Yr Arwr : The Hero

Ivor, probably in his late eighties or early nineties

My lasting memory of Ivor.  Maybe this is where my love of tractors and farming came from.
This is not my last visit with Ivor; here I would have been 2 and I doubt I remember 2.

        

   

     In our youth, I think the majority of us have a predetermined idea of what a brave hero might be.  Fearless, physically dominant, tough, and commanding: Superman, Batman or maybe "The Daredevil".  

    And then we grow up and realize that heroes and bravery are barely more than a myth.  We meet some real heroes and realize that they were either highly trained professionals or they were regular people that did not completely understand or consider the threat they faced.  One common thread is that very few of these heroes considered themselves heroic.

    Every hero remembers the fear they felt at the time and are privately embarrassed that they faced clear and present danger and wanted to run away.  It's the natural thing to do: flight rather than fight.  Acts of heroism are not "fearless" acts: the are controlled fear.

    I would define a brave person somebody who admits their fear and learns to work through it.  Frank Herbert, the author, had it right: " I will face my fear, I will permit it to pass over me and through me".  The true hero is never fearless...they control their fear and direct it to get them to the other side of the threat.

    Ivor Thomas, born in 1889 in what was then called "South Cedar District" was, when I knew him, hardly a "heroic" character.  He was not a big man; I would be surprised if he was taller than 5'5" and I doubt he ever weighed much more than a buck seventy five.  My memory of him was a blocky, elderly man kind of built like a fire hydrant.  At the time I assumed that his physique was the result of a hard life of farming labor; to my infant mind that was just what old farmers looked like.

    Of course, now days I realize that solid, blocky and on the short side was the result of genetics because pretty much all the Thomas descendants age into the body morphology best known as "squat fire hydrant".  If I get a bad sunburn, I need to be careful around fires in case somebody mistakenly tries to hook up a fire hose to me.

    Here it is, over fourty years since Ivor moved on and I am just learning that he was a true hero by any definition.  It makes memory of the old man letting me pretend to drive his farm tractor that much more poignant: no haughty pride, just an old uncle giving his wet-behind-the-ears grand-nephew a trip around the farmyard.

    I'm not sure I ever saw him again after that summer day.

    Now, finally, in my sixties, as my body becomes a true "Thomas", I am just now reading about Ivor's exploits and truly wish I had been old enough to talk to him and hear first hand about his adventures. But back then, all I really cared about was that big red tractor.

    Unfortunately, just this small amount of research for my own family history, and really barely more than a hundred years after all the events, it is almost impossible to get any dependable information.  You see, most of us don't see history even as it passes before our eyes. We don't remark it and we don't note it and then, when the dust settles, we end up playing catch up to remember and document what really happened. 

    Napoleon once said that history is just myth that we all agree on.  I think that is more true than any of us want to admit. 

    Edwin Ivor Thomas, or Ivor as we all knew him, was born on the farm.  John Thomas' farm was not exactly a bankable investment; old John was supporting his family down in the coal mines that originally justified the establishment of a British fort halfway up Vancouver Island. Unfortunately, John was apparently too tall to do well down in the shafts, so there was a fair bit of pressure on the whole family to make the farm work.  (I'm not under the impression that John was all that tall, so the mines must have been a might cramped for just about anyone)

    Lucky on that: the coal in those mines was never terribly high quality, so they were not a truly lasting proposition.  Having said that, I'm pretty sure the Thomas family can take credit for at least one of the sink-holes that suddenly open up around Nanaimo periodically.

The red circle is the approximate location of the original farmstead.  Not too many years ago there was still a silo in-situ, but this image seems to deny that now. 2415 Yellow Point Road.

  

      Ivor grew up hardened by long hours of farm work in a day when pretty much everything was done by the original horsepower.  From two very short biographies on Ivor, every day  of his life was filled with endless chores or riding along trails through the dense rainforest typical of the west coast to and from school or the postal outlet on the farm to the west of the family homestead around the head of Quennell Lake, south of Nanaimo.

    In fact, from the scant information I have, it looks like the horses of the farm consumed much of Ivor's time; that proved to be a lucky thing for him later in life.

      Ivor's first remarkable act of bravery came at the age of 16: he hunted down and killed a rogue cougar that had been hazarding the local livestock.

They are always watching but still we rarely 
see them.  The stealth ninja of the cats.

