Joseph Whiteside Boyle ( November 16, 1867 , Toronto April 14, 1923 ) - Canadian adventurer, gold miner, prospector.
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Biography
The youngest of four children, Charles Boyle and Martha Bane. In 1885-1888 he went sailor on merchant ships. In 1889 he married Emily Raynor (divorced in 1897). He was engaged in the cargo transportation business. He worked as the manager of boxer Frank Slavin, with whom he came to Alaska during the gold rush .
By then, most of the gold that could be mined by hand was already exhausted, and Boyle engaged in large-scale industrial gold mining. In 1900, Boyle received a concession in Ottawa for gold mining using drags on a large site. In 1904, he founded the Canadian Klondyke Mining Company Limited, whose shareholders were English capitalists. In the best of times, gold was mined using four dredges (three of which were the largest in the world), and a power station was built to supply Dawson with energy.
With the outbreak of World War I, Boyle, at his own expense, assembled and armed a detachment of 50 machine-gunner volunteers. For this he was awarded the honorary title of lieutenant colonel. Subsequently, people from his squad were included in regular Canadian units and did not participate in battles as a separate squad. In 1916 he arrived in England. In 1917, he was sent to Russia, officially as a consultant on narrow gauge railways, but, apparently, also performing intelligence functions. At this time, he worked with another famous English intelligence officer, George Hill .
After the October Revolution, together with George Hill, he actively supported the Bolshevik government, helped to organize the work of railway transport. Hill’s memoirs claim that Boyle’s decisive action succeeded in eliminating the congestion at the Moscow railway junction, but it’s hard to say how true this is.
Further Boyle's activities are related to Romania. In February 1918, he mediated armistice negotiations between the Romanian government and the Red forces in Bessarabia. He managed to get the Bolsheviks to return to the Romanian government the Romanian values evacuated to Moscow after the devastating campaign of Romania in 1916 . He was familiar with the Queen of Romania, Maria . Popular legends often say that they were lovers, but there is no evidence of this.
In May 1918, Boyle suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. After he partially restored his health, he helped organize loans for post-war reconstruction for Romania and the supply of Romanian oil to England. Tried to get an oil concession in Soviet Russia for Royal Dutch Shell . He died in 1923 in England, where he was buried. In 1983, his ashes were reburied in Canada in the city of Woodstock.