A Barrie couple has a shrine in the front hallway of their Allandale home to memorialize a Spitfire pilot who was raised in the house and later killed in the Second World War.
John Randolph 'Jack' Patton was born and raised at 62 William St., which was recently placed on the city’s heritage register at the request of homeowners Elizabeth Dauphinee and John Andrews. They have a handful of photos of Patton set up inside their front door as a link to the past.
But what makes the story even more compelling is the detailed story they've discovered behind the man, who was 25 years old when he died, shot down in his plane over the English Channel.
Dauphinee says it’s important to preserve the city’s history through its architecture.
“These homes have souls,” she tells BarrieToday.
“This is crazy and it may be something that seems absurd, but when you live in old, old houses, you know when they’re also occupied by the past,” says Dauphinee, who's a professor in the politics department at York University. “I’m not going to say there’s ghosts, but you can feel the energy of the past.”
She does admit to feeling a sense of grief within the structure’s walls.
“Sometimes it would wake me up,” she says during an interview at the home's dining room table. “I would feel some grief or some crying, and then it would stop.”
Andrews, who is a stay-at-home dad, says he hasn’t had the same feelings: “I’m really not connected that way.”
62 WILLIAM STREET
The house was built by John Patton Sr., who began his career as a fireman with the Grand Trunk Railway before working his way up to an engineer and eventually retiring in 1937, Dauphinee says.
Patton purchased the land in 1907 from a man named William Park.
Patton married Jessie Adaline Meggison in 1908 at Burton Avenue United Church at a time when Dauphinee believes the house was being built, though records aren’t specific.
“The first time the house appears in the municipal assessment is in February of 1909,” she says, “so the house would have been built throughout the year in 1908.”
Dauphinee and Andrews began searching William Park, because they'd assumed he had originally built the home.
“When we were finding William Park and all his family, we were finding them at No. 50 William St.,” Dauphinee says, noting Park’s family remained at that address until the 1960s. “At this house, we didn’t find any evidence of him, so we just let it go.”
Then a neighbourhood friend, while out walking his dog, came by this past summer while Dauphinee and Andrews were gardening and the topic of the city’s heritage register came up.
“As he was leaving, he said, ‘You know, there was a Spitfire pilot who lived in the house,” says Dauphinee.
That began the search anew and she soon found records about a John Randolph 'Jack' Patton, who was born July 14, 1916 at 62 William St., where he lived until joining the air force during the Second World War.
Patton, who also had a sister, was a well-rounded athlete, playing rugby at Barrie Collegiate in addition to hockey where he was a defenceman with the 1934-35 Barrie Colts, which won the Ontario Hockey Association’s Junior ‘B’ title.
He also worked as a grocery clerk for a man named F.W. Dobson at a business located at 50 Essa Rd.
Patton enlisted with the RCAF in August 1940 when he was 24 years old. He was the first Barrie man to receive his wings under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. He trained in Toronto, received flight training at St. Eugene, Que., and then earned his wings at Uplands No. 2 Service Flying Training School in Ottawa on April 1, 1941.
He was deployed to Kent, England, with RCAF 401 Squadron in August, transitioning from the Hurricane to the Spitfire.
From Biggin Hill and Gravesend, Patton provided fighter support for bombers headed toward occupied northern France, while also participating in missions to engage the Luftwaffe fighters.
In a letter to his parents, published by the Barrie Examiner on April 2, 1942, just a month before his death, Patton described his experiences:
“I had a squirt at four Huns who dived down through the clouds, but don’t think I hit any of them; it was such a fleeting glimpse I couldn’t tell,” Patton writes. “They dove down through a hole in the clouds at probably 400 m.p.h.
"I turned to meet them and was climbing up at 200 m.p.h. It happens so fast you hardly realize it. They weren’t in a position to squirt at me and didn’t come back.”
Less than a month later, Patton was shot down and killed the afternoon of May 1, 1942 in his Spitfire, five miles off the coast of Le Havrem, France.
Earlier that day, Dauphinee’s research indicates the squadron had attempted sorties from Gravesend to support bombers. On each occasion, the squadron was called back due to weather before finally receiving the go-ahead.
