Generally Kay Gimpel left aesthetic and policy decisions about which artists the gallery represented to her husband and latterly her son René, now director of Gimpel Fils, but she was a key player in approaching and courting artists and clients. She had a discerning eye and a retentive memory, traits that she enhanced with a massive and idiosyncratic card index on which she scribbled telling details about the clients, which she could retrieve and decode with panache and dispatch. She “ran the family and she set the rules” at the gallery, according to her son.
Even after her husband died of cancer in 1973, she continued to work at the gallery, retiring only in the late 1990s, when she was in her late eighties. Throughout her career, her personal and domestic support system was an Irishwoman named Bridget (Bridgie) Ferry. She had arrived as a girl in the late 1940s to do housework and child minding and was still there six decades later, the glue between generations of Gimpel children and grandchildren, and Gimpel’s companion and most trusted of family retainers. The two women — both in their nineties — continued to play Scrabble, do the Times crossword, and entertain all and sundry until Gimpel died of pneumonia, a complication of heart disease, and emphysema, in Chelsea, London, at the age of ninety-five.
John Weir
Flier and Prisoner of War
July 22, 1919 – September 20, 2009
IN A SKY as azure as a line from “High Flight,” a Lancaster bomber, one of its port engines cut and propeller stilled, flew in sunlit silence over the playing fields of Upper Canada College in midtown Toronto on an afternoon in late September 2009. It was chased by a perky canary-yellow de Havilland Chipmunk, a flypast that was an idiosyncratic but moving tribute to John (“Scruffy”) Weir, a veteran of the Second World War, a pilot who loved to restore heritage planes, and a man who had thwarted his German captors as a prisoner of war.
Above all, he was a survivor. A Spitfire pilot who crashed and burned in France in 1941, he endured four years as a German POW, underwent horrendous plastic surgeries without anesthesia, helped plan the “Great Escape” from the infamous Stalag Luft III, and withstood a forced march across Germany in the dying days of the war.
Few people knew better than John Weir how to cherish life.
JOHN GORDON WEIR was born in Toronto on July 22, 1919, less than a year after Germany signed the armistice ending the First World War, a war that had scarred the life of his father, Colonel James Gordon Weir. The elder Weir, a Presbyterian of Scottish descent, served in the frontline trenches in a machine-gun battalion. By the time the guns were silenced, he had been gassed twice, awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, and risen through the ranks from trooper to colonel. He was a genuine military hero.
After the war, he married a Canadian nursing sister, Mary Frederica (Freda) Taylor, whom he had met in a convalescent hospital. After Weir’s discharge, he and his wife settled in Toronto. He resumed his former trade as a bond salesman, eventually helping to found the brokerage firm McLeod Young Weir (now part of Scotiabank).
Everything that Weir had absorbed and accumulated — affluence, the horrors of trench warfare, Germany’s festering imperial ambitions — he expended in structuring a training and survival framework for his only son. Young John was sent to Upper Canada College, an elite private school, but the classroom was merely a humdrum part of a much larger education orchestrated by his father: how to survive in the natural and political wilderness. As the 1920s turned into the ’30s, Weir was convinced that a second world war against the old foe was inevitable.
He wanted to hone his son’s wilderness and strategic skills, so he sent the boy to Algonquin Park in the summers under the tutelage of an Ojibwa fishing guide. He sent him to France during school breaks when he was a teenager to learn the language and customs, and took him along on European business trips in the mid-1930s to observe the rise of Nazism.
On a couple of occasions, Weir had his son carry covert messages to desperate McLeod Young Weir clients who were trying to escape from Germany. In the final stage of this idiosyncratic boot camp, he sent his son to Timmins, in northern Ontario, in July 1938 to work underground in the gold mines. Ostensibly the teenager was earning tuition money for university, but the real goal was to toughen him up with hard physical labour.
