Why would Winnie say such things? What would Tom fear her putting in a letter that a snooping Annie Fraser might find? the wedding plans? But how could she be speaking of a wedding day—as Daphne Crombie claimed—and now be talking vaguely about Tom heading out for some unknown destination? Could it be because she knew some of her letters had been read and was determined that no one think there had been any pressing need for a wedding? She might even have been selflessly protecting Thomson.
Very quickly, the Thomsons of Owen Sound severed any connection between themselves and Miss Winnifred Trainor of Huntsville. In a December 23, 1917, letter to MacCallum, George Thomson simply dismisses her by saying, “I spent a few hours in her company, and I think that even in that short time I formed a fairly accurate estimate of her worth and attractions.” He does not say when, exactly, he met her. They did not cross paths at Canoe Lake during the search, and George did not attend the Canoe Lake burial, where she was present, so, presumably, it was at some point following the death of Tom.
George Thomson did not think she could have held much “influence” with Tom. “His relations with the Trainor girl,” he wrote, “I don’t consider to have much bearing upon the case.”
Such a strange choice of words—“case.” Whatever did he mean?
“I met her once and wasn’t terribly impressed by her,” Jessie (Harkness) Fisk told researcher Iris Nowell in 1973. Nor had the Tom Thomson niece taken great notice of Winnie in their one meeting, as it was Fisk who wrongly identified Winnie as the woman in the long-lost “Winnie Trainor” photograph Tom had taken back in 1912.
Fisk showed Nowell a letter the family had received from Winnie in September 1917 regarding Tom’s loan to Shannon Fraser and the clothes he’d purchased that spring. Nowell was struck by the visual impression of the letter, which she noted “starts off fairly rationally and by the time you get to page two the writing is getting all tightened up and squinched together and on the reverse, for no reason at all, one little column of tight, heavily written words, goes vertically sideways on the page.”
Once Nowell had looked at the second page of the letter, Fisk pointed to it and said, “She was unbalanced, you can tell here.”
This sense that Winnifred Trainor was “unbalanced” took solid hold in the Thomson family. When Nowell interviewed Tom’s sister Margaret Tweedale in the fall of 1973, Margaret said that she “didn’t like being interviewed about Tom, that there were so many wrong things that were coming out and a lot of lies being told and if anyone wants to find out the real truth all they have to do is look at the old articles and newspaper stories written about the accident. Tom had a fine character, nobody had a finer character than he did and there was no mention of suicide. I get so peeved it really makes me sick—and a person seems so helpless against it, there are a lot of people trying to make money out of the articles they sell.” (Mrs. Tweedale was likely referring to a recent article I had written in Maclean’s magazine on the relationship between Tom and Winnie.)
Tom’s sister believed that Winnie Trainor was not a significant force in Tom’s life, even though she had never been to Canoe Lake to see her brother in his element and with his northern friends. In the sad letter Margaret wrote to her sister Minnie less than a week after Tom was found, she expressed sorrow that “He was alone and no one else was taking his affections.”
In 1973 a much older Margaret said that she had received three letters herself from Winnie following Tom’s death, as somehow Winnie had perceived that she was also curious about exactly what had happened. Margaret confirmed this curiosity by writing back—“at the dismay of her family,” Nowell noted, “who told her not to write back because Winnie was not in her right mind.”
“I never saw such confused letters in all my life,” Margaret said. “I didn’t know what she was getting at, I was anxious to find out anything I could, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. I didn’t keep them. I suppose I should’ve but I didn’t. You couldn’t understand what she was driving at, she was anxious to be a friend of Tom’s. I knew some of the girls that Tom used to see and they were very nice in every way. But he wouldn’t hold anything against her if he knew she wasn’t in her right mind.”
Tracy Thomson has seen the letters that were kept and can appreciate how her older relatives might have thought that Winnie was out of her mind. However, she thinks it possible that Winnie was under such severe trauma—her life’s love lost, her marriage lost, perhaps pregnant—that her “confusion” and “anxiety” are all understandable. “She lost so much,” Tracy says. “It would have been such a strain on a person’s psyche.”
