Obituary: Bryan Wannop decorated for bravery while working in hot spots for CIDA, UN

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During his lifetime, Ottawa’s Bryan Wannop was kidnapped and robbed in Sudan, strafed by rebels on a beach in South Yemen and decorated for bravery by Canada and Germany.

He helped rescue hundreds of tourists and diplomats caught in a civil war and once gave famed actress and UNICEF ambassador Audrey Hepburn a tour of the massive United Nations famine relief operation that he led in Africa.

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Wannop was also gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Canada. He struggled to accept his sexuality and, after he embraced it, he had to wait decades to legally marry longtime partner Frank Kajfes.

Wannop died earlier this month. He was 87.

“He was the liveliest, most wonderful creature, an extremely generous and big-hearted person,” said his friend, Eduardo Terranova, an artist from New York City.

William Bryan Wannop grew up in New Westminster, B.C., and Calgary; his father was a teacher and his mother an artist. They were a religious family. As a young man, he resisted the realization he was gay.

“It wasn’t a spiritual struggle, but it was a moral struggle,” he once told an interviewer. “I felt terribly guilty. In fact, I would go to church and beg for forgiveness.”

After graduating from the University of British Columbia, Wannop moved to Ottawa in the 1960s to take a job in what was then known as the Department of External Affairs, today’s Global Affairs Canada.

His career was almost derailed in its formative stages. In 1967, he was arrested by Ottawa police at Nepean Point, then a well-known cruising area for gay men.

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The arrest threatened Wannop’s fledgling career since LGBTQ2 employees were then being purged from the civil service and armed forces because of fears that they could be blackmailed by Canada’s Cold War enemies. (The federal government in 2017 formally apologized for its actions and created a $145-million compensation package for those who experienced discrimination.)

Wannop informed his supervisor and deputy minister of his arrest, but, instead of trying to have him ousted from the public service, they both wrote supportive letters to the Crown on his behalf. The charges against him were withdrawn on the condition that he take counselling.

“I could not believe the acceptance,” Wannop said.

In 1969, Wannop was named first secretary in the High Commission of Canada in India. There, he helped establish a daycare for children of itinerant construction workers who were building Canada’s new high commission, and he launched a program to teach literate Indians how to pass on their reading and writing skills to others.

Wannop would spend the next two decades travelling the world as an international development officer.

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He spent years as regional director of Canadian International Development Agency in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then moved in 1984 to the United Nations, where he became a member of the UN Development Program (UNDP).

The UNDP’s ambitious mandate was to end poverty, build democratic institutions and promote the rule of law.

In South Yemen, Wannop was the UNDP representative when civil war broke out in January 1986, leaving hundreds of tourists and diplomats caught in a chaotic crossfire in the capital city, Aden.

Wannop leaped into action, helping to co-ordinate an evacuation by sea, but, at the appointed hour, their British rescue ship sailed away because of heavy shelling. “We were flabbergasted,” Wannop told the Los Angeles Times. “At first, we couldn’t believe it. Without warning, they set sail and left us.”

Stranded on the beach, evacuees were strafed by machine-gun fire, and they fled to hiding places in the city. Wannop would receive the Governor General’s Medal of Bravery for his subsequent daring.

His citation reads: “He organized many rescue missions to bring out those trapped in combat zones, personally provided shelter, food and water to many of those rescued and co-ordinated the convoys which took the evacuees to the waiting ships. When it was learned that five West Germans were trapped in their embassy in a centre of intense fighting, he did not hesitate to drive into the area to retrieve them.”

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The German government awarded him its Order of Merit.

In 1988, Wannop served as special co-ordinator for massive emergency relief operations in Sudan, where a widespread famine threatened millions of lives. More than two million people had been displaced by drought and a years-long civil war.

He personally led one relief mission to South Sudan aboard a train loaded with food that was stopped by rebels in May 1989. Wannop and other UN officials were marched into the bush, stripped and robbed; the train crew negotiated their release by paying a ransom.

Wannop also served as head of the UNDP in Somalia and Kenya before retiring to Ottawa, where he lived with Kajfes, a teacher.

The two men were together for more than 30 years before getting officially married at the Glebe Community Centre in 2007, two years after gay marriage was legalized in Canada. Both deeply religious, Wannop and Kajfes had hoped for a church wedding, but they had to settle for being personally blessed at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church.

The church would be allowed to formally bless gay couples married in civil ceremonies the following year. (Kajfes, who was ordained as a non-denominational minister in 2013, died eight years ago at the age of 69.)

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The couple loved to travel, to attend National Arts Centre performances and to eat fine food. They often stayed with Terranova in New York City.

“These were big guys, and I have a small painting studio with a futon, but somehow they managed it,” he said.

Andrew Duffy is a National Newspaper Award-winning reporter and long-form feature writer based in Ottawa. To support his work, including exclusive content for subscribers only, sign up here: ottawacitizen.com/subscribe

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