by Douglas How

One Saturday in 1941 I was on weekend duty with the Halifax bureau of The Canadian Press when an unusual teletype message arrived from CP’s Toronto headquarters. It stated that one of the three Toronto newspapers was carrying an East Coast Canadian port story about a sailor who was keeping a diary as he and others bobbed about on the Atlantic in a lifeboat after their ship was sunk by a German submarine.

What’s more, the message stated that this was no ordinary diary. The sailor had no pencil or pen, but he was so determined to record what had happened that he punctured his flesh with a sharp piece of wood and set to work on what paper he could find. In other words, the diary was written in his own blood. The message from CP included a punch line that was quite familiar to CP staffers working for a co-operative news agency owned by virtually all of Canada’s daily newspapers. It stated: “Need matcher.”

What this meant was that Toronto headquarters needed a story of its own for all those dailies who had missed the first one.

It is a sign of those times that what the story said did seem possible. Or, in retrospect, let us say, not possible. World War II had been going on since September 1939 and survivors of German submarine and surface-raider attacks on the Atlantic had been coming in for months to a city that censors had re-defined as an East Coast Canadian port and a British Admiral had called the most important in the world. There even were rumours of German sailors slipping ashore and going to the movies.

Indeed, a year and a half would go by before the enemy would be mastered in the campaign Winston Churchill would call the most crucial of the war, the Battle of the Atlantic.

But all this heavyweight stuff was secondary in my mind as I reread the message from CP. Uppermost in my mind was the fact that I had a date to take my girlfriend dancing at the Nova Scotia Hotel that night. Moreover, late on a Saturday afternoon was hardly a propitious time to check any story. But orders were orders, and I started phoning sources who might know something of value. One was a haven for merchant seamen.

I still remember feeling sort of ridiculous when the words came out and I asked if anybody had heard of a sailor who had written a diary in blood. There was a sort of a snort in reply, and that was when a suspicion entered my mind. Late Saturday was a good time to plant a story because if it didn’t stand up, it might be forgotten by Monday morning.

I never did get a matcher that day—or ever. CP’s editors accepted the explanation that it had been impossible to track one down and that it would take more time to check it out. By Monday morning, headquarters was busy with other things.

I still didn’t know the truth when I enlisted that year. Indeed, it would take me a long time to discover that the reporter who had the toughest time of all was the one who had written the piece. He was one of several Halifax journalists who added to his income by stringing—writing freelance stories—for big-city papers. The dailies were interested in these stories because they came from what had become known as Canada’s Front-line City.

The truth came out long after I got home from overseas when in a moment of postwar candour raised the question with the reporter concerned. He even seemed a bit relieved to talk about it. Either alone or in cahoots with others, it seems, he had been bewailing the fact that so many survivor stories had been written that it was hard to find a fresh angle. The diary written in blood provided one, but there was one major problem: No such diary and no such sailor existed.

Imagination and financial imperatives created the story, and a Toronto daily went for it on a Saturday without too much news. But out of this emerged another major problem: The paper’s editors kept after the reporter for some way to keep the epic alive. They wanted an interview. They wanted the man’s background. They wanted pictures of him and of the diary. The requests kept coming in for days, and in desperation he fell back on the heroic fact that the typical answer of a survivor about what he would do next was that he would go back to sea. This man, the reporter said, had gone back to sea, presumably taking his punctured flesh and his diary with him.

Years later the reporter still remembered those messages and the time he spent sweating over his answers. He came to suspect the editors had guessed the truth and were teaching him a lesson. And, he confessed, he did learn something because that was the first and last time he made up a story. As for myself, I was a bit frazzled but I did get to the dance at the Nova Scotia Hotel. The dance featured a great orchestra, bolstered by moonlighting sailors who were hot-shot musicians. Once or twice I did think about the diary written in blood, but not for very long.