George Sydney Williams (1882 - 1956)

George Sydney Williams was known to his family as "Sid" and to the BC Penitentiary inmates with whom he lived from 1945 - 1956 as "Bill". He was born to Isham Lyman Williams III and Emma Jane Williams (nee Winter) in the village of Grafton, east of Cobourg, Ontario on January 29, 1882. BC Penitentiary records listed Williams' ethnic origin as "Welsh", however his paternal great-grandfather Isham Lyman Williams, who came to Canada in the 1830s from Watertown, New York, was listed in the US Census of 1790 as a "Free Colored Person" (Williams family history always said he and his family travelled north via the Underground Railroad).

Registration of Williams' birth in Ontario civil register, #024224 - 1882.
Sid Williams lived on his parents' farm in Lakeport, Haldimand Township until he was twenty years old, and in August 1902 joined his brothers Charles (a Boer War veteran) and Wallace, his sister Alberta and others from the area on a harvest excursion to the village of Napinka in southwestern Manitoba. (Harvest excursions were a popular tradition between 1890 - WWII, organized by the CPR to assist prairie farmers with the grain harvest.) This may have been Williams' first introduction to the west. He returned to Lakeport and it is known he was living there in 1911, however little is known of his early adulthood.

On October 7, 1920, at the age of thirty-eight, Williams was sentenced to life imprisonment at Calgary, Alberta, and committed to the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert. Twenty months later, on May 23, 1922 he was transferred to Stony Mountain, 25 kilometers north of Winnipeg. He remained at Stony Mountain for seventeen years, until August 18, 1939, when at the age of fifty-seven he was conditionally released under the Ticket of Leave Act (Canada's first parole statute, later replaced by the Parole Act). At that time he came to British Columbia to live with his younger sister Alberta (1884 - 1962), who was living in Lynn Valley, North Vancouver. Williams’ death certificate indicates he worked at that time as a carpenter.

Nearly six years later, on July 6, 1945, Williams was sentenced in the Vancouver spring assize to thirty months for a second offence. He was admitted to the BC Penitentiary on July 17, 1945, at the age of sixty-three. As Williams was still on conditional release from his first offence, his parole was revoked. Accordingly, after completing his thirty month sentence for the second crime, Williams resumed serving his original life sentence, this time as a "ticket of leave violator".

On November 23, 1956, eleven years after his admission to the BC Penitentiary, Williams suffered a gastric hemorrhage and was admitted to the BC Penitentiary hospital. The following morning, while smoking a cigarette in his hospital bed, he suffered serious burns to large areas on his chest, arms and left thigh, apparently caused by a flaming nightgown. Williams was initially given medical attention by penitentiary medical staff, until BC Penitentiary physician Dr. Alan Pedlow - contacted by telephone - ordered he be transported to Shaughnessy Hospital, a federally-funded veterans’ hospital in Vancouver to which federal inmates were routinely transferred. Two days later, Williams died in hospital of complications from his burns.

Coroner's Inquest

Under the British Columbia Coroner’s Act, any death occurring in a correctional facility, penitentiary, police prison or lock-up automatically becomes the subject of a Coroner’s Inquest. Accordingly, an inquest took place at Vancouver Coroner’s Court on Cordova Street on December 5, 1956, presided over by Vancouver Coroner Glen McDonald. There were three witnesses at the inquest: BC Penitentiary warden Frederick C.B. Cummins, two penitentiary hospital employees, and the pathologist from the Coroner’s office who carried out the autopsy.

The inquest began with an explanation by Warden Cummins as to what had occurred:

Our inmates smoke if they wish and all inmates are allowed to have lighters for that purpose and this man enjoyed smoking and if we had taken his tobacco and lighter away from him he would have raised Cain and demanded to see the warden and ascertain why he would be deprived of this privilege ... [A]nd there was no reason, so he was allowed to have his lighter and tobacco and there is a strong suggestion that he set fire to his blankets or his bedding on purpose. Now, why he would do that, I suppose, is to attract attention to himself ... we don’t actually know that he did set fire to his blankets on purpose, but it is certainly a strong suggestion of that.

BC Penitentiary hospital officer Roy F. Perkins, the second witness to give evidence at the inquest, was in charge of the penitentiary hospital on the day in question, and was among the first at Williams' bedside following the incident. Perkins, who testified that Williams was the only patient on the ward on the morning of the incident, said he heard an alarm sound in the hospital about 11:10 am, and dashed out to the ward to find Williams on the floor with his nightgown on fire. Hospital staff removed Williams' gown and put out the fire, and Perkins called his senior officer, Wilfred L. Pritchard.

