Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

Ranger Mark Robinson later claimed that Thomson had tried three times to enlist, but Ranger Edward Godin came away from that summer of 1916 with a decidedly different view. “We had many discussions on the war,” Godin recalled. “As I remember it he did not think that Canada should be involved. He was very outspoken in his opposition to Government patronage. Especially in the militia. I do not think that he would offer himself for service. I know up until that time he had not tried to enlist.”

  All the same, Thomson must have been feeling the pressure to do what was endlessly described as “one’s duty.” Fred Varley said that the artist was bothered that “everyone was worried about him joining up.” But the conflict in Europe could not be ignored, not even by a person who thought Canada should never have become involved—and Thomson’s position was not endorsed by his friends. First it was Jackson, who was eager to sign up and fight. Then, in the fall of 1915, Ranger Mark Robinson, despite being in his late forties and having a family to support, enlisted in the 35th Regiment of the Simcoe Foresters. In light of his long service with the militia, Robinson was commissioned as a major. Lawren Harris followed in June 1916, joining the 10th Regiment of Royal Grenadiers. And Fred Varley was going as a war artist, even though he believed the world would be “forever tainted” with the war’s “cruel drama.” Thomson wouldn’t have used such dramatic language, but his sentiments might certainly have been the same as Varley’s. According to one early biographer, Tom once told his sisters that “he would willingly serve as an ambulance man but could not face the prospects of killing.”

  Everyone else, it seemed, was off to support the great cause. Roy McCormick, my great-uncle and Winnie’s future brother-in-law, enlisted on February 23, 1915, in Montreal, where he was a medical student. He was only twenty-two and might easily have avoided a uniform, but he was so determined to do his part that he’d already taken a six-week military course at Ottawa and Kingston the previous year. (His war record was impressive. He was wounded twice while fighting with the 39th Battery Artillery Corps in France and Belgium and served again in the Second World War in a medical capacity—as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve in charge of examining draftees.)

  Tom’s sisters always maintained that he had tried to enlist but was turned down. Attempts to prove this have been futile. Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa has indicated that there are “no surviving lists of names or applications of those rejected by the Canadian military” for duty in either the Boer War or the First World War. Nonetheless, when Mark Robinson was in his eighties, he insisted in an interview that Tom had tried to join up. “Most of the boys with any blue blood in their veins enlisted at once,” Robinson said. “Tom endeavoured to do the same thing. He was turned down and he felt very keenly about it, went to Toronto and tried it there. Turned down again. Went to some outside point in the country; was again turned down. Then he came back to the Park. I remember him looking around and counting the boys that had gone. A lot of them had become his friends, and he threw his heart right into painting…

  “[H]e was back in 1915 and he came up to my place and he said, ‘Well, I’ve done my best to enlist and I cannot but I’m going to go with the Fire Ranging. I’ve been to see them at the Department and I can get on Fire Ranging and if I cannot fill a place in the Army, I can fill a place here at home of a man who’s gone to the Army,’ and he seemed pleased that he could do that.…”

  In spite of such claims, the controversy over Thomson’s personal war effort has stuck to his story as long as it has been told. A tale has even persisted about Thomson being “white-feathered” by a woman while he was in Toronto riding on a streetcar—though there appears to be no solid evidence of the story’s truth. White feathering was a ritual carried out by women who belonged to what they called the Order of the White Feather. Inspired by a British practice, these enthusiasts placed a white feather—the sign of a coward—on any able-bodied man they encountered who was not doing his duty during time of war.

  Thomson left little evidence of his own thoughts on war apart from a letter he wrote to J.E.H. MacDonald after Jackson enlisted. “I can’t get used to the idea of Jackson being in the machine,” he wrote, “and it is rotten that in this so-called civilized age that such things can exist but since this war has started it will have to go on until our side wins out. and of course there is no doubt which side it will be, and we will see Jackson back on the job once more.”

