internal Medicine in 1957). Hazel completed a Bachelor of Arts in French and Western Canadian History at the University of Calgary. 

They moved to Mill Bay in 1975. The Daily Colonist of October 12th 1978 describes Jack’s testimony in the inquest on the death of a 72 year old man in a local emergency ward. Jack died in 1992, and Hazel in 2013, both on Vancouver Island. 

Ronald Cox died three years after Hazel, in 2016 in Nelson, central British Columbia. His wife Sheila died earlier this year, aged 99, still in Nelson.

Matthew Halton had preceded them all in Death. He died in London, UK, in 1956, just 52 years old. By all accounts, he’d been a hard living, hard drinking reporter, and this may have contributed to his early death.

I am left wondering whether there is a connection between the Coxes and the Cottrells, and even the Haltons in Pincher Creek. A pre-existing connection could explain why Halton chose to write about Ronald Cox in Holland, and why he gave a signed book to his mother after the war. 

All three families moved to the same general area of southern Alberta and British Columbia around the same time, separated, or perhaps connected only by Crowsnest Pass. They went their different ways from there. And the book did go from Halton to the Coxes, and then to the Cottrells.

On the other hand, perhaps Hazel just picked up the book in a thrift shop in 1986, just as I did 30 years later. Jack Cottrell and Hazel were both university educated. Ronald Cox was a tradesman. Sheila worked in a hardware store and ran her own dog grooming business.

While Jack was busy specializing in internal medicine in the 1950s, Ronald was fighting a new kind of war as Third Vice President of the Woodworkers Industrial Union of Canada, then engaged in a defensive battle for certifications in BC with the invading US-based International Woodworkers of America. Jack and Hazel, and Ronald and Sheila were from different worlds and lived very different lives, although they never lived very far away from each other, and their lives were channeled by the same historical currents. They all died in the same province.

One thing gives me pause. There is a picture of Matthew Halton in an envelope pasted on the inside back cover of the book, labeled “photo of Matt. Halton & others”, and cut out of a magazine marking the 50th anniversary of the CBC, which would have been in 1986, the year the book is first attested in the library of Jack and Hazel. The “Matt.” has a personal touch and it suggests a personal interest, or perhaps even a connection. If there is one, I haven’t found it.

There are many lessons in the story of this book, about the way life takes its own course, regardless of what we plan, or what we do. About the way we intersect with each other and together accidentally build a coherent history, even though we will never individually know our part in it, or that it is even a coherent story at all.

In his conclusion, Halton acknowledges this interconnectedness, this world web, which connects us, but also makes us responsible for each other: “If there is hunger in Timbuctoo it breeds trouble which will soon intimately concern the people of Yorkshire or Wisconsin.”

With his closing words, Halton gives us the moral of the story. It resonates as much now as it did in 1944. Comparing the realists of the 30s, such as Chamberlain, whose mistakes led to the Second World war, and the “wild dreamers” for a peaceful future, such as Henry Wallace, who would soon be shoved aside on the world stage of power politics, he writes: “If these wild dreams do not come true this will be only the second world war, not the last, and the world of our children will be a darkling plain.”