On September 4, 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, John Weir, then barely twenty, enlisted in the nascent and ill-equipped Royal Canadian Air Force. He was called up in November, sent to a civilian flying school in Winnipeg, and then shipped back east. He was eventually posted to Trenton, Ontario, to train on fighters. After he appeared on dress parade wearing a uniform stained with the engine coolant glycol, a visiting RAF group captain observed that Weir was “rather a scruffy looking individual” — and “Scruffy” he remained.
About this time he met Fran McCormack on a blind date. They danced together like champions and she brought out the playful side in him — although it never was far from the surface. On at least two occasions he “bombed” her with notes in handkerchiefs dropped from training planes over her Forest Hill neighbourhood, a courting ritual that today would rouse the institutional ire of aviation authorities.
Weir shipped out in August 1940, arriving on the south coast of England in the middle of the Blitz and at the apogee of German invasion fears. He was posted to 401 Squadron, which had sustained heavy losses in the Battle of Britain, and was then reassigned to Thurso, Scotland, to regroup while protecting the skies over Scapa Flow, the main British naval base.
By October 1941, Squadron 401 had been posted to Lancashire and re-equipped with Spitfires, which were faster than Hurricanes and more agile than Messerschmitts. By then Weir had accumulated a thousand hours of operational flight time, far exceeding the life expectancy for new fighter pilots, which was approximately six combat hours. But his luck was about to expire.
Flying sweeps over Abbeville, one of the main Luftwaffe bases in Picardy, he was shot down by a covey of Messerschmitts. When the Spitfire’s cockpit and fuel tank burst into flames, he bailed out at 26,000 feet, a dangerously high altitude without an oxygen mask, and landed — burned, battered, and bootless — about thirty kilometres southwest of Caen.
His eyes were almost fused shut and the skin on his hands, face, and neck was seared. A French farmer led him, nearly blind and in shock, to a tree stump and told him to wait for the Germans. That’s how he began his nearly four years as a POW, first in a German hospital and then in Stalag Luft I, on the Baltic. After a couple of short-lived escapes followed by brutal beatings, he, along with three hundred other prisoners, was transported by rail to Stalag Luft III, the allegedly escape-proof camp near Sagan, Poland (about 160 kilometres southeast of Berlin), in mid-April 1942.
He immediately joined the X, or escape, committee. Hatching escape plots was a universal conversational currency for bored and frustrated POWs. Carrying out these brave but often foolhardy schemes — sneaking under the wire, jumping from trains while being transported from one camp to another, or tunnelling under the prison walls — was as commonplace an activity as stamp collecting in peacetime. But Stalag Luft III had been specifically designed to thwart tunnelling. The barracks in the four compounds were raised two feet off the ground so guards could observe covert digging; the sandy subsoil, which was structurally fragile, was bright yellow and easily detected against the grey surface soil; and seismograph microphones had been embedded around the perimeter of the camp to amplify the sounds of digging.
But the Germans hadn’t anticipated the determination and organizational skills of RAF squadron leader Roger Bushell, who later became immortalized in print and on screen as the mastermind behind the Great Escape. Since being shot down in May 1940, Bushell had survived at least four POW camps and several escape attempts before arriving at Stalag Luft III in October 1942. He immediately developed an ambitious master plan for three tunnels — Tom, Dick, and Harry — and an escape strategy to spring more than
two hundred men, equipped with civilian clothes or tradesmen’s uniforms, identity papers, and travel documents.
Weir’s pal Wally Floody, whom he knew from Toronto and the mines in Timmins, was also a POW at Stalag Luft III. He became the X committee’s master tunneller and quickly recruited Weir as a digger. The summer that Weir spent in the mines of northern Ontario had taught him the significance of shoring up tunnels so they wouldn’t collapse and bury the diggers.
Floody’s first decision as master tunneller was to use Klim tins (containers of powdered milk sent in by the Red Cross) as scoops to dig straight down for thirty feet (thereby making a smaller sound field for the guards) before levelling out and extending horizontally. The tins were also modified and strung together to form ducts to bring fresh air from the surface into the tunnel. The row of tins provided a directional marker as well, which was a bonus for Weir, who was inclined to veer left and downwards. They helped keep him from digging in a circle.
