Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  Intriguingly, the Thomson family had long considered this possibility—one even doing some genealogical research on Winnie’s side out of curiosity. But no solid evidence has ever been produced. “Certain members feel there is/was a child out there somewhere,” says Tracy Thomson, who counts herself among those who look at the circumstantial evidence and see the possibility. “But no one knows who or where.”

  In the spring of 2010, I travelled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and visited the branch office of the Bureau of Vital Records. I went with the documentation the bureau’s website said would be sufficient to request a search for a birth anywhere in the state of Pennsylvania and was granted an interview with one of the officials. If there had been an illegitimate birth, I was told, such information would be made available only to a “direct” relative, meaning sibling, child, grandchild. A niece or nephew was not sufficiently direct, nor was a relative by marriage.

  In the summer of 2010, a different approach was taken by Ottawa’s Chris MacPhail, a retired engineer and amateur genealogist. Working from available U.S. Census data on Ancestry.com, MacPhail uncovered in the 1920 census the existence of an “Edwina Trainor,” then two years old and living with the Brady family in Philadelphia. The Bradys were listed as a family of eight—parents and six children ranging in ages from nine to twenty-seven, the children all single and all still living at home. Edwina Trainor is listed in the census as a “granddaughter” and was the only member of the household with a different surname.

  MacPhail’s discovery certainly seemed promising, as it had been two years earlier that Winnie and her mother had wintered over in Philadelphia. There was even some initial consideration that the names “Brady” and “Bradley” share the same Irish root, and Winnie’s mother had been a “Bradley.” However, any such thoughts evaporated when MacPhail, a diligent researcher, decided to return to the 1910 census just to make sure he had not missed any Brady children. Sure enough, the prolific Bradys had nine children at home in 1910, including Mae M. Brady, age fifteen. Further research indicated that Mae had been a dressmaker and at a very young age—twelve or thirteen—had married Edward Trainor and had a daughter at some point in 1917. Edward died in a truck fire on August 16, 1918 and Mae was missing from the Brady family census of 1920 because she was then twenty-six years old and living in Alleghany, Pennsylvania.

  The search continues.

  It is difficult from a century on to realize what a pregnancy outside marriage would have meant in the Ontario of those days. It was a time when orphans from Great Britain—often “bastards” and “illegitimate children” but referred to as “Barnardo” boys and girls—were shipped by the thousands to the colonies and in many cases treated as slaves and chattel by those with the God-fearing “mercy” to take the wretches in. It was a time that saw the rise of children’s aid societies with power to take children away from mothers who could present no fathers. What later became known as “social work” was originally considered “salvage work.” Pregnant girls were usually shielded (when not shunned) by their own families. Those from small towns were forced by fear of public outrage to go somewhere else for the duration of the pregnancy, do the proper thing by giving up the child for adoption and return home in shame, the unwed mother now considered unworthy and unable to land a husband. As for men who left unwed women in such a “condition,” when it was known—which was not often, as men, of course, do not “show”—they, too, were shunned and ostracized.

  Ontario passed its Children of Unmarried Parents Act in 1921, four years after Thomson’s death and three years after any possible child might have been born. The impetus was to ease the consequences of illegitimacy for “bastards”—essentially mandating the Children’s Aid Society to act as investigator, judge and ward for children not being properly cared for by the society’s definition of “family.” Nothing was done, however, to improve the lot of unwed mothers. Lori Chambers, associate professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University and author of Misconceptions: Unmarried Motherhood and the Ontario Children of Unmarried Parents Act, 1929–1969, has argued that the effect was to institutionalize the sharp prejudices against young women who became pregnant out of wedlock. Errant women were to be punished.

