For Posterity's Sake         

A Royal Canadian Navy Historical Project

They made the Ultimate Sacrifice

BROWN, Walter James (Dicky), AB, 3211, RCN, MPK - 19 Oct 1940, HMCS BRAS D'OR - son of Fred and Mary Brown, of Oakville, OnN.

Walter James (Dicky) Brown was born September 05, 1920 at Oswestry, Shropshire, England, and came to Canada with his father Fred Brown (a WWI veteran) to a farm just north of Springside at the age of six (his mother Mary died of tuberculosis when he was just three). He farmed before enlisting on June 09, 1938 as a boy seaman at Esquimalt, British Columbia, and was the Yorkton area's first casualty of the war. His father Fred later moved to Oakville, Ontario. The Bras d'Or was an auxiliary minesweeper completed at Sorel, Québec, in 1926 as a lightship. On the outbreak of war she patrolled the approaches to Halifax and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In October 1940 while shadowing a Romanian freighter she disappeared without a trace between Anticosti Island and Sydney.