Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  More than a month later, MacCallum received another letter from the Thomson family, this time from Tom’s brother George. Again, the subject of possible suicide was raised, but quickly dismissed. George Thomson was of the opinion that Winnie would not be likely to “influence him one way or the other.” He also speculated that perhaps Fraser’s continued whispering about suicide was strategic, intended to get others thinking that Tom might have done himself in “and thereby throw off any suspicion of foul play against himself.”

  George shortly after vented his anger in a letter to the Frasers saying, “You have apparently done your utmost to fasten this terrible stain upon his memory using as evidence for this purpose some trivial incidents, innocent enough in themselves, and fashioning them to suit your theory.” The fact that George would take time out on Christmas day to write such a letter demonstrates just how much this gossip was infuriating the Thomson family.

  Six days later, MacCallum received a letter from Fraser complaining about George Thomson, saying the artist’s brother was “accusing me and Mrs. Fraser of telling the coroner that poor Tom committed suicide. My wife wasn’t at the inquest and never spoke to the Doctor as the inquest was held at one of the neighbours and at midnight. No one ever mentioned such a thing at the inquest.…”

  That much apparently was true, but then the lies began. “I am feeling very badly about this terrible thing,” Fraser told MacCallum, “as I thought so much of Tom and would be the very last to mention such a thing. However several people have said to me it was no accident and I have always assured them it was an accident … He also accuses me of keeping the money you sent to pay the men which I returned to you as soon as the cairn was finished … George Thomson ought to be the last one to say anything as he came up here and did not do anything to find Tom’s body did not even get men to grapple went back home and left everything up to me and the people were talking about him wondering if he had no money.”

  The Thomsons were anxious to quash any such talk that might spread beyond Canoe Lake and Huntsville to the city and, perhaps, do irreparable damage to Tom’s reputation. On January 2, 1918, George wrote to J.E.H. MacDonald, the most influential of Tom’s art friends. “At first,” George began, “I classified Fraser as an ignorant sort of fellow, but honest. In light, however, of what has occurred more recently in his dealings with Harkness and Dr. MacCallum, I have to place not the slightest dependence in his word. I believe he has come near to manufacturing this evidence to suit his purpose, which was to show that Tom had committed suicide.” Such loose talk, George feared, could have the undesired effect of “fastening upon Tom’s memory a stain that would be difficult if not impossible to wipe out.”

  The effort to shut Fraser up became almost a mission for the family. “I really don’t know what to do about J.S. Fraser,” Tom’s sister Elizabeth Harkness wrote to MacCallum on February 19, 1918. “I feel such a horror of him to think he is deliberately undermining all Tom’s lovely character at a blow when he was not here to defend himself. I wanted to go down to Canoe Lake as soon as I heard it—but the family did not want me to go so things are just allowed to drift—much against my will.”

  Elizabeth called Fraser’s continuing gossip nothing but a “bread and butter yarn” and told MacCallum that its purpose “puzzles me. He is certainly ignorant and without principle. His whole story from beginning to end is a muddle of contradictions, what is the underlying meaning of it all is what I would like to penetrate.”

  There was certainly an attempt, largely successful, to put an end to any talk of suicide. But there was also, at the time, little speculation concerning murder, even if many of those close to the situation had their thoughts on the possibility. Ottelyn Addison came to believe that just about everyone who had been there at the time, or who had some connection with the story, had deliberately turned quiet about what might or might not have happened. When Blodwen Davies wrote to J.E.H. MacDonald to ask for information, he responded, “I feel sure that it is best for me to associate myself with the silence of an old friend.”

  Art historian Joan Murray claimed the Group of Seven came to treat Tom’s death as a “taboo subject.” Their view of him rarely varied from the sentiments behind the saintly words MacDonald had chosen for the Canoe Lake cairn. Murray argued that the group felt it had a vested interest in maintaining and grooming that reputation. “Fighting for his art,” she wrote, “was a way of fighting for their own ideals.”