  As for the “job” of painting for a living, it was certainly not as easy as Thomson might have first thought. He quickly spent the five hundred dollars he’d received in 1915 for Northern River—not only on his new camping equipment and canoe, but also by lending money to Shannon Fraser to help him purchase canoes for Mowat Lodge. When the cash was gone, Thomson was forced to swallow his pride and turn to MacCallum, admitting in a letter that “my account has gone broke.” He asked for twenty-five dollars to be wired to him in South River so he could stock up on supplies and return to Canoe Lake. “I am stranded,” he pleaded. And the prospects for selling new paintings suddenly seemed remote.

  “With the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914,” art historian William Colgate wrote, “all artistic effort ceased. The public, numbed by the suddenness of the cosmic tragedy, no longer wanted the work of the painter. Almost overnight, dealers’ galleries were denuded of patrons.” Nor was there much work for illustrators like MacDonald and Lismer. With rail and steamship companies tied up with troop movement, tourism faltered. There was no call for brochures and posters. MacDonald, Lismer and Thomson had surely been grateful for MacCallum’s commission to paint cottage murals over the previous winter of 1915–1916.

  The wall murals are now on permanent display at the National Gallery, erected in a room built to resemble the interior of MacCallum’s cottage. The project was overseen by MacDonald, who “sub-commissioned” Lismer to do six of the murals and Thomson, three. All three of Thomson’s murals are entitled Forever Undergrowth. He did four more panels on the same theme for the MacCallum cottage, but they were not used, and it’s easy to see why. All seven are uninspired, as if Thomson had been acting as no more than a workman getting through his day while thinking of all the other things he’d rather be doing.

  Since MacDonald and Lismer were, first and foremost, illustrators, they appear to have taken this assignment to heart. Their murals feature skinny dippers and picnickers, steamers arriving, Aboriginal people, priests and the granite outcroppings of the local landscape. They seem to have been fully caught up in the spirit of the cottage decoration, while Thomson was not. They also sneaked images of Thomson into their work. MacDonald used him as his model for a large mural depicting a rugged lumberjack that was positioned to the right of the cottage’s stone fireplace. And Lismer used him for the mural he called The Fisherman, in which Thomson looks like a cartoon character wearing a floppy hat and smoking a pipe while fishing from a rock. And he looks, well … stoned.

  The financial collapse of the art world also hit Arthur Lismer, who decided he needed a regular, paying job. Lismer was married with a daughter and, unlike Harris, had no family means to fall back on. In the summer of 1916, he pursued and succeeded in landing a teaching post at the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax. He moved his young family to Bedford, Nova Scotia, and sent Tom a letter from there in January 1917. “How goes life in the old shack this winter?” he asked. “… hope you are keeping warm & fit & doing a little work occasionally in between the records on the Victrola—Sometimes I wish I were back in Toronto. The atmosphere here is not an artistic one—but I have a ‘job’ & I like it & its great country & we have a fine little place on the edge of all the wild stuff one could wish—its very like the Park & a lot like Georgian Bay. —Civilization seems to have passed on & left the country in all its wildness.…”

  In early spring of 1917, Thomson set out for his own little world of “wildness” for the last time. He stayed in Huntsville for a while, visiting with the Trainors, and, given that he was living at Mowat L
odge by early April or perhaps earlier, he would have passed through the town as the war effort was reaching fever pitch. The Bracebridge Examiner, which had originally editorialized against the war, was now onside, and the Huntsville Forester had been solidly behind Canada’s involvement from the very beginning. The United States was also getting involved, with President Woodrow Wilson asking Congress in early April to declare war on Germany.

  And finally the town’s own 122nd Battalion was heading overseas. More than a year earlier, the authorization had come through, but hitch after hitch had delayed the deployment. A shipping-out date had already been missed in March, and morale had reached rock bottom. But now that the Americans were joining in, the 122nd was going to be commissioned at last.

  Thomson’s visit to the Trainors might well have coincided with the celebrations. The ice was late going out that spring (it didn’t leave until May 1st) and though, that year, he was known to be sketching a daily record of the arrival of spring, no one has ever determined precisely when Tom arrived at Canoe Lake or when he stopped his daily record. It is believed that he arrived either during the last week of March or during the first week of April, so he would have passed through Huntsville at some point around this time.

