261 The Royal Canadian Legion MANITOBA & NORTHWESTERN ONTARIO COMMAND www.mbnwo.ca STAPLES, Ernest E. WWI Ernest was born in Manvers, Ontario on November 19, 1886. He moved with his parents to Carman, Manitoba on August 25, 1899. He finished his schooling in Carman and then joined his father running their dry goods store. He enlisted in the spring of 1918 and shipped out to England in April 1918 where he completed his training and transferred to the 34th Canadian Cameron Highlanders at the age of 32. He was killed in action in France in the Battle of Cambria on September 28, 1918 and is buried in the Crest Cemetery, Fontaine-Notre-Dame, France. STARRATT, D. Dean WWII Dean was born in Grand Prairie, Alberta in 1923, to Robert and Iris Starratt, homesteaders from New Brunswick. The parents and four boys moved to Hudson, Ontario in 1926 and Robert eventually formed a large transportation company Starratt Airways serving the gold fields of North West Ontario with boats, planes and tractor trains. He followed his older brother Don into the Royal Canadian Navy at the age of nineteen in 1942. Despite growing up around airplanes they stayed true to the family’s east coast roots and chose to serve on the sea. Dean served on a Corvette, the Louisburg II, plying the Atlantic back and forth between Canada and England providing anti-submarine protection to convoys carrying troops and materials to England in the war effort against the Nazis. He was in Halifax on VE Day and was then assigned to join the Pacific War, but the Japanese surrendered before he was required to report to the west coast. Dean and Don formed their own transportation company in Hudson after the war, starting by hauling fuel over a substandard bush road to Red Lake from the CNR mainline one hundred miles away. In 1951, he received his pilot license and worked for 33 years flying passengers to forestry camps, trap lines and the Hudson’s Bay Post store on Lac Seul, until his retirement in 1984. Dean died in 1997 leaving behind his wife Esther and seven children in Hudson. He was a member of The Royal Canadian Legion Candlish Memorial Branch 139 in Hudson, Ontario.
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