Scout `angel' recalls fiery horror

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Scout `angel' recalls fiery horror

 

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Jul. 18, 2006. 06:01 AM

JIM COYLE

 

Long before there were Guardian Angels, pressing their largely unasked-for services upon a largely unreceptive city, Toronto had guardian angels of a more popular and fetching sort. And, happily, I had reader Glen Bonham to remind me.

 

Recently, after the death of a retired harbour police officer who played a role in the long-ago drama, I wrote about the burning of the cruise ship Noronic at the foot of Yonge St. in 1949, and the death of 119 passengers in an inferno that gave downtown Toronto the look of a city under siege.

 

Afterwards, though it had been "a long time since I thought about the horrors of that night,'' Mr. Bonham passed on his own recollections of the Noronic catastrophe and how he came to be involved in "a way that would never happen today.''

 

Bonham is 70 now. The night the Noronic put into port in Toronto for a short layover en route to the Thousand Islands and its final cruise of the season, he was a boy of 13. He was also a member of the 101st Boy Scout troop at Windermere United Church in the city's west end.

 

"I recall my dad shaking me awake around 2 a.m. and telling me to get dressed in my Scout uniform because we were needed at the scene of a fire,'' he said.

 

By then, the red glow in the night sky had been noticed, the first alarms sounded and frantic rescue operations had already begun as men and women, some of them ablaze, leaped from the ship into the lake.

 

World War II was not long over. The notion of boys taking on manly responsibilities was hardly a strange one. And the Boy Scouts commanded more respect then than they probably do today, when the diminutively hip and cynical seem to have outgrown childhood and idealism by age 10.

 

As soon as he was dressed, Bonham was driven by his father to the waterfront.

 

"I was to link arms with other scouts to hold back the crowds of spectators. I don't remember how many scouts were there, but I do recall holding back crowds and hearing the roar of the flames and the screams of those trapped inside the ship.''

 

"I, too, saw people jumping into the water, some in flames,'' he said. "It was a horrible experience and I guess it will forever be engraved in my memory."

 

Of course, it was not the first or last time that scouts would be called into action.

 

On the night of Hurricane Hazel in 1954, Boy Scout troops and their leaders had been gathered in church assembly halls the very image of innocence buffing apples for the next day's annual Apple Day. Over the next few days, they were joining search teams in the Humber Valley looking for bodies.

 

Scout leader Don Boyd told the historian, Jim Gifford, in his book Hurricane Hazel, that on the following Monday he took the day off work and his scouts the day off school to help out.

 

"We started off at Bloor St. and walked down (the valley) to Lake Ontario. We saw lots of destruction refrigerators and huge timbers from barns in trees. Thank goodness we didn't find any bodies.''

 

As for his part in serving the city during the Noronic blaze, Bonham said, "the interesting aspect of this to me was that it would never happen today.''

 

It's not just that youth have changed.

 

Though, true enough, many among the contemporary young would probably think it laughable to cheerfully and earnestly repeat at the prompt Dyb, Dyb, Dyb, Dyb "We'll DoB, DoB, DoB, DoB!'' (Do Your Best. We'll Do Our Best.)

 

It's more that both expectations and opportunities for them have, too.

 

It was, naturally, an old British military man, Lord Baden-Powell, veteran of India, Afghanistan and the Boer War, who founded the Boy Scouts in 1908, and two years later, with his sister, the Girl Guides, then later the Cubs. All of it was aimed at teaching the young to become good citizens, doing duty to God, their country and other people. Their motto is, famously, Be Prepared.

 

However prepared they might be, Glen Bonham said that today he couldn't "imagine Boy Scouts being called upon to assist at the scene of such a disaster.

 

"Today there would be police, EMS workers and firefighters to do the job, and I don't think it would occur to anyone to call on Boy Scouts.''

 

"I wish I knew how it was that the call came to my Dad in the middle of the night,'' he said. "And I wonder how many other dads got the same call.

 

"Perhaps it was the horror of the event that has wiped such things from my memory and I guess I'll never know.''

 

Perhaps. But memories shared do have a way of nudging the memories of others. It was a brief reminiscence about the Noronic, after all, that stirred Bonham to thoughts of events he hadn't thought of in years.

 

Maybe there are other old Boy Scouts out there with stories of how, when their city needed them, they were summoned to do man-sized jobs.

 

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Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.