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 … the families of British IBM were invited out I think under the jogging of the American President of IBM

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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 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 . 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?

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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. Did you know Pierre Mayrand, the ecomuseum specialist from ? A. No

Q. There is a picture of the Founders of APT sitting on the porch at Stanley House and you are not in this picture. I would like to confirm that you were the one who took this picture. A. I suppose so! But I can’t swear it.

Q. Did you know Lee Nelson? A. I had not met Lee before this meeting.

Q. What was your impression of him? A. He was a very talented and very knowledgeable person, a very good person to have with APT, terrific.

Q. A.J. Richardson? A. Ah yes, Jack. He was a fantastic fellow, absolutely fantastic.

Q. What do you remember of him? A. I remember he was a huge source of knowledge, and round a like ??? of who wrote the historic component of the historic reports from the 1940 one on the “Gananosque” here in the Port Hope area and first of all was Ontario’s number one architecture historian. Jack was Canada’s number one architecture historian. And of course, Jack being bilingual too was able to take in the Quebec scene and wrote the book on Quebec pilot study and so forth. Oh Jack was fantastic. He had a most delightful wife, Gertrude. She was Catholic and possibly Jack was anything but … he could have been Presbyterian, he could have been Anglican, I don’t know but I’m sure he wasn’t Catholic.

Jack was not an administrator and I understand that Jack Herbert was put in his place; he was for a short time the Head of Historic Sites, not very long. I don’t think he could even drive at that time, I’m not sure he ever did.

Q. What was Peter John Stokes doing at that time, in 1968? A. He was trying all kinds of things. I was still consulting with Historic Sites on various sites across the country. They paid my traveling so I went along.

Q. Were you alone or did you have an office with several staff? A. No, I was mostly alone. I had a secretary that I inherited from St. Martin’s Church in Niagara at that time that was Kathleen Korny who died last year. I had a small staff.

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Q. You were based in Niagara-on-the-Lake at that time? A. I had started up in Ottawa. I had an office on Sussex Drive which I had been studying for the National Capital Commission.

Q. The work that was done at that time by the NCC, and you were part of that work, on Sussex Drive was considered to be some of the pioneer conservation work done in Ottawa. A. Well, they rebuilt my building, the one I was in. On the top floor, the bats used to fly in every night. The thing is I occupied half the top floor and the other half wasn’t. People used to call “Tea bag Stelman” . John Anthony plugged it up all the time. So I decided, as soon as they moved out, I’d rent it. Then I discovered to my horror that the place was absolutely infested with bed bugs. I couldn’t get rid of them! End of that story.

But that was torn down and rebuilt, the one with the arcaded windows at the top, it looked right out at Sussex Drive and I remember I called the police one night because I heard things going on in the hardware store next door. It was broken into at that time. I think they managed to catch them. I had to go to court and I never had been so unpleasantly looked at!

In 1961 I was called out in the late fall to speak to the Chamber of Commerce because they were desperate as to what to do with Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was really in doldrums, nothing moving, it was really dead commercially and so forth. And I suggested to them that they might sort of go ahead and try out some re-enactment s of things that happened there. One of the principle quotations was Mrs. Simcoes’ about the subscription balls they held during the season and there was a great deal of gauze, feathers and velvet and there was supper as well as tea. So the Historical Society took this on and they ran the Simcoe Ball for many years, very successfully. They took in quite a lot of money in these things. Then they started up that cocktail thing, I forgot what they called it, but they also had that. Anyway, I was called down by the Chamber of Commerce. Then I found myself getting work in the area. I was involved in getting a land use map for the township of Niagara at that time and I started work on that. Then I got all kinds of calls.

Well, in 1964, I was called to look at St. Marks Anglican Church. It had a crack in the ceiling. We discovered it had been held up by ??? since 1822. We did a lot of work on that. Then I was given a commission on a very unusual thing. But the next year I was called to look into the possibility of enlarging a Catholic Church in St. Vincent-de-Paul which was built in 1834-35. We can see keeping the original nave and sanctuary and not putting transepts on that; there was a scheme for that. We built a polygon in the front which is acoustically not totally satisfactory but it solved the problem of keeping the original church and so forth. There was a donor in the name of Halzie Patman who ran a baulk carrier goods for gravel, things like that, around the lakes, and there was a ??? called Halzie Patman who was always holding me up at lock 1 in the Welland Canal; anyway, he gave a quarter of a million dollars to make the addition to the vestibule. They were just summer residents; he married a Catholic; I don’t think he was a Catholic himself. He married a “Foy” and she of course was Catholic and they said they very much wanted to see the Church that they loved very much to have what it needed. So I was called in to work on that. That was a very interesting project. We ended up with a “???” in the front. We only lost the tower and the spire of the original Church. It was a French Church.

