During the Second World War, Alan Earp was assigned to a pioneer platoon, which did engineering and construction work on the front lines with the infantry in Europe. Lt. Earp joined the army when he was 17 – he lied about his age and told a recruiter he was 18 – and survived being shot in the head in the final days of the war.Courtesy of family
Lieutenant Alan Earp was shot in the head at point-blank range by a German soldier in the dying days of the Second World War. It was April 14, 1945. Hitler would shoot himself 16 days later, and the war in Europe would be over in a little more than three weeks.
“The fighting at the Rhine was some of the most vicious of the war,” said Robert Fraser, a retired professor of history at the University of Toronto and the regimental historian of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
Lt. Earp survived the wound, though there were pieces of metal left in his head. His parents received a letter saying their son would only be able to work as a farm labourer or some such job because of his head injury. But he went on to get a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto and a master’s from Cambridge; after a successful career in academia, he retired from his position as the president of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.
He died July 7 at the age of 99 – the last surviving officer of the Argylls from the Second World War.
Alan Earp was born in Toronto on Feb. 18, 1925. His father was a Church of England minister who had been sent to Canada to recover from a disease he acquired in India. In Canada he met and married Laura Sloan. Young Alan returned to England with his family when he was 5 or 6; they also lived in Paris for a while. Alan went to a couple of posh schools – Cheam, where he was a few years behind the future Prince Philip, and then to Marlborough.
In 1942 Alan was evacuated to Canada, arriving in Toronto when he was 16. He was slated to attend a boarding school but was so academically advanced that he started studying classics at Trinity College at the University of Toronto, on a full scholarship with a room at the college. He soon wanted to join the fight against Nazi Germany, so the high-minded son of an Anglican minister lied about his age when he joined the Canadian Army at 17, telling the recruiter he was 18.
He was taught engineering at an army camp in Northern Ontario and would eventually be assigned to a pioneer platoon, which did engineering and construction work on the front lines with the infantry in Europe. As a young officer he was in charge of older, more experienced men. It worked. “We had the southern half of Holland, the Germans had the north,” he told Weston Miller in an article published when Mr. Earp was 94. The fighting intensified as the Argylls moved into Germany itself.
“It was a battle in Germany. We had been ordered to move from Holland into Germany, which represented for us an enormous change,” Mr. Earp told the CBC’s Debra Arbec in 2005.
The fighting was brutal. The Argylls’ colonel went upstairs in a house they were occupying and was shot and killed by a German sniper.
“We lost just under 300 soldiers [who] were killed and three times that number were wounded, some of them very seriously. I was among the wounded and [one of] the lucky ones because here I am 70 years later,” Mr. Earp said in the CBC interview. “For a time I kept the pieces of bullet that they had given me, but two or three years later I said, ‘What am I doing with this spent metal?’ I threw it away. It would be a museum piece [by now].”
After the Second World War, Earp went on to a career in academia, teaching at universities overseas before becoming provost for Brock University in 1968 and eventually going on to serve as the university's president for almost 20 years.Brock University
He said that after he was wounded, about 60 soldiers from the Argylls were killed in the short time left in the war.
Later in life, he signed petitions against both war and capital punishment.
“He was very much anti-war. He took my brother and I to a political rally in Maple Leaf Gardens to hear Tommy Douglas speak,” recalled his son Jonathan.
(The father of universal health care was a Baptist minister who abhorred violence but nonetheless had fully supported Canada’s involvement in the war against Nazi Germany; his father, Thomas Douglas, had also served with the Argylls in the Boer War, but in the First World War enlisted with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps so he wouldn’t have to carry a gun.)
After recuperating in England, Mr. Earp returned to Canada and the University of Toronto, where he earned a degree in classics, and then to Cambridge in England. He then worked in a series of academic jobs, including teaching at the University of Nigeria and the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica.
He returned to Canada as the registrar and dean of men at Trinity College, a post he held for 10 years. After Trinity he held positions at Carleton University in Ottawa and the University of Guyana in South America. In 1968 he became provost for Brock University, which was only four years old at the time. He eventually became president and served in that role for almost 20 years. He was also president of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.
“The dedicated and visionary leadership of Dr. Earp helped lay the groundwork for Brock to become the comprehensive university it is today,” said Lesley Rigg, the school’s president and vice-chancellor, in a statement. “His invaluable guidance through the university’s early days has impacted generations of learners and will continue to do so as Brock enters its next 60 years. We’re grateful for his lasting contributions.”
Then there is the family name, Earp. It is best known because of Wyatt Earp, an American lawman and legend of the Wild West. He was one of the participants in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881. Burt Lancaster played him in the 1957 movie Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as have many others in subsequent films.
Prof. Fraser recalled crossing into the United States and having border guards light up at the mention of the name Earp. “One of them asked Alan if he had ever handled a gun, and he answered, ‘Not lately.’”
According to Mr. Earp’s son Jonathan, there were a pair of Earp brothers from Yorkshire, in the 1700s, who went first to Northern Ireland; one later went to the American colonies, the other back to Yorkshire. “My family is descended from the one who went back to England.” It’s a distant connection, but a connection nevertheless.
In 1987, Mr. Earp was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for his leadership and contributions to postsecondary education in Ontario and Canada, including serving as president of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and the Canadian Bureau of International Education. Brock awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1990. In 2000, the university named its newest campus building the Alan Earp Residence.
He was married twice, first to Elizabeth Harkness when he was just 18, before he went overseas, and later to Jeanette Woesl.
In his long retirement, he loved to garden. He moved to Montreal late in life and died at the veterans hospital in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.
Alan Earp leaves his two sons, Jonathan and Toby, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild and his partner, Robin Quinlan.
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