  So prudish was Ontario society at the time of Thomson’s death that the board of Taylor Statten Camps resigned in the early 1920s over the potential scandal of the Stattens deciding to have both a boys’ and a girls’ camp on the same lake. And while sexual mores did relax over the coming decades, attitudes toward unwed mothers lagged significantly. In Huntsville in the 1950s and early 1960s when I was growing up, the stigma of being pregnant and unmarried was severe. In some quarters of North American society, this attitude would never change: in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle assailed a fictional television character, Murphy Brown, for exhibiting a “poverty of values” for having a baby on her own. Choosing to do so, he argued, was “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘life-style choice.’ ” The New York Daily News came out with a headline—“QUAYLE TO MURPHY BROWN: YOU TRAMP!”—that not everyone saw as satirical. To many, unwed mothers remained “tramps.”

  But the world was so very much harsher on unwed mothers back in 1917–18. Queen Victoria might have died in 1901, but in backwoods English Canada, her stern gaze still very much ruled. In The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925, Mariana Valverde says that a community such as Huntsville would have been caught up in what was called the “social purity movement”—a powerful cause taken up by churches, educators, doctors and concerned individuals to “raise the moral tone” of all Canadians. And, she says, sexual mores were the main target. One member of Parliament, John Charlton, even tried to criminalize seduction, introducing one of his bizarre bills saying, “No vice will more speedily sap the foundations of public morality and of national strength than licentiousness.”

  In no small part, the movement was fear driven. There was general panic about the vast loss of life in the Great War. Young Anglo-Saxon men were being sacrificed by the thousands, and wild fears were rampant: young women said to have been taken from their families for the white slave trade, immigrants overrunning the country … Irrational, but powerful, forces were at work.

  In parallel with this concerted, often twisted, effort to raise the puritanical standards before and after the turn of the new century, bizarre notions sometimes took hold. A female doctor published a book through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union suggesting dishwashing as a cure for the menstrual cramps of young women. “This hot water represents truth, heated by Love,” wrote Dr. Mary Wood-Allen in What a Young Girl Ought to Know. “The soiled dishes represent myself, with my worn-out thoughts and desires.” One renowned moral watchdog, C.S. Clark, led a Toronto campaign against summer lovers, claiming, “The whole city is an immense house of ill-fame, the roof of which is the blue canopy of heaven during the summer months.” In Clark’s terminology, lovers who met in the parks were committing a form of “prostitution,” and one 1915 report by the reformers made little distinction between prostitution and going out on a date. Young women who went with their boyfriends to ice cream parlours and parks, and perhaps occasionally engaged in sexual activity with their beaus, were called “occasional prostitutes.”

  “Toronto the Good” was at the forefront of the movement. In the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, the Canadian Purity Education Association was extremely influential. It talked the provincial government into placing a complete ban on Sunday shopping and any commercial leisure activity on the Sabbath. It lobbied the government to create a “provincial bureau of purity.” Methodists and Presbyterians established councils for temperance and moral reform. The Methodists wanted the federal government to “raise the age of consent, ban liquor, criminalize adultery.…” A Presbyterian leader, the Reverend John G. Shearer, called on Ontaria
ns to join a “crusade” against slipping morality, urging his followers to fight on “unterrified by all sneering cries of ‘puritanical legislation’ raised by caviling newspapers that would cater to an evil-minded crowd.” Winnie Trainor’s mother was vice-president of the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the highly conservative women’s movement that opposed drinking, smoking and “social impurity” (including sex outside marriage and illegitimacy).

  What, then, would happen to a child born out of wedlock in a small Ontario town like Huntsville? Such a child was to be considered a bastard, nobody’s child. The ultimate social stigma of its time. In Ontario men were not held responsible for children they might have fathered out of wedlock. Nor did the community assume any responsibility. It was assumed the fallen mother would give up the child to an orphanage, where the child would often be adopted by those merely wishing to gain some free labour.

