British Trade Commissioner James Cross plays solitaire almost one month after his kidnapping on Oct. 5, 1970, in this photo released by his FLQ kidnappers in Quebec.The Canadian Press
The British diplomat James Cross, whose kidnapping by Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorists in 1970 sparked the October Crisis and Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act, died of COVID-19 on Jan. 6, according to his son-in-law, John Stringer. Mr. Cross was 99.
On the morning of Oct. 5, 1970, armed men forced their way into Mr. Cross’s house on Redpath Crescent on the edge of Mount Royal. They found him upstairs, where he was half dressed and getting ready for his job as trade commissioner and head of the British government office in Montreal. They ordered him to get down on the floor or they would kill him, Mr. Cross recalled in a taped memoir years later.
They allowed him to put on trousers and kiss his wife goodbye, then forced him into a stolen taxi outside and took him to captivity in a house in north-end Montreal, where he would stay for 59 days.
The kidnapping threw the Canadian and Quebec governments into chaos. Nothing like it had ever happened in the country, although there had been an earlier failed scheme by the FLQ to kidnap an American consul-general.
The October Crisis played out on television day after day. The kidnappers issued seven demands, including the release of 23 FLQ “political prisoners,” and said if their conditions were not met Mr. Cross would be executed. Mr. Cross said later he mentally prepared himself for death, even saying he preferred to be shot rather than strangled.
Five days after Mr. Cross’s kidnapping, the deputy premier of Quebec, Pierre Laporte, was kidnapped from his house in Chambly, a suburb south of Montreal, while playing football with his nephew.
Early on Oct. 16, Mr. Trudeau declared the War Measures Act and armed troops took to the streets of Montreal. Police rounded up 495 suspected FLQ sympathizers, who ranged from future Parti Québécois cabinet minister Gérald Godin and his partner, the singer Pauline Julien, to the Montreal Star journalist Nick Auf der Maur.
The following day, Mr. Laporte’s body was discovered in the trunk of a car at St. Hubert airport, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence. Mr. Cross was sitting in captivity in front of the television that night.
“I was watching it on television; it was all broadcast live,” Mr. Cross told Anna Maria Tremonti on the CBC’s The Current in 2010, on the 40th anniversary of the kidnapping.
“The real horror of it … a few minutes later … the CBC announced that I was dead, [but] they had got it all wrong. They were running things out of Toronto and completely lost the track and announced that I was dead, and I was afraid that my wife would be watching, but luckily she had gone to bed. But she heard the story the following morning and it wasn’t until about 1 o’clock the next day when a letter they had allowed me to write got to her to confirm that I was still alive.”
The RCMP, Montreal police and the Sûreté du Québec searched for the murderers of Mr. Laporte and the site where Mr. Cross was being held. He spent seven more weeks in captivity after Mr. Laporte’s murder.
James Cross and his wife, Barbara, at a press conference in London, on Dec. 9, 1970.Central Press/Getty Images
At first, Mr. Cross was handcuffed to a bed wearing a hood, but then he was moved to a chair. Aside from watching television, he read newspapers, Agatha Christie mysteries in French and other books, including the revolutionary tract of an Algerian psychiatrist.
Mr. Cross said he was watched all the time, and never beaten or abused. He talked to the kidnappers about their cause. Indeed, as an outsider and well-read diplomat, he was keenly aware of the roots of French-Canadian nationalism, which he outlined in a lengthy debriefing.
“In French Canada and particularly in Quebec there developed almost a colonial regime in which the political masters delivered the vote to national political parties in return for patronage and the economic advantages were left to the non-French,” Mr. Cross wrote. “Thus in 1962 onward there emerged a revolutionary terrorist movement in Quebec called the FLQ. Their objective was to break the ‘colonial’ hold on Quebec by violence.”
He said part of his duties in Montreal was interpreting the political situation in Quebec for the British government.
The situation with his captors changed after Mr. Laporte’s murder. Mr. Cross didn’t have that much to say to them. He was civil and calm, but he later said, “I hated the lot of them and would have cheerfully killed them if the opportunity arose.”
During the CBC interview, he listened to a clip of one of his captors, Jacques Lanctôt, who said there was never a plan to kill Mr. Cross.