According to records, they were ‘jumped’ by German fighters, two at first followed by almost a dozen more.
A flight lieutenant reported seeing Patton’s aircraft hit and going down from 7,000 feet, hitting the water.
Patton’s body and plane were never recovered, although he's commemorated at the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey, England.
“Doing all of this research, you start to realize that you have this guy’s entire life,” Dauphinee says. “The tragic thing is that he died at 25 and his sister had a child who had Down syndrome. She was institutionalized and there were no heirs.”
That means there's no lineage to the Patton family as it's directly related to the William Street house.
“His niece never had children,” Dauphinee says, “so I started to feel this incredible sense of stewardship over the house and around what this family lost in that war. They were caught up in events that they probably didn’t realize then; that’s where it all ends.”
“It’s incredible the amount of detail we have now,” Andrews adds. “It’s such a deep, rich biography.”
“We inherit the past,” Dauphinee says.
HERITAGE REGISTER
At its Oct. 1 meeting, councillors approved a request from the homeowners to add 62 William St. to the city’s heritage register, a public list of properties that includes designated buildings as well as those with historical interest.
Dauphinee says she believes the register can provide more “robust” protection of older homes in the city.
Council also added 27 William St. and 250 Dunlop St. W. to the register following requests from the owners.
Meanwhile, Dauphinee and Andrews are saving up for a plaque to be placed on the house to commemorate Pilot Officer Jack Patton and identify it as his childhood home.
FINDING THE HOUSE
Andrews and Dauphinee have been married since 2009 after becoming high-school sweethearts while living in Ocean Grove, N.J., which itself is a nationally protected historic site.
“When we were very young, it was a gated community, so on Sundays you couldn’t get in,” says Andrews, who was born in Honolulu while his father, a U.S. Navy pilot from 1967 to 1972, was stationed in Hawaii.
Dauphinee’s father is Canadian and she ended up in New Jersey with her mother. Dauphinee, who was born in the U.S., is considered a Canadian born abroad. She has been in Canada since 1996, while Andrews arrived in 2009 as a landed immigrant, but both are now Canadian citizens. They have two little sons together, aged seven and five.
“We just wanted to get as far away from Toronto as possible,” Dauphinee says. “We wanted to live in a city where people mainly worked where they lived.”
They were drawn to historic houses and bought the William Street home in July 2011. They were specifically attracted to its original features such as the baseboards, floors and stained-glass transoms, as well as the proximity to the Allandale Waterfront GO Station, which was still in the planning stages.
While the architecture may be different - “this is a more industrial-type, heavy brick, austere,” Dauphinee says - both she and Andrews agree Allandale carries the same sense of community as Ocean Grove did for them as kids.
“It’s just a wonderful neighbourhood,” Andrews says. “Some of these houses are absolutely fantastic and we just wanted to be part of it. I don’t think we’re those hyper business-like, condominium-focused, all of those amenities. We really like the feeling of being at home.
“There’s so much history,” he adds. “It’s a warm place.”
Dauphinee says she feels like it’s a very welcoming house.
“It’s a bit rundown, but we’re working on trying to restore it,” she says, such as the original windows as well as removing the front porch.
While previous owners have been interested in modernizing the house, Andrews says he and his wife are more inclined to restore its original character, “but in a way that’s going to make it survive longer.”
They didn’t buy the house for its history, however. That all came later as Dauphinee began to delve deeper and deeper down the proverbial rabbit hole.
“I research for a living, so once something gets rolling for me, it’s almost an unstoppable force,” she says. “You often discovery things that are in plain sight that no one thinks to look for.”
The feeling Dauphinee gets from poring over the information the information she’s seen is that Patton was extremely excited to be performing his duties.
“When you get involved in deep, deep research, you make connections with them that may or may not be real,” she says. “It’s impossible to say that I could be connected in any way to a past that I can’t even understand.
"But at the same time, I think there’s something real about those connections. There are generations of people in Canada who’ve inherited the legacy of war and of loss, and they don’t even know that they’re walking around with that legacy embedded in them.”
