Peter John Stokes
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Peter John Stokes Interview in Port Hope, ON, May 24, 2012 - Video transcript Q. Have you been interviewed before by any media, radio, TV, magazines? A. No. I am obviously not well-known in that connection. You will find snippets of me everywhere I think. I have spoken my mind on many things you know. I was not much involved with the very creation of APT because I was very much concerned with projects on the go. I like to get on with the nuts and bolts. Q. Let’s talk about the first APT meeting at Stanley House in New Richmond QC A. I can’t even remember how we got there! I must have gotten there by car but I can’t remember otherwise. I remember most of the people who were involved. George Fuller was one of the principle organizers. I hadn’t known Dave Bartlett at that time; but I knew Jeanne Minhinnick, Gerald Budner, George McBeath, Jacques Dalibard and Bill Patterson. I hadn’t met Lee Nelson before. I knew Charles Peterson. I took part in a seminar; I guess it would have been in the bicentennial in 76 in connection with something Peterson was very much involved with. Peterson wrote a book on it. I knew him because I participated in one of his seminars to produce this book and it was really a history of preservation at that time and also ideas about where it might go for instance accreditation and things like that. I remember that I wrote an article for it. Alice Allison I knew sort of peripherally. She was an architect and she was interested in conservation. David Bartlett, I hadn’t known before. Gerald Budner I knew, and we were friends in fact; we had some interesting connections in that respect because I used Gerald as a sounding board and consultant. And I had some very interesting experiences. He also managed to find for me a lovely little star fixture for my Niagara house which I put up there, but also I consulted Gerald on the colours of St. Martin’s church paintings after we took down the ceiling because of a damaged roof structure that had been held up since then (it had been rebuilt in 1822). Anyway I said “Gerald I’m really non protestant”. It started out with a dusty sky blue from the walls of St. Martins. I said “it is thoroughly unsatisfactory with a mostly Victorian stained glass”. It just made the mood sick. And I said “I don’t really know what to do”. What to paint the interior. Well he said “I would suggest some neutral color like dried cigar” and I said “tobacco brown for the woodwork?” And he said “yes that’s not a bad combination”. So you can imagine when I presented this to the vestry which is the assembled congregation, and I presented it to them and I said “dried cigar and tobacco brown” you should have seen their faces drop! Well we tried to get dried cigar but we got a very deep and rather rich green which actually turned out beautiful and they had it for years, around 25 years. Just the reveal of the windows were painted white so there was a sort of break between the two. But suddenly the stained glass came alive. They since painted them a pale yellow which is soiling now because the dust is going through the lath and plaster and depositing a layer on the face; so you got these striations all the way which of course you didn’t see in the dark green tone. Anyway, we compared it to a yellow that I used up here in the Presbyterian Church about 20 years ago, difference between chalk and cheeks. Q. Where did your interest in historic preservation come from? A. Starts a long way back. My father was an IBM man in Chernaughts? How I came to be in Canada… the families of British IBM were invited out I think under the jogging of the American President of IBM 1 Thomas Day Watson. A Canadian company invited the families of British IBM out during the war. I was a reduced part of it because there had been some sinking of ships after the first one came out in July. We came in September. Q. Did you know George McBeath? A. George McBeath I knew very interestingly from various perspectives because I first met him when he was a stimulator of local historical societies in New Brunswick hence the Director of the New Brunswick Museum and that is where I first met him because I got involved in 1961 with my longest project which took 25 years. It was the restoration of the Old Court House in Upper Woodstock, New Brunswick. The Carleton County Historical Society was always running out of money. So it took a long, long time to do it. So hands on! It was a fascinating project to do anyways. And I remember crawling through in February, I think it was 1962, crawling through that horse barn, it had been a horse barn for 50 years, and lastly stripped out inside. It was cold as charity, snow on the ground outside, there’s nothing like an unoccupied building in winter in New Brunswick! Oh! It came on to us, it was freezing. It wasn’t clad and I had no sort of clothing and so forth and I never said a word and they were fascinated because they were freezing. Dee Somore was the Principle of the Society at that time. Her husband came out; he was a journalist and broadcaster as well as a teacher; a very nice man in Nova Scotia. And anyway, I never said a word and they were sort of wondering with bated breath what I might say about this thing, this huge, empty sort of absolutely stripped, there was nothing, there was very little left of the Court House; you knew that all the signs where there to tell what was or had even been, and I said my first words of the morning: “when can we start?” They never forgot it! The building was opened by Princess Anne and of course she being a great horse women herself was fascinated by the various signs of the horses in the building including something that they saved from the original, courtroom furnishings such as the judges benches all chewed on the … that had been in front of a manger … fascinated by that, cause all the margonizing at the front was still there. Anyway, she took much too long … she came in a helicopter and they had a hard time getting her back. But anyway, George McBeath that is how I met him originally. I didn’t meet Marie his wife, later on as she became very active, much part of the party simply because she was often driving George around. We used to call her “lead foot McBeath”. She put her foot to the floor in the car; she drove by her “pedal of hell”! She came from Campbellton. George McBeath then had a very unfortunate experience as you know. He became involved in the Science Center in Toronto which is politically a very hot potato. And he just couldn’t manage it. He had the help of an American called Kroan Bradfoot, a very nice man; he was an Alaskan actually. He came and settled in upstate New York and George eventually became the historical administrator of New Brunswick; he came back to New Brunswick and he got involved in Kings Landing and that’s where I worked with him again. That was great fun. I was the consultant on that one but formally I’d been consulted you know on inside work or on other things. Tony Adamson was the consultant and my boss was Ronald Way. But I was a consultant on Kings Landing and I had a young man, David Lane, who tragically died in 1994. A great frustration then. He helped me on Victoria Hall in Cobourg, ON. Sadly, he’s no longer with us. But any way, he was the man on the Kings Landing job. So the consultant knew something about the process. He was a very talented man, a beautiful person; he did some lovely drawings. Well, he persisted. He was from Hamilton actually. But he persisted in working for me. And he measured the Butler House in Niagara-on-the-Lake which is moved. And anyway, that is how we became involved and on and off we were together. But he had a very sad life I think in the end. Q. Back to McBeath? 2 A. Well anyway he… I found him laughably a very strong man; he never wanted to stick his neck out; that is probably why he survived for so long! But I liked him. He was an adopted child. I think he was also brought over. That may have been sort of in his background always, you know, a little reticent to attack something, make it his own. He was very helpful in the setting up of the historical societies, before he left for the Toronto experience, and that almost wrecked him I think. As I say, when he went back, he undertook the Kings Landing project. I tried to get David to establish a clear sort of program through from reporting on the building, making decisions based on that report and then carrying out the thing accordingly. But they abandoned the report I did very early on because it tied them up or tied them down whichever way you want! Q.