Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  … In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing

  The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell

  Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time

  Tracy Thomson, the artist’s great-grandniece (great-granddaughter of George) and an artist in her own right, says her famous uncle worked “at a fever pitch” for a five-year period. She believes he worked with “extreme focus” and could become totally immersed in whatever project he was doing.

  “He was beyond just a moody guy,” she says, relying on family lore for her sense of Thomson’s personality. “He would produce these brilliant pieces, and he just couldn’t see it. He wrecked pieces. He burned them. He was really unhappy with The West Wind. I always wonder what exactly was in his mind’s eye? He always came up short in his own opinion. It makes me wonder where was he going from here? Abstractionism? What was that elusive vision he had that made him move toward it at such a frenzied pace?”

  His pace toward the end was truly astonishing. Tom’s output in “the spring time” of 1917 consisted of several dozen daily sketches—the precise number is unknown—until the final week of May, when the blackfly season got under way and Thomson wrote to MacCallum that they were so bad that painting in the open was impossible. He gave away some of the sketches from that period to Daphne Crombie and others at the lake, but while this might simply have been a result of Thomson’s well-known generosity, it could mean, Lehto speculates, that he was getting rid of his stuff. Then there was the Saturday night party of July 7th, the heavy drinking and the possibility of a fight.

  “People with bipolar disorder often become suicidal, especially when symptoms of mania and depression occur together,” Lehto writes. “Increased energy and some form of anger, from irritability to full blown rage, are the most common symptoms. Symptoms may also include auditory hallucinations, confusion, insomnia, delusions, racing thoughts and restlessness. Alcohol may trigger such individuals. The view that a swing from mania to depression to suicide is unthinkable because no artist, who created such joyful, life-affirming landscape paintings in that last spring series would have killed himself, simply ignores such evidence.”

  There was certainly alcohol at Canoe Lake. It was regularly brought in by train. Nearly a year before Thomson’s death, the Ontario government had passed a Temperance Act prohibiting the sale or serving of alcoholic beverages, wine excepted, and all bars and liquor stores were to be closed at least for the duration of the war. There were, however, enormous loopholes allowing sales for a great many other purposes, including sacramental and medical, and many heavy drinkers simply continued to drink courtesy of a friendly family doctor and a local pharmacy.

  Mark Robinson’s journals of 1917 indicate that alcohol was a concern in the park, as he okayed a shipment of three barrels of 2.5 per cent beer for the Blechers “for personal use” and, following the Saturday night party that preceded Thomson’s disappearance, carried out Superintendent Bartlett’s “instructions this morning to have Mr. S. Fraser have no more booze come in.” It would seem from this that the lodge had supplied the “booze” for the wild Saturday night party. Yet not all alcohol arrived by train. The regular binges, firings and rehirings of the guides working for Mowat Lodge suggest that there were many other ways—raisin wine being just one—of getting drunk without paying freight charges.

  When it came to how, exactly, Thomson might have killed himself, Lehto theorized that perhaps he simply let nature take its course by overturning his own canoe in deep water. The “weapon” of choice would have been hypothermia. Lehto says that the spring of 1917 had been uncommonly cool and wet—true enough—and that if Thomson had let himself morosely slip into water that was 21°C “within a few minutes, he would have suffered fits of shivering and fumbling hands and legs. The cold water flowing across his body would have rendered him drowsy, incoherent, unconscious, and drowned in ten minutes. By swimming well ahead of the drifting overturned canoe, he would have confounded searchers as to what happened.

  “As his dying body sank to the bottom, his right forehead and ear struck submerged lumber, a fallen tree, or logging machinery. The head-down position of his corpse caused the injury to bleed, complicating later efforts to determine whether it happened before or after the drowning.”

