Lieutenant-Colonel C.C. Thompson
Toronto Scottish Regiment

This might be the wrong time or place to mention it, but Chris Thompson is a bachelor, the only unmarried commander in the Toronto area. It’s not the wrong time to mention that he now passes up a pension from the last war to risk his neck in this one. He thinks this one will be fun, too.

(Toronto Star, 24 October 1939, 4)

Born on 7 March 1894 in Toronto, Christopher Craig Thompson was a University of Toronto graduate, bond broker, First World War veteran, and commanding officer of the Toronto Scottish since February 1939. He served as a lieutenant with the 124th Battalion and was wounded at Passchendaele. “If they ever offer prizes for military Jack-of-all-trades,” the Toronto Star wrote on the outbreak of war in 1939, “Chris Thompson … ought to win one.”

As the Toronto Scottish mobilized as a machine gun unit, the Star profiled the war veteran commanding officer:

Being gassed once and wounded through lung and shoulder another time spelled the end of Col. Thompson’s active fighting days in the last war, but now, 25 years later, he pops up again to pass the hardboiled medical tests in A-1 shape.

He has been a soldier, more or less steadily, from that day as a downy-cheeked student he joined in with the training corps at Varsity. He isn’t fat or thin or tall or short. At 45, he has his original hair, teeth and eyes (which twinkle mischievously).

The Toronto Scottish went overseas with the 1st Division in December 1939. Second-in-command Major John Herbert Christie took over the regiment in October 1940 when Thompson returned to Toronto, where he faced greater danger than overseas. In July 1943, Thompson found himself the victim of an assault when a pair of thieves tried robbing the cash box from the city’s Scottish Club.

He returned to architect work and died in Toronto on 3 February 1967.