  Certainly Winnie and her mother would have been involved with the celebrations around the deployment and, if Winnie had had the opportunity, she would have insisted that Tom come along to the huge sendoff the town was holding, complete with band and singers—and a dinner at the Anglican church’s parish hall.

  At the dinner it was announced that the Patriotic Fund had reached $7,400 in contributions from the townspeople. After the total was made public, Mayor W.E. Hutcheson gave a speech to inspire the troops: “Be strong, men,” he told the soldiers, “and when the fight is over and you return to your homes, come back with pure hearts and wholesome bodies, and take the place prepared for you as representative citizens.”

  There were more speeches and impromptu cheers, and the parish hall gathering ended with a stirring rendition of “God Save the King.” But the party didn’t end there. Most of the town stayed up much of the night so they could cheer as their fifty local boys in uniform left on the troop train at 3:45 a.m. Those who wanted to see the boys off walked the streets until well after midnight, eventually coming together at the station to wait for the train’s arrival. Then word arrived by telegraph that the United States had officially declared war—bringing a resounding three cheers for President Wilson.

  Whether Tom was with Winnie that night or not, she would have wondered what was going through his mind. To her, there was no debating the matter of the war. She, like everyone else in town, would have been profoundly moved when, that same spring, Private Charles Catton had come back as Huntsville’s first war hero. Nineteen years old and strikingly handsome, the young man had enlisted and been shipped overseas. He’d fought and lost his right arm in France. Wounded, he was said to have carried an unconscious mate two miles to safety, gripping the other soldier with his one good hand and clenching his teeth on the soldier’s clothes.

  What had Tom told Winnie about his attitudes to the war? The idea of “serving” as a fire ranger was the previous year’s solution; he had no plans this spring but to sketch daily and capture the slow march of spring as it arrived at Canoe Lake. Perhaps Tom told her he’d tried to enlist but was turned away because of his supposedly bad feet. But no one knows. What is known is that in the spring of 1917, when Prime Minister Robert Borden introduced his controversial conscription bill in the Canadian Parliament, Tom would have fallen under classification 7: “Those who were born in the years 1876 to 1882, both inclusive, and are unmarried or are widowers who have no child.” As the war worsened in Europe, his classification would have moved to 5—ever closer to being called up if the government went ahead with conscription.

  There were grave concerns over the progress of the war. When neither the French nor the British had been able to take Vimy Ridge, considered the key link in the Hindenburg Line, the Canadian troops were assigned to what many believed was an impossible task, a suicide mission. During an astonishing six days in early April, the Canadians—fighting together for the first time ever—took the ridge, but at a terrible cost. Canadian casualties numbered 10,602, with 3,598 of the soldiers killed. It was not only a pivotal moment in the war; it was a pivotal moment in the history of the country, which would emerge from the war experience no longer thinking of itself as a mere colony of the British Empire, but as a country that could stand on its own and had shown the world it could do so.

  Perhaps to tune out the incessant talk about war, Tom arrived at Canoe Lake that spring with a monumental, rather manic, ambition. He would complete one painting a day to capture, in oils, the arrival and settling in of spring. Though he took out a guide’s licence at the end of April, he had no intention of doing a lot of guiding, and there were few tourists looking for guides. His aim was to let such work interfere as little as possible with his art. When it was available, he would stay at the Trainors’ cabin free of charge; when not he would take a room at the lodge. In May he put in a small vegetable garden for the Frasers out back of the lodge and a smaller garden for the Trainors at their cottage. And he sketched every day, each new painting marking the daily creep of the good weather.

  Unbeknownst to Thomson, the Owen Sound Sun decided to write him up on April 10, 1917.

  In a long article titled “Pictures by Sydenham Boy Worth Seeing,” the newspaper heaped praise on Thomson such as he had never read or heard before. The local artist, the paper said, “has been spoken of by the highest art critics as a young artist who is on the threshold of an exceptionally brilliant career.” The anonymous writer predicted that Tom Thomson would be a name “much before the public in coming years.”