  When it became known that the Canadian Expeditionary Force had the highest venereal disease rates among the Allied troops fighting in western Europe, society showed no disgust for the soldiers but came out with a wholesale condemnation of the “guilty” women who had carried this disease to the “innocent” men. There seemed little or no contrary opinion at the time. Dr. R.H. Patterson, writing in The Canadian Public Health Journal in 1920, posed the rhetorical question, “Who is really to blame?” when a young, unmarried woman becomes pregnant. His answer? “The mother.” Even the widely recognized social pioneer (and future mayor of Ottawa) Charlotte Whitton was of the opinion, at the time, that “most unwed mothers were of ‘low mentality’ and consequently unable to successfully raise their children for the state.”

  If, then, Winnie was indeed pregnant, the trips away from Huntsville in the early stages and the fact that she and her mother spent November through April—a span of roughly five-and-one-half months—staying with “friends near Philadelphia” do suggest the possibility of a pregnancy carried to term. That no child ever “materialized,” as Daphne Crombie put it, does not prove no child ever existed.

  However, proving that a child did exist is far more complicated than merely stating the obvious. Efforts continue to this day, using both genealogical expertise and by going through the appropriate state channels regarding such information, if in fact there is information to be found.

  Easter of 1918 fell on April 22nd. It marked the return of Miss Winnifred Trainor to Huntsville after she had left the small town in the fall. If she had borne a child over the winter, she would have been completely recovered by this date. She returned in the company of her friend Irene Ewing of Toronto, the Forester reported. The two friends attended the Easter service at All Saints’ Anglican Church down on the banks of the Muskoka River, and one can only imagine the emotions that ran through Winnifred as the choir stood and launched into the hymn Rector Law had chosen for this special occasion: “O Death! Where Is Thy Sting?”

  FOURTEEN LIFE AFTER TOM

  Following her Easter weekend return to Huntsville from her long sojourn near Philadelphia—165 days stretching from November 8, 1917 to April 22, 1918—Winnie Trainor soon left town for another stretch, this time in Toronto. In the third week of May, she returned home again, this time with her sister, Marie, and Irene Ewing. They did not stay long. Mrs. Ewing had her husband in Toronto; Marie had her nursing studies in New York; Winnie seemed to be spending little time in Huntsville. Her father, too, was rarely around, having found work with a timber operation in the Magnetawan River area north of Muskoka.

  In September 1918, Winnie came back to Huntsville once again from Toronto and, this time, the paper noted, Hugh Trainor was also “back from the North.” Her father had decided to move the family of three—himself, Margaret and Winnie—to Kearney, a small village on the Magnetawan River, which was a stop along the rail line running west from Algonquin Park to near Parry Sound. Here, he could continue working in the bush with his family nearby, and they would be closer to their summer cabin on Canoe Lake—a train ride of approximately an hour. They would also be a good distance away from Huntsville. They rented a simple bungalow from Arthur Hurd, camp foreman for the Shortreed Lumber Company of Kearney, and moved in to stay.

  While her father continued working in the bush, Winnie herself went to work for Shortreed’s, a local timber operation dealing in various hardwoods, pine, hemlock, tan bark for the Huntsville tannery, cedar shingles, posts and poles and pulpwood. She was hired by J.D. MacNeill and was soon basically operating as office manager, handling everything from orders to pay packets. She was also in charge of the accounting and was said to be extremely good at keeping the books. In the small “Trainor” collection at Muskoka Heritage Place is a letter dated October 27, 1923, from Scully and Scully Accountants in Kitchener, Ontario. It is addressed to Miss Winnifred Trainor, Kearney, Ont.:

  Dear Madam:

  We have much pleasure in writing you to say we have audited the books of account of The Shortreed Lumber Company Limited, for the years 1922 and 1923.

  The accounting during such periods had been done by you, and we found the books well and satisfactorily kept.

  Yours very truly,

  Scully and Scully

  Winnie made a lifelong male friend in Kearney, but this relationship was never anything but professional and social and, later, somewhat businesslike, as the friend became her adviser and, ultimately, executor of her estate. He was Dr. Wilfred T. Pocock, ten years younger than Winnie and a native of a small village in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Before he began school, his family moved to Brockville, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence River.