Q. At that time you had bought your house in Niagara-on-the-Lake? A. Yes. I bought that in 1964 for less than $10,000. I’ve never finished it! And I sold it for I think $300,000! So everything else was expensive at the time. But anyway, the reason why we moved down

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I had started work here (Port Hope) in the sixties like the St. Laurence Hotel on the Main Street and so forth. I knew Port Hope pretty well, as much as Niagara-on-the-Lake. It is a much more scenic town anyway; it goes up and down while Niagara-on-the-Lake is flat as a pancake. Also it’s (Port Hope) on the railway and still using a Grand Trunk station from 1856! So I decided to move down to Port Hope. We never found a suitable house. We live in a 70 year old thing where the siding is falling off already.

Q. On another subject, concerning your career, architectural historian Susan Buggey found out that you provided architectural assessments for nominations of national historic sites almost single handily for a number of years. A. That was when I was sent around the country.

Q. What are your memories of that activity? A. Interesting things I saw in that. I remember I came across some interesting comparisons like the almost country-wide use of the elemental French construction of “colombage” which I found in British- Columbia, , and heaven knows where. That’s what I found very interesting some of those connections. And I remember some in the Red River Valley to. I think the only province I didn’t, well apart from the Northern Territories, I’ve never got anything to do was in . I’ve been to British- Columbia, Saskatchewan, , Ontario, of course in many respects, and Quebec.

Q. Newfoundland? A. Newfoundland hadn’t join Canada by that time. I went to New-Brunswick, Nova Scotia, pretty well everywhere. I don’t think there was anybody else they felt they could rely on.

Q. How did you come involved with Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada? A. I think because of Village. It was a natural connection. They were sort of watching that project closely and it was a total immersion course because we went from smart materials to simulate historic things. I remember that after our first step, after starting on that one, we never did it again.

Q. What would you consider to be your contribution to the idea or the concept and practice of historical restoration at that time? A. I think that I was always concerned about the standards that were sort of developed. I remember discussions in the States with Peterson, and producing that book, was the business of accreditation of practitioners. I think it was always on the sort of right way to go about it, the right materials and so forth, not necessarily using modern substitutes, that was always what I was against in principle, because we could never get the right effect for one thing, and it frequently had side effects which were dangerous, and that’s what we’re finding now. I’m going around with this local contractor on churches, we’re finding so much damage done by the use of modern materials, repointing, and also the improvements supposedly of the buildings performance with the insulation and so forth, but no concern for getting rid of moist air that collects in those stagnant places like roof spaces and particularly spires. We can’t understand it. We should have a seminar on that! When are you going to have APT talk about spires and attics?

Q. What was your continuing interest in APT? Why did you follow the organization? What did you get from that organization?

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A. Well, it got away from me. I mean it’s grown. The only thing I regret is perhaps that it became too professional. In the early days, it included the “little old ladies in running shoes”, people like in the winning of the wake of Perth, Jeanne Minhinnick for that matter ; she couldn’t qualify you know for instance from the academic standpoint, but she qualified with very much more, she really handled all those things. So there was a tendency to exclude more and more, to become more and more exclusive and didn’t think even that there was sufficient emphasis on craftsmen, people who actually did it with their hands. And so to a certain extent, I probably grew away from it. But I haven’t really contributed to it. It is almost accidental I was a founder.

Q. Actually you were involved in the creation of the College of Fellows, no? A. I can’t even remember that. I can’t understand why because I’m certainly interested. Interestingly, a couple years ago, Natalie Bull, she was APT for a time, she came from Lower Woodstock, N.B. and she had a family house there. She always said that she got involved and very concerned in building conservation because she took a summer job in the Old Court House in Woodstock. You never know!

Q. You were honoured recently at the November Awards Dinner of the Architectural conservancy of Ontario held in Toronto where you were given the Eric Arthur Lifetime Achievement Award. And there was a new award created in your name. What’s the award about? A. I’m not too sure… the people who got it were working on the St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Kinkora. It is for excellence in restoration I guess.

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