  This constant polishing carried on for more than half a century. In a letter A.Y. Jackson wrote on September 15, 1966, he mentioned the Blodwen Davies biography and said there were “many people who thought she was too positive about foul play in Thomson’s death. She got all that from old Mark Robinson.

  “Dr. MacCallum,” Jackson continued, “said they believed it was suicide and they brought in a verdict of accidental drowning to make it easier for the family. MacCallum had received a letter from Tom written the day before. quite cheerful and looking forward to starting painting again—I think Lawren [Harris] always had the feeling there was foul play, but there was no evidence. I think perhaps influenced by the feeling he was of no importance as a painter and probably up there to avoid military service.”

  Jackson himself would play a part in the silence of Thomson’s old friends. When he finally got around to delivering on a promise to write a foreword to the re-publication of Blodwen Davies’ original work, he took advantage of her recent death and his access to the original manuscript to expunge the three critical questions Davies had asked back in 1935:

  “Who met Tom Thomson on that stretch of grey lake, screened from all eyes, that July noon?

  “Who was it struck him a blow across the right temple—and was it done with the thin edge of a paddle blade?—that sent the blood spurting from his ear?

  “Who watched him crumple up and topple over the side of the canoe and sink slowly out of sight without a struggle?”

  When the new version of Blodwen Davies’ book appeared in 1967, her three powerful and suggestive questions were missing—with no answers provided to replace them.

  Why Jackson would do such a thing to Davies’ book is itself a mystery. A.J. Casson, the last surviving member of the Group of Seven—he died in 1992—once told Tom’s great-grandniece Tracy Thomson that “Alec [Jackson] knew exactly what had happened to Tom. He knew—but whatever he knew he took it to his grave.”

  Ranger Mark Robinson and son Jack.

  Shannon and Annie Fraser (sitting), with unidentified woman, Smoke Lake, Algonquin Park.

  Daphne Crombie and Robin Crombie in sled driven by Shannon Fraser. The fourth person seated beside Fraser is unknown.

  Shannon Fraser.

  Algonquin Park Superintendent George Bartlett. He was determined that there be no trouble reflecting on him or his park in 1917.

  Dr. Noble Sharpe of the Ontario Provincial Criminal Laboratory led the investigation into the bones discovered at Canoe Lake in the fall of 1956.

  Kelso Roberts, Attorney General of Ontario in 1956.

  Original Blecher cottage table where 1917 coroner’s inquest was held. The Blecher cottage has been torn down and replaced, but the new building still holds the dining table where North Bay Coroner A.E. Ranney held his quick inquest following the burial of Tom Thomson at Canoe Lake.

  THIRTEEN A CHILD?

  There were two lost lives at Canoe Lake that damp July week in 1917 when Tom Thomson went missing. One, of course, was the life of the artist—dead but certain to live forever as a Canadian icon that was half art, half mystery. The other belonged to Miss Winnifred Trainor, the life she might have had.

  Winnie Trainor is the one who disappeared far more than Tom Thomson. Initially dismissed as an insignificant figure—the subject of ordinary boy and girl letters, as ranger Mark Robinson put it, between herself and the artist and long unmentioned in the many studies of Thomson and his art legacy—she became “a person of interest” only after her own death in 1962.

  I
n the first publication to mention Winnie, a photograph of another woman, still unknown, became the image that would come to identify her for the next half century or so. The CBC documentary of 1969 and William Little’s bestselling book of 1970 both referred to her as a possible fiancée but no one ever dared suggest she might have been left with anything but a broken heart and a few of the painter’s original sketches.

  The first tenuous public hint of the possibility of a pregnancy or child did not occur until 1972, when Charles Plewman was interviewed by the Canadian Press regarding a short article he’d written for Canada Camping magazine. Reporter Gord Wainman, the brother of longtime Algonquin Park ranger Dave Wainman, filed a story that ran on Valentine’s Day and contained the first hints in print that there might have been a pregnancy involved. Plewman, eighty-two years old at the time, said that he had come to believe Shannon Fraser’s interpretation of death by suicide and said that Thomson “may have taken his own life because of the desperate situation in which he found himself with his fiancée, Winnie Trainor.” The CP report suggested that Plewman had “diplomatically” suggested that the Huntsville girl could have been pregnant at the time and “was pressing him to go through with the marriage.”

