Jack Ratcliff’s grandfather hoped he would become a Methodist minister. Jack had other ideas: he wanted to join the army.

On his first day of Grade 12 at Eastglen High School in Edmonton, Canada declared war on Nazi Germany, and Jack signed up.

“I left Edmonton on Sept. 16, 1939,” recalls Jack, now 86, who shares an apartment in Spruce Grove with his orange cat. “I was a boy soldier.”

He spent the war years overseas, and returned home in 1945 with an English war bride, Joyce. He joined the Edmonton police force, but in 1948 returned with Joyce to England where he spent five years as a London police officer. When the Ratcliffs came back to Canada, Jack rejoined the army and served for the next 17 years. They had four children, two of whom became Edmonton police officers.
On leaving the army, Jack got a job as an investigator with the Alberta Ombudsman’s office, a job he held till retirement.

“I specialized in Workers Compensation cases (for the Ombudsman),” says Jack. “My crowning glory was getting a pension retroactive for a Russian widow who had never come to this country.” The woman’s husband, an immigrant worker who had been killed in a Medicine Hat railway accident, had been supporting his wife in the Soviet Union until his death.

The Ratcliffs went through the searching for a spiritual home common to many Unitarians. They attended one Unitarian service in Barrie, Ont., while Jack was stationed in CFB Borden, only to find that the Unitarians there were disbanding.

The couple even checked out Catholicism, but were put off by a bishop who told them that when they hit any conflict between faith and logic, faith must predominate. “That was it – goodbye, finish, kaput (to Catholicism),” says Jack.

When they tried the Unitarian Church of Edmonton in the early 1970s, the couple found their spiritual home at last. Part of the attraction was Rev. Rob Brownlee, said Jack, and Joyce liked Brownlee’s wife Susan. So they became involved in UCE, although Jack resisted any committee work. He sang with the Unitarian choir, and Joyce for years ran the church bookstore.

The appeal of Unitarianism was the freedom it offered, says Jack -- freedom to think for oneself, freedom from dogma.

“When you get rid of religion you get a load off your back,” Jack says.
The Ratcliffs were members when a group of Edmonton Unitarians left to form the Westwood Unitarian Congregation in 1982.

“I think that they felt that they should have some moving emotional experience every week,” he recalls. Happily, the split caused no lasting hard feelings. Jack has a snapshot of himself and other UCE singers performing in the Westwood church years ago.

Joyce Ratcliff died several years ago. These days Jack rarely makes it to church, since a stroke put an end to his driving. But he is still a Unitarian, and still ready with a joke and a smile.

[Interviewed in 2009]
Photo courtesy: Collection of J. Ratcliff