Harold Newman
Harold Newman (June 27, 1906 – September 29, 1993 (aged 87)), christened William Harold Newman, was the youngest child of the civil engineer William Newman and Lorana Wilkinson. Much of what is known of his childhood survives through the recollections of his daughter Loraine (Newman) Houston, who recorded the stories he told of an unsettled and often hard upbringing in Windsor, Winnipeg, and Leamington.
Early childhood
Harold was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1906, the youngest of William and Lorana Newman's three children, after Clint and Clare.
About 1910 or 1911, when Harold was four or five, he and his mother took the train from Windsor to Revelstoke, British Columbia, to visit his father, who was at work building railway tunnels and culverts. Harold remembered sleeping in a tent and running up and down the tunnels, and the family stayed about a month. The visit ended badly: on the station platform as they left for home, he watched his parents quarrel over money.
Soon afterward Lorana began selling off the family furniture, William having told her to sell the house because he needed the money to cover overages on a bridge he was building in Winnipeg. Before the family left, a photograph was taken on Clarke Avenue in Leamington, at the home of Harold's paternal grandmother, Mary Ann (Elbott) Newman, where his aunt Sarah and uncle Arthur also lived. The family left for Winnipeg in December 1912.
Winnipeg and Leamington
In Winnipeg the Newmans lived in furnished rooms for the first year or so before moving to a better part of the city, away from downtown. Harold remembered that the new neighbourhood meant a better school, where the boys did not fight every day. His mother took in boarders at that home.
In June 1917 Harold came home from school to find the furniture out on the front lawn, and learned that he and his mother were returning to Leamington. They stayed a few months at the Wilkinson farm — his mother's family — after which Lorana and her widowed sister rented a house in town, across the street from the school, and opened it as a convalescent home. That Christmas of 1917 his mother gave him a Bible inscribed with his name and address, 221 Mill Street, Leamington; the Bible was still in Loraine's keeping decades later.
Death of his mother
By the spring of 1918, business at the convalescent home was poor and the schools had closed because of the influenza pandemic. On 17 April 1918, Lorana and Harold crossed into the United States to Buffalo, New York, to stay with Harold's eldest brother Clint and his wife Genie, who were expecting their first child. As the end of August approached, Clint grew concerned that Harold be back in Canada in time for school. Although Clint had had no contact with his father since their falling-out around 1912–13, he wrote to William about arranging the journey home; when William either could not or would not help, Clint paid for their return himself.
Harold and his mother reached Winnipeg in time for school, but the schools again closed because of the influenza. William took Harold out to a construction job, but the two did not stay long, as both fell ill. Back in Winnipeg, Lorana called the doctor, who judged that it was she who was seriously ill and admitted her to hospital with double pneumonia; the hospital was so crowded that her bed was placed in a hallway. She died on 14 November 1918. William and Clare accompanied the coffin to Leamington, where Lorana was buried, while Harold stayed with a neighbour. He later told his daughter that he cried for three days — and never cried again.
Boyhood with his father
After Lorana's death, William arranged for Harold to board with a Mrs. Anderson, who had helped with the house and meals; when her son bought her a larger house so that she could take in boarders, William paid three months' board and placed Harold there. At first Harold had an upstairs bedroom with a closet, a bed, a dresser, and his small trunk beneath the bed. His sister Clare was by then working and boarding with Randolph and Marie Holiday in Winnipeg South (as recorded in the 1921 census), and William appears to have taken a room in the Nanaimo Building about this time.
William soon began taking Harold along to his construction jobs — the first at Rocanville, Saskatchewan, replacing CPR bridges with concrete culverts — pulling him out of school early in the season and returning him late. When Harold came back to Mrs. Anderson's in the fall of 1919, he found that, because William had stopped paying for the upstairs room, it had been rented out; his trunk had been moved behind a curtain behind the kitchen stove, tucked under a Winnipeg couch. That remained his sleeping place for as long as he stayed there. He was expected to rise early to light the fires in the stove and heater and to run the hand-cranked washing machine, all before leaving for school.
Young adulthood
During the 1920s, Harold lived for a few years with his sister Clare and her husband Cliff Morrell in Detroit, where his nephew Harold Patrick Morrell was born; Harold remained close to him afterward. Loraine recalled her father saying that in the early 1900s, before the reverses that followed his father's railway ventures, William had been worth as much as a quarter of a million dollars — a fortune largely gone by the time of Harold's hard boyhood.
As a teenager Harold worked for a time in St. Thomas, Ontario, for the Michigan Central or New York Central Railroad, then as a plumber's apprentice and as a YMCA building manager in Detroit, and for the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railways, before returning to Winnipeg to work for his father.[2]
Marriage
He married Marie Sloan on 1 June 1932. They had three children:
- David Harold Newman (Dave); lives in Terrace, BC
- Loraine (Houston) (died 2025); lived in Red Deer
- John (who was estranged from David and Loraine as of 2018); lives in Nanaimo as of 2008
Later life
As construction work grew scarce, Harold and Marie moved to southern Ontario in 1933, where he held a variety of jobs including manager of the Sylvain Apartments in Windsor. When his son David was born in 1937, Harold was assembling cars at the General Motors plant in Windsor. Shortly afterward the family moved to the town of Essex, where a daughter, Loraine, was born in 1939.[2]
Harold preferred railroad work to the assembly line. He had first been employed by the Canadian National Railways in 1928 and, though unable to hold steady work with them at first, kept his seniority; with the prospect of more regular CNR work he quit General Motors and moved the family to Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay) in 1940. He moved the family again to Winnipeg in 1944 — working for both the CNR and his father's construction company — before settling in Biggar, Saskatchewan, in 1951 to work for the CNR. A son, John, was born there in 1952.[2]
Harold and Marie lived in Biggar until 1992, when they moved to Red Deer, Alberta. Harold died of congestive heart failure on 29 September 1993, and Marie in 2008; both are buried in the Alto Reste Cemetery, Red Deer.[2][3]
Health
Harold suffered from digestive trouble throughout his life and, although he never drank alcohol, was found at autopsy to have cirrhosis of the liver. The cause was alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, an inherited disorder that in a minority of those affected damages the liver rather than the lungs. The post-mortem diagnosis prompted members of the family to be tested for the deficiency.[3]
Sources
- Recollections of Loraine (Newman) Houston, daughter of Harold Newman, recounting stories told to her by her father (correspondence, 2025).
- [2] Newman, Ken. "The Travelling Kind: In Search of the Newman Family in Essex County." Trails (Essex County Branch, The Ontario Genealogical Society), 2016, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 30–33. PDF
- [3] Audio recording and notes from a family dinner in Red Deer, Alberta, 20 September 2018, recorded by Michael Currie, who attended with David Harold Newman and Loraine Houston.