In Memoriam
I never knew Robbie Nicholl. And yet, he was a presence in my childhood, and has been all my life.
Robbie was my father's childhood friend. A couple of years older than my father, he protected him and provided a role model for what my father might be and do.
But Robbie, too, was the father of my childhood friend, Bobbie Nicholl, named after his father.
Yet still, I knew him not. Robbie was killed in Sicily on the 25th of July, 1943. I was seven months old. His son, my friend Bobbie, was not yet born.
Robbie was born at Waskatenau in Alberta, Canada in 1920. My father was born there a couple of years later. Their parents (Will and Annie Nicholl and Frank and Elsie Scott, respectively) were pioneers of the Canadian west. They lived a couple of miles away from each other, which was close in those times at that place, and they grew up together. Dad remembers Robbie, in particular, as the guy who looked after him in scrapes. Dad also tells the story of the time that Robbie walked across the bridge at Waskatenau, walking on the rail of the barrier, at the side of the bridge
When war was declared by Canada in September of 1939, Robbie was old enough to enlist and he joined immediatly, becoming an artilleryman in the 3rd Field Regiment of the Royal Canadian Artillery (RCA), in Edmonton.
My father was too young to join and it was only two years later in 1941 that he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Robbie went to England in 1940, my father in January of 1942 . The Canadian Army in England was not involved in much other than training (except for the raid on Dieppe which resulted in major Canadian casualties) until the Operation Torch invasion of Sicily in July of 1943. Robbie spent his time in England in the Kent area and eventually met and married Nellie. When Operation Torch was activated, the 3rd Field Regiment of Edmonton was part of the force and he shipped out. By this time Nellie was pregnant with their son, who would be named Robert Gunn Nicholl, after his father, and who has always been "Bobbie Nicholl" to me.
The Torch Landings were on 11 July 1943. Two weeks later Robbie Nicholl was killed, near Nissoria, by counter-battery artillery fire. Unusually, this action is recorded in the war diaries of the 3rd Field Regiment and of the 19th Battery (which mentions him by name) in sufficient detail that we know the time and location of Robbie's death as well as what he was doing at the time.
I said that Robbie has always been a part of my life. Those of us who were born to Canadian military personnel in Britain during WWII have, I think, always had a different sense of 'being Canadian'. Our mothers were not from Canada. Our fathers. while Canadian, acquired British ways during the war, which made them always a little different. And, too, some of us, like my friend Bobbie, lost fathers in that war and that was different in Canada, which, although it lost many sons, did not lose many fathers.
I remember, as a child, visiting, with Bobbie, Grandpa and Nannie Nicholl (for so I called Will and Ann Nicholl, Robbie's parents). And I remember when Nannie would reverently bring out some of Robbie's things for us to see; parts of his uniform, his bugle moluthpiece, and various pieces of paper which I did not understand). It was different and it was special to see these things. And it was with an aura of reverence that Nannie would show us these things and with which we would view them. And it was with reverence that I viewed them, trying to understand what they meant.
So it was with a special sense of having accomplished a childhood task, and a man's responsibility, that I stood before Robbie's grave this spring, at Agira in Sicily, . . .and I wept. . .and I weep now as I remember those moments at Agira and think on the great sadness and tragic cost of war.