  A perturbed Plewman immediately sent a letter of complaint to the Star, one of many newspapers that had printed the wire story, saying he was “shocked and stunned” to find that the press and radio were saying that “I said Trainor was pregnant—that I said Thompson [sic] committed suicide. Both were untrue—I never made such statements to the media.” It seemed Plewman was trying to have it both ways. He might not have made such actual “statements,” but he certainly had dropped all the necessary hints.

  To have it known back in 1917 that Tom Thomson had left behind a pregnant girlfriend, and a potential unwed mother, would have been a far larger scandal than suicide. It would likely have destroyed forever the artist’s image in the eyes of prudish Canadians. Pregnancy in wedlock was to be hidden and not spoken of—pregnancy without a husband was, on the other hand, spoken of in the harshest of terms.

  The Thomson family faithfully kept letters and scraps of information that came out of those sad events of 1917. But we do not have the luxury of such information where Winnie Trainor is concerned. Terence McCormick, my mother’s first cousin, was the nephew who inherited all of Winnie’s property: the house on Minerva Street in Huntsville, the cottage at Canoe Lake, the dozen or more Tom Thomson sketches and a cluttered upstairs apartment that I recall was filled with old newspapers, magazines and kept letters and postcards. Terence told William Little that his aunt and Tom Thomson had been engaged to marry, and certainly my own family always believed this, but no documentation has ever been produced that might confirm her betrothal to Thomson.

  The Thomson family, according to Tracy Thomson, always felt there might have been “a verbal agreement” between Tom and Winnie. “They probably talked about it,” she told me in the spring of 2010, “but there wasn’t a date set.” Tracy counts herself as “unusual” in the widespread Thomson family in that “I don’t fall into the camp of ‘Winnie as odd.’ I always gravitate toward people who others think odd and I think interesting.”

  There is a Tom Thomson painting in the McMichael gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, that has always been identified as Figure of a Lady, Laura. This portrait, of a woman sitting on a rock overlooking water, has long been presumed to be of Laura Meston (sometimes spelled “Weston”) Worsfold. It was donated to the gallery by William Pfaff, who said it was a portrait of his aunt Laura. “Unfortunately,” McMichael archivist Linda Morita says, “there is not much information in the accession file on this work.” For years the gallery dated the portrait as 1916, but it is now believed that Thomson actually painted it in the fall of 1915. The Thomson family has also long been convinced that the figure in this painting is Winnifred Trainor. “Yes, I feel it is Winnie,” Tracy Thomson told me in 2010. “That’s my opinion anyway, from an artistic point of view based on my study of the figure.”

  Thomson rarely titled his paintings and sometimes he even failed to sign them. Following Thomson’s death, J.E.H. McDonald designed a stamp with the initials “T.T.” and the date “1917” enclosed within its palette, to be used as a method for authenticating the work that Tom Thomson left behind. Titles were also assigned to works that had previously been without one. If this painting was indeed of Laura Meston Worsfold, it seems rather strange that it would also be titled Figure of a Lady. It is possible the painting was named Figure of a Lady by someone other than Thomson, and that the name “Laura” was added later, either to show possession or to signal that it was given to the gallery in her memory, as the McMichael gallery feels. We cannot, however, ignore the possibility that the painting is of Laura Meston Warsfold, as her nephew claimed.

  Victoria Lywood, the internationally known forensic artist from John Abbot College, in Montreal, studied the few available photographs of Winnifred Trainor and the painting Figure of a Lady, Laura and was able to conclude that the proportions are very much the same in the faces of the photographs and in the face in the painting. So, too, is the dark unwieldy hair. Lywood also cast her professional eye on the available Canoe Lake landscapes painted by Thomson and determined that it is also possible that the background of Figure of a Lady, Laura is Canoe Lake. If the setting is indeed Canoe Lake and if the portrait is now believed to have been painted in the fall of 1915, then the painting fits with the period in which a romantic link between Tom and Winnie was generally accepted around Huntsville and Canoe Lake.