  Much as I respect Neil Lehto’s diligence in investigating the Thomson tragedy, I have to say as one who grew up in Algonquin Park that we would often swim for hours in such cool July waters. In fact, in the cool summer of 2009, the water at our summer place on Camp Lake, which is fed directly by Algonquin Park waters, stayed at about 20°C, sometimes lower, for all of July and much of August. And yet swimmers, once they got used to the cool water, would stay in for long stretches—long enough, in some cases, to swim distances that would have taken them across the width of Canoe Lake several times. After ten minutes, swimmers would merely be getting used to it; they would not be drowsy in the least.

  One medical expert finds the suicide theory lacking. Dr. Philip Hall, a Winnipeg forensic specialist, had previously worked in Ontario and, coincidentally, was a colleague of forensic scientists directly involved in the examination of the skeleton uncovered at Canoe Lake in 1956. That experience gave him a fascination with the Tom Thomson story that lasted right until his death in 2008. In a presentation titled “Mystery and Myth” that he prepared for a service club in Winnipeg, he took on the suggestion of suicide directly.

  “There was no evidence whatsoever of suicide,” Hall told his audience. “No threats, no sustained depression and no note. The day before he died, July 7th, Tom wrote in a letter to Dr. MacCallum ‘… will send my winter sketches down in a day or two and have every intention of making some more … Have done some guiding for fishing parties and will have some other trips this month and next with probably sketching in between.…’ ”

  Hall points out that Thomson had recently sold a painting for the impressive sum of five hundred dollars. He would have been full of life, Hall argued, not looking for death. “Even if there had been reason to suspect suicide,” he wrote in his notes for his talk, “consider the inanity of the idea given the circumstances. It is preposterous to suggest that Thomson would have killed himself by weighting his ankle with a fishing line and rock, first hiding or tossing away his paddle, tent and fishing gear, then diving into the lake taking care to strike his temple on the gunwale or a rock on the way down, while holding a finger in his ear perhaps to keep the blood from washing out. As an aside, it is equally preposterous to have suggested that a canoeing expert with the understanding of water so clear in his work would stand up in his canoe, minutes from shore, to urinate, wave at a passing fellow loon, or for anything else, or that splinting a sprained ankle with 16 or so loops of fishing line is anything other than a silly idea.” In Hall’s opinion, the suggestion first put forward by Shannon Fraser that Tom had done himself in was not only an impossibility but very likely “a malign attempt to cover something up.”

  But cover up what?

  ELEVEN DAPHNE

  In the winter of 1976, I received a letter from Ron Tozer, then Algonquin Park’s interpretive services supervisor, in response to an inquiry I had made concerning any information the park archives might hold on Winnifred Trainor. Ron, one of the country’s great naturalists, responded that they had a taped interview in the archives that might be of interest to me. The interview had been done not long before by Tozer’s employee Ron Pittaway, and if I cared to drop in anytime at the park museum at Found Lake—this was years before the Visitors’ Centre was built—he’d gladly set me up to listen.

  I was mesmerized by what I heard when I finally got to the basement of the old stone building and began listening to the tape. As noted earlier, Lieutenant Robert Crombie and his young wife, Daphne, had stayed at Mowat Lodge during the late winter and spring of 1917 while the lieutenant recuperated from tuberculosis. During this time Daphne had become close with both Tom Thomson and Annie Fraser. While the Crombies had not been there
when the July tragedy occurred, they had returned the following November in the hopes that the Algonquin air would further benefit Robert Crombie’s health.

  Daphne and Annie immediately renewed the close friendship they’d enjoyed during the Crombies’ first stay at Mowat Lodge. Early in the interview, Ron Pittaway asked Daphne, then well into her eighties and a widow, if she could shed any light on the relationship between Tom Thomson and Winnifred Trainor. Perhaps because she later knew tragedy herself—her son Charles had died at twenty-three while serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force in Gambia in the fall of 1942—she felt that now was the time to say what she knew about Canoe Lake back in 1917.