  Pocock was thin, small and moustached, retaining the look he’d acquired while serving as a captain in the Canadian Medical Corps, spending one of his two years in uniform overseas in England. He graduated from Queen’s University in 1918 and then briefly did some postgraduate studies in women’s surgery at Johns Hopkins University. In the fall of 1919 he answered an advertisement and was hired, at one hundred dollars a year, to assist one Dr. Mason, who served both the Kearney area and the western part of Algonquin Park. (The eastern part of Algonquin would be the domain of Dr. Gilbert “Gib” Post in Whitney, who was the doctor present when I was born in 1948 at the village’s Red Cross station.) Dr. Pocock, who bought the retiring Dr. Mason’s practice in 1920, had been the doctor for my mother and family while they lived at Brule Lake, the railway depot located between Canoe Lake and Kearney. Both Dr. Pocock and Dr. Post were legendary and beloved figures in the park. Stories were told about them walking miles through the bush to save a life or deliver a baby and, as often as not, never even being paid for services—because so many families didn’t have the money to pay them.

  Dr. Pocock would stay twenty-five years in Kearney and then another twenty-three in nearby Emsdale before moving to Huntsville for another two years of medical practice, followed by a long retirement. He died in 1987 at age ninety-two, having outlived his great friend Winnifred Trainor by twenty-five years.

  In his later years, Pocock was interviewed by Algonquin Park archivist Ron Pittaway, and as the elderly doctor was in the midst of describing this great friendship, his third wife, Clara—his first, Audrey, and second, Helen, had both died—jumped into the taped interview with her own impressions of Winnie. She’d known Winnie when she’d been married to Courtney Amm, an engineer with the Department of Highways who also served on town council.

  “She made our lives miserable,” Clara Pocock said. “She was a cranky old maid. When we first lived here we lived almost next door to her and the children would play ball. The ball would go over on her lawn and oh boy could she cuss and swear.”

  But Clara’s husband would not join in. “I was her doctor there until almost the last,” Pocock added softly. “I found her a very great friend and that’s all I can say.”

  Dick Pocock, the country doctor’s son, recalled in 2010 that he first encountered Winnie when he was about six years of age and that she often stayed with them. He thought her “kind and a very good-looking wo
man with dark hair.” He recalled, as only the young will, how she would often do the laundry while visiting and how she would let him help put the clothes through the wringer. “She loved to do laundry,” he said.

  In his later years, Wilfred Pocock and I talked often of Thomson, whom the country doctor had never met, and of Winnie, whom he called his “intimate friend.” He could tell you the exact day he met Winnie—October 29, 1919—and it was a friendship that would last forty-three years, until Winnie’s death in 1962.

  I eventually ended up with a thick file of letters from Dr. Pocock. Something would jog his memory, and he would put pen to paper, recording his thoughts and memories from those Kearney years. He wrote about the then-bustling village with its two hotels, only one of which, he said, permitted men to sit around and smoke and drink. He also described the Shortreed mill, located on a widening of the river known as the “lake.” He recalled sleigh rides, the horse-drawn democrats used in the good weather, church socials, card games, square dances and round dances to gramophones—and the latest novelty: the radio. He and his wife especially enjoyed days out picking blueberries or raspberries with Winnie.

  “We loved her for herself,” he said in a letter he wrote to me on January 6, 1976, “and she treated us the same way. She was really a part of our family and came and went as she pleased, eating her meals often with us at Kearney or on a common holiday. She often slept in the spare room we kept for visitors—a custom in those days.”

  It was Wilfred’s opinion that the move to Kearney had been Winnifred’s idea and predated her father’s getting work there. Hugh Trainor had a weakness for drink, Pocock said, and did not continue working for many years following the family’s relocation to Kearney. He was often ill with stomach ailments that Pocock treated as best he could. “I believe her only idea in moving to Kearney,” he wrote in a February 8, 1977, letter, “was to have her parents near her work and where she could care for them.”