Another relative, Elva Henry, who married Tom’s nephew George, told Nowell that neither she nor her husband had ever met the painter, but the family was convinced that Tom had drowned accidentally. In her version of events, Tom had sprained his ankle and had wrapped support about his ankle with the fishing line that was found, had “lost his footing” while stepping out of his canoe, fallen and struck his head. As for Margaret Tweedale’s fiery defence of Tom’s character, Mrs. Henry suggested that her aging relative “gets things all mixed up” and you had to be careful to check anything she might say. “Mrs. Tweedale,” she said, “has become rigid in her beliefs about Tom and has got to the point where she’s holding him in a sacred light.”
With regard to Winnie Trainor, Mrs. Henry said the family had been upset by the lack of consultation with them both by the CBC for its 1969 documentary and by Little for his book. The family wanted to ensure that “from now on,” only the truth would be told. And the truth, as the family saw it, was that there had been nothing significant between Tom and Winnie. Tom, she said, “probably had a good friendship with Winnie Trainor, that he’d been used to girls at home, having sisters, and that it would be natural for him to like her and her family.” And then she added what had become the common line on Winnie: She had surely once been a very nice person, but “after Tom died, she did go a little strange.”
According to Margaret, Winnie had approached their father, old John Thomson, after Tom’s death and “wanted a share in Tom’s estate. No one in her right mind would do a thing like that.” Margaret said other letters from Winnie came to the family and, finally, a Thomson nephew set out to find out more about this strange woman from Huntsville.
“Somebody got him in touch with her guardian,” she told Nowell, “and he said her mind was gone.” At another point, Margaret insisted, “She was entirely out of her mind, the guardian said.”
What “guardian”? At no point in her entire adult life, right up until her death in 1962, was Winnie under anyone’s guardianship. She could be abrupt, but her lifelong friends and neighbours and even her enemies in Huntsville, Kearney and Canoe Lake would all agree that she was sharp, bright and, as they often said, certainly knew her own mind. She was never “out” of it.
Margaret claimed that a letter had come from Winnie to the Thomson family insisting that she be given consideration in the settling of the estate. Could this, in fact, be the “case” that George Thomson had referred to in his letter to MacCallum? It is intriguing to note that the estate was not fully settled until 1923—an inordinate amount of time, given that Tom Thomson was virtually penniless and had limited material possessions beyond the sketches.
If Winnie truly did approach Tom’s father in search of some portion of the estate, that could well have been the trigger for the cold manner in which the family treated her, conveniently dismissing her as mad. Jessie Fisk told Iris Nowell that there was a great discrepancy between the number of sketches Tom had supposedly completed that spring—Mark Robinson claimed 62 over 62 straight days; Audrey Saunders 35 over an unknown period of time—and the roughly 40 that were found. She believed that the missing paintings had gone to Winnie Trainor. Elva Henry told Nowell that Winnie Trainor said in a letter to the family that she had six paintings when Tom died and that she took six more, for a total of twelve. Again, this letter was not produced for Nowell to see for hersel
f.
It may well be that Winnie Trainor did believe she was owed something more. George Thomson, in one account, had relieved the Trainor cottage of as many sketches as he was able to collect during his brief foray up to Canoe Lake during the search for his missing brother. He entered a dwelling that neither he nor his brother owned and took items that he deemed belonged to his brother, whose fate was still unknown. By what authority had he acted? None, it appears, apart from claiming possession on behalf of the family. Mark Robinson, the only “authority” on the lake, had not prevented him from gathering up his brother’s “belongings” and might even, according to a later version told by Robinson himself, have helped him. And all this was done before it was even known what had become of the missing painter. Given his death, given the possibility that Tom and Winnie were engaged and given the reality that the paintings were found in the Trainor cabin, could not a legal argument be made concerning some legitimate claim by Winnie?
