Meet “150 Neighbours,” and be inspired by the stories of those who work tirelessly to enhance community for all residents in a way that makes this uniquely Scarborough, and uniquely Canada.

“150 Neighbours” is a photo-documentary series marking Canada’s sesquicentennial, celebrating local accomplishments as part of our national festivities. This social-media driven and crowd-sourced campaign has featured 150 Scarborough community and nation builders—past and present—over 150 days, from Saturday July 1^st to Tuesday November 28^th.

For more information about the “150 Neighbours” doc and a short feature about the invitation to join, go to: http://www.150neighbours.ca/ted-barris/

The Hermitage Ballroom at the Best Western Mariposa Inn was the room with the Sir John A view Saturday night.

The 19th annual Sir John A Macdonald Celebration was once again sold out, with approximately 200 people on hand to show their support for the Orillia Museum of Art and History while feting one of the Fathers of Confederation.

The celebration took on an added significance this year, as 2017 not only marks the 150th anniversaries of both Confederation and the incorporation of Orillia, but also the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, pointed to as pivotal moment in making Canada the nation it is today.

That made Ted Barris a fitting speaker for the evening. He has written extensively on the country around the time of Confederation, as well as specifically on Vimy, in 2007’s Victory at Vimy.

Read the full story: http://www.orilliapacket.com/2017/01/15/celebrating-sir-john-in-orillia

On December 30, 2016, RCAF Association News website announced:

“As 2016 comes to a close, the RCAF Association would like to wish its members, partners and other industry professionals a safe and happy holiday season. As we reflect on the past year for the industry, we would like to provide the readers of the RCAF Assocation News a look at the most accessed articles from the year…”

Among them was “Bringing the Hally home,” published by the National Post.

Read the full story at: http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/ted-barris-bringing-the-hally-home

By Dave Johnson (Erie Media)

On the night of March 24, 1944, 80 Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 400-foot long tunnel, escaping Stalag Luft III, a POW camp near Sagan, Poland.

Of those 80 men, including Canadians, British, Poles, Greeks, Australians and others, only three — two Norwegians and a Dutch pilot — successfully escaped.

The remaining 77 were caught by the Germans, and of those, 50 were murdered by the Gestapo on the orders of Adolf Hitler.

The Great Escape, as it was known, was considered the greatest prison breakout in the history of the Second World War.

And, despite what the Hollywood movie of the same name would have everyone believe, it was not planned and carried out by Americans. No one escaped by motorcycle or plane and the 50 murdered men were not all shot at the same time.

“Hollywood never let facts get in the way of telling a good story,” Canadian author Ted Barris told a packed house at Readings at Roselawn Thursday evening.

Barris wrote The Great Escape: A Canadian Story, and told the real story of how Canadians were behind it all.

The Great Escape, the third most popular war film, has stars like Richard Attenborough as a British soldier who masterminds the whole plan, with Charles Bronson as a Polish trench-digging expert, James Garner as an American with a talent for theft, Donald Pleasence as a master forger, and Steve McQueen as an American rebel.

“Hollywood would have us believe the tunnel king was Charles Bronson … it was Wally Floody from Chatham, Ont., not a Polish RAF officer”

Barris said Floody worked gold and ore mines of northern Ontario, and it was there he learned his tunnelling skills.

The real scrounger in the escape from Stalag Luft III was Barry Davidson, of Calgary, who had offered to fly for Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese.

Davidson had learned to fly well before the Second World War.

Tony Pengelly, of Truro, Nova Scotia, Barris said, was the master forger in the operation, and flew all manner of planes when he was with the RAF.

Barris revealed a local connection to the Great Escape during his talk.

He said Gordon Kidder, of St. Catharines, who was one of the 50 officers murdered by the Germans, was instrumental in teaching other escapees German.

One day before his talk, Barris had been in Poland at the former POW camp with Kidder’s nephew.

“It was a moving time.”

He said the Great Escape was actually years in the making.

Many of those involved in the action had been in other POW camps and had made many unsuccessful escape attempts.

Several of the men, he said, were together in Stalag Luft I near Barth, Germany.

“Escape was a private enterprise then,” said Barris, adding there 47 tunnels dug at Stalag Luft I.

Stalag Luft III was the Luftwaffe’s main POW camp for those prisoners considered to be troublemakers, meaning those who had tried to escape from other camps.

