Mary Beacock Fryer - Bold, Brave, and Born to Lead. Major General Isaac Brock and the Canadas

BOLD
BRAVE
AND
BORN TO LEAD

Major General Isaac Brock
and the Canadas

Mary Beacock Fryer

A BOARDWALK BOOK

A MEMBER OF THE DUNDURN GROUP

TORONTO

Copyright Mary Beacock Fryer, 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Copy-Editor: Jennifer Bergeron

Design: Jennifer Scott

Printer: Webcom

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Fryer, Mary Beacock, 1929

Bold, brave, and born to lead: Major General Isaac Brock and the Canadas/

Mary Beacock Fryer.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55002-501-5

1. Brock, Isaac, Sir, 1769-1812 Juvenile lierature. 2. Canada History War of 1812

Juvenile literature. 3. Canada History 1791-1841 Juvenile literature. 4. Generals

Canada Biography Juvenile literature. 5. Lieutenant governors Canada Biography

Juvenile literature. I. Title.

FC443.B76F79 2004 j971.032092 C2003-907197-9

1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

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Courtesy of the Government of Ontario Art Collection. Portrait by George Berthon. Photograph by Thomas Moore.

(all maps by Geoff Fryer)

Ricky Allen, Priaulx Library, St. Peter Port, Guernsey

Brockville Museum staff: Bonnie Burke,

Curator/Director, and Larry Smith,

Volunteer Archivist

Douglas M. Grant, Brockville historian

Wayne Kelly, Plaque Program Coordinator,

Ontario Heritage Foundation

Brendan Morrissey, National Army Museum,

London, U.K., for officers pay

Peter Twist, Kitchener, for major generals uniform

Gavin K. Watt, Museum of Applied Military History

Gillian Reddyhoff, Curator, Ontario Government

Art Collection

Jennifer Bergeron, Dundurn Press

Jennifer Scott, Dundurn Press

Georffrey R.D. Fryer, husband and best friend,

for the maps and the endless encouragement

S ome readers might say, Another book about the War of 1812? or Another book about Sir Isaac Brock? Why not? Perhaps I have something different to say. We have recent books on the war by Pierre Berton and Wesley Turner, for example. The only recent study of Brock is Begamudrs book Isaac Brock: Larger Than Life, published in 2000, in which he conjures up a fiance, a daughter of Aeneas Shaw named Susan.

Despite his denial, this puts Begamudr into the realm of historical fiction. I agree with C.P. Stacey, who wrote the piece on Brock in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, that there is no evidence on what ladies Brock might have been romancing in Upper Canada. That is not to deny he enjoyed the company of women, partying, and dancing. If he had a serious attachment and was entirely discreet about it, more power to him.

This work is a military history of a military man. Military history does not loom large in most historical writing for young adults.

During my days at Collegiate, the Second World War was on. We had a girls cadet corps, sister to the boys corps, where we turned out smartly for the annual inspection in the armories. By Grade 12 I had worked myself up to lieutenant. In Grade 13, as the regimental sergeant major, I had to dress the whole battalion. Later I learned that the move to RSM was a demotion, from commissioned to non-commissioned officer.

My hometown is Brockville; we were very Brock-conscious. General Brock was the name of the local chapter of the IODE. My first school was General Brock, a stone building of two storeys, with two classrooms on each storey. Prominent, next to King George V and Queen Mary, was a portrait, in profile, of General Brock.

In Court House Square is a drinking fountain of marble, above which is a bust of Brock. Halloween was an occasion for pranks. Sometimes on November 1, the police would collect the dustbin that folks with no sense of propriety had stuck over the generals head.

As I worked through the materials and the various versions of the story, I found a conflict between language usage of Brocks day and our usage nearly two centuries later. For Brock and his contemporaries, Canadian meant French-speaking. English speakers were the English or British. People of African origin were coloured. The Aboriginal people were Indians. First Nations is a more satisfactory term, since the name Indian was a mistake made by Europeans who hoped they had found the wealth of India, not an unknown stretch of two continents. I have used the terms of the time in quotes and when it is necessary for clarity.

Bust of General Brock, on the green in Court House Square, Brockville. Cast in bronze, the figure is mounted on top of a stone base with drinking fountains on either side. The monument was erected in 1912 as a centenary project of the General Brock Chapter, Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE). The sculpture was the work of Hamilton McCarthy.

Text from an article in the Recorder and Times by Douglas M. Grant; photo by M.B. Fryer.

I hope my book makes a good read, and that young adults everywhere come to appreciate Canadas military history.

MBF

T he bateau from Lachine rows slowly up the St. Lawrence River, past the blockhouse under construction below the village of Prescott. Standing in the bow is a tall, fair-haired, broad-shouldered man in the uniform of a brigadier general in the British army. He is en route to York, the tiny capital of Upper Canada, where he will assume command of all the soldiers in the province. As they near the pretty village of Elizabethtown, which bears the same name as the township that surrounds it, their ears are bombarded with quite unfriendly sounds. Shouts of derision compete with the stamping of feet on the boardwalks near the river and the shattering of glass. Here and there a shriek of pain echoes when a well-aimed rock strikes home.