Toronto lawyer Patrick Shea was at the Remembrance Day ceremony at Osgoode Hall when he first heard it.
“Never called.”
The phrase followed the names of 60 Ontario law students killed in France and Belgium in the First World War.
“It sort of stuck in my head,” he says.
In early 2013, he wrote to the Law Society of Upper Canada and proposed the idea for the centenary of the First World War — a chance to “provide these men and their families what the fates denied them almost 100 years ago.”
Shea began visiting memorials at law societies, locating relatives online, and making cold calls.
“Sometimes you can hear it in their heads: who is this crazy guy?” he says.
Shea is a commercial lawyer specializing in insolvency. He used to be a reserve member for the Canadian Forces. For the last two years, he has been researching and digging through files to write comprehensive biographies of these law students.
“With some of them you can tell the family has been through them before,” he says of the records in Ottawa. “Then you find that one file that no one has touched since it was put into the box all those years ago, an envelope that has never been opened.”
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In 1914, the minimum age for admission to be a law student in Ontario was 16. High school students had to serve as a clerk for a lawyer for five years, university graduates for three years.
“Overall it’s quite moving to look at the pictures, they’re very young men,” says law society treasurer Janet Minor, who called the project “extremely impressive.”
The law students will be given honorary calls to the bar this November at the law society’s Remembrance Day ceremony.
Shea has found many descendants, but some of the men were the last of their family.
Ambrose Harold Goodman was the grandson of Marmaduke Matthews, who built some of the first homes in Toronto’s Wychwood Park. When he was a boy, Goodman dumped his goldfish bowl into Taddle Creek pond. The law student and only child was wounded in the Battle of Amiens and died of his wounds in France, 21 years old.
“The story goes, he dumped his goldfish bowl into the pond, and the goldfish, several generations later, still live in the pond,” Shea says.
Truth is not romantic
In 100 years, many stories have become the stuff of lore.
Take law student Matthew Maurice “Sonny” Wilson. After he died in France, his mother supposedly threw his revolver into the Thames River in Chatham, Ont., so it “could never kill again.”
The truth was less romantic, as great-nephew Fred Hall relates. The gun had been taken to a gunsmith so it would never discharge again, and it was later destroyed by the police. When Hall explained this to his aunt, she became very upset — she had believed the bridge story her entire life.
“They twisted things to suit themselves or to make themselves feel comfortable with the story,” Fred Hall says. “They didn’t want to be open and honest about the past.”
Sonny was “the unspoken ghost in the room” when Fred, now 68, was growing up. “It was difficult to get any information out of my grandmother.”
His grandmother, Meta Hall, was Sonny’s eldest sister. Sonny had been the baby of the family, born 10 years after his two sisters who survived infancy. Sonny and his sisters grew up in one of Chatham’s finest homes, featuring two lanes of five-pin bowling in the basement, a ballroom on the third floor, and a life-size stained glass window of Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine.
Their father Matthew Wilson — a man who went by “Matt” — was an authority in municipal law, the president of the Western Bar Association for the Province of Ontario. He was a religious man who in his will bequeathed $3,000 for the Gideons for hotel bibles, $6,000 for bibles printed in foreign languages for new immigrants to Canada, and $600 for prizes for regular attendance at Sunday school, among other religious donations.
Biographies are full of praise for the brilliant and rapid-speaking Matthew Wilson, K.C. — an upright, likable, smart guy.
In the oral history there is a yarn or two about a man who didn’t like to be outsmarted, a detail-oriented lawyer with a “somewhat vindictive” streak in him, Fred says. He had timber investments in the United States and once found himself on the end of a bad deal — the particulars are hazy, but he owed a business partner approximately five million feet of lumber. He had it cut into five million pieces before shipment, Fred’s brother Geoff says.
Letters kept by the family show that Matt relished the role of adviser to his only son. He believed that one day Sonny would take over for his law practice.
At 17, Sonny enrolled at Trinity College at the University of Toronto. As Canada’s first contingent began gathering at Valcartier, Que., in September 1914, he was admitted as a law student, articling under his father.
His father was in Ireland when war broke out — and worried he might not be able to return home.