With the German air force running the facility, it abided by the Geneva Convention, which meant officers didn’t have to work. All they had to do was show up for roll call.

Barris said it freed them up to plan the escape.

With the camp built in the middle of a pine forest on powdery white sand, the escapees had to find a way to dispose of the coarse yellow sand found 30 feet below ground where the tunnels were.

One element the Hollywood movie got right, the author said, was how soil was disposed of. Prisoners, called penguins, had bags of sand in their legs and dispersed it near a fire pool that had been dug in the ground and had the same coarse yellow sand.

The sand was later dumped underneath a theatre built on site. The theatre had a basement, and unlike every other building, a solid foundation.

Barris said the POW’s buildings were built on stilts so the Germans could watch and make sure no one was tunnelling below.

The prisoners, however, exploited the one weakness of the buildings – the chimneys, which were built of concrete and went into the ground. They went through that concrete and rebuilt a floor system so perfectly, the Germans never knew it had been broken through.

Barris said the POW’s had a system set up with stooges, basically lookouts, in the camp to alert the men tunnelling.

“They could close up a tunnel in 60 seconds if they had to,” he said.

Just before 9 p.m., on March 24, Les “Johnny” Bull became the first man through the trapdoor under the stove in Room 23 of Hut 104 on his way to open the exit shaft to freedom. In Tunnel “Harry” itself, Bull stretched himself face down on the trolley, and dog-paddled his way to Piccadilly, the first half-way house, a hundred feet up the tunnel. Once there, he jerked the rope for Johnny Marshall, who would act as underground conductor for the first hour and once his 10 men were through would exit the tunnel in the number 11 spot. The two men repeated the travel sequence past the Leicester Square half-way house and at the base of the exit shaft climbed to the top of the shaft to make the final cut through the ceiling boards and sod beyond in the pine forest.

It took Bull and Marshall nearly 30 minutes to break through the ceiling since the planks had swollen with dampness and frozen in the sub-zero temperatures. They’d stripped off the civilian clothing that would disguise them at the train station and in their underwear finally pulled the wood free and poked into the grass roots and snow above. That’s when the two discovered Tunnel “Harry” was 10 feet short of the pine forest and in plain view of the goon tower and fence-line sentries 40 feet away. They improvised and rigged a rope from the exit shaft hole to a blind in the woods and implemented a tug-on-the-rope system for each kriegie to interpret as an all-clear signal for the dash to the woods.

Of all the legendary personal stories involving escapers on the 360-foot trolley ride to the exit shaft and beyond, among the more compelling involved Canadians Hank Birkland and Briton Bob Nelson (who later immigrated to Canada). As some of the hard-arsers rolled their way through “Harry” some (because of their nervousness, claustrophobia, or just because they were so bulky with clothing, bundled blankets and provisions) inadvertently bumped the tunnel timber causing cave-ins.

Tom Kirby-Green, 13th in the tunnel, accidentally derailed the trolley between Piccadilly and Leicester Square breaking some of the bunk boards in the tunnel walls and sand began to pour in and bury him. Digger Hank Birkland realized the problem, crawled to Kirby-Green and freed him from the sand. Bob Nelson remembered a similar incident.

“When I was hauling (James Long) through the tunnel, the roof fell on top of him,” Nelson said. “I had to pull him out and then when he got past me, I then had to go up the tunnel on my elbows and toes to repair the roof and clear the sand.”

The difficulty of manoeuvring broad-shouldered men wrapped with as much clothing as they might need to fend off the cold and hauling enough food to fuel their progress, meant the narrow passageways became even narrower. At the trapdoor entrance, Robert Ker-Ramsey and Tony Pengelly made the difficult decision to trim back hard-arsers’ layers of clothing and carrying gear. The hard-arsers understood the safety factor, but feared the impact on their survivability. Keith Ogilvie’s thoughts summed up their fears.

“They hoped for the sake of fellas like myself, going hard-ass, that our chances of hiding out in the woods or getting something to eat would be a little better,” Ogilvie said, “but (once out and on the run) it was really cold and frosty.”

Through the night the flow of escapers continued until nearly 80 were either out of the tunnel or already on the run. The months and years of planning and trial and error had yielded not 200 escapers outside the wire (as Bushell had hoped), but it had delivered sufficient numbers to divert as many as 70,000 German troops, police and civilians – in the hours that followed – in an all-out effort to recapture the escapers.