Stationed at Fire Hall No. 2, which was located at Smith Street and York Avenue, he was riding the tailboard of a hose truck on a call to Kennedy Street when it was "t-boned" by a streetcar at the intersection of Donald Avenue and York Street. The truck spun around and Lunny was thrown to the ground. He died of head injuries three hours later at Winnipeg General Hospital.
Lunny was buried at Elmwood Cemetery.
After graduating from Riverbend Girls' School, (now Balmoral Hall), she performed with the Winnipeg Little Theatre before moving to England in 1938 to study drama. She went on to become a star of the London stage and British cinema.
A July 1944 Time Magazine review of her movie Candlelight in Algeria noted: “Canadian Carla Lehmann, with her prairie voice, is about twice as American as the average U.S. screen heroine.”
For more about Carla Lehmann, see my West End Dumplings post.
When Gordon's father died, his mother remarried a Carberry-area man named Storyak. In 1916, Mr. Storyak went off to war and Gordon was sent to the Spence farm near Carberry to stay. It appears that the Spences were interested in adopting the boy.
Thomas Fletcher was a farm hand who worked at the Spence farm. He had been sent over from Britain while in his teens. It is thought he became jealous of the affection shown to Gordon by the Spence family and on April 15, 1917, he took Gordon into the woods and executed him with a close-range shotgun blast to the base of the skull. When Fletcher returned to the farmhouse he confessed to the family and the RCMP was contacted.
On November 23, 1917, Fletcher was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang but "Elliott" the hangman botched the job.
The Voice, a weekly labour paper opposed to capital punishment, wrote on March 1, 1918 that: "Poor Fletcher hung on the rope with feet touching the ground and his pulses did not cease to beat for half an hour. It was one minute short of three quarters of an hour before the physician pronounced him dead."
The February 27, 1918 Manitoba Free Press reported that "Hangman Elliott bungled the affair and the scene was most revolting to those who who had been summoned as witnesses". It described Elliott's unsuccessful attempt to hoist the man part-way back up so that he could strangle. Others had to assist him by grabbing the dying body by the legs and lifting them off the ground. They had to hold him in place for over half an hour until the doctor finally declared him dead.
February 26, 1940 - Nelson Eddy played the Winnipeg Auditorium. (Read the programme.)
February 26, 1988 - St. Peter's Dynevor Anglican Church Rectory, 1147 Breezy Point Road, R.M. of St. Andrews (near Selkirk), was designated a Provincial Heritage Site.
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