SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
As Cliff Woolf lay on his deathbed in the summer of 1996 he pulled his son, Stephen, aside and told him that he had lived a good life.

Terry Woolf and his brother Stephen take a plaque displaying their father Cliff's Second World War medals to the Yellowknife cenotaph on Remembrance Day. The two brothers have been paying their respects to their dad in this way every year since he died in 1996. - Cody Punter/NNSL photo

When the Second World War veteran died on Stephen's birthday Aug. 4 soon afterward at age 76, Stephen couldn't help thinking it was just another one of his dad's elaborate pranks.

"He did that on purpose," Stephen recalled with a smile. "He had a good sense of humour."

While his children may remember him best for his magic tricks, juggling acts, being able to spit fire or balance a wheelbarrow on his nose, the fact remains that Cliff was one of many young Englishmen whose formative years were shaped by the war. That is why every Remembrance Day for the past 18 years, Stephen and his brother Terry have taken his medals to the Yellowknife cenotaph on Veteran's Memorial Drive to pay their respects.

"The war was an incredibly big thing for these people," Terry said.

"I don't know if I can find anything in my life that would have as much of an impact for so long and at such a critical time. For us it's important to remember."

Woolf was just a 19-year-old reservist from Birmingham, England when he was called up for active service in the fall of 1939. Because he had experience installing heating and plumbing fixtures, he was assigned to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers where he was trained to lay mines.

In the spring of 1940, he was deployed to the Battle of Dunkirk. As the Allies retreated by boat back to England, Woolf ended up being one of the last people to be evacuated because he had been tasked with laying explosives to buy Allied troops more time to escape the German advance.

The window for Woolf's retreat was so narrow that as he was being transferred from a small fishing boat to a larger ship offshore, they were hit by a shell.

"They were bombed and dad said there were bodies everywhere," Terry recollected, adding that his father received a medal from the French government for his role in the evacuation.

Although Woolf didn't talk about the war often, Terry remembers reading a soldier's memoir, which included an account of the evacuation of Dunkirk, when he came across a passage that caught his eye.

"Somebody wrote a book about this and he talked about the ship getting hit and afterward when they were trying to recover them and the medics were out there and everybody was yelling, he heard this really sweet sound of the harmonica playing," Terry said.

"(The author wrote that) he came across Sapper Woolf, which was my dad, playing a harmonica to these people who were injured."

After Dunkirk, Woolf was shipped off to North Africa where he served under Lt.-Gen. Bernard Montgomery in the fight against Gen. Erwin Rommel. Once the Allies started beating back the Germans in 1944, Woolf followed the advance up from Sicily, through to mainland Italy, which is where he received his only scar of the war - which didn't come from battle.

"Early in the war (Woolf) was on the motorcycles. When they were in Italy, they were near an American base and they had heard about these Harley Davidsons," said Terry, recalling his father's anecdote. "I guess they got a little inebriated and they stole the Harleys from the Americans. The American MPs (military police) chased them and cut them off and when he wiped out, the handlebars cut his leg.

"They wanted to try a Harley and they thought they could just get one and use it," added Stephen with a laugh.

As the Allies pushed closer to Berlin near the end of the war, Woolf found himself in Germany. It was at this point that Woolf was forced to confront one of the most unsavory elements of the conflict, when he came across concentration camps full of prisoners for the first time.

"The worst thing, he said, was when they opened up the concentration camps. There were basically skeletons of people. They wanted to kill any German they saw," Terry said, recalling his dad's words. "'It was madness,' he said. It was horrible and madness."

After the war, Woolf settled back in his native England before immigrating to Canada with his wife and six children in 1957, where he settled in Ontario. Today Terry and Stephen are the only two of Woolf's offspring who live in Yellowknife. It wasn't until a few years before Woolf died that he made his first of two trips up North to visit his sons. During that visit Terry took his dad fishing at his cabin on Jennejohn Lake. A photo of their dad holding up a jackfish he caught during that trip is one several, included on a wooden plaque which local artist Sheila Hodgkinson made out of materials she found at the dump.

In addition to the photograph, Hodgkinson decorated the wooden frame with Woolf's medals, his obituary, a photograph of him on his motorcycle during the war and some poppies.

While Woolf died shortly after his last visit to Yellowknife, the plaque means Terry and Stephen can take their father with them every Nov. 11 so they can all enjoy a moment of silence together.

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