  Thomson received the article, likely sent by his family, and wrote back to Tom Harkness, his sister Elizabeth’s husband, saying, “I got a copy … and it seemed to be filled with bunk. However, the foolishness of newspaper matter is well known, and I knew nothing about it in time to have it stopped.” Privately, he was probably delighted with the “bunk.”

  Thomson—who signed off as “your aff. brother,” signalling how close the two were—also told Harkness that he had been there much of April and had already completed “considerable work.” He said he anticipated the ice going out sometime in the coming week and that he had no intention of looking for work again as a fire ranger, “as it interferes with sketching to the point of stopping it all together.” There was still snow on the north side of the hills, he said, but it was going, and he figured to have another good month of sketching “before my friends the blackflies are here.”

  In the only reference we have to his future plans for 1917, the painter then revealed to his brother-in-law that “I may possibly go out on the Canadian Northern this summer to paint the Rockies but have not made all the arrangements yet. If I go it will be in July and August.”

  Thomson also sent a letter to MacCallum, saying he expected the ice to go out soon. “Have made quite a few sketches this spring,” he wrote, “have scraped quite a few and think that some that I have kept should go the same way. however I keep on making them.” (He likely misspelled “scrapped” in the letter, but it is slightly possible he meant what he wrote, as he would sometimes scrape his boards clean and start anew.)

  MacCallum wrote back a few weeks later with good news: “I have deposited to your credit a cheque for $25.00 given me by Bill Beatty for a sketch of yours which he had sold to some chap from South River … You had better send down a lot of those sketches of yours as soon as you start in guiding,” he advised, “and see if I cannot sell some of them and increase your bank account.…” Bill Beatty is painter William Beatty, a former Toronto fireman who gave up his job to study art. He was friendly with several of those who went on to form the Group of Seven and had painted in Algonquin Park as early as 1909. It is likely that Beatty influenced Thomson in his decision to paint the North Country.

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bsp; Finally, the painter wrote to his father as well, talking about the ice still being strong and snow still in the bush. He said he’d been fishing through the ice but caught only “ling,” a cod- and eel-like fish held in contempt by the locals. He briefly mentioned his work, saying he hadn’t sent any paintings to the OSA Exhibition that year “and have not sold very many sketches but think I can manage to get along for another year at least I will stick to painting as long as I can.” He said he expected to get “a great deal” done that spring and signed off “your loving son, Tom Thomson.”

  Signing his full name in a letter home suggests he might have felt some discomfort or awkwardness in addressing his father. It might be that Tom was acutely aware that he would turn forty that summer and, unlike all the other Thomson males, had yet to settle down and take on the usual responsibilities of a middle-aged man.

  SIX SPRING 1917

  James MacCallum wrote back to Thomson that he would do what he could to sell some of the painter’s sketches during the spring of 1917 and signed off with a request that the artist, then on his way from South River to Mowat Lodge to “remember me to the Frasers and their guests.”

  One of those “guests” was Daphne Crombie. If Thomson had passed MacCallum’s greetings on to her, she would not have had a clue who the eye doctor was. Mrs. Crombie was a slim, striking beauty, still in her twenties, who had come to the Frasers’ lodge during the winter with her new husband, Lieutenant Robert L. Crombie, who had been advised to go to Algonquin Park for health reasons. Robert Lionel Crombie—affectionately called “Robin” by his young wife—was almost twenty-six years old and had trained as a broker in Toronto before he signed up in December 1914. His war was short-lived, however, as the slight, newly commissioned lieutenant was soon struck down by tuberculosis, a common affliction during the war: for every 100 Canadian soldiers killed in action, 6 died of tuberculosis, and for every 100 pensioned off for wounds suffered in the conflict, 25 were pensioned off because of the disease. Cool, fresh country air was the only known treatment at the time, so Algonquin Park was considered the perfect natural setting for healing.