That Bill Strawbridge enjoyed a long life working with his hands should come as no surprise. He is a descendant of stonemasons, who emigrated from England in 1842 and settled in Prince Edward County. That’s where Gideon Henry Strawbridge was born on March 18, 1877, the son of John Henry and Sarah Susann (Tugwell) Strawbridge.

In 1903, Gideon married Susanna (Susie) E. J. McVeen of Amherst Island. By 1905 they were renting the house at 148 Norman St. in Stratford. A trim carpenter by trade, Gideon had come to Stratford to build storefronts. When his employer went bankrupt,  he elected to stay in the city on the Avon River.

He and Susie had two sons: Bruce McVeen, born in 1905; and Clifford Macklin, born in 1907. Susie was 31 when she died in 1910. In 1923, Gideon married Ann Ashmole Jackson (1863-1935). Clifford married Kathleen Holmes (1908-2005), and they had four children. The first of those was Clifford William (Bill), born May 9, 1935. Kathleen would routinely tell the story of that birth, of how she went into Stratford General Hospital on May 7, but Bill wasn’t born until May 9. As she lay in labour there were public tours underway in the hospital, located at 70 John St. South. In 2023, hospital officials demolished that building, the city’s first general hospital.

There were Strawbridges living at 148 Norman until Bill’s mother, Kathleen, sold the house in 1978. While cleaning out the second storey of the shop, family members found glass plates that had been stored in the rafters when the Maitland photography business had operated at that address.

As technology began to outstrip Gideon’s knowledge, Clifford took control of the machine shop. His changes and additions included the first portable welder in the city.

On Oct. 10, 1959, Bill Strawbridge married 21-year-old Joyce Doreen Boulter, a native of Magog, Que., whose family had moved to Galt (now part of Cambridge) when she was a youngster. In Ontario, she trained as a nurse and after three years at Hamilton General Hospital, she moved to Stratford General, where she nursed for another six years.

On Oct. 23, 1959, the family was jolted when Clifford died of a massive heart attack. He was 52.  At age 24, and married for less than two weeks, Bill Strawbridge knew that was the end of the family’s formal machine shop business. By then he was a Class A mechanic, a designation earned in the previous year at the Provincial Institute of Trades (now George Brown College) in Toronto. “The training there was mostly in-house; there wasn’t a lot of formality to it,” he says. He concedes that most of his skills were self-taught, using an assortment of tools inherited from his father. 

After his college training, Bill took a job at the Ontario Department of Highways depot in Stratford. Though hired as a mechanic, he found many opportunities to showcase his abilities at assessing and solving problems in other areas. “I was often pinch-hitting in the machine shop,” he says. “I’d been running a lathe since I was 12 years old, so if there were small jobs that I felt comfortable doing, I’d do them. Suddenly, my star was shining a little brighter.” He also became a welder.

Bill Strawbridge and the companies with which he became best known deserve their well-earned place in the industrial history of Stratford. But he will be the first to tell you he could not have done it without a lot of help from family, friends, colleagues and customers. At the top of that list is his wife Joyce, who was 85 when she died on Jan. 1, 2023. “I said to Joyce, ‘I think the most important thing we need to do is raise our kids.’” Bill recalls. “So, I think you need to give up your career at the hospital. And she went along with it.” The kids eventually numbered five, the businesses almost as many.

In their first 25 years of kids and commitments, Joyce also became an organic gardener and avid seamstress. She volunteered with the cancer society and sang in the church choir. She enjoyed woodworking, earned her designation as a nutritional consultant and subsequently became a reflexologist. In 1980 she joined the family business to do the books and help keep everyone on track. In later years, she took up oil painting and water colours, and could be found knitting or crocheting or doing cross stitch.

He says he’s always enjoyed “trying to solve people’s problems, and if you are building a tool, try to make damn sure it works well.” It’s that kind of dedication that made Bill Strawbridge a magnet for problems. Beginning in the summer of 1982 and for three successive seasons, the Stratford Festival staged The Mikado in its Avon Theatre. The production included a large fan which was operated by a mechanical gearbox. Not long before the musical’s 1982 opening, Neil Cheney, of the Festival’s scene shop, took a sizeable problem to Bill Strawbridge. The fan was not operating properly, he said, and asked Bill if he could “fix it.” After careful study, the response was, “I’d sooner start over.” That may not have been music to the Festival’s ears, but a bind is a bind. Bill remembers Cheney saying something like, “We’re in a bit of a rush.” The Strawbridge hands did the rebuild successfully and in short order.“That was the start of our association with the Festival,” says Bill. “We did a lot of work over the years for the Festival – mechanical stuff. We would make mechanical things, things they couldn’t make (in their shops).”

Another of the memorable theatre jobs, Bill recalls, involved a magic show. “They came to us and said, ‘For this magic trick, we’re going to levitate someone in a chair. We’ve done this, and this, and this. And we want you to do this.’ The way it worked, the magician put his hand on the chair and triggered a switch and the chair was raised electrically on a large screw that was hidden.”

Then there was the swimming pool job at Spruce Lodge, the long-term care facility at 643 West Gore St. The need on that occasion was a stainless steel lift to lower and raise a therapeutic chair in and out of the lodge’s shallow pool. It was a device to accommodate residents and guests who were unable to safely use the steps into the water. Angus McDermid and his Marshall Industrial Supply business furnished the water-driven cylinder and assorted hardware for the job, and Humphrey-Strawbridge donated its installation, mechanical and operation expertise. As Bill recalls that job was far more complicated than anticipated, but it resulted in a welcomed addition to the lodge’s amenities.

Farther afield, it was through multiple contacts that the H-S team found itself resolving an issue in Port Dover. A St. Marys contractor doing work on the lift bridge over the Lynn River required certified drawings and millwork for the cross arms because of Ontario highway standards. Humphrey-Strawbridge met the challenge.

Closer to home, in retirement Bill found himself drawn to the Stratford Perth Museum. Soon after the museum relocated to its current site, on Highway 8 west of Stratford, he was recruited by a former schoolmate, John Douglas, to help move artifacts from the site of the former railway shops, where they had been stored for years in a city-owned outbuilding. Among the artifacts were stand-alone sections of railings that Bill was told were likely destined for disposal. “They were made of one-by-six (one-inch by six- inch) pine, or something like that,” he remembers. “And had big bases, so they could stand.” Sensing a creative possibility, Bill said, “If I can have them, I’ll build you some Muskoka chairs, which I did. Then they (museum staff) thought they needed some picnic tables, so I said, ‘I can build you tables.’ At the time, John Douglas and Allan Reath were buying wood for the museum from the Hoffmeyer mill in Sebringville. They bought what they thought would be enough for six tables. I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure there is (enough).’ So, I started to build tables – 12 of them.” From chairs and tables, Bill moved onto assorted other jobs, including a rebuild of the museum’s front porch and steps. Officially retired as of 1995, he has remained a highly valued volunteer at the museum.