FOOTE, John Weir

The Reverend John Weir Foote is the only chaplain in the history of the British Commonwealth to have been awarded the Victoria Cross for action against an enemy in the field. He earned it on the shingle at Dieppe on 19 August 1942, where he worked for eight hours under continuous German fire tending the wounded of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, and then refused a place on a landing craft leaving the beach in order to surrender with the men he could not carry off.

Early life

Foote was born in Madoc, a small town north-east of Belleville, on 5 May 1904, to Gordon and Helena Foote. Family tradition held that the line ran back through Ulster Protestant emigration. As a boy he played the organ at the local Presbyterian church. He married Edith Sheridan, of Brockville, on 31 August 1929, and worked for a time in his father-in-law’s Cornwall hardware business before he turned to the ministry.

His theological training took him through three universities — Western Ontario, Queen’s at Kingston, and McGill — with his divinity degree conferred by the Presbyterian Theological College in Montreal in 1934.

Orange Order and ministry

That same year, 1934, he was initiated into the Orange Institution at Fraserville L.O.L. No. 46 in Ontario. He took his first pastoral postings at Fort Coulonge in Quebec and then at Port Hope in Ontario.

Dieppe

When Canada declared war in September 1939, Foote enlisted with the Canadian Chaplain Service and took a captain’s commission. He was attached to the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry — a Hamilton-raised unit that would be in the first wave of the Allied landings at Dieppe on 19 August 1942. The Glengyle, the assault ship from which the RHLI was transferred to landing craft, carried him into the Channel the night before. Dieppe was meant as a reconnaissance-in-force across a fifteen-mile front; it became one of the most costly single-day actions in Canadian military history.

Chaplains of the British and Canadian forces were non-combatants by convention and were not required, or even expected, to go ashore in the assault wave. Foote went ashore anyway. The Victoria Cross citation later summarised what he did there:

“Upon landing on the beach under heavy fire he attached himself to the Regimental Aid Post which had been set up in a slight depression on the beach, but which was only sufficient to give cover to men lying down. During the subsequent period of approximately eight hours, while the action continued, this officer not only assisted the Regimental Medical Officer in ministering to the wounded in the Regimental Aid Post, but time and again left this shelter to inject morphine, give first-aid and carry wounded personnel from the open beach to the Regimental Aid Post. On these occasions, with utter disregard for his personal safety, Honorary Captain Foote exposed himself to an inferno of fire and saved many lives by his gallant efforts.”

When the order came for re-embarkation, Foote reached a landing craft that could have taken him back to the ship. He climbed out of it, waded ashore, and stayed with the roughly nineteen hundred Canadians who were about to be taken prisoner.

Prisoner of war

Foote spent thirty-four months in German prisoner-of-war camps. Survivors of Dieppe had spoken of a tall chaplain they had christened “Padre X” — the Canadian authorities did not identify the figure as the six-foot-three-inch Foote until months later. In the camps he held services irrespective of prisoners’ denominations, improvising altars from Red Cross ration boxes, and made repeated formal protests to the German authorities over conditions. He was liberated on 25 April 1945.

The Victoria Cross

The Victoria Cross was gazetted on 14 February 1946, cited to Hon. Captain John Weir Foote of the Canadian Chaplain Service and the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry. When Foote first heard the news he thought there had been a mistake. He received the cross in a private investiture.

Later career and death

After the war he entered Ontario politics. He sat in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as the Progressive Conservative member for Durham and held the Ministry of Reform Institutions from 1950 to 1957 under George Drew and Leslie Frost. Matthew Dymond succeeded him in that office. He left the Legislature in 1959.

Foote returned to the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry as its Honorary Lieutenant-Colonel in 1964 and served in that role until 1973.

He died in Hamilton on 2 May 1988, three days short of his eighty-fourth birthday.