44 Facts About Watson Kirkconnell

Watson Kirkconnell instead spent the rest of the war guarding Central Powers POWs at Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camps in rural Ontario.

Watson Kirkconnell has accordingly been dubbed the father of multiculturalism in Canada.

Watson Kirkconnell was, paradoxically, very eccentric, a life-long conspiracy theorist, and believer in the pseudosciences of eugenics and scientific racism.

Furthermore, while Watson Kirkconnell was hesitant to condemn Nazism in May 1939, he changed his mind and used his many literary contacts to help mobilize Canadian immigrant communities in favour of the Allied war effort.

One of his most popular literary translations from Hungarian literature is of Janos Arany's The Bards of Wales, an 1864 ballad criticizing the conquest of Wales by King Edward Longshanks, but which was intended as a covert denunciation of Emperor Franz Joseph over the defeat of the Hungarian revolution of 1848, and which Watson Kirkconnell translated into the same idiom as the Child ballads.

The poet pondered how much the culture of the region and the celebration of Christmas Day had changed since Watson Kirkconnell Abbey was founded by St Conal, a Culdee monk and missionary of the Celtic Church.

Walter Watson Kirkconnell accordingly married one of them; Mary McCallum, the daughter of John and Janet McCallum, from the farmhouse known as "Carnban" in what is a ruined and completely depopulated village in Glen Lyon.

Christopher's youngest son, Thomas Watson Kirkconnell, had adopted his father's profession and taught at the schools in Allanburg, Beachwood, Lundy's Lane, Stamford, and Port Hope, Ontario.

In 1851, Thomas Watson Kirkconnell had married Margaret Elma Green of Lundy's Lane, a woman descended from Welsh-American United Empire Loyalists, as well as more recent British immigrants to Canada with both German and Spanish roots.

Watson Kirkconnell was born on 16 May 1895 in Port Hope, Ontario, where his father, Thomas Kirkconnell, was headmaster of Port Hope High School.

Watson Kirkconnell was a sickly child and was accordingly delayed entry for two years into Port Hope Public School and only began taking classes at the age of seven.

Thomas Watson Kirkconnell used to reward his grandson by giving him one cent for every stanza he memorized from Divine and Moral Songs by Isaac Watts.

Watson Kirkconnell further recalled that his "first awareness of small town journalism came" after his "second Christmas-time promotion".

The Port Hope Guide reported that "a local lawyer" had angrily protested during a school board meeting that his son has not been similarly promoted and accused Watson Kirkconnell of having been "shoved", solely because his father was the headmaster of Port Hope High School.

At the age of twelve, Watson Kirkconnell asked for and received both baptism and membership in the Port Hope Baptist Church.

In 1913, at the urging of his father, Watson Kirkconnell began studies at his father's alma mater of Queen's University at Kingston.

Watson Kirkconnell received a Master of Arts degree in 1916.

On 4 August 1914, Kirkconnell was attending Queen's University at the outbreak of World War I Although he enthusiastically hoped to see combat in France, Kirkconnell chose, similarly to JRR.

Walter Watson Kirkconnell was killed in action during the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, when the Canadian Corps platoon under his command ran into a German machine gun nest in a grain field near Villers-Bretonneux.

Campbell and shortly before he was to be shipped overseas with the 253rd Battalion, Captain Watson Kirkconnell was ruled unfit for combat duty by three successive Medical Boards.

Watson Kirkconnell was first sworn into Freemasonry in Canada in December 1920 at the "Faithful Brethren" Lodge No 77 in Lindsay, Ontario.

Watson Kirkconnell remained in "The Craft" for the rest of his life and even served as Grand Master of St George's Lodge No 20 of the York Rite in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Kirkconnell later experienced some doubt about the organization, as his subsequent research made him realize that Freemasonry's legend of the murder of Hiram Abif is contradicted by the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus.

In 1922, Watson Kirkconnell accepted the offer of a faculty position in the English Department at Wesley College.

Watson Kirkconnell taught English there for the eleven years, before switching to the Department of Classics for the next seven years.

Watson Kirkconnell became passionately interested in the now discredited pseudosciences of scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics.

Watson Kirkconnell read widely in all three subjects, and composed his own Nordicist tract predicting the imminent demise of the "Nordic race" in Ontario due to the increasing immigration of French-Canadians, Jews, and Slavic peoples.

For example, Watson Kirkconnell believed that, not only the Icelandic sagas and the Elder Edda, but the Old Irish Tain Bo Cuailnge and the Old Low German Heliand, "threw light on Beowulf, the Battle of Maldon, and the Caedmonian Genesis", and advocated teaching all of those texts together.

Therefore, Watson Kirkconnell concluded, as all Europeans are of genetically mixed ancestry, further White ethnic immigration and intermarriage would actually strengthen the development of Canada as a nation.

Watson Kirkconnell worked in close collaboration with distinguished literary scholars, such as Albert Verwey, Douglas Hyde, and Pavle Popovic.

Watson Kirkconnell eventually published the volume European Elegies in 1928.

Watson Kirkconnell continued publicizing and making translations of the national poetry of European immigrants for the rest of his life.

The title page describes Watson Kirkconnell as having been made a knight of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the government of the Second Polish Republic.

In 1936, Watson Kirkconnell was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

The Soviet newspaper Trud attacked Watson Kirkconnell for being both an anti-communist and a Ukrainophile, and even dubbed him, "the Fuhrer of Canadian Fascism".

Meanwhile, so vocal were Watson Kirkconnell's continuing criticisms of Stalinism and of Soviet war crimes that Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King seriously considered acting to protect the Soviet-Canadian military alliance against Nazi Germany by silencing Watson Kirkconnell with an Order-in-Council.

Igor Gouzenko launched both the Cold War in Canada and the PROFUNC counterintelligence operation, Watson Kirkconnell was recruited as a secret informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service regarding politicians, fellow university professors, and students who were suspected of links to Soviet Bloc foreign intelligence services or the Communist Party of Canada.

Chesterton, Watson Kirkconnell wrote a poem defending Draza Mihailovic, harshly denouncing the Serbian Chetnik General's show trial by Josip Broz Tito's Soviet-backed Yugoslav Partisans, and eulogizing the General's execution by firing squad on July 17,1946.

Watson Kirkconnell wrote the poem because he believed that General Mihailovic was innocent of both Chetnik war crimes in World War II and of collaboration with the occupying Axis forces, that Mihailovic had fought both honorably and selflessly to save his country from Nazism and Titoism, and that his "trial" was nothing more or less than a Stalinist witch hunt.

From 1948 to 1964, Watson Kirkconnell served as the ninth President of Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

Watson Kirkconnell had originally expected to be, "a full time administrative officer", but instead found himself repeatedly drawn back into the classroom.

Watson Kirkconnell and MacGregor Fraser collaborated upon a literary translation of the iconic poem A' Choille Ghruamach by Tiree-born Nova Scotia Gaelic poet Iain mac Ailein, which was published in the 1948-'49 theme issue of Dalhousie Review under the title, "John MacLean's Gloomy Forest".

Watson Kirkconnell accused Continental Freemasonry of being "atheistic" and of having, "a zeal for political revolution in a spirit both anti-Christian and conspiratorial".

Watson Kirkconnell accordingly expressed relief that Freemasonry in the Anglosphere, "which today comprises over ninety per cent of the fraternity", refuses to recognize Continental Freemasonry, and considers it irregular.

In 1968, Watson Kirkconnell was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his services at home and abroad as an educator, scholar and writer".