George Thomson, of course, was the responsible one, the first born, the one the family turned to when word arrived that Tom was missing. The two Thomson boys could hardly have been more different. George was educated; Tom had little use for school. George was responsible; Tom was carefree. George had been financially successful early in his life; Tom was always struggling for money and, when he had it, was quick to spend it. But most of all, undeniably by the summer of 1917, Tom was hailed as an artist of merit, while the acclaim George surely craved as an ambitious artist would largely elude him. George was competent, even very good, while Tom was brilliant. George obviously felt a responsibility to preserve his brother’s work as much as possible, but given Tom’s recent successes, his financially savvy older brother would also have known the current and future value of the string of daily sketches Tom had left behind from that spring.
There is another mystery around George’s activities. It is difficult to figure out why he would deny making a second trip to Algonquin Park when there was a letter from him that had been postmarked “Mowat” on the very day Churchill loaded his sealed casket on the train. The Owen Sound papers said George accompanied the casket home. His sister wrote a letter saying the same. Yet he denied that this had ever happened.
It may be that George felt he had failed the family. He had, after all, been the one dispatched to the park when Tom went missing but could not find him. He had left just days before the body was found. He had failed to prevent the Canoe Lake burial and do as his father had requested: bring Tom home to rest. Having let Winnifred Trainor take charge of the exhumation by Churchill, he must have felt betrayed in the fall of 1956, when a body turned up in the grave and it appeared—at least at first, and still to many from then on—that his brother’s body had never been moved. It would have deeply disturbed him that the casket he was said to have accompanied home to Owen Sound might have been empty.
A proud, organized and dependable man, George Thomson would have felt the fool for letting all this happen on his watch. No wonder the family would have nothing to do with the opening of the Leith gravesite to prove whether or not Tom was there. Better, perhaps, to insist he was there and that he had been seen by witnesses to have been lying in that casket.
William Little wrote that, not long before George’s death in 1965, he was beginning to come around to the necessity of having his brother’s grave opened. It could be he felt guilty; it could also be that he hoped he would be proven to have acted properly, as first sons are expected to act, back in July of 1917.
It seems hard to portray a woman who denied herself hot running water as a money grubber, but it may be that Winnifred Trainor felt herself under pressures that she did not dare speak of, given the temper and order of the times. If she was indeed pregnant, as Daphne Crombie claimed and Charles Plewman certainly hinted at, then what became of the baby? As Crombie said, “The baby never materialized.”
However, if one did “materialize” and either did not survive or was given up for adoption, the possibility raises certain questions of timing. In first bringing up the issue of a full-term birth in an author’s note to my novel Canoe Lake that gives a fictionalized account of that abandoned child, I suggested that Winnie might have been three months along when, as Daphne Crombie had claimed, she sent the letter to Tom, asking that he get the money from Fraser to buy a suit for the necessary wedding. That, I guessed, could mean a baby born anywhere from December 1917 to February 1918.
In Algonquin Elegy, Neil Lehto took this theory and tried to refine it. He found that Mark Robinson’s invaluable journals suggested Winnie Trainor left Mowat on May 25th, and it is possible that she did not return between then and the time she arrived at the Canoe Lake train station on July 17th, after the body had been found. Of course, Robinson did not report on every single arrival and departure, and the Trainors regularly came and went, since Huntsville was relatively close. Thomson could also have gone to visit her in Huntsville, as he often did. If the demanding letter truly existed, it would have been written before Tom went missing, as it was reportedly found in his room. Lehto therefore presumed the pregnancy would have begun before May 25th and not been confirmed until Winnie had missed at least one, more likely two, menstrual periods. He concluded that if there was a baby, it would have been born sometime in February 1918.
