After his university studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, Captain Watson Kirkconnell was extremely disappointed to be classified as medically unfit for active service when he was only days away from being shipped to the Western Front with the Canadian Corps.
Even so, he continued to write and speak publicly about Soviet war crimes, religious persecution, the Holodomor, and other human rights abuses, and what he saw as the domestic threat posed by both the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Canada and the covert operations of the KGB and GRU on Canadian soil.
During the Second World War, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King seriously considered acting to protect Canada's military alliance with the USSR by silencing Kirkconnell with an order in council.
Only after the 1945 defection of Soviet military intelligence officer Igor Gouzenko did the Canadian government and it's counterintelligence services begin taking Kirkconnell's claims seriously and decide to recruit him as a covert informant.
The poet pondered how much the culture of the region and the celebration of Christmas Day had changed since Kirkconnell Abbey was founded by St. Conal, a Culdee monk and missionary of the Celtic Church.
[20] In, "an almost imperceptible little ripple in the vast tide of Scottish immigration that flowed into Canada", Walter Kirkconnell (1795–1860), the poet's great-grandfather, sailed for the New World in 1819 and settled as a pioneer in Chatham Township, Argenteuil County, Quebec.
Christopher's youngest son, Thomas Watson, 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 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.
"[31] Also as a child in Port Hope, Kirkconnell's interest in geology was sparked by attending a lecture about local prehistory, Ice Age glaciers, and the Glacial Lake Iroquois by Arthur Philemon Coleman, who was visiting from the University of Toronto.
After training in the mud of Salisbury Plain, Lt. Walter 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.
[36] A deeply disappointed Captain Watson Kirkconnell spent the rest of the war guarding POWs and civilian internees at Fort Henry and at Kapuskasing internment camp, both in rural Ontario.
Ignorant, sullen, inert, the mass of these interns were the very incarnation of passive resistance ... there prevailed among all these hundreds of thick heads a strange belief that for every day of their captivity they would receive at the close of the war an indemnity of five dollars wrung from Canada by a victorious Austria ... guarding them was something of a sinecure.
'"[39] During the fall of 1919, Captain Kirkconnell accompanied 445 POWs and internees from Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camp aboard the S.S. Pretorian, from Quebec City to Rotterdam, pending their repatriation to the Weimar Republic.
20 of the York Rite in Wolfville, Nova Scotia,[43] 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.
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.
"[9] Kirkconnell's experiences, however, as a professor in the multiethnic and multilingual Manitoba city of Winnipeg exposed him to world literature, which caused him to begin questioning his views and making radical teaching innovations.
For example, Kirkconnell believed that, not only the Icelandic sagas and the Elder Edda, but also the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge 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.
In the process, Kirkconnell came to believe that treating the languages, cultures, and literatures of White ethnic immigrants to Canada with respect would instill in them a sense of loyalty and gratitude to their adopted country.
In response, Kirkconnell sought during the interwar period to return John Milton to his pedestal by translating and publishing what had long been believed to been the poet's many sources of inspiration from World literature in many other languages.
His blank verse translations of the neo-Classical but Biblically centered plays of Dutch national poet Joost van den Vondel, which Kirkconnell strongly believed to have been a major influence on Milton's Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes date from this period.
These same contacts, however, had made Kirkconnell well aware of the sufferings of the relatives of his immigrant friends under both Soviet rule and occupation and he accordingly continued to write articles and to give public lectures attacking both human rights abuses under Marxist-Leninism and Stalinism.
Eliot and his learned appendices, in which almost my entire poem was a patchwork, from my own library shelves, of some forty score high-sounding phrases from all literatures and all periods, including Chinese, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Basque, Polish, Breton, and Arabic, each with its appropriate footnote.
According to Gordon L. Heath, however, Kirkconnell's motivations were based, "on lofty ideas of democracy" and he accordingly never advocated, "a policy of suppression", but preferred instead to see the real loyalties of Soviet spies, crypto-communists, and fellow travellers laid bare before the Canadian people.
[1] Also at the beginning of the Cold War, Kirkconnell went on the record as an extremely harsh critic of the Western Allies' policy of forced repatriations of anti-communist refugees to the USSR during Operation Keelhaul,[53] of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for handing Eastern Europe over to Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, and of the pervasive totalitarianism and human rights abuses in the new Soviet Bloc.
"[54] Despite his vocal anti-communism, Kirkconnell was also extremely critical of McCarthyism and once wrote, "I have an uneasy feeling that Senator McCarthy messed up an important job by handling it in an offensive and blundering fashion.
[55] In his 1967 memoirs, Kirkconnell credited his academic colleague Dr. R. MacGregor Fraser with introducing him, after his 1948 move to the Province, to Nova Scotia's many immortal contributions to Scottish Gaelic literature.
Kirkconnell and MacGregor Fraser also collaborated upon a literary translation of the iconic poem A' Choille Ghruamach by Tiree-born Nova Scotia Gaelic poet Iain mac Ailein,[56] which was published in the 1948-'49 theme issue of Dalhousie Review under the title, "John MacLean's Gloomy Forest".
[60] In his memoirs, Kirkconnell recalled, "In 1963, public occasions evoked from me two blank verse plays, The Primordial Church of Horton and Let My People Go, a tragedy in strict Greek form with its mise en scène before the palace of Pharaoh on the night before the Exodus.
[13] When Let My People Go was published in his 1965 poetry collection Centennial Tales and Selected Poems,[61] Kirkconnell summarized it as follows, "The guards of Pharaoh seek to arrest Moses on the night of the Passover but cannot find him.
[64] His private papers are preserved at the Acadia University Archives, through which Gordon L. Heath was able to document Kirkconnell's secret role as an RCMP Security Service informant during the early Cold War, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.