The Royal Canadian Legion is a non-profit organization whose purposes and objectives include: providing support to veterans,ex-service members and their families,perpetuating the tradition of Remembrance and participating in programs designed to improve Canadians general quality of life. To this end it makes the Royal Canadian Legion the greatest organization in the world! The Sir William Stephens
on Branch was chartered on May 2,1989, named to honour the war hero and master spy who was also known as the ‘Man Called Intrepid’. The Branch houses replicas of Sir William Stephenson's medals, which were generously donated, and a personal telegram granting permission to honour him in this way. Born in the Point Douglas area of Winnipeg, Manitoba, he left school at a young age. In 1916 he volunteered for the 101st Battalion (Winnipeg Light Infantry), CEF. He earned a field promotion to Sergeant and a medal for battling in the trenches before he turned 19. While recovering from being gassed in 1916,Stephenson learned to fly and then transferred to the British Royal Flying Corps on August 16,1917. Posted to 73 Squadron on February 9, 1918, Stephenson flew the British Sopwith Camel fighter biplane and scored twelve victories,among them was Lothar von Richthofen,the younger brother of the famous Red Baron,before he was shot down and captured by the Germans on July 28,1918. While a student at the University of Manitoba, he invented the wirephoto and then a radio facsimile method of transmitting pictures without need of telephone or telegraph wires. He moved to Britain in 1921 to develop and market this invention to newspapers and rapidly earned a fortune and an entrée to influential political circles in London. Thus, for example, he served on a royal commission in the 1930's to plan the development of India's natural resources. At the beginning of WWII, Stephenson was placed in charge of British Security Co-ordination (counterespionage) in the Western Hemisphere, with headquarters in New York City (where the telegraphic address was INTREPID - later popularized as Stephenson's code name). His organization's activities ranged from censoring transatlantic mail, breaking letter codes (which exposed at least one German spy in the US) and forging diplomatic documents, to obtaining Vichy French and Italian military codes, protecting against sabotage of American factories producing munitions for Britain,and training (at CAMP X, near Oshawa, Ont) allied agents for surreptitious entry into Nazi-occupied Europe.
