Postwar, Mowat studied biology at the University of Toronto. “Only one item of the more than 900 tons of equipment he collected with some pals still survives: a manned V-1, which is now in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa,” according to Martin of the Globe & Mail, but other sources say some of the armored vehicles are displayed at the Canadian Forces Base Borden tank museum. In My Father’s Son (1992) Mowat recalled forming the 1st Canadian Army Museum Collection Team, which shipped to Canada captured German military equipment including a V-1 rocket-propelled “buzz bomb,” a V-2 rocket, and several armored vehicles. Becoming an intelligence operative, Mowat crossed the Nazi lines to help arrange Operation Manna, a series of food drops credited with saving thousands of Dutch lives. Serving with the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, Mowat rose to the rank of captain while in Italy, then was transferred with the division to the Netherlands in 1945. “It was in Ortona, against the backdrop of German guns, that he drafted early versions of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be and Owls in the Family,” recalled Toronto Globe & Mail obituarist Sandra Martin. As a subaltern commanding a rifle platoon, Mowat on Jparticipated in the Allied invasion of Sicily. I never hunted again.”īut Mowat did enlist in 1939 to participate in World War II. “Driving home to Saskatoon that night,” he continued, “I felt a sick repugnance for what we had done. “Then I experienced a revelation,” wounding but not killing a goose, whose evident yearning to rejoin her flock as the other birds flew out of sight lastingly transformed young Farley Mowat’s perspective. By the time I was fourteen, I had been fully indoctrinated with the sportsman’s view of wildlife as objects to be exploited for pleasure. Having served that bloody apprenticeship, I began killing ‘game’: prairie chicken, ruffed grouse, and ducks. With these I killed ‘vermin’: sparrows, gophers, crows and hawks. “I learned first how to handle a BB gun, then a. Under my father’s tutelage I was taught to be a hunter taught that communion with nature could be achieved over the barrel of a gun taught that killing wild animals for sport establishes a mystic bond, an ancient pact‚ between them and us. “When I was a boy growing up on the Saskatchewan prairies, that feeling of affinity persisted––but it became perverted. “Almost all young children have a natural affinity for other animals,” Mowat recalled later. Farley Mowat returned to Ontario with his family, but revisited Sakatchewan in 1938 to collect bird specimens for the Royal Ontario Museum. His great-uncle Frank Farley, an ornithologist with the Royal Ontario Museum, took him to the Arctic for the first time in 1936.Īngus Mowat was in 1937 appointed inspector of public libraries for the province of Ontario. He used the proceeds to feed nonmigratory ducks and geese, and pets including a rattlesnake, a gopher, two owls he remembered in Owls in the Family (1962), an imported Florida alligator, several cats, and a living insect collection. Forming the Beaver Club of Amateur Naturalists with several friends, Mowat at age 13 founded a nature newsletter, Nature Lore, and eventually sold a weekly column on birds to the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. There, with his dog Mutt, memorialized in The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957), Farley Mowat discovered his calling as a naturalist and nature writer. He attended Richmond Hill High School, but in his mid-teens relocated with his family to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He began writing in his early teens, while his family lived in Windsor from 1930–1933. Inheriting an already famous name, as great-great-nephew of third Ontario prime minister Oliver Mowat (1820-1903), and the son of World War I veteran, librarian, and novelist Angus Mowat, Farley Mowat was born on May 12, 1921, in Belleville, Ontario. Possibly the most widely read Canadian author ever, Mowat produced more than 40 books, mostly with pro-animal themes, which sold more than 17 million copies and were translated into 52 languages. Farley McGill Mowat, 92, collapsed and died on at his longtime home in Port Hope, Ontario, six days short of his 93rd birthday.
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