Tom Thomson Death myth #7 - 'Tom Thomson: the reluctant father'

The suggestion that Tom Thomson committed suicide because he was about to become a father is a relatively recent concoction. Like a few other flawed stories about Thomson’s death, this one originates with author Roy MacGregor’s penchant for spinning far-fetched conclusions from slim evidence.

In Tom Thomson Death Myth #8, I explored claims that Thomson was engaged in the months preceding his death. I showed how no records from 1917 indicate, or even intimate that Tom Thomson was engaged. Of course, Thomson did not need to be engaged to a woman for her to become pregnant.

When I investigated theories of Tom Thomson’s death, I was intrigued to discover that the two claims - engagement & pregnancy - developed along quite different timelines. This feature is critical for understanding flaws in the pregnancy story.

As I describe in Tom Thomson Death Myth #8, the engagement story began as gossip in the 1920s. It first appeared in a written account in 1930, and was offered by a man who knew Thomson and who lived at Canoe Lake in the summer of 1917. This suggests that the story at least seemed plausible to someone who had known Thomson and who lived in Canoe Lake. Speculation that Thomson might have impregnated a woman first appeared in 1973. No one who met Thomson or who lived at Canoe Lake in 1917 ever suggested such a claim.

The story can really be explored as the thinking of one man, Roy MacGregor, who has advanced and expanded on his theory since 1973.

As with the engagement claim, MacGregor’s story about an ‘illegitimate’ pregnancy is closely associated with Winnifred Trainor. Trainor’s family lived in Huntsville. Her family leased a cottage at Canoe Lake, where Thomson was staying from April 1917 until his death.

In his article, “The Great Canoe Lake Mystery”, published in Maclean’s magazine in September 1973, Roy MacGregor breezily introduced the idea that Winnie Trainor might have been pregnant. He states that Dr. Pocock, Trainor’s physician from 1919 until her death in 1962, had heard rumours that Winnie had been pregnant by Tom. Pocock rejected them, though.

MacGregor returned to the pregnancy story in 1977. His article, “The Legend”, printed in The Canadian magazine, referred to Charles Plewman’s 1972 claim that Thomson committed suicide to avoid Trainor’s insistence on getting married. MacGregor suggested Trainor was exerting what he called ‘tremendous pressure’. He suggested this indicated that Winnie was pregnant. He overlooked, of course, that a woman might press for marriage without being compelled by pregnancy. He also did not seem to consider that Plewman’s account was purely hearsay.

In 1980, MacGregor followed up his 1970s magazine articles with a novel, Shorelines. The book offers a scenario of what might have transpired if Trainor had been pregnant by Thomson. It was republished in 2002 as Canoe Lake. In a supplementary statement included in the 2002 version, MacGregor offered a new tidbit of information. He noted that in fall 1917 the Huntsville newspaper’s social pages included a notation that Winnie Trainor and her mother were leaving to spend the winter in the United States. He also notes Winnie was not mentioned again until Easter 1918. Working from these two newspaper notices, MacGregor extrapolates that Trainor might have left Huntsville to have a child. MacGregor also suggests that his grounds for the story go back to Charles Plewman, who he claims told a Canadian Press reporter in 1973 that Winnie was pregnant with Tom's child.

Finally, in 2010, in Northern Light: Tom Thomson and the woman who loved him, MacGregor again advanced his pregnancy theory. In this account, MacGregor repeats his claim that the only explanation for Winnie leaving Huntsville in the fall of 1917 was that she must have been pregnant. He also includes an interesting disclaimer about Plewman's 1973 claims, noting, "[Plewman] might not have made such actual 'statements', but he certainly had dropped all the necessary hints." (196)

Shortcomings in MacGregor's argument:

MacGregor’s argument is based on wild extrapolation from very thin evidence. Discussing the pregnancy story in 2002, he notes, “I have no proof.” (pg. 288) The absence of proof, however, does not stop MacGregor from offering wild speculation. Why might he pursue this line of speculation without evidence?

He is the only person to have ever suggested that Trainor was pregnant. Trainor lived her later years in Huntsville, where MacGregor also spent his childhood. As MacGregor notes in several of his works, Trainor’s sister married his uncle. In this regard, MacGregor might have very personal reasons to portray his distant relative as a central player in the story of Tom Thomson’s death.

He has yet, however, to prove that Thomson and Trainor were anything but mere acquaintances. He has not established that they had a relationship of any kind, beyond Thomson’s visits to the Trainor family home, and his claims that Thomson gave the family some art works. Were these gifts meant for Winnie, her father, or the family in general? We don’t know. Neither, apparently, does MacGregor (or presumably, he would produce evidence supporting his claims.)

What of Winnie’s trip away over the winter of 1917-1918? Should we assume that the only explanation for such a trip is pregnancy? Given what emerged later as Trainor’s emotional attachment to Thomson, might her family have decided it best to get her away from the reminders of Thomson for a while? Might she have entered some sort of sanitarium to receive mental health care? (There are certainly many reports – from MacGregor included – that her mental health was questioned by many, even in 1917.) These explanations are just possible as MacGregor’s pregnancy theory.

Conclusions

We certainly know that no one who was familiar with any of the central players in Thomson's last days ever suggested an unwanted pregnancy was involved in Thomson's death. The challenge the pregnancy story faces is it seems to have originated more than fifty years after Thomson's tragic accident, and to have only been offered by one person, who has not provided any convincing evidence to support it.

In the absence of proof, and with its untrustworthy origins, the pregnancy story must be regarded as wild, groundless speculation that only serves to further muddy the facts of Tom Thomson’s death. It certainly doesn't provide any solid support for the suggestion that Tom Thomson committed suicide.

Gregory Klages - © 2017
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Gregory Klages was Research Director for the website Death On A Painted Lake: The Tom Thomson Tragedy, launched by the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project in 2008. Klages is the author of the 2016 book, The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction (Dundurn Press).