Senior hospital officer Wilfred Pritchard testified that since he lived on the grounds of the BC Penitentiary, he was on-site almost immediately. Pritchard described how once he observed the extent of Williams’ burns, he made immediate calls to the penitentiary surgeon, Dr. Pedlow, and Warden Cummins, indicating it was Dr. Pedlow who instructed him to have Williams transported to Shaughnessy Hospital. Mr. Pritchard conceded that in situations of "extreme emergency", it was standard procedure to transport patients to the nearby Royal Columbian Hospital (three blocks from the penitentiary), but indicated that in his estimation Williams' condition was not that serious.

No explanation

Dr. T.R. Harmon, a pathologist employed by the Vancouver coroner’s office, testified during the inquest that Williams had suffered "extensive burns involving the face, neck, right arm and most of the trunk and both thighs". Dr. Harmon, who performed the autopsy on Williams the day after his death, noted that some of Williams’ burns indicated "considerable heat generated before the surface [of the skin] had been burned". There was also damage to Williams' lungs, from inhaling hot gases and smoke.

In response to a juror's question, Dr. Harmon testified that burns of the nature suffered by Williams would take "five to ten minutes" to occur. Dr. Harmon could not explain how third degree burns -- requiring so long an exposure to flame -- could occur, given how quickly Williams’ nightshirt would have burned. Hospital officer Wilfred Pritchard was also asked to explain how the burns could have become so serious in so short a time, to which he replied that he could not "any more than anyone else could".

The matter of Williams’ "difficult" personality was alluded to on several occasions during the inquest. Warden Cummins noted that "he was a cranky cantankerous man who would go out of his way to cause the authorities trouble". Hospital officer Wilfred Pritchard added:

Williams was a very difficult individual to take care of. He had a very mean personality. Very uncooperative. He would actually go out of his way to make things difficult for the administration and the people that were taking care of him. He was always on the verge of aggression and he would persistently try to make things as difficult as he could for everybody concerned.

From Transition, December 1956
The focus by penitentiary officials on Williams’ personality antagonized at least one juror during the inquest, who noted the matter was irrelevant to the subject at hand. Even after this point had been made, Warden Cummins again emphasized Williams’ difficult nature, citing this as the reason "hospital officials can't give you an answer why it happened".

The Coroner’s jury concluded Williams’ death was accidental (Coroners juries were at that time asked to determine cause of death as between "accident", "suicide" and "homicide"). The jury recommended that "in view of the feeble condition of the deceased that stricter regulations be enforced regarding smoking in the Prison Hospital".

Williams died at Shaughnessy Hospital on November 26, 1956, at the age of seventy-four years. The obituary at right appeared in Transition, a BC Penitentiary magazine published by inmates in the 1950s. It is apparent from this obituary that Williams' friends among the prison population were not advised of his actual cause of death (or, alternatively, that Transition was not permitted to publish the details).

Williams was buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery on December 7, 1956, following a graveside funeral at which Reverend Donald "Jake" Gillies officiated. At the time of his death, Penitentiary officials were unable to locate Williams’ next of kin. Efforts were made to contact his sister in North Vancouver, but to no avail. Warden Cummins indicated during the Coroner’s inquest that when Williams arrived at the BC Penitentiary in 1945 "he told us he did not want to give any next of kin and he said he did not want any of his relatives to worry about him".

References

Many thanks to Sharon Neely for supplying details of Sid Williams' early life in Lakeport, including the birth certificate and Cobourg World article noted below.
Civil Registrations for Ontario, registration number 024224 - 1882
British Columbia Division of Vital Statistics, call number: 1956-09-013215/Roll b13230 (see BC Archives online Vital Event Indexes)
"City Lawyers' Persuasion Cuts Terms: Nineteen Sentenced", The Vancouver Daily Province, July 7, 1945 p. 1
"Dope Case Conspirators Get 3 Years: Sentence Day for Seventeen Others in Assize Court", The Sunday Sun, July 7, 1945, p. 1
Bowell Funeral Home Records, New Westminster Public Library
Social column in Cobourg World, August 22, 1902
Transcript of Coroner's Inquest, December 5, 1956, British Columbia Archives GR 1502, B4860, 564/56 (see British Columbia Archives Research Guide to Coroner’s Records)
Transition - a periodical published by inmates of the BC Penitentiary from 1952 - 1963. Vancouver Public Library Special Collections ref. 365.971 T77
History of Parole in Canada - National Parole Board