    The story goes a bit like this.  Ivor and an unnamed cousin were drafted to go find the marauding cat and kill it before any more sheep or cattle were pulled down.  And, as young men (barely more than boys by modern standards...and experienced men likely by the standards of 1905) the two intrepid lads set out to hunt: young versions of Elmar Fudd, and hunting a big cat rather than a harmless bunny.  Ivor had his trusty 40-65 rifle, likely a lever action of either Remington or Winchester make (40-65 refers to the bullet load: 40 caliber, 65 grains of gunpowder). No idea what the cousin was packing.

40-65 refers to the cartridge rather than the gun.  The
lower charge on the bullet (65 grains) means less recoil.

    Okay, what the hell, a cousin!  We have NO record of any cousins. That would suggest that either John or Anne had some siblings living near them in Cedar District. I've never heard hide nor hair of them.  Maybe somebody from the extended family knows something.

    Anyway, the two young men split up, Ivor heading out with only his old brown hunting dog (no name, but I can bet it wasn't called Fluffy or Fifi) as back up.

      Somewhere out there in the deep dark forest, Ivor felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up and he knew somebody was watching him.  He spun in his steps, raising the rifle as he did and basically caught the cougar as he was about to leap from a tree branch above Ivor.  One shot, one kill.

    The cougar turned out to be a giant: nine feet of adult cat and certainly an easy match for a 16 year old boy.  From the news article written in 1981, a few months short of Ivor's passing, Ivor still had that old cougar hide squirreled away somewhere,  nearly 80 years later.

    The two intrepid teen-hunters were drafted for a follow up performance not so long after, with equal success. There was no note how big the second cougar was or where the hide ended up, and, unfortunately the surviving cougars in the area are a little tight lipped about the fate of their family members.  Cougars tend to be like that: silent and reclusive; they see us, but we rarely see them...in time.

   I live in cougar country these days.  We even have the odd semi-domesticated cougar that takes up residence in the urban forest of Powell River, living off of the resident White Tail deer population with the odd side order of family pet.  I have not seen any reports of our local cougar this year, but she comes out to play just about every summer and the city-bred transplants moving out of the big city get to enjoy the thrill of being hunted.  Longer term inhabitants of Powell River tend to shrug off the cougar threat; most of us consider the deer to be road hazards, the bears to be nuisances, the racoons to be modified rats and the cougars to be a variation on crowd control for the rest of the forest.

    Ivor enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force to serve in the trenches of WWI. His lifelong affinity for horses served him well here; he was put in charge of the artillery horse teams and that put him out of the trenches and away from the front.  Of course, the gun emplacements were a favorite target for the enemy artillery; so maybe hanging with the horses was not the safest place to be in the battle.

You're in the army now.

and, apparently healthy

And sent home in one piece.

    We have some of Ivor's time overseas documented.  His service records are available "on-line", we have a few photos of him in his uniform (taken, I assume, after his return from the European theater) and we have a couple of postcards sent home hastily ("before they get crumpled in my pocket"....I would assume from hiding in the bomb craters surrounding his assigned position.

    Two years in the hell of the Western Front.

Ivor in full uniform.  I am sure this was
after 2018.  I'm almost sure that I owned
the nickel spurs seen here for years.  I have no idea
where they might be now.

A collection; the mounted shot and the horse were from the war. The shot with Margaret had to be after the war simply because Ivor did not marry Margaret until after the war.

     

Treherbert circa 2016 or so.

In Ivor's own hand.  Nothing detailed, just bland words home before he left for hell.

Ivor says cousins.

Another note home.

    We know that Ivor served at both Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, both famous Canadian battles considered "coming of age" moments for the young Dominion of Canada.

Taking Vimy Ridge represented the first time that the four divisions of the Canadian contingent had fought as a coordinated unit. The regiments had been heavily trained to advance in waves under the cover and immediately after progressive and advancing artillery barrages.  Some of those barrages undoubtedly came from the mobile guns drawn by the horses Ivor tended.

    Vimy Ridge was the first salvo of the much larger and longer Battle of Arras.  The attack on the ridge was of highly questionable strategic value and, in truth, as much as the Canadians eventually won control of the ridge, the casualties on both side of the battle were so high that it was a basically a draw.  The goal was not necessarily "taking the ridge" as much as drawing some heat off the French forces preparing to advance along the Aisne Valley.  The Canadians certainly served that purpose...but at what a cost.

