Weave the Web

Some said he might have been a scientific spy, but all that was thirty years ago and the townsfolk knew nothing but vague rumor.  They did know that Bill Webster's father had been Dr. J. Clarence Webster, a real celebrity who had built the riverside mansion where Bill lived with only his housekeeper, but he never let anyone know very much more. It was ironic, because Dr. William Lusk Webster, PhD, OBE, holder of the American Freedom Medal, may well have been the most extraordinary of the many remarkable people this old and unusual Canadian coastal resort town had produced.

 

His father had become famous for pioneering in gynecology and obstetrics at Edinburgh, McGill and Chicago and, in the latter half of his life, as a Canadian historian. In Shediac, he was "Dr. Webster" so that when his son came to live in the big house on the hill, he was known only as "Bill".  People knew he had been "some kind of a scientist" and there were even those who said he might be up there by himself secretly making a new kind of atom bomb.

 

What they did not know, and few anywhere knew, was that this Dr. Webster was one of the world's earlier nuclear physicists. He had, in fact, been a research colleague of the man who made the atom bomb possible, Ernest, Lord Rutherford, of Cambridge. Besides, and quite apart from his secret scientific career, Bill Webster had been the first man to cross Africa's Sahara desert in a motor car.  His brother, John, had been the only Canadian to compete in the King's Cup air race around England in 1930.  His only sister,  Janet,  died in a German prison camp.

 

Bill wasn't the James Bond kind of spy but he was a wartime spy in the scientific task of gathering and

transmitting undercover physical in­formation for the British/American/Canadian allies in the Second World

War. It was he and his associates who first warned North America of the coming nuclear peril and allowed

the United States and Britain to beat the Germans to the bomb. He was, for at least two years, in personal

peril as Nazi operatives in Washington sought to frustrate his liaison work between the British scientific community and the United States scientists and government. And there was a time before the Russians joined the Allies to repel the Germans when he went inside Russia itself in an attempt to lure out a nuclear scientist.

 

After the war, Webster was decorated by both British and American governments and came to Shediac to "prune trees on Dad's estate" which his father had willed to him in 1950. When maintenance of the thirty-acre estate became too great a burden twenty-five years later, he and his faithful housekeeper, Catherine Gallant, who had served the family forty years, moved into a new and smaller one a few hundred yards from the Shediac Cape churchyard where his parents lay buried.

 

Webster had not planned to remain in Shediac when, at the age of 47, he came back to help his ailing and widowed mother. But his father had willed him trusteeship of the Webster Museum Trust and this required considerable attention. It had helped establish the New Brunswick Provincial Museum and the battlefield museum at Fort Beausejour. The estate needed much care, help was hard to find and Bill found himself doing much of the work himself. Once. years later, he told me: "People are always asking what I do with myself up there. Well, I tell them I prune." And prune he did, keeping in good condition the trees, lawns and flowered walks of the place where his illustrious. often irascible, father had welcomed prime ministers, viceroyalty and notables from the arts and academic world.

 

Not even after his death in 1975 did the real story of Bill Webster's strange career become known, and much of the cloak-and-dagger period remains a mystery. Most of the scientists who worked with him are dead and those remaining are old men, reticent and forgetful, who even now will not detail the exploits which frustrated the Hitler Nazis and defeated Tojo's Japan.

 

I had known Bill Webster by sight from many summer vacations on Shediac Bay but it was only when my wife and I bought back a family property in 1967 that we met the man himself.  He drove in through the gate one day to say he was pleased that the place had come back into our hands and was being restored. It was a modest old house but one of the oldest in the community, and Webster was concerned about the history and preservation of the district to which his Scottish grandfather, James Webster, had come early in the 19th Century. Besides, the long abandoned Presbyterian cemetery, where his grandmother Chapman's family were buried, abutted our property.

 

In the early 1970s I had published a magazine article which mentioned his name in what I had thought a pleasing context, yet he seemed disturbed by this minimal publicity. After that when we met he called me his "friendly enemy.  He died in 1975.