Despite the ingenuity and perseverance of the POWs, the Great Escape was stalled more often than not. In December 1943, with Tom and Dick abandoned and all the obvious dumping grounds exhausted for the mounds of yellow sand coming out of Harry, the ambitious escape plans were put on hold. That’s when Wally Floody persuaded his Ontario pal to consult a visiting Red Cross doctor about his deteriorating eyesight. Because Weir’s eyelids were gone, he did everything — including sleeping and digging — with his eyes wide open, leaving them vulnerable to disease, damage, and fatigue. The doctor convinced him that he would eventually go blind if he didn’t seek treatment. Consequently, Weir agreed to be transferred to a German hospital for plastic surgery.
He thought he would be away for a couple of weeks. In fact, he was there for several months, serving as a guinea pig under the experimental care of David Charters. A Scottish ophthalmologist serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Charters had been captured in Greece in 1941. By 1943, having turned down an opportunity to be repatriated in a prisoner exchange, he was the chief medical officer of Stalag IXB, at the spa town of Bad Soden, near Frankfurt. The Germans had so few medical supplies and medical personnel by then that they used qualified Allied POWs to treat civilians and perform experimental surgeries on prisoners.
Charters did a series of experimental skin grafts on Weir, slowly rebuilding his upper and lower eyelids — without anaesthetic. Before operating, he trained Weir in self-hypnosis, as that was the only way the patient could withstand the pain of the scalpel and keep his eyes still enough to avoid being blinded during the multiple surgeries. It took until late spring 1944 for Weir to heal enough to be sent back to Stalag Luft III.
Charters saved Weir’s sight, and probably also his life, for without the long hospitalization in Bad Soden, Weir would have been crawling through Harry on Friday night, March 24, 1944, in the Great Escape. Of the seventy-six men who slithered through the tunnel before the Germans discovered the escape attempt, only three made it to safety. Defying the Geneva Convention, fifty captured prisoners were executed, either singly or in pairs. Weir arrived back in Stalag Luft III in early June (about the same time as the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy) knowing that many of his fellow prisoners had been murdered.
By late fall, as the Allies advanced through France, the Germans were clearly facing defeat. Camp conditions deteriorated, and Red Cross parcels of food and medicine frequently disappeared into German mouths. Open hostility erupted between the guards and the prisoners. As the Soviets marched from the east in the bitter January weather, the Germans, fearing retaliation for earlier atrocities, forced the hungry and ill-clad prisoners to march westward, deeper into war-ravaged Germany.
Weir, his survival instincts in overdrive, decided that making a break for freedom would greatly increase his chances of staying alive until the end of the war. He bribed a guard to organize a cart and horse and to pretend he was escorting four POWs to a prison camp near the coast. In exchange, Weir invented an amnesty agreement, scribbled it on a piece of paper, had his three pals sign it, ripped it in half, and gave one portion to the guard.
If they made it to Lübeck, on the Baltic, the POWs would rejoin the pieces of paper and vouch for the guard. After a horrific march through war-ravaged and SS-infested Germany, Weir nonchalantly tossed the other part of his fake amnesty to the guard after they linked up safely with the invading Allies.
After the war, Weir, like many veterans, was reluctant to talk about the horrors he had witnessed or what he himself might have done to survive that trek. Considering that he left the POW camp near Sagan weighing 124 pounds and had gained nearly 40 pounds by the time he was liberated by the Allies in Lubeck three weeks later, he had clearly drawn upon his father’s enforced training in survival techniques.
Weir returned to Canada, married his sweetheart Fran, cashed in nearly four years of back pay from his truncated flying career, and embarked on a profitable career as a bond salesman for Wood Gundy — his father’s strict rules against nepotism meant that the doors of McLeod Young Weir were firmly closed to him.
