Lieutenant-Colonel Stoney Richardson
14th (Calgary) Tank Regiment

“He was unique in the army,” said Fred Ritchie, his second-in-command. “He was the ideal colonel; spit and polish didn’t impress him. He rolled dice with his boys, and still had their respect.”

(Maclean Kay, Globe and Mail, 29 Aug 2007)

Born in Vegreville, Alberta on 12 October 1908, Clinton Argue (Stoney) Richardson was a store grocer when he joined the Calgary Regiment on mobilization in February 1941. He earned a temporary commission prior to the unit going overseas in June 1941 and became regimental quartermaster. Known as “old stone face,” Richardson soon came to be nicknamed Stoney. He served with the Calgary Tanks for the whole duration of the war from mobilization in March 1941 to demobilization in December 1945 when he led the regiment home as commanding officer.

During the Italian campaign, Richardson became a company commander and by January 1944, he served as second-in-command. Following the heavy fighting in the Liri Valley in May 1944, Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Neroutsos went to hospital and handed over the regiment to Richardson. “It was a delight to take command of the unit,” he later recalled, “as it had gone through a lot of very difficult fighting and I had been with it through all of this.”

He remained in command of the next eighteen months, through the advance on the Gothic Line to the large-scale movement to Northwest Europe and to the final return home. In September 1945, Richardson earned the Distinguished Service Order for extraordinary leadership since taking command of the Calgary Tanks:

During his term of command his regiment has been constantly in action, and has never failed to reach and hold all its objectives. The unvarying success of this regiment has in a large measure been due to the magnificent leadership and example of Lt-Col. “Stoney” Richardson. Before every action he invariably conducted reconnaissance personally, both by day and by night, often under heavy and accurate mortar and shell fire …

This officer’s contempt of danger, personal fighting spirit, magnificent example and outstanding leadership have been an inspiration to his regiment and have directly contributed throughout the mixed and heavy fighting of the 1944 Italian campaign to successive defeats of the enemy.

On arrival home in December 1945, he remarked to the press, “I haven’t though much about what I’m going to do, although I have received two or three ideas about the future already, but I’m just going to look around for a while and take a good long rest.” Within a few years, he joined International Paint Canada Ltd., where his old commander, Cyril Neroutsos, was an executive and later president. Richard relocated to Montreal in the 1950s as sales manager and vice president. As in the war decades before, Richardson would eventual succeeded Neroutsos, becoming president of the company in the 1960s. He retired after a successful business career in 1973.

He died in Montreal on 4 June 2007 at the age of 98.