Lacking relevant letters, interviews and, certainly, a birth certificate, I did some research in the late 1970s, using the only source readily available to try to trace Winnie’s whereabouts in the months following Tom’s death: the “Personals” section of the Huntsville Forester. Each week the newspaper reported the comings and goings of the local readership. It covered the church socials, the out-of-town visitors, the anniversaries, births, deaths and often even the visits of the townsfolk.
When I first began examining old issues of the newspaper, there was no microfilm at the Forester to thread through machines and there were no search engines. There was only a concrete “bunker” off the cellar of the old Forester offices on Main Street. I had the good fortune of having my parents live kitty corner to Peter Rice, then manager of the paper and a member of the family that had owned the weekly through three generations. He said I was welcome to pick through the “archives” so long as I was careful and did not rip anything. I spent a week there, sneezing and dusting myself off at every turn of the page. But I thought it would be worth it. Perhaps by accident, the Huntsville Forester would suggest a story that might itself equal the mystery of Tom Thomson’s death.
The Forester had duly noted Thomson’s passing—“the deceased was well known by several in Huntsville”—and remarked upon the local undertaker, Churchill, being called to Canoe Lake to oversee shipment of the body to Owen Sound: “Strange to say, prior to his arrival the body had been buried, and it was his unpleasant task to exhume it.”
The paper reported during the first week of August that Winnie’s sister, Marie, had come home from her training at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York for a visit. Nothing was said about any connection with the tragedy, however. Winnifred then went to Toronto to stay for several weeks with her friend Irene Ewing. We know from her letter and the letters and remarks of the Thomson family that she attended the CNE in late August. The November 12th edition noted that Miss Winnifred Trainor had returned from yet another journey away from Huntsville, this time having passed several weeks in northern Ontario. She had stayed with Mrs. James Bradley (her mother was a Bradley) in New Liskeard and with Mrs. Jago in Haileybury and had spent time in North Bay with Miss Lottie Laing, who had been ill.
In that same edition of the Forester, it was noted that Mrs. Trainor and her daughter Winnifred had departed for Philadelphia on Thursday, November 8, 1917, “where they will spend the winter.”
Hugh Trainor had lived in upstate New York before leaving the farm where he’d been born, to find work in Ontario, but no one in Huntsville knew of any Trainor connections in Philadelphia. Marie had been training at St. Luke’s in New York City, and she and Roy McCormick would later settle in upstate N
ew York, but at the time of Thomson’s death, Roy was still serving in the army. (He would graduate from McGill in 1922, intern at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal and then serve a year as resident physician to the New York City Cancer Institution and Neurological Hospital. Roy and Marie would marry in January 1924.)
In early 1918 the Forester again mentioned Winnie and her mother, saying they remained with “friends near Philadelphia,” but there was no indication of the friends’ names or the location near Philadelphia, as easily New Jersey as Pennsylvania.
There were, apparently, some rumours about town concerning this vanishing act. Shortly after I wrote my 1980 novel speculating on the possibility of a child, one of the town’s most respected citizens, Frank Hutcheson—scion of the family that partially owned Muskoka Wood, a hardwood operation that had existed during the same years as the pine-based Huntsville Lumber Company Hugh Trainor worked for—asked to speak with me. It was at the end of the Christmas midnight service at All Saints’ Anglican Church, which I had attended with my family and my mother. We met out back, fresh snow falling, and I remember being particularly nervous, as Frank Hutcheson was known not to suffer fools gladly, and I have certainly been known, at times, to be a fool.
“That book you wrote?” he began, his breath clouding in the cold.
“Yes, sir?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s pretty much the way it was.”
Many years later, Huntsville’s Connie Spiers, then living in British Columbia, contacted me to tell me that her mother, Jane Edrie Demaine, whose family had worked in lumbering in and around Huntsville, and who died in 2004 at age one hundred, had always claimed that Winnie Trainor had “left town” to attend an “Unwed Mothers’ Home” somewhere in the United States. Hearsay evidence all, but at this late date, there’s not much else.
Northern Light Page 23