Brigadier Norman Gianelli
2nd Armoured Regiment (Lord Strathcona’s Horse)

I resent very much his using the title brigadier. He has it on his door. I don’t know whether he uses it to make people think they are coming up before someone high and mighty, but as far as I’m concerned, a brigadier is only a lance-jack general.

(Councilman David Post in Toronto Star, 17 Feb 1955, 26)

Born in Toronto on 29 January 1895, Norman Angelo Gianelli was a First World War veteran and professional army officer. Commissioned with the 8th Canadian Mounted Rifles in February 1915, he went overseas for training and instructional duties. While on a tour of the front with an artillery battery in May 1916, he was wounded and shell shocked. On return to Canada in 1917, he served as assistant adjutant-general in Ottawa, and joined the Permanent Force in 1920. Serving for twenty years with the Lord Strathcona’s Horse, he succeeded Lieutenant-Colonel F.M.W. Harvey in July 1940.

In February 1941, the Lord Strathconas mobilized for active service as the 2nd Armoured Regiment. It went overseas under Gianelli’s command in November. On being recalled to Canada in September 1942, he was succeeded by second-in-command Lieutenant-Colonel P.G. Griffin, who would lead the regiment in action in Italy. At Camp Borden, Gianelli took over the 2nd Army Tank Brigade from fellow LdSH veteran Brigadier G.R. Bradbrooke, who had returned overseas.

The brigade, soon to be redesignated the 2rd Armoured Brigade, arrived in the United Kingdom under Gianelli’s command in June 1943. It trained over the next year for the invasion of France, however, in March 1944, Gianelli was replaced by Brigadier R.A. Wyman, formerly of the 1st Armoured Brigade in Italy. Too old to command in action, the nearly fifty-year-old Gianelli was posted to the Canadian Reinforcement Units. In April 1944, he became Brigadier of the Royal Armoured Corps with the First Canadian Army until he was succeeded by Brigadier J.F. Bingham in December. He briefly reunited with the Lord Strathconas when they arrived in the Northwest theatre.

After a thirty-year army career Gianelli retired in late 1945. He worked in real estate until appointed an Ontario magistrate in 1954 despite having no legal training. Less than a year on the job, he antagonized the New Toronto mayor and town council, who called him a “dictator.” Not only did he allegedly “gouge” citizens with petty fines but he soon took over more than half of the council building, including “the room in the basement we had for a lunchroom.”

Citing the postwar appointment of former senior army officers to judicial posts, Ontario criminal court judge David Vanek, who had served under Gianelli at Camp Borden, reflected:

these lay magistrates, who later became lay judges, lacked the depth and breadth of training in the law to reasonably ensure that their administration of criminal justice would be conducted according to law, and not their induvial discretion, an indispensable requirement in a democratic country.

After fifteen years as a magistrate, Gianelli briefly served on the Ontario criminal court until he stepped down from the bench in 1971. He died in Toronto on 12 September 1974.