His life spanned from the Spanish flu to the COVID-19 pandemic, and when he died at 109 this month in Saanich, Albert Stanley Middleton was the oldest man in Canada.
Middleton, who lived at Broadmead Care’s Veterans Memorial Lodge, was also the oldest Canadian veteran of the Second World War and the oldest surviving British Home Child who served in that war, according to his family.
As of last week, Canada’s oldest living person was Margaret Romans, who was born in what is now Latvia on March 16, 1912.
Middleton would have turned 110 on March 11, when a celebration of his life is now planned.
“I’ve done everything I should have done for a happy life,” he told the Times Colonist at a past birthday celebration.
Daughter Darlene Van Raay, in an interview from her home in Ontario on Thursday, attributed her father’s longevity in part to his strong mind and a tough childhood that stiffened his resolve.
“He had a hard life, stuff I’m sure I don’t even know about,” she said. “He was very strong-willed and stubborn.
“You don’t get to be 109 without having some stubbornness, not letting people tell you what to do.”
Born March 11, 1915, in London, England, Middleton immigrated to Canada at age 14 with no birth certificate or passport, with the help of a charitable group called the National Children’s Orphanage.
Middleton’s parents had broken up and his father had sent him, one of four children, to an orphanage, said Van Raay.
Upon arriving in Halifax, Middleton worked three years as a labourer on a farm to repay the cost of the ship’s passage.
“It was hard on my dad — it was hard labour,” said Van Raay, recalling her father’s stories. “He might have worked on three farms. My dad had to learn early on how to speak up for himself.”
After surviving the Great Depression, he married his first wife, Jacqueline, in 1940, and the couple went on to have three children. In 1943, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was deployed in the United Kingdom.
He served until 1946, when he received an honourable discharge at the age of 31.
In 1952, with help from the Veterans Land Act, which offered veterans who wished to farm loans to purchase land, stock and equipment, Middleton bought a 26-hectare hobby farm in Ontario and tended to pigs and beef cattle.
Van Raay remembers her father as a strict man who saw everything as right or wrong, “black or white” — likely stemming from his work on farms and in the air force.
Middleton also worked at various factories, attended night school and retired from farm-equipment company Massey Ferguson in 1980.
At age 70, Middleton, who was divorced from his first wife, remarried and moved back to England for two decades, travelling with wife Constance until her death in 1996.
He stayed on in England for a few years, before deciding to return to Canada. At age 90, he wasn’t inclined to go back to southwestern Ontario’s harsh winters. He had heard that Victoria’s weather was similar to England’s and that there were lots of English people living in the city, so he resolved to make it his new home.
Van Raay said she had small children at home, so she couldn’t accompany her dad to Victoria, and there was no convincing him not to go.
“He wasn’t frail, and he was very determined — he was still very much of sound mind, and he was making up his own mind, and nobody was going to tell him what to do,” she said, laughing, adding that her dad didn’t even have a credit card, so he was “electronically untraceable.”
“He had $6,000 in his breast pocket — traveller’s cheques and cash — and I put him on an airplane … and off he went to the other side of the country and there was no way of tracking him.”
Middleton stayed at the Strathcona Hotel on Douglas Street until he found an apartment across from Beacon Hill Park in James Bay, where he lived independently until the age of 101, when he moved to Veterans Memorial Lodge.
“He just kind of made the best of things,” she said of her dad’s philosophy. “Keep working. Keep your head down. Stay busy. Stay out of trouble, but have a little bit of fun.”
At the care home, Middleton mellowed and was known as an ever-smiling and big-band-tune-singing charmer, said his daughter.
On Wednesdays, with the help of activity worker Yvan Cameron, he’d talk to his daughter and son and other family via Facetime on an iPad, ending the conversations with: “See you later alligator.”
On his 108th birthday, he listed his life’s pleasures as music, coffee and candy. When asked, he’d say he had no regrets, with the exception of once having been a smoker — “that was a bad habit.”
He took part in fitness activities at the lodge, made friends with staff and residents, and enjoyed listening to the radio and watching the “telly.”
He also enjoyed a drink here and there, said Van Raay, who gave him a much-appreciated bottle of Crown Royal whiskey on one recent birthday.
In his latter years, dementia set in and he would only remember that he was over age 100. “I’d say Dad, you’re going to be 110 and he was like, ‘One hundred and 10?’ He couldn’t believe that.”
A celebration of life is planned for friends and family on Middleton’s birthday, at 2 p.m. on March 11 at Veterans Memorial Lodge.
