Rufus: The Life of the Canadian Journalist Who Interviewed Hitler

Five years of pioneer farming, laying track, heaving lumber and coal, was ideal cross-Canada preparation for newsman and author Rufus Johnston. Hired by the Vancouver Province in 1910, a wizard with words and steeped in the issues, Rufus was a natural. Editorial stints in Duncan and Victoria, then war service as a Canadian Corps staff officer at Vimy and Passchendaele, further equipped him for big league journalism. The Province rewarded his postwar scoops with its magazine section, then Southam News with their London bureau. From here, drawn like a moth to a flame, this ambitious journalist went to meet Germany s dictator. He never returned.

Colin Castle is a Canadian who was born in England in 1936. After wartime years at primary schools in Scotland and England, most of his schooling was at fee-paying boarding schools (similar to the one Rufus attended many years before). He left school at 18, spent two years in the British army in Berlin and three taking a history degree at Oxford. After trying several other careers he became a history teacher in 1961, and remained one until his retirement in 1998. He met his Canadian wife, Val Johnston, on a ski trip to Austria in 1964, and they were married in July that year in London, England. Their early married life was in Westmorland, England, where their two sons were born. In 1969 they emigrated to Kelowna, BC, where Colin taught history and social studies in what is now West Kelowna first at George Pringle Secondary, and then, for twenty-three years, at Mount Boucherie Secondary. Their daughter was born in 1971 and the three children grew up in the Okanagan. Colin and Val still rattle around happily in the family house beside the lake, often visited by their children and grandchildren who now live, learn and work in Victoria, Vancouver and Glasgow. Apart from Rufus, Colin has written three books: Lucky Alex, a biography of Group Captain Alex Jardine (2001), available through Trafford Publishing; Canada s Story an (as yet) unpublished history of Canada for children; and a Family History of the antecedents and descendants of Allan Macdiarmid and Grace McClure, his Scottish grandparents.