  “I could start in,” she said, “by Annie and I having a walk, and about the letter she said she had read about Winnifred’s desire to come up [to Canoe Lake] the following week. ‘Please, Tom, you must get a new suit because we’ll have to be married.’ Now this came right from the mouth of the horse, if you will. She read this letter you see. Anyway, [Winnifred] did come up and when she came up, Tom had been drowned in the lake.” Here was someone who had actually known Tom Thomson suggesting that he and Winnifred Trainor had to get married.

  Crombie went on to talk about the Saturday night party but in a far different manner than Little had pursued in the book he’d published seven years earlier. Little claimed that Martin Blecher, Jr., had threatened Thomson at the party after the two had quarrelled over the progress of the war. But Daphne Crombie spoke about events that followed the party that had nothing whatsoever to do with Martin Blecher, Jr.

  Crombie said that Annie Fraser had told her that the men were “all tight” after the party and that Tom had confronted her husband over money Fraser apparently owed him. Tom insisted on the money “because he had to go and get a new suit. Well, of course, the family doesn’t like all this to come out. Anyway, they had a fight and Shannon hit Tom, knocked him down by the fire grate, and Tom had a mark on his forehead—I don’t know where it was—anyway, Annie told me all this and [she told] Dr. MacCallum, as well.

  “Anyway, Tom was knocked out completely and, of course, Fraser was simply terrified: he thought he’d killed him.”

  Crombie insisted this was all her “conception” of what had happened and she did not know or care what others believed. She chose to believe Annie, whom she trusted completely. Why would her friend lie about something so profoundly incriminating of her husband and, ultimately, of herself? Daphne had never been impressed with Fraser’s personality, considering him “timid” when it came to such aggression even though he was a large and strong Irishman. Far more than dangerous, she considered him “devious,” and she believed from what Annie had told her that Fraser had tried to cover up what had happened by staging a drowning. It was Fraser, she claimed, who had taken the deeply, perhaps fatally, injured Thomson, placed him in his canoe, towed it out and dumped it over in Canoe Lake.

  “I know he hit him,” she said, “but I don’t think that he was dead. I think he might have been unconscious. Shannon Fraser was terrified that he was dead. I believe that Annie helped him pack the canoe and he went off into the lake with Tom’s body.”

  Crombie said the Frasers’ daughter, Mildred, was away, so wouldn’t have been witness to any of this. And she refused to entertain any suggestion that Annie might make up something as sensational as this. “She was kind, decent, and very honourable,” Crombie said of her Canoe Lake friend. “She never told me lies, ever.”

  As for Martin Blecher, Jr., Crombie had little use for him. She knew of the rumours and had read Little’s book, but she was adamant in saying, “I don’t think Blecher had anything to do with it. It was simply a myth to me. They never saw one another during the day, and they didn’t seem to have any antagonism towards him. I’m damned sure that Winnifred never went with Blecher. He was an unattractive, blasé sort of individual. He had a German accent. Why he was living up there, I don’t know.”

  As far as a love triangle went, in Daphne’s opinion, there was none. Tom’s only connection was to Winnie. Though he never mentioned her existence to Daphne in the months the Crombies were at Mowat Lodge, Annie Fraser made it clear to Daphne that it had been a serious relationship. “He was with her all the time when she was there,” Annie had told Daphne. And when Winnie was not there, she wrote regularly to Tom. Annie had happened to pick up one of these letters while cleaning Tom’s room at the lodge, which was how she made the discovery that the two had to get married and that Winnie was pressing Tom to get his money back from Shannon to purchase a wedding suit. “Annie told me from her own lips, having read the letter,” Daphne said.

  She was speaking out now, she explained, because the Frasers were both dead: Shannon died in 1946 at age sixty-two and Annie suffered a stroke in 1953, leaving her partially paralyzed and unable to speak until she died the next year. Their daughter had never known anything of the secret.

  As for the Trainors, after Tom died nothing was said about any official engagement and most assuredly nothing that might suggest a wedding was a necessity. “The family was like that,” Crombie said in the interview. “They didn’t want anything repeated at all, according to Annie.”

