While the gallery pamphlet did not go so far as to identify the pretty young woman as Tom Thomson’s fiancée, it did say that “the rumour nevertheless persisted that Thomson and Miss Trainor were in fact engaged to be married.”
Fisk had met Winnie Trainor only once, during a very brief encounter in Toronto in late August 1917, at a Canadian National Exhibition display of some larger works by the recently deceased artist. Her word that the young woman was indeed Winnie ensured that these photos of “Miss Winnifred Trainor” would be reprinted in dozens of book and magazine accounts of the Tom Thomson story, and they are among the only pictures of Thomson’s fiancée that have ever seen print. But the pictures are not of her.
Dennis Reid had noted that this woman was wearing rings on her wedding finger, but he had trusted Fisk despite the anomaly, figuring that the Thomson family should know, after all. Some have even argued that the rings are proof that Winnie and Tom were engaged, but her immediate family knew it was not her; her extended family also knew, though no one has ever bothered to correct the record until now. Winnie never wore a wedding ring or engagement ring, she was darker and more solid than the woman misidentified as her, and her hair, tending toward frizzy and kept in a bun most of her life, was never as shiny and carefully sculpted as the locks of the woman in Tom’s photos. By her own account, as well, Winnie did not meet Tom until 1913, the year after these images were shot.
There are few photographs of the real Winnie Trainor available, but enough to provide Montreal forensic artist Victoria Lywood, an international expert on facial reconstruction, to note the various differences between the real Winnifred Trainor in family photographs and the “false” Winnie identified in the National Gallery exhibition and in several books on Thomson. The real Winnie’s nose is straight, the false Winnie’s nose upturned. The real Winnie’s face is oval, with soft jaw line and rounded chin; the wrongly-identified Winnie’s face is rectangular with a sharp jaw line. Victoria Lywood later prepared a professional eight-page report on the discrepancies in facial features between Winnifred Trainor from verified photographs and the woman in the Thomson photograph that has long been identified as Winnie. While various differences were noticed in everything from nose structure to brow, most telling is the hair, which in the known photographs of Winnie is wild and unruly and usually kept in a bun that could have been held down only with tent pegs. Lywood wrote:
While my opinion regarding the hair is personal rather than forensic, as hair can certainly be changed, the three confirmed Winnie Trainor photographs show a female with what appears to be consistent hair texture, somewhat curly and frizzy in nature, during what appears to be three different seasons of the year at three different stages of her life. It is curious and unknown as to how she would be able to produce and maintain a straighter, yet wavy, natural-looking hairstyle in the outdoors for any period of time relying on products and methods produced in 1912 unless the style, texture and nature of the hair was indeed natural to the subject in [the photograph taken by Thomson in 1912].
Lywood also set out to determine the relative height of the woman by using fashion references and involving research by Martin Cooper, senior archaeologist at Archaeological Services Inc., in Toronto. By calculating the length of the fishing rod in the 1912 photograph, Lywood could estimate the height of the woman. Height measurements were also estimated through period fashion as well as head-to-body proportions. While absolutely accurate measurements proved impossible, the photographs known to be Winnie Trainor indicate a taller woman than the one in the 1912 photograph.
“It is my opinion,” Lywood concluded, “that the facial comparison combined with the stature comparison does not offer strong support that the unknown subject in [the 1912 photograph] is Winnie Trainor.”
Even so, in Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm, co-author Harold Town (David Silcox is the other author) used the false photograph to rhapsodize on what Winnie might have been like: “A surprisingly formal Winnie Trainor displays the bony angularity of Katharine Hepburn and from the strain evident in the sinews of her arms appears to be having some trouble holding what can’t be more than twelve pounds of fish. She is thin of mouth—might have had bad teeth—and projects a tension that has me believing the Thomson family accounts of her strangeness.” Poor Winnie, blamed for a “strangeness” Town finds in the photograph of an unknown woman. Victoria Lywood was happily able to use the available photographs of the true Winnifred Trainor to do an artist’s interpretation of how she would have looked that summer of 1917, when she was 32, Tom 39, and she was in love. She does not seem strange, but lovely, with soft eyes and a barely hidden smile of mischief.