The Weirs eventually had three children. In an extraordinarily close marriage, they travelled extensively and enjoyed weekends and vacations at a large farm they bought in the mid-1950s, in the Mulmur Hills north of Toronto. By the time Weir finally retired from Wood Gundy, long past the age when most people call it quits, he had helped found the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton and African Lion Safari, near his father’s birthplace in Flamborough, Ontario. He died at home in Toronto on September 20, 2009, at age ninety.
Lucien Saumur
February 6, 1921 – March 22, 2007
&
Glen How
March 25, 1919 – December 30, 2008
Jehovah’s Witnesses and Civil Rights Activists
WE LIKE TO think we live in a tolerant society, but many of the rights we take for granted only became enshrined after dogged legal battles against bigoted politicians and censorious bureaucrats. As Jehovah’s Witnesses, Lucien Saumur and Glen How may seem unlikely champions, but these two men, in fighting for the right to worship according to the tenets of their faith, helped ensure that religious freedoms were encased in the Bill of Rights and subsequently in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Saumur was arrested more than a hundred times for distributing religious tracts and canvassing door to door for converts in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Quebec. How was a lawyer with only one client, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. From the time he was called to the bar in Ontario in 1943 until the day he stopped practising, well into his eighties, he spent his entire professional career protecting, defending, and promoting the interests of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, all the way to the Supreme Court. In the 1950s, he acted on behalf of Witnesses, including Saumur, who were routinely arrested, especially in Quebec, for going door to door proselytizing their faith and criticizing the Roman Catholic Church and its priests.
After Canada declared war against Germany in 1939, the War Measures Act was invoked to empower the government to take whatever actions it deemed necessary to confront its enemies abroad and at home. Less than a year later, Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s government, terrified by the fall of France in June 1940, fearing the German invasion of England was imminent, suspicious that fifth columnists might be operating in Canada, and wanting to placate generally anti-conscription and Roman Catholic Quebec, passed an order-in-council outlawing a number of organizations in Canada, including the Witnesses. “This ban ranks as the single most serious interference with religious liberties by the state in all of modern Canada’s history,” argues William Kaplan in State and Salvation: The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Fight for Civil Rights.
At the time, Nazi Germany was the only other country to have issued such an edict against the Witnesses. After the war, Maurice Duplessis — who was both Quebec premier and attorney general — actually declared “a war without mercy against the Witnesses of Jehovah,” a faith he sa
w as a serious threat to the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.
Duplessis feared the Witnesses for a number of reasons. Many of them spoke French, so they melded into the majority population, unlike Protestants and Jews, who were mainly English-speaking and so easily identified as the “other.” Yet the Witnesses were also outsiders in that they studied the Bible rather than the Scriptures and they refused to acknowledge temporal authority. Finally, they were strident in their condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church, its nuns, priests, and Pope, and relentless in their proselytizing on street corners, preaching in people’s homes, and assembling in large gatherings.
The Quebec premier waged his campaign against the Witnesses with all the authority in his administrative and legal arsenal. Between 1946 and 1953, Witnesses were involved in more than 1,500 criminal prosecutions, ranging from disturbing the peace to sedition, even though there were fewer than five hundred Witnesses in the province. Three legal cases — one of them Saumur’s — involving basic rights to freedom of speech, of religion, and of association made it all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Witnesses emerged out of the Bible Student movement, led by Charles Taze Russell in the 1870s in Pittsburgh; the religion spread through the evangelistic Watchtower Society, which was formed a decade later. Russell’s successor, Joseph Rutherford, expanded the group and its theological basis. He gave the name Jehovah’s Witnesses to Bible Students who were faithful members of what later became the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Witnesses believe that two worlds exist simultaneously. There is Satan’s old world, to which the vast majority of humanity belongs, and Jehovah’s new world, to which the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the chosen people of God, belong. Witnesses deny the existence of the Trinity and believe that Jesus established his kingdom in heaven in 1914 and ousted Satan, who came down to earth to live amongst us. They use the Bible to interpret the past and predict the future and believe that the world will be destroyed, as the Bible states, at Armageddon, in a conflagration whose anticipated date has shifted from 1925 to 1975 and then to an indefinite time in the future.
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