    After four days of bloody horror, the Ridge was taken. The Canadians had faced three divisions of war hardened Germans. The numbers on both sides were forbidding: 3600 dead and greater than 7000 injuries for the Canadians.  The Germans experienced higher casualties: 20,000 all told and, when the Arras campaign was complete there would be as many as 80 thousand German casualties with 20 thousand soldiers missing in action.  Likely buried in the mud of Arras to be found serially over the following decades and to this day.

    Tomb of the unknown soldier is a real thing.

    Ivor survived Vimy Ridge, but he certainly remembers friends and colleagues dying right next to him as he hunkered at the bottom of the impact craters that ringed his position.

    Later that year, in late 1917, Ivor served at the taking of Passchendael, a small town that represented the last action of the Battle of Ypres. The casualty count for that action was nearly as nasty as Vimy Ridge.

And Ivor walked away unscathed again.  He came home when many of his comrades stayed below the French dirt.

    Perhaps his survival was the very thing that spurred him to be a super producer for the rest of his life.

    Upon his return home Ivor married his first wife Margaret and immediately settled down to continue a hard life down on the farm.  He bought 100 acres from the family and raised a combination of market produce and Jersey Milk Cows (if you don't know it, Jersey cows tend to produce very high fat milk, but in much lower volumes than the much more common dairy cow, the Holstein.).  He was pretty open about the fact that the farm itself was not a great breadwinner and he had to diversify.

    Ivor and three friends bought all the equipment needed to string a very basic telephone line south to Yellow Point, using trees as their poles. The transmission along the line was of a very poor quality, but Ivor and his friends managed to scare up enough clients to make the line pay off.  BC Telephone (or whatever it was called back then) eventually bought the line off of the four entrepreneurs and upgraded the service considerably.  

    Ivor did a little construction around the area and, indeed, the Cedar Community Hall was some of his work: he was one of the original board members and was, indeed, the last surviving member of the board when he moved on in 1981. 

Ivor is somewhere in there

    Ivor and Margaret tried to make a go of the farm into the late forties, but Margaret was failing and they were a long way from financially stable.  The two finally sold off the farm and moved a few miles east to "Cedar by the Sea".  

    Now, Cedar by the Sea has an entire history all for itself.  Several books document the sordid history of the Aquarian Foundation, Canada's own cult, born in England and exported to the wilds of the West Coast Canada in 1912 when the leader, Brother 12 wanted to take a walk on the wild side.  Of course, by the time Ivor settled into Cedar by the Sea, the Aquarians were all gone and Brother 12 had long disappeared in the late twenties (he might have lived until about 1957 according to his brother, though his death was documented to be 1934 in Switzerland)

    Margaret died in 1952, before Ivor had finished the family home still standing at the corner of Leask and Ivor road.  I swear I remember riding that old tractor up the dirt track that was to become Ivor Road, but seeing as how Ivor had subdivided the extensive property long before I ever rode shotgun on Ivor's old tractor.

    I visited that old house early in the spring of 2025; it hasn't really changed much. The forest that covered the hill behind the house is now the backyards of several homes and, yes, the dirt track I remember is long gone.

at the corner of Leask and Ivor road

Ivor married his second wife, Leslie of Drayton Alberta, in 1955 and the newlyweds settled into Cedar by the Sea.  Ivor funded his new home through his real estate ventures.  Leslie and he found an entire new all-consuming endeavor: breeding and raising purebred Siamese cats.

    Those Siamese cats became a fixture of the Fleming family; I personally remember any number of Thomas cats spread between the various Fleming families.  Honey, Caesar, and Aqaba just to name the three I remember the best.  (None of them were quite as good as my boy Dougie, but I doubt I will ever meet quite such a strange and loving cat as that McDougal cat.)

The great and wonderous Dougie.  No purebred here, just a mutt pretending to 
be a Siamese....or a human.

    Ivor was heard to say that he was likely to pass very soon after his treasured FarmAll tractor and that proved to be prophetic.  The tractor was done in the spring of 1981 and Ivor left us all on July 16, 1981.  I'm not sure how he would have felt about my one lasting memory of him being that tractor.

How I remember Ivor.  I cannot think of a higher calling than being a farmer.  On a tractor.

    Every life can be compared to a boat on water.  Most of us live life small, barely more than a water mattress on an above ground backyard pool barely raising ripples.  Some of us are bigger; motor boats on a small lake leaving a wake that washes the sand on the shore.  And, a few of us lived large; freighters that cross the ocean and leave a wake on distant shores.

Ivor left a wake, as many men of his generation did.  

The world has become so small these days and, I'm afraid most of us have shrunken with it.