“If I fail to get home, & if you have passed, get right on with your university course as you & I talked over. Then take law if you desire it, & clients will not have forgotten me or my reputation. If you take law, then ask the Executors to keep my library so you can have it either for nothing or at a nominal price,” he wrote to his son.
In 1915, Sonny was appointed lieutenant with the Chatham-area battalion.
As the battalion prepared to go to England, his father passed along advice, imagining his son would have time to go to the theatre, hear great speakers, and take train trips “here and there” during training.
“You of course will need some money in London and I thought that you were warned of this long ago so that you would be saving money for that purpose,” Matthew wrote to his son in March 1917, in timeless fatherly prose. “Now the $200. I cheerfully give to you, but upon the express condition that you keep a strict account habit and get it in youth, and you must stop lending money which as you see now you need for yourself.”
He told his son that while he was in London for training, he should take in the theatre — useful for courtroom oratory — but not spend wastefully.
Before the battalion left Canada in 1917, Sonny was declared surplus: There were too many officers and the young lieutenant was going to be left behind.
Sonny wanted to serve, so he gave up his commission and became a private. The boat was held up for six hours in harbour to “enable Private Wilson to go on board,” the local paper reported, noting that he could have returned to law school, but he wanted to be with the men he had trained with.
“That one act showed the spirit of this young man,” the paper noted.
He was given his commission back in England before he went into action with the 18th Battalion on the Arras front in France in 1918.
On Oct. 10, 1918, 21-year-old Sonny was part of the final advance eastward, known as the One Hundred Days. As a lieutenant, he was leading an attack in a town called Iwuy, between Cambrai and Valenciennes.
“The (Canadian) barrage was not good,” the war diary notes of the battalion’s advance — saying that the company’s progress was slowed by their own shells “breaking” just ahead of them. Wilson’s name appears in typed letters, a casualty from the day’s fighting.
Sonny was one of the first to reach Iwuy, and was hit by a high-explosive shell that shattered his left leg, according to a letter by an Irish relative serving overseas. An intense counterattack followed.
“ … the place was so swept by fire that they could not recover him for several hours and when they did drive the Germans off and got him, he seemed to be still cheerful on his way back from the field,” Maj. Charles Wilson wrote the family in December 1918, noting that Sonny died later that day at a medical station behind the lines.
In Chatham, Matt Wilson was eviscerated by grief.
“Here’s this rich and powerful guy with the shining-light son who was going to follow in his footsteps, and it all comes crashing down,” Geoff Hall says.
“Mr. Wilson found it very difficult to reconcile himself to the loss of a son in whom he had such great hopes for the future,” the local Chatham paper reported upon his death in 1920. “While he struggled heroically to overcome the shock of the great disappointment which it brought into this life, his son’s death had an effect upon his health and undoubtedly hastened the end.”
Although Sonny’s map, pistol and binoculars survived, there are no letters from the younger Wilson — the family isn’t sure what became of them. There is no glistening legal career, no landmark cases, no memorable courtroom arguments.
“I’ve always felt for him and wondered what life would have been like for him and the family and what difference he would have made,” says his great-niece Meta Hall.
An unlikely family reunion
Kelsey Wilson, a video editor at the Star, received an email from Patrick Shea last September. He had discovered her on Sonny’s family tree on Ancestry.ca.
Sonny is Kelsey’s second cousin three times removed. She found small pieces of his story online — but then the trail went cold.
Her parents knew that they were in some way related to the Hall family, and Kelsey’s mother introduced herself. Geoff and his siblings had a treasure trove of information — old maps, binoculars, family letters. It was weird, Kelsey says, how quickly they became family.
“If it hadn’t been for Patrick (Shea) then we wouldn’t have met all these people and have all these new relatives,” she says.
“You run into people you never knew existed because of this, this one person’s tragedy,” Geoff Hall says.
The descendants plan to come to Toronto for the Nov. 10 service.
“Osgoode Hall has done a wonderful thing by recognizing these young men,” says Meta. “One hundred years after their deaths, their names will not just be remembered, but remain connected with the values they held dear of duty, honour, and self-sacrifice for a cause.”
Beginning this year, Sonny will have a new distinction after his name: “honorary call.”
“Never called,” never again.
