Author Colin Castle in Duncan

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Saturday, May 31st, 2014
3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

On Saturday, May 31st, from 3:00-4:30 pm, Kelowna's Colin Castle is at the Duncan Library (VIRL). Colin has written Rufus - The Life of the Canadian Journalist who Interviewed Hitler.

Castle is related to Lukin Johnston, aka Rufus, and Colin was struck by the history, the intrigue and the man who did so much in 46 years. Rufus is history and a mystery all in one book. RUFUS, by Kelowna's Colin Castle, is a true life story that will draw you in and keep you guessing. Did Hitler and his men kill Rufus - it's a must read to see how things lead up to this mysterious ending.

Owing to his shocking red hair, he was �Rufus� to friends and family, while his many readers in newspapers across Canada knew him as Lukin Johnston. The second son of an impoverished English vicar, at 18 he emigrated to Canada to seek his fortune in 1905. He survived indentured labour on Ontario farms, two failed Prairie farms and the winter of 1906. From east to west, Rufus worked across Canada in banks, lumberyards, coal yards, fruit farms, railway construction, even insurance, before finally being hired at the Vancouver Province in 1910.

A natural journalist, by 1916 Rufus had been editor of the Cowichan Leader and news editor of the Victoria Colonist. When World War I struck, he joined up, went to Vimy and was a staff-captain at Passchendaele, Amiens and Arras, finishing the war as a major. Back at the Province he ground out years in the journalistic trenches. Desperate for interesting work, he infuriated his superiors by independently covering the Washington Naval Treaty in 1921, then Warren Harding�s 1923 trip to Alaska. These trespasses made his reputation and the Province handed him the magazine section and in 1928 dispatched him to London to lead their first overseas bureau.

His articles on the English scene soon delighted ex-pat Canadians, but as European skies darkened his investigative reports left readers in no doubt about the danger of a new war. As they digested his interview with Hitler in November 1933, they heard of his mysterious disappearance from the ship back to England. His untimely death at 46 cut short a writing career that significantly affected the Canadian political landscape.


About Colin Castle:

Colin Castle is a Canadian who was born in England on 19 January 1936. After �interesting� wartime years at primary schools in Scotland and England, most of his schooling was at fee-paying boarding schools (similar to the one Rufus attended many years before). He left school at 18, spent two years in the British army in Berlin and three taking a history degree at Oxford. After brief encounters with accountancy, advertising and urban gardening, he became a history teacher in 1961 and remained one until his retirement in 1998. He met his Canadian wife, Val Johnston, on a ski trip to Austria in 1963 and they were married in London, England, in July 1964.

Their early married life was in Westmorland, England, and their two sons were born there. However, in 1969, they uprooted their small family and emigrated to Kelowna, BC, where Colin had found a job teaching history and social studies in what is now West Kelowna. Their daughter was born in 1971 and the three children grew up in the Okanagan. The family skied and skated in winter and the children played sports � mainly soccer. Summer holidays, when they weren�t spent visiting the UK, were a blur of camping at mountain fishing lakes and swimming or sailing in the big lake. Christmases were usually with Val�s parents in Vancouver, and they considered their countless perilous trips over Allison Pass on studded winter-tires to be just part of living in the interior. The children thrived on it and, in order of age, now live and work in Victoria, Vancouver and Glasgow.