From Asbestos to the Air Force
Jack Hobbs remembers
Although he shares a name with a famous English cricketer of the early 20th century, it was cribbage (and not cricket) that Jack Hobbs learned to play when he arrived in England as a bomber pilot in 1941.
“I saw these fellows on the train playing a card game with a board and pegs,” he recalls, “and I asked what it was they were playing.”
Today, inching towards his 99th birthday on November 26, Hobbs organizes both bridge and cribbage games at the Wales Home.
His memories of the five years he spent in Europe during the war remain vivid, as do many of the other events that marked his life.
Although he was born in Toronto, Jack Hobbs is very much a Townshipper. His parents had moved to the Ontario capital for economic reasons and were there when he was born in 1918, but in 1921 , when work dried up in southern Ontario, they returned home to Sherbrooke. Immediately after, his father, who was a driller and blaster, found work in Asbestos at the Johns-manville open-pit mine.
Jack and his younger brother, Joe, grew up actively in Asbestos, playing hockey in the winter and baseball and softball in the summer. When Joe, three years Jack’s junior joined the Hussars, Jack followed suit. The Hussars allowed the Hobbs brothers to remain active one or two nights a week as well as at summer camps at Valcartier.
A few short years later, when World War II broke out, both Hobbs boys were eager to sign up, and both entered the air force.
“I was almost 20. I had a Grade 10 education and an office job at Johnsmanville,” Jack recalls. “More and more of our friends were signing up. What was holding us back was that my mother had lost her brother, Joseph Noble, in the First World War and because of that she didn’t want to see either of us in the Army.”
The dilemma was solved in July of 1940 when an Air Force recruiter arrived in Sherbrooke. The Air Force wasn’t the Army and both Jack and his brother signed up not in Sherbrooke, but in Thetford Mines, the next day. It was significant that it was their parents who drove them there.
Shortly after the Hobbs boys found themselves in Toronto.
“The Canadian National Exhibition Grounds had been taken over by the Air Force,” Jack says. “We were there for six weeks of basic training, and then, at the end of August, we went out to Regina.”
There Jack and his fellow recruits were given a battery of tests to determine their skill sets to see where they could best serve their country. “They decided that I should take pilot training,” he continues. “Both Joe and I became pilots.”
Jack was pegged as a bomber pilot as opposed to a fighter pilot. The training was quite intense. The recruits were sent up solo after only 10 hours of flying time. Soon after, they were going up to 5000 feet to start aerobatics: spins and loop the loops.
From Regina, Jack was sent to St. Eugene, a small town near Hawkesbury on the Quebec-ontario border. From there he went to Moncton, and it was there that he obtained his wings.
It was adventurous and exciting, but it wasn’t necessarily always easy.
“I was homesick at times,” Jack admits. “Before signing up I’d been to Sherbrooke and to Montreal once or twice, but I’d never really ever been away from home.”
While his brother was stationed in Nova Scotia for the duration of the war, Jack shipped out to England in 1941 as part of a convoy of 50 ships. Bad weather and a route that brought them as far north as Iceland made the trip a monthlong ordeal.
“We landed in northern Scotland,” he recalls, “and we received a royal welcome. Queen Elizabeth, who was then Princess Elizabeth greeted us in person. We were Canadians but we were going to be flying for the Royal Air Force.”
“We flew out of an airport near Tain, just 80 miles from the northernmost tip of mainland Scotland,” he continues. “It was all night flying, eight-hour, sometimes even 10-hour- long return trips to Cologne and Berlin, but also to Norway. The German Navy had stationed one of their battleships in a fjord near Trondheim in Norway and that was our target. We didn’t get it, but shortly after it was sunk.”
Jack flew a total of 16 missions. Interestingly enough, the first eight at the controls of a two-engine Woodley bomber and the last eight piloting a four-engine Halifax bomber. He recognizes how lucky he was. “On average one plane in every ten did not return.” The stress played havoc with his nerves, and in May of 1942 he was grounded.
He wanted to stay in England and he was sent on a six-week course in Wales to train as a flight control officer, the equivalent of an air traffic controller, a position he fulfilled until the end of the war.
One reason Jack preferred to remain in England rather than return to Canada in 1942 was that he had met the woman who would become his first wife in 1943.
Back home after the war, Jack picked up where he left off. As was the case with all servicemen, he returned to the position he had when he enlisted. For Jack this meant an office job at the Johns-manville mine in Asbestos, a position from which he would retire after 40 years of service.
Besides his old job, the other thing Jack went back to was music.
“My mother had seven or eight years of piano training,” Jack says, “and she did give me piano lessons for about two years, but I just wanted to go outside and play sports. I took up the piano later when Joe started taking guitar lessons. I sort of learned from him. In 1938 we were playing as a small orchestra: drums, violin, guitar, and piano. We played at the Farmers Hall in Danville. We’d play from 8:00 in the evening till 2:00 in the morning and get paid $2.50 for the night’s work.”
“After the war,” he continues, “I put another little orchestra together and we’d play the Richmond Legion and earn $10 a piece and a bottle of beer. We played weddings, receptions, other events. I did that till 1962 when a tax collector appeared at my door. Someone felt we were making too much money or taking too many jobs and reported us. I told him what we were earning, and then I showed him our expenses, and he pretty much laughed and went away.”
Although Jack says he quit playing for money after that, he has never stopped playing and piano. First at the Asbestos Legion and then at the Danville Legion, where he is a lifetime member, he continued to tickle the ivories.
Now comfortably settled at the Wales Home, he remains musically active.