Memories of Geoff Winnington-Ball

[Michael Dorosh]

Cleaning out some files today and ran across a submission I made to the Governor-General in the name of Geoff Winnington-Ball....brought back fond memories of the early days of this website, and my own. Link to a Facebook post with an image of the submission and my thoughts.

Happy to see the MLU community is still active here, and glad to remember where (and with whom) it all began.

https://www.facebook.com/madorosh/po...ArsVvENsUTQpql

EDIT to say: Hmmm - I see my good friend Ed Storey is still posting here and there are probably a few who don't have Facebook access, so I'll copy the text here:

Having just gone through another round of commemorative medal awards, I found myself a little shocked but pleased not to see a bunch of "but I didn't get one" posts in my feed, though there were still a few grumbles about "why him and not me" offline. I find complainers tend to be highest among those who have never in turn sought to recognize others. Cleaning out some files today I ran across the letter in the image.

Geoff Winnington-Ball was a force in the early days of the internet, creating the online community at Maple Leaf Up which connected a wide range of military hobbyists from around the world, where they could share their interest in the Canadian Army of the Second World War. This was the days before Wikipedia (founded 2001) and YouTube (founded 2005). If you wanted to know about an arcane subject, you could go to the library or archives, try and find a book at your local bookstore or possibly ebay (or a fledgling little website called amazon). But your best bet was to find an online discussion forum (something Facebook may ultimately be responsible for extinguishing). MLU went online sometime in 2000, a few months after my own little website and forum at canadiansoldiers.com went live.

From the beginning of MLU Geoff was inviting to all others sharing the same interests as he and was happy to share cyberspace with his fellow enthusiasts. He was free with advice on such things as downsampling jpgs (back in the days of dial up internet) and I believe I was eventually hosting my site on one of his servers. Despite the double-barreled name and the commissioning scroll on his basement wall, Geoff was as down to earth as they come.

In the summer of 2001 while on a military course in CFB Borden I had the pleasure of spending an evening in his home along with, I believe, Jon Skagfeld. He cooked bacon wrapped steak, decorated the table with the Logistics Branch flag (whose insignia I was wearing at the time) and demonstrated his potato gun in his backyard (Jon brought his remote control Tiger tank to the party). We toasted the fallen out of a Sten Gun return spring cap.

In those days I thought what he was doing to keep history alive was pretty impressive, and always done looking outward, never to his own ego. So I recommended him for the Order of Canada.

And why not. Anyone can do it, just go the Governor General's website. It's definitely not guaranteed, but if you can't recognize the good in others, I don't think you can bitch too much when you get passed over for recognition yourself.

Geoff died in December 2010. His son helped me keep my website afloat with their Class 5 hosting service until I transitioned to a commercial server.

Geoff never got admitted to the Order of Canada, but he had the respect of people around the world, and among the things he taught me was that you don't need "the guv'mint" to subsidize you in order to do good, meaningful work. I last saw him in person in Ottawa, either for the 60th Anniversary of D-Day, or VE-Day (I was at both). His cropped hair had grown out so long I no longer recognized him at first. I told him about the Order of Canada submission, and he gave me his grin and simply said "you bugger."

He did not need a medal to know what he had done for the Canadian military hobby community. For me, his loss is still deeply felt.

[Stewart Loy]

Here is a picture from that parade.

VE parade.jpg

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Thanks for sharing this, Michael. A very nice tribute to Geoff, regardless of the fact whether he was awarded a medal or not!