LANDON-L Archives

From: Michael Landon <>
Subject: Some Other Canadian Landons
Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 17:12:26

Being a native Canadian myself, I have been interested to read the
accounts on the website of Landons in Canada, mostly Ontario and Quebec. It
occurs to me that researchers into Canadian Landon family history might
stumble upon some of my immediate relations and wonder where on earth we
came from.

My father, Arthur Henry Whittington Landon (1889-1968) was actually born
in Cyprus where his British army career officer father (Major General Sir
Frederick William Bainbridge Landon, 1860-1937--son of the Reverend James
Timothy Bainbridge Landon, Vicar of Ledsham, Yorks.) happened to be
stationed at the time. By 1912, he had completed four years as an
undergraduate history student at Worcester College, Oxford (where else?),
but never completed his B.A. degree. By that time he had earned a
commission as a second lieutenant in the local territorial battalion of the
Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He was informed, however,
that his eyesight was not quite good enough to qualify for a commission in
the British army. Fortunately, the then Canadian minister in charge of the
army, Sam Hughes, had been on his father's staff in the South African
("Boer") War, and he arranged for father to take a short course at the
RCMC, Kingston in the summer 0f 1912, after which he was commissioned as a
2nd LT in the Royal Canadian Regiment.

For most of WWI, father was on loan to the British army in France. He used
to tell of how he probably saved the life of "the head of the family," the
eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son of L.E.L's father, John
Landon, who was then serving as an NCO in the British army (whom he just
happened to meet up with), by finding him an office job back at
headquarters just before his unit was sent off to the front on a suicidal
mission. Back in Canada by the end of 1920 Father spent some time at the
RCR regimental headquarters in London, Ont. One of his duties was as
regimental Band Officer, and in that capacity he played a part, I forget
the details, in the creation of that famous musical group known as "Guy
Lombardo and his Royal Canadians." Father usually got moved about every two
years in the interwar period. In the early 1930's he was in Calgary,
Alberta, where he met and married my mother, Elizabeth Worthington Fair
Landon (1904-80). My older brother, Guy (whose genealogy is published in
the 1972 Burke version) was actually born in London, England, in 1933. I
was born in St. John, NB (at 22 Mecklenburg Street), My younger brother,
Christopher Bainbridge Fair Landon (now a resident of Zimbabwe) was born,
1940, in Halifax, NS (where my earliest memories begin), and my youngest
brother, James Timothy Whittington Landon (an RMC Sandhurst graduate,
formerly of the 10th/11th Hussars, and now a Brigadier in the Oman army and
an equerry to Sultan Qabus) was born in Victoria, BC, in 1942.

Father was regarded as too much needed in Halifax to go and fill the
position he was down for on paper with the Canadian Army in Europe at the
start of WWII, and in 1941 was sent out to Victoria, where we later joined
him, shortly before he was reassigned to Vancouver. By the end of the war,
he was a brigadier and the number 2 person in Pacific Command under General
Pearks (my godfather). His last major assignment was arranging and
supervising the transporting of British former POW's of the Japanese across
Canada from Vancouver to Halifax on their way home. He retired in the
summer of 1946

Meanwhile, both of his parents had died in England, and left him a little
money which, at that time, could not legally be transferred out of the
sterling aarea and into the dollar area. So, at the end of August, we took
a train back to Halifax, and sailed from there, on the Cunard Liner
AQUITANIA, over to Southampton, England. I am the only one of us to come
back to Canada. From 1958 to 1960, I was a Master a Lakefield College
School (the "Grove"), near Peterborough, Ont. 1960-64, I was in graduate
school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, intending to return and
teach in Canada. But then I got a wonderful offer from the University of
Mississippi. That was the notorious "Long Hot Summer, "Mississippi Burning"
and all that. So I said I'll go down there for a year or two, and watch
history being made, before I go back to Canada. But I still haven't made it
yet. My two children, Clay de Laval and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, are both
native MIssissippians.

Michael de L. Landon
Professor of History
University of Misssissippi

Tel: 601-232-7105
Fax: 601-232-7033

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• Some Other Canadian Landons by Michael Landon <>