  As for the story of the two graves and the coffin that may or may not have contained the body of Tom Thomson, she had no opinion. “I don’t know what happened after they picked him out of the water,” she said, “because I wasn’t there.”

  When I went to Daphne Crombie’s apartment in 1977 to conduct my own interview, I was met at the door by her son, David—not to be confused with the Toronto mayor of those years. He cordially invited me in to a neat apartment that held the trappings of old money, but not too much, and a modest display of stylish grace, just the right amount. Daphne wore a plain print dress, hair and powder perfect, eyes clear and sparkling above a slightly pursed mouth that was quick to smile. She was a small woman made even tinier by age, as she was slightly stooped, and yet, even though she was approaching ninety, you could see the beauty that Tom Thomson could not have failed to notice. In the backwoods of Algonquin during the Great War, this striking, privileged young woman from the city with the sickly husband would have attracted as much notice as the weather.

  Daphne talked about Path behind Mowat Lodge and how Tom gave it to her. She was slightly embarrassed to confess that she had sold it for a fraction of what it might have fetched on the open market in 1977—let alone the $2 million that it might bring in today.

  She talked about the replacement vase—decorated with pussywillows—that Thomson had promised to paint for her but didn’t because he never did see the next spring. “If I ever meet him up in heaven,” she smiled, “I’m going to ask him, ‘Tom, you never made me that other vase—where is it?’ ”

  She said that she herself had been part of another painting that final spring. She and Annie Fraser had been walking around the old Gilmour mill site on a fine, clear, spring day, the lake mostly open, when Thomson suddenly shouted for them to “Stop!” as they neared Larry Dickson’s cabin. Thomson was sketching on a nearby knoll and, with a few deft strokes, he placed Daphne, in her blue coat and white hat, and Annie, in her red coat and pink hat, in the foreground of the now-famous Larry Dickson’s Shack that hangs in the National Gallery in Ottawa.

  The reference to Annie Fraser made the conversation easy to open. She knew that her words could be made public, since she was speaking to a reporter, as opposed to giving information for archival records that might never be publicly displayed during her lifetime, if at all, but she was adamant that her story needed to be told before it was too late. She had clearly avoided the topic in past interviews—art expert Joan Murray had interviewed Crombie years earlier without the slightest hint of any possible “scandal” being mentioned. She repeated the story of the walk with Annie Fraser and Annie’s confession about the letter from Winnie Trainor that she’d read and the necessity for marriage.

  “But,” she emphatically added, “the baby never materialized.”

  In her talk wi
th me, Crombie was even more specific about a possible baby than she had been in the archival interview. Annie, she said, was “very gossipy” and simply had to tell her what she had found. “ ‘You know,’ Annie said, ‘I went up to Tom’s room and I found a letter there and I read it. It said, ‘Tom, we must get married—because a baby is coming.’ ”

  In the letter, Winnie pressed Tom to get the money back that he had lent Shannon. Tom would have to buy a suit for the wedding. “This is all gospel truth,” Daphne claimed, though she had not seen the letter herself and was taking her friend Annie at her word.

  Apart from the specific mention of a baby, the story Daphne Crombie told me that summer day in her Toronto apartment was very much in tune with what she had told to park employee Ron Pittaway. Thomson demanded the money that Fraser owed him, they argued over it and began to fight: “Shannon hit Tom a blow,” she told me, and Tom fell and hit his head on the fire grate. Annie told Daphne that “he wasn’t dead” but her husband panicked. “Fraser ran out and got his canoe,” Daphne said Annie told her, “and they put Tom in the canoe. Fraser then took Tom’s fishing tackle and hid it in a room.”

  Daphne Crombie’s sparkling eyes went on fire when she began talking about Shannon Fraser’s role in putting it about that Thomson had killed himself. “I’d swear on a Bible,” she said, “that he didn’t commit suicide.” He was happy in his work, happy to be in his beloved park, and “his paintings were starting to sell … That’s not suicidal.”