“Between us and him there was an understanding; it was clear that we would never kill him, we told him, despite what it said in our news releases to the media, ‘Don’t worry we wouldn’t hurt a fly.’”
Mr. Cross was unimpressed.
“I’m sure they said the same thing to Pierre Laporte. I don’t believe a word of it.”
James Richard Cross, known to his family and friends as Jasper, was born on Sept. 29, 1921, in Nenagh, in County Tipperary in rural Ireland, where his father, James Peter Cross, operated a 100-acre farm. Less than a year after his birth, Ireland was plunged into a vicious civil war, far more divisive than anything experienced in Quebec during the 1960s when the FLQ was active. Political conflict was a fact of life for him while he was growing up.
The Cross family were Protestants and young Jasper went to an Anglican boarding school, the King’s Hospital School, on an 80-acre site in Dublin.
Andrew Whiteside, the school’s archivist, said the boy did not come from a rich family.
“I was very bad at sport,” he said in an interview in the school magazine, although he did play rugby. He was a top student and was head prefect in his final year. Mr. Cross said he earned a scholarship for five of his seven years at the school, but couldn’t manage a scholarship to university.
“I tried Trinity scholarship in my sixth year, but didn’t make it and then I tried again in my seventh year and didn’t make it again, but we managed to get a bursary from the school and a bit of the thing helped, so I got to Trinity,”
In 1944, he graduated from Trinity College in Dublin, with first-class honours, studying political science and economics. Although born in Ireland, he had British citizenship as well and served as an officer in the British Army in Europe and the Middle East. He was in Palestine when Zionist terrorists bombed the King David Hotel in July, 1946, killing 91 people.
“There were [nearly] 100 dead and we were trying to get them out. There was no time to be scared,” Mr. Cross told Maclean’s magazine in 1985. It was perhaps experiences such as this that led to his being able to withstand the rigours of a 59-day captivity.
Later, he joined the British Trade Commissioner Service and served overseas in Malaysia and India and was posted to Montreal as the British Trade Commissioner.
After more than eight weeks in captivity, Mr. Cross suddenly realized he was going to be released when the electricity was shut off.
“We knew that we were surrounded. I was taken out then into the hall and one wrist was chained to the handle of the door so I spent the whole night in that very uncomfortable position crouching, not sitting or not standing,” Mr. Cross told The Current. “We had negotiations for a few hours until they agreed on the ‘modality,’ as they say, of their surrender. We all drove out and went down to Île Sainte-Hélène, where the Cuban consulate had been set up and where the exchange was to take place.”
The kidnappers flew to Cuba. Mr. Cross spoke with his wife, who was in Switzerland, and with Mr. Trudeau and Quebec premier Robert Bourassa. At the British Consulate, he was fed but later mentioned no one offered him a Scotch or a beer, which he hadn’t had in almost two months. He lost 22 pounds in captivity.
Mr. Cross returned to Britain right away after his release, without returning to the house from which he had been kidnapped. On the plane back to London, he was debriefed by a Canadian official. However, there is no record of the conversation since the official neglected to push the record button on the tape recorder.
James and Barbara (née Dagg) Cross spent their first weekend following his rescue at Dorneywood, the official residence of the foreign secretary, who at the time was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the former Tory prime minister.
Mr. Cross never took another foreign posting. He was absorbed into the British civil service. His last post was head of personnel for the Energy Department. Mr. Cross retired in 1980, when he was 59. He was predeceased by his only child, a daughter named Susan, in 2015, and his wife in 2018. He had no immediate survivors.
Reached at his house in Chichester, in southeast England, his son-in-law, Mr. Stringer, told The Globe and Mail that “apart from the last two weeks of his life [Mr. Cross] was in good health and mentally very lucid until the end,” though he had lost his sight a couple of years earlier.
Following his move back to England, Mr. Cross returned to Montreal three or four times to visit, including May, 1984, on the day Denis Lortie shot and killed three people in Quebec’s National Assembly. Mr. Cross said once that he found that unnerving.
As for his captors, he never forgave them: “I still hate them for what they did to me and my family.”
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