But who, then, is this other woman? Given the other photographs on the rolls, it would seem reasonable to assume that it might be Edythe McRuer, the young wife of Thomson’s doctor friend. Thomson, after all, had been best man at their wedding three years earlier. But extensive correspondence with the McRuer family—and considerable help from Patrick Boyer, James McRuer’s biographer—produced photographs of a young Edythe that quickly ruled her out. Nor do the images appear to be of the McRuer brothers’ sister Margaret, who did not marry for some years following the death of Tom Thomson and, therefore, would not have been wearing an engagement ring and wedding band.
So we do not know who this woman is—only that she is not Winnifred Trainor, the woman she has been said to be for more than forty years.
Annie Winnifred Trainor was born in Bracebridge, the next substantial community to the south of Huntsville, on March 18, 1885. She arrived the day after St. Patrick’s Day and in the midst of an extreme freeze that had settled over Ontario. She was the first child of Margaret Jane Bradley of Milton, Ontario, and Hugh Trainor, who had been born on a farm in New York state and who had come to Canada at seventeen and found work in the lumber industry. Hugh and Margaret had married in Bracebridge in 1883, and Winnifred arrived on her mother’s twenty-seventh birthday.
When Winnie was two years old, her father landed a good job with a growing timber operation to the north, and the little family relocated to Huntsville. Hugh became a walking foreman for the fledgling business—which soon renamed itself Huntsville Lumber Company—overseeing much of its pine-cutting operations. He organized the winter cuts, when trees were felled deep in the various timber rights and the logs then drawn by horse team to depots near the Big East and Oxtongue rivers. From there they would be stacked until breakup and the beginning of the spring log drives.
The Trainors had arrived in a bush community where most of the early settlers had built on the surrounding hills rather than on the flat, more arable land along the river that ran between Vernon and Fairy lakes. This was because the town’s founder, Captain George Hunt, had insisted on a temperance clause in the deeds he was offering on the better land, while Allan Shay, who owned much of the higher ground, asked only for cash for his rougher and rockier lots. Hunt was so determined to establish a proper Christian community that he insisted his ban on alcohol remain in effect not only for his lifetime, but for twenty years and ten months after the last grandchild of Queen Victoria had also died.
It’s no surprise that Hunt eventually had to drop his restrictive clause and the development of Huntsville gradually crept onto the lands that might otherwise have been settled first. Still, deep Christian principles and temperance leanings would profoundly affect the town where Winnie was growing up. One of the first tasks of the first council—apart from banning the firing of guns in the village—was to pass Bylaw 4 concerning the “Preservation of Public Morals.” Its eight subsections dealt with everything from the public utterance of obscenities or blasphemies to renting out a room to “persons of bad character.” The final provision was that “no person shall indecently expose his or her person by bathing or washing near any public highway between the hours of seven o’clock in the morning and eight o’clock in the evening.”
What a very young Winnifred Trainor thought of her town as she grew up is not known. Her
mother was a strict churchgoer and a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), so it is fair to conclude that Winnie would have been as conservative and judgmental as most other inhabitants of the town. But we can only presume that this would be the case. If she left a personal diary or cache of letters behind—and I don’t recall seeing them when I helped to clear out her house and cottage—none of these found their way to the town museum following her death in 1962, though some of her clothes and a few photographs were donated. And Marie, her only sister, has left us no sibling memories of a young Winnie. Unlike all the reminiscences of family, friends and acquaintances that followed Tom Thomson’s death, there would be no later articles written by anyone who grew up with Winnifred to tell us how she wore her hair as a girl, what songs she sang, whether she played with dolls or, for that matter, what her dreams were for the future. All we know for sure is that she could not possibly have wished for what was to come her way later in life.
