Joseph W. Boyle

Joseph Whiteside Boyle (6 November 1867 – 14 April 1923), better known as Klondike Joe Boyle, was a Canadian adventurer who became a businessman and entrepreneur in the United Kingdom. In the First World War he came to see service assisting the allied Kingdom of Romania.

Family Joseph Boyle was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame racehorse trainer Charles Boyle and wife Martha Bain Boyle. His brother, David A. Boyle, would follow in their father's footsteps and become a Thoroughbred racehorse trainer. His family had immigrated from the Ulster region of Ireland (modern Northern Ireland) to Canada in 1839. The Boyle family were Protestants and Unionist in their political sympathies, but he was always proud to call himself a "fighting Irishman". Though he was born in Toronto, he grew up in Woodstock.

Early career Boyle was early to recognize the potential of large-scale gold mining in the Klondike gold fields, and as the initial placer mining operations waned after 1900, Boyle and other companies imported equipment to assemble enormous dredges, usually electric-powered, that took millions more ounces of gold from the creeks while turning the landscape upside-down, shifting creeks.

In service of Romania

In February 1918 he served as the principal intermediary on behalf of the Romanian government in effecting a ceasefire with revolutionary forces in Bessarabia. On 23 February 1918, when Romania was on the brink of defeat, Boyle first met Queen Marie, who was lying dejected on her sofa as she heard the news that Romania had asked for an armistice with Germany. Although Marie was only a queen consort, she was vastly more popular with the Romanian people than her husband, King Ferdinand. At the time she vowed: "My English blood refuses to accept disaster. If there remains the smallest, most meagre fighting chance, I shall fight on-a losing battle no doubt, but I shall consider myself unworthy of my own ideals were I to give in before I am completely convinced that all is lost". Boyle's arrival at the Romanian court and his promise as he got on his knees to shake the queen's hand and to swear that he would never abandon her did much to lift her spirits. Marie later wrote of him: "I can honestly say that during that dark period of my life, Joe Boyle kept me from despairing...This strong, self-reliant man had been my rock on a stormy sea". One biographer of Queen Marie wrote of him: "An exaggeration of a man, Colonel Boyle reads today like a fictional hero created by his contemporaries to lighten the frustrations of defeat. Were it not for the corroborating memoirs of his partner, Captain George A. Hill of the British Secret Service, we would write Boyle off as the wish fulfillment of a desperate queen looking for a twentieth-century version of Lancelot". Boyle, in cooperation with Captain George Hill, a Russian-speaking member of the British secret service, carried out clandestine operations against German and Bolshevik forces in Bessarabia and southwestern Russia. Just one of their many exploits together had been secreting the Romanian crown jewels and Romanian treasury out of the Kremlin and back into Romania. In March–April 1918, he rescued some 50 high-ranking Romanians held in Odessa by revolutionaries. This made Boyle a national hero in Romania and gave him influence within its royal court. Boyle's remains were re-interred in his Canadian home town of Woodstock, Ontario in 1983, in a full military funeral.

In the novel, Boyle claims to have been in Yekaterinburg where he learned first-hand of the death of Nicholas II and his family—and is the first to report it to the tsar's mother. He also reported the death of her other son, Grand Duke Michael.

In the graphic novel Sous le soleil de minuit, published in 2015 by writer Juan Díaz Canales and artist Rubén Pellejero, Joe Boyle accompanies Corto Maltese in 1915 in his Alaskan adventure.

Boyle is a character in the 2012 historical novel, The Romanov Conspiracy by Glenn Meade. He is also a character in the 2019 Romanian feature film Queen Marie of Romania, played by Scottish actor Robert Cavanah.

Awards Distinguished Service Order - England Croix de Guerre - France Order of the Star of Romania (Grand Cross) - Romania Order of the Crown of Romania (Commander) - Romania Order of Regina Maria - Romania Order of St. Vladimir, 4th Class - Russia Order of St. Anne, 4th Class - Russia Order of St. Stanislaus, 2nd Class - Russia