Just two days before his 22nd birthday, Geoffrey Hughson was in the thick of naval operations on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He was a junior officer on HMCS Huron, part of the flotilla protecting the armada of invaders heading to France.
It was the culmination of a busy war for the Huron, one of the powerful Tribal Class destroyers, much larger and more formidable than the corvettes which did the bulk of convoy duty. And Mr. Hughson spent his entire war aboard.
In the months leading up to the invasion of Normandy, the Huron was on non-stop patrols in the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay.
Sub-Lieutenant Hughson, just a year removed from being head prefect at his Ottawa private school, helped guide the ship's anti-submarine warfare team, electronically hunting for German U-boats.
As one of 14 officers on the destroyer he was on the bridge during the running battles with German ships in the English Channel and Bay of Biscay that marked Operation Neptune during the pre-invasion period.
About six weeks before D-Day, a skirmish with three Elbings (medium sized destroyers designated as torpedo boats) left one German vessel sunk, and one damaged, said Steve Harris, chief historian at the Department of National Defence in Ottawa.
"The threats [Huron] protected against on June 6 were German destroyers in the Bay of Biscay and [off] Cherbourg. Indeed, they had running fights with German destroyers on June 9 and, with Haida, another Tribal Class destroyer, the Huron was credited with driving at least one German warship ashore and sinking another."
Before Operation Neptune, the Huron was an escort on the Murmansk run, the challenging convoy route that delivered war supplies to the Soviet Union at Arctic ports. The convoys had to run a gauntlet of German U-boats in frigid weather.
HMCS Huron spent Christmas of 1943 and New Year's in a port near Murmansk, a place so cold it made Sub-Lieutenant Hughson's native Ottawa look balmy by comparison.
It didn't lower standards aboard the Huron. A photograph shows a 19-year-old Geoffrey Hughson and his fellow officers in formal dress for a holiday dinner.
But the most dramatic and heart-breaking part of the war for Mr. Hughson took place on land, and not at sea.
His older brother Ward Hughson, was an officer fighting with the Royal Canadian Engineers in Normandy. He was wounded and captured by the Germans in late August of 1944. He was then executed in cold blood, as described in the unit's war diary.
"He was ordered, in English, apparently by the Germans, to stand up and come over to them. When he stood up they fired on him with automatic weapons, as a result of which he died."
The murder haunted Mr. Hughson all his life. He named his only son Ward after his brother.
Geoffrey Hughson was born in Ottawa. His grandfather was in the lumber business and was one of the owners of Gilmour and Hughson, which had a mill on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. Geoffrey started high school at Lisgar Collegiate and then won a scholarship to Ashbury College, a private school, where he became captain of the school.
He was in his first year of chemical engineering at McGill when he joined the navy. He was sent to the Royal Canadian Naval College and then joined the Huron. He served on the ship from 1943 to 1945. In February of 1945, he was promoted to lieutenant.
At the end of the war, Mr. Hughson returned to McGill to study chemical engineering.
Later he admitted he would probably have failed his first year if it hadn't left for the navy.
But by this time he was more serious and many of his classmates were also veterans.
Some people who claimed to be veterans were not. While sitting with a young woman at the bar of the Berkeley Hotel on Sherbrooke Street, Mr. Hughson listened while a man boasted of his exploits on the Huron.
Mr. Hughson knew everyone on the ship but didn't recognize the man and could tell from his conversation he was a fraud. He said later that rather than challenge him he just decided to ignore him.
After graduating he went to work for Canadian International Paper, a subsidiary of International Paper, at the time the largest pulp and paper company in the world.
Mr. Hughson worked in research and was soon director of an engineering research section. In 1957, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, he was part of a trade delegation to Russia. He was the only member on the Canadian side who had been to Russia before. He recalled that he was told to be careful of conversations in hotel rooms since they were certainly bugged.
He also said Canadian government officials approached him about doing some intelligence work. Though he certainly had the good looks of a spy in the movies, he declined.
In the 1960s Mr. Hughson worked for several years as director of research for the parent company, International Paper, in Glens Falls, N.Y. He became president of CIP research at Hawkesbury, Ont., in 1967 and later became vice-president of planning and technology at CIP, which involved a sizable staff and a budget of $400-million a year.
Mr. Hughson retired in 1986 and moved to Knowlton in Quebec's Eastern Townships. He was an example of what demographers now call the "long retirement" people who spend 20 years or more in active retirement. He was in good health until late last year.
He had many of the same pastimes before and after retirement. He was a keen skier and tennis player. He had a court behind his house in Knowlton. He also had a family cottage at Blue Sea Lake north of Ottawa. He showed his talent for fixing things as a boy at the cottage. He earned money from the age of 10 fixing motors for neighbours.
"My father loved that place so much that one summer someone offered him good seats at Wimbledon, but he refused to travel in the middle of cottage season," said his daughter Janet. His wife Joan, a keen tennis player and sports fan, was quite disappointed in losing out of a trip to Wimbledon.
The cottage was also where he kept his survivalist hoard of food and water from the Cuban missile crisis to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He kept busy at an amazing number of projects. He installed a special wood furnace in his house, with an elevator to bring the wood to the basement and an auger to feed it. He also got into personal computers early, in part because the IT department at work had kept the workings of computers a secret.
"He retired and became a computer nerd," said his daughter Sally.
Geoffrey Hughson was a Conservative and lived in one of the few Quebec ridings that sometimes sends a Conservative MP to Ottawa. Brome-Missisquoi was represented by Heward Grafftey and the late Gabrielle Bertrand.
His political views made for lively discussions with his son in law, Terry Mosher, the political cartoonist Aislin, who is married to his daughter, Mary.
GEOFFREY D. HUGHSON
Geoffrey Drummond Hughson was born on June 8, 1924, in Ottawa. He died on July 3, 2009, in Cowansville Que., after two bouts of C.difficile in the past few months. He leaves his wife Joan, and his children from his first marriage, Janet, Mary, Ward and Sally.