Shortly after Winnie turned nine, her little village all but burned to the ground when fire broke out on April 18, 1894, back of Harry May’s hardware store on Main Street. One of May’s hired boys had been clearing winter debris and ill-advisedly set a bonfire to clear up the mess. The wind came up, sending flames into the storage shed, where a new shipment of forty-gallon barrels of coal oil had been stored only days earlier. The oil exploded and fire roared into the wood-frame buildings that lined the street. Another merchant, George Hutcheson, moved his goods out to the lake steamer Excelsior, which was tied up at the dock directly behind Hutcheson & Sons, but this seemingly sensible action only exacerbated the disaster when flaming oil ran down through the ditches to the river and ignited the boat. In less than three hours, thirty-two buildings and the Excelsior were lost to flames.
The insurance covered less than half the estimated $110,000 in damages, but the town quickly rebuilt, this time mostly in brick, and Huntsville’s now-considered-charming Main Street dates from this reconstruction. It was a time of relative prosperity, with the new railway transporting whatever timber the mills along the river could produce. North Muskoka was renowned for its variety of wood: cedar and an array of pines and spruce from the lowlands; hardwoods—maple, oak, ash, beech—from the hills; birch and poplar from everywhere. A few sparse stands of magnificent white pine were still being logged, and even the lowly hemlock was being felled for siding planks and its bark, which was hammered into a “liquor” used to tan leather. The ready availability of hemlock bark led to a tannery being built on the lower side of town, where Hunter’s Bay narrowed into the first stretch of the Muskoka River. By the turn of the coming century, the Anglo-Canadian Leather Company would be the largest tannery in the British Empire to produce sole leather. Even into the 1950s, when I was growing up, the tannery was still a major force. We kids all had key chains with miniature leather soles attached—embossed with the words “Anglo Canadian Sole Leather.” We carried those chains around, even though we had no keys to carry, as no one locked their doors.
The tannery soon closed, though, and, in June 1961, it burned to the ground after a workman doing maintenance started a fire with his blowtorch. The entire town came out to watch as the chemicals from the old vats sent flames like northern lights high above the collapsing walls. The tannery was now gone, just as most of the mills along the river had vanished, leaving behind a single plant that produced hardwood flooring. Forestry was no longer the economic force it had been. Muskoka’s economy was now largely based on the tourism that—at the time the Trainors came to Huntsville—was just opening up thanks to the new railway and the lake steamers that carried visitors to the various local lodges.
Winnie Trainor would have walked to a new two-storey wood-frame school that had been erected on a knoll overlooking Hunter’s Bay. Children living in the surrounding hills no longer had to walk the length of Main Street and cross a small bridge over the river to get to school. Her trip would have been short but interesting, with the town rebuilding from the fire and Main Street busy with buggies and wagons, workers and shoppers. In spring she would have kept as much as possible to the wooden sidewalks, as the road itself was all but impassable: the runoff turned the route to muck so deep buggies would sometimes sink to their axles in the sucking mud.
The new school was much larger than the original log building where the town children had received instruction, but, still, students could attend only to the end of the elementary grades. In later years the school that Winnie attended became known as the “White School,” when siding became the rage in rural communities. My own grade one was the last class to occupy the White School before it was closed.
In the first edition of the Huntsville Forester to appear after the fire—the paper having shut down for three weeks—nine-year-old “W. Trainor” is listed as standing first overall in sub-arithmetic, with 82 per cent. A week later she stood first in spelling, with 95 per cent. She is listed with youngsters named Wattson and Scarlett and Kinton, all familiar names from the storefronts along Main Street. Following a rare and heavy snowfall at the end of May that year, the school was struck with the grippe, and Winnie was identified as one of the children too sick to attend.
