Combat photographer one of Canada’s last witnesses to D-Day
Ottawa’s Charlie Beddoe watched D-Day unfold on Juno Beach through the viewfinder of his film camera.
Beddoe, then a 24-year-old combat cameraman, was in a gunboat about 500 metres from shore while bombers streaked overhead, naval guns pounded the Normandy coast, and Canadian soldiers streamed past in landing craft, bracing for their moment on history’s stage.
“You could see the anxious, intense look on all their faces,” Beddoe recalled in a two-hour interview with the Citizen last year when he was then among the precious few Canadians who could offer an eyewitness account of the D-Day operation, the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Beddoe died earlier this month at the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre. He was 98.
“He was an extraordinary, ordinary man — if that makes any sense,” said his son, William Beddoe. “He was a man of great honesty, integrity, generosity and humility with an active, curious and orderly mind, and a tremendous memory.”
Beddoe was classified as a “super-ager” because of his ability to recall precise names, dates and details late into his 90s. At a recent family gathering, he recalled in order the address of every house and apartment he had ever lived in during his long life.
“We just sat there gape-mouthed: His memory was phenomenal,” said his daughter, Margaret Lawrence. “And he could still beat the pants off any of us in Scrabble.”
Charlie Beddoe was born on Jan. 27, 1920 at The Ottawa Maternity Hospital, which as he rightly recalled used to stand at the corner of Rideau and Wurtemburg Streets. His father, Alan, a First World War veteran, was an accomplished athlete and painter who owned one of the city’s largest commercial art studios.
Growing up, Charlie found classrooms tedious and preferred the outdoor study of nature and people. He was, he said, “just drifting along” when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. He enlisted in the navy and was activated for service in June 1940.
A disappointed Beddoe was first assigned to naval headquarters in Ottawa. But the boredom that ensued would change his life: Beddoe studied photography while waiting to hand-deliver messages to senior officers. He was eventually assigned to an armed merchant cruiser on the Pacific coast, HMCS Prince David, and became the ship’s photographer.
Beddoe’s work brought him attention and he trained as a combat photographer before being sent overseas in December 1943 as a member of the navy’s photo unit. He survived several close encounters.
In April 1944, he was assigned with three other members of the navy film unit to the HMCS Athabaskan, a new Canadian destroyer. But Beddoe reasoned that it made more sense to separate the fourman crew and so he volunteered to travel with a sister ship, HMCS Haida.
That night, on April 29, 1944, while patrolling the English Channel near the French coast, the Athabaskan and Haida engaged two German destroyers trying to break through the Allied blockade. During the ensuing battle, the Athabaskan was struck with a torpedo and its ammunition magazine exploded.
“It was a horrible, sickly, ghastly sound,” Beddoe said of that moment. The ship sank quickly, taking with it 128 sailors, including Beddoe’s two film unit colleagues.
He was also in London when German V1 rockets terrorized the city during the latter half of 1944. Beddoe helped pull people — dead and alive — from buildings destroyed in his Haymarket neighbourhood.
His final assignment of the war was on board HMCS Huron, which sailed as part of a supply convoy in April 1945 for Murmansk, Russia. The Arctic Ocean convoys were often the target of German attacks. Near the Russian coast, Beddoe was standing at the ship’s stern when he saw a torpedo flash through the water. He alerted the bridge, and the Huron had to make a series of high-speed, evasive manoeuvres to escape.
“I was lucky again, lucky again,” Beddoe said.
After the war, Beddoe went to work for the National Film Board, then did film and photographic work for a news service and several federal government departments.
In the summer of 1954, he met Louise FitzGerald at a tea party on the Gatineau River, and returned to the same cottage for three consecutive days. On the fourth day, on the Wakefield covered bridge, he proposed. They married the following year, bought a house on Browning Avenue and raised three children. He loved spending time in nature, with gadgets of all kinds and his sizable clock collection.
“He had quite an eclectic mix: from cuckoo clocks to little battery-operated clocks to wind-up clocks,” Lawrence said. “He was very satisfied by getting a clock that wasn’t working up and running.”
Beddoe died one month after his wife, Louise, who also lived at the Perley and Rideau for the final year of her life.