  But that, of course, is conjecture and not proof. Research to find Laura Worsfold eventually uncovered a grainy photograph of new brides, which appeared in the January 21, 1928, edition of the Toronto Daily Star. On the far right is, “Mrs. T.J. Worsfold, formerly Miss Laura Weston, daughter of Mr. And Mrs. Weston of Guelph.” Though this photograph is of the same poor quality as the rare photographs of the “real” Winnie Trainor, Victoria Lywood again cast her expert eye on the Toronto Daily Star photograph and the Figure of a Lady, Laura painting to see if she could find any agreement between the subjects. Lywood found similarities in proportion, in cheek and jaw bone structure and in the elongation of the neck, concluding that she could not rule out Laura Worsfold as the possible subject of the painting. Because of the hat in the wedding picture, no comparison of hair could be made; however, the photograph in the newspaper strongly suggests an impressive hawk nose on Mrs. Worsfold, whereas Winnie Trainor’s nose is much more in line with the subject of the painting. Even so, it could be that the painter was merely flattering his subject by performing a little plastic surgery with his brush. “Right now this is arguable,” Lywood concluded, “but if I had to argue it, I’m still leaning toward Winnie.”

  “I think the two of them were pretty sympatico,” Tracy Thomson said of Tom and Winnie, “and that the only thing standing in the way of their union was his total and complete devotion to his craft. That was his sacrifice. I don’t think he could have achieved the sublime level of genius in his painting if he had familial distractions which took him from his intense focus. He had to live and breathe and immerse himself so completely in nature to produce these perfect paintings.

  “I feel he really did love her, but he was just consumed with his work.”

  We know from Mark Robinson that some letters Winnie had sent to Thomson were found, likely in his room at Mowat Lodge, and that these were given to her father to be returned to her. We know from Tom Harkness that the Thomson family asked about certain letters that had been produced at the shoddy inquiry, but it seems Harkness never did get any satisfaction from his query. Winnie herself said in a letter to Harkness that she had lost earlier letters in a fire.

  In her few letters to the Thomson family, far more questions are raised than answered. Winnie seems reluctant to spell out her concerns on paper, yet at one point tells Harkness, “If I see you I can tell all.” What “all” entailed is open to endless speculation.

  Her letters
contain few references to Tom and the tragedy, yet the letters that do are heartfelt. In writing to Harkness at his farm in Annan, east of Owen Sound, on September 17, 1917, she says she would have a hard time enumerating the various costs she incurred on behalf of the family, as “It seemed like two years instead of just two months to-day since Tom was drowned.” The letters were far more about finances and property than heart. However, she was mostly answering Thomson family inquiries regarding possible loans to Shannon Fraser, the possible overbilling by the original undertakers and personal items the family wanted to have returned to them from Canoe Lake.

  That she is reaching out to the Thomsons is clear in the letters, but her overtures were not reciprocated. Margaret never did go to Canoe Lake with Winnie, as Winnie had believed Margaret had agreed to do when they’d met briefly at the CNE in late August. The Thomson family, which had been quick to accept her offer of help during the discovery of the body and the burial, was just as quick to distance itself from her afterwards. When Margaret wrote to Dr. MacCallum following her brief encounter with Winnie at the CNE, she said that Winnie told her Tom “had warned her not to put anything in her letters that she wouldn’t care to have them [the Frasers] read, as they always seemed to know his business.”

  Winnie gave the family the first hint that Tom was on the verge of heading somewhere else when he disappeared. “She said that he was intending to leave in a week or so,” Margaret wrote to MacCallum, “and that he didn’t want them [the Frasers] to know where he was going as they were so curious about everything.”