Events
Date of Birth: 17 October 1930.
Place of Birth: North Bay, Ontario, Canada
Date of Death: 13 April 2015.
Place of Death: Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada.
Relationships
Father: Harry Ewart Ward.
Mother: Doris Winstanley Molineux.
Spouse: Isabel Yvonne Crozier. Married 1 July 1963 in Bracebridge, Ontario.
Allan was the father of the author of this page. He was born and spent his early years in North Bay. He once told me that when he was very young, probably less than six, he had calculated that his sister June was born less than nine months after his parents were married. He asked his mother how this was possible. “Your father,” she answered, “was very persuasive.”
After his parents were separated in 1940, he lived with his mother and sisters in Sudbury. As were the rest of the family, he was an extremely bright student, skipping two grades in school. His mother once told me that close to Christmas 1946, when Allan was in Grade 13, she received a phone call from the high school principal asking her if she was aware her son was only coming to school one day a week. She replied she most certainly was not aware of that. My father told me had been hustling pool – he claimed to have been the best player in the city – and going to the cinema almost every day. His mother insisted he improve his attendance, and he ended up being accepted to the University of Toronto with a full scholarship. He worked summers in the mines in Sudbury.
He started out at U of T in the Forestry department, thinking that being a forest ranger would leave him lots of time to read. He soon switched to Chinese, becoming one of only four students enrolled in the program. After graduation, he joined the Air Force, training as a pilot and expecting to be sent over to Korea. However, the conflict there ended before that happened, and Allan left the service shortly after. He had an opportunity to work in China, but took what seemed to him a more attractive post in London, England, working for Johnny Walker. He returned to Canada after a couple of years, spent some time working in Uranium City in northern Saskatchewan, then went to law school at the University of Toronto for a year (“It was too much work.”) He decided he would rather be a teacher, and took some courses in history and geography. It was at the university that he met his future wife, Isabel. After getting his qualification to teach in a summer course (There was a shortage of teachers in those days), he was hired by the Oxford County School Board and became a teacher at Ingersoll District Collegiate Institute.
He told me that at first, it was odd to work in an environment where everyone called each other “Mr so-and-so” and “Miss so-and-so”. “In the mines, you would call your boss’s boss by his first name.” He became a union (“federation”) steward and negotiator. He told me that in 1969, at a large provincial federation meeting in Toronto, he proposed that teachers should have the right to strike. There was general, derisive laughter. (In 1973, 90 000 Ontario teachers walked off the job and there was a massive demonstration in front of the provincial parliament. They won the right to strike in 1975. Times can change fast.)
Allan became a vice principal and then principal, working at several high schools in Oxford County. He retired in 1991, after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He showed a wonderfully philosophical temperment when dealing with the trials of this disease, never letting it get himself or those around him down.
Allan had an unusually broad range of interests, including, but by no means limited to, geology, history, dance (especially ballet), American football, language, and literature. He was an admirer of the writing styles of E.B. White and John Updike, and as a teenager hitchhiked to New York City to hear Dylan Thomas read his poetry. (Thomas showed up drunk, pointed to a woman in the audience, and instructed his attendants in a loud voice to “Take off her clothes and bring her to me.”)
In his youth, he was an adventurous traveller, and had some hair-raising stories. During the Algerian War, he was visiting his friend Tony Brown in Algiers (Tony, a pioneer in machine translation, had been one of the other three students studying Chinese at U of T, and was doing some work on a Berber dialect for a PhD.) While Allan was sitting a cafe frequented by Europeans, a militant bicycled by and tossed in a bomb. Allan decided to leave at that point. He also managed to be in Havana during the Cuban Revolution, and on his honeymoon with Isabel, they were in the massive earthquake in Skopje, Yugoslavia that destroyed 80% of the city. (They had reservations in a hotel in the centre of the city, but Allan was tired from driving, and they stayed in a motel on the outskirts instead. The hotel collapsed that night.)
Allan was a wonderful father, thoughtful, caring, always even-tempered. A model. The older I get, the more things I discover he was right about.
Evidence
Date and place of birth.
I know these in the usual way a child does, through birthday celebrations and personal reminiscences. Allan once showed me the house he grew up in in North Bay. Allan appears living in North Bay (480 Main Street) in the 1931 Canadian census, aged 7 months. (The census was taken 1 June 1931.)
Date and place of marriage.
I know these as well in the usual way. Everyone remembered it as being a hot day and extremely hot inside the church. I have a newspaper clipping, but am not sure what paper it comes from.
Date and place of death.
My brother informed me of the details. There are obituaries online.
Relationships.
I knew both of Allan’s parents, although I only met Harry once or twice, as he and Allan were more or less estranged. Harry and Doris appear as Allan’s parents in the 1931 census.
References
Harry Eward Ward household, 1931 census of Canada. Ontario, Nipissing, sub-district 42, North Bay (City), Ward 1, page 14; digital image at Ancestry.com (accessed 6 January 2025), citing Library and Archives Canada. Seventh Census of Canada, 1931. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Library and Archives Canada, 2023. Series RG31. Statistics Canada Fonds.
"Dr. (sic) Allan Ward", obituary on Legacy.com (accessed 6 January 2025). [My father (Allan) told me that his father (Harry) had intentionally given him names with the intials D.R. before the name that he actually used, Allan, so that people would mistake him for a doctor. He used to get mail addressed to “Dr. Allan Ward”, and apparently it also worked for Legacy.com.]