Buster Brown

By Conrad Beaubien

Often through the generations there are names that come up in conversation, names of past family members that have a certain panache that accompanies their story, a bit of ‘out there’ that conjures the imagination. Sure, the details get shifted or expanded in every telling, but we like to think how it was that Great Grandma Hendrika was all of five feet tall and wore brown leather boots that laced up to her knees and smoked a thin clay pipe. Or how Uncle Alphonse, a distant cousin on my dad’s aside was a bank manager in Bailey’s Falls and kept a revolver in his top right hand office drawer. Apparently being manager back then also meant being responsible for security in the event of hold ups. Then again there might be how Uncle George’s third wife’s greataunt’s sister, Louisa, someone who never married as was generally pointed out, nevertheless became head cook for the Boundary survey crew that laid out the Canadian 49th parallel markers from Lake of the Woods westward. These bits of family recollect are passed down as a way of feeling connected to a bigger picture of ancestry and time and place.

In the trail of our family lore I was recently prompted to think of the name of Buster Brown. While I never heard his formal name mentioned, Buster is what I recall. He’s situated up there in the branches of our family tree on my mother’s side. From the point of view of a six-year-old and catching that name from time to time at family gatherings, even now I sense echoes of sadness associated with his mention all these years later. I retain only short anecdotes of his story.

So Buster, assuming that to be a nickname and whose real name is parked somewhere in the family archives, was a figure from the WWII era. Synonymous with his mention was also the name of a place that back then, was placeless in my imagination. Cherry Valley and Prince Edward County somehow was a sidebar ID that accompanied a faded black and white photo of a man apparently in his early twenties leaning against a motorcycle.

But not just any motorcycle. I have since learned from enthusiasts that the Triumph Tiger 100 was the kickass bike that won all kinds of events in Great Britain where it was built. The “100” on its signature plate was there because it could do 100 miles an hour, a record speed in its day. November 14th, 1940 changed things in the life of Buster Brown when German bombers took out the Triumph factory and its home city of Coventry England. It also took out the dream of the eighteen-year-old Buster of one day owning a “100”.

At the time, Buster lived with his family, his mother being the person known to me as Auntie Clara. They lived on Merton Street, a leafy, subdued street in a Toronto neighbourhood. When Auntie Clara visited our home in Ottawa from time to time, I recall her gentle and quiet voice, especially when she described how Toronto had street cars that ran on rails and electricity and where you could travel almost everywhere around the city. Now I think of it, it was her way of engaging the imagination of the sixyear- old introverted kid that was me.

The story as I understand it is that Buster had signed up for war service in 1940, originally in the army, but requested a transfer to the air force when he heard news of the demise of the Triumph factory that squelched his dream of maybe one day owning a Tiger 100. He was shipped off with a contingency of others from the Fort York armoury building near the Exhibition grounds in Toronto to later that day, disembark on the train platform in Picton.

From there a bus took the group up Macaulay Mountain to Picton Base where he would train with the RCAF as a wireless operator in what was then one of 150 training sites around the world, part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan that existed from 1940 to 1945.

My thoughts on the photo of Buster is that it was taken post-war, perhaps around 1950 because production at the Triumph factory had resumed and as the photo showed, Buster had reached his goal of owning a “100”. I know little of events except to say that apparently Buster was to revisit Picton base one day following the war and his service there as a way of looking back and that is where the story of Buster on a Tiger 100 ended on a bend in the road near Cherry Valley.

My recent recall of that story is related to my visit to a drill hall at what is now called Base31. The interior of the now-transformed building seems to hold an acre of hardwood flooring on which paraded young members of the Armed Forces; where was heard the sounds of cheering as games took place between Forces members and residents of the County and where today, a place whose genesis was wartime is now a place of the arts. I invite you to join us this weekend as we roll Canada’s only theatre on wheels into the cavernous space to perform an original stage play inspired by one of the County’s distinctive stories- The Boxcar Cowboy.

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