All Saints’ Anglican Church on the banks of the Muskoka River just downstream from the bridge would have played as significant a role as the school in her young life. The rector was the Rev. Thomas Llwyd, a stern man whose white-bearded visage seemed carved out of one of Moses’ tablets. On the inside, however, he was hardly made of stone. He suffered a nervous breakdown from worrying about his wooden church catching fire (it didn’t) and then collapsed again from the stress of building—at a cost of $6,196.73—the magnificent stone church that still stands today. Nonetheless, so formidable a force was the stern “Dr.” Llwyd that the village lowered its flags to half-staff when he passed away in the summer of 1903.
Huntsville was typical of small Ontario towns in that it held several Protestant churches and a single Roman Catholic church, with a guaranteed rift between the two Christian forces. When Winnie was eleven years old, renowned Catholic-baiter Margaret L. Shepherd came to Huntsville to speak of a long-suspected Catholic plan to rise up and massacre Protestants using weapons said to be hidden in the basements of Catholic churches. With rumours about that Shepherd would be arrested the moment she set foot in town, tickets sold out quickly, at a stiff fifteen cents a head. She claimed to be the daughter of an English nobleman and said her intimate knowledge of the Catholic mind came from her once studying to become a nun. Following an opening prayer, she laid out the diabolical plot to kill Protestants. A few weeks after she left town, news came that Margaret L. Shepherd, a.k.a. Margaret Herbert, a.k.a. Margaret Riordin, had previously been a prostitute in England and had served time in Bristol’s Roman Catholic prison, where it was said she picked up an impressive knowledge of Catholic ritual.
Winnie’s mother was active in the Anglican Church and was soon elected to the executive of the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which in those days banned Catholic women from membership. Despite the town founder’s failure to uphold an alcohol ban, the WCTU was a powerful force in Huntsville. The women’s organization had its beginnings in Ohio in the 1850s and found great support in small-town Ontario. Members often wore a white ribbon on their dresses to signify “purity,” and they would recite a poem about the ribbon that included the well-known line “Pure and unsullied as new driven snow.” The organization reached far beyond mere temperance when it came to alcohol. It was against smoking and all for social purity, even establishing its own Department of Purity in Literature, Art and Fashion. The WCTU was most adamant that a family meant a married man and woman—“a white life for two,” the WCTU called it—and maintained that “Every child has the right to be well-born.” That meant not born to parents who drank, who smoked or who were socially impure and most assuredly not to parents not married in a Christian (preferably Protestant) church. Being born illegitimately—to a woman who could produce no husband—was unfor
givable. Being an unwed mother was about as far as one could fall in a community like Huntsville in those early years.
And the sanctimony extended beyond the churches and the WCTU. On January 14, 1909, the Huntsville Forester reported that Fairy Lake had frozen over solid and was clear of snow. Skaters could go all the way to the far end of the lake and back. Yet instead of celebrating this magical fluke of nature, the paper harshly pointed out that it had happened on a Sunday and had therefore “nullified a proper respect for the one day in seven which we are exhorted to spend in restful meditation … The example of adults indulging in such an open violation of the Sabbath will have a disastrous effect upon the younger generation.”
Though Winnie’s school records suggested that she was bright (and particularly with numbers and spelling), she had her academic weaknesses. Worst among them, ironically, was art instruction. In drawing class she could barely manage a 52 and later failed completely. Irene May, a friend of Winnie when Tom and Winnie were courting, told an interviewer years after the painter’s death that “Tom could see beauty in the old shoe left on the side of the road. That is one thing … I will never understand, as Winnie could never see beauty anywhere. She and Tom were miles apart in this respect.”
As Winnie moved up through the grades, her interest in her studies seemed to fade. Her early high marks in grammar soon plummeted to 50. Though she continued to be promoted, her marks slid to bare passes, even in the courses in which she had previously excelled. It is difficult to know what to make of this. As she was invariably described in her later years as “sharp” and “quick,” it’s unlikely that the marks reflect any dullness of mind; they’re more likely to do with the dullness of the classes.
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