A Family History in Artifacts — Part 1

To earn a little pin money in his retirement, my Airbnb guest, Richard, appraises stamps. Once a month, he makes the four-hour drive from Magog, Quebec, to Ottawa, holes up in an Airbnb somewhere in easy commute distance from Maitland Avenue, and spends five days at the warehouse and offices of Sparks Auctions. He’s been a client of this company – both buyer and seller – since the 1980s when there was a bricks-and-mortar store on Sparks Street. As a seller, he would draft his own descriptions of the stamps on offer, and was so close to the company’s assessments and their writing style that, one crunch season, they pleaded with him to help out with the appraisals for an upcoming online auction. It has turned into a regular gig.

I was delighted to host a professional stamp appraiser. It was an opportunity to assess what can be done with the stamp collection Dad left behind when he passed away in 2013. Back then, the Calgary-based appraiser advised there was no market for stamps. I couldn’t keep everything, but I did bring back to Ottawa a score of three-ring binders and a small cardboard box.

Some of the binders contain a collection of hundreds of “corner blocks.” Others hold hundreds of Canadian “first-day covers” going back to 1964. The first-day covers were issued to launch each commemorative stamp and, in addition to the postage itself, the envelope is a work of art highlighting the stamp’s theme.

I knew that my father also collected first day covers from Bermuda, where my parents lived from 1976 to 1990. When I mentioned this to appraiser-guest Richard, he perked up: such an exotic collection might be valuable. I went looking for the Bermuda collection among the boxes and trunks I’d had shipped from Calgary in 2013, but couldn’t find it. In those hard decisions after Dad’s death about what to keep and what to let go, I had left behind the Bermuda stamps.

In some trove somewhere else in the basement there are more modest stamp collections that my sisters and I put together in our childhood. In those days, Diane, Denise and I were among the kids who brought stamp collections to school for show and tell. Few school children, I’m sure, had a philatelist like Bill Cummer to show them how stamps should be handled. Dad taught us to tear off the corners of envelopes carefully to avoid damaging the stamp. When we had gathered enough bulk stamps, we would soak them in a bowl of warm water until the glue softened and the stamp separated from the envelope. We would lift the stamps out of the water with specially-designed tweezers and would place them face-down on a newspaper. Once dried, the stamps were given a glued stamp hinge to attach them in the appropriate spot in the album.

Those Christmases, packages of bulk stamps were popular stocking stuffers and new stamp albums were wrapped and waiting under the tree. A stamp album was a marvelous tour of the world. Spaces contained black and white renditions, waiting for the moment when an actual stamp would be carefully placed, like some bean in a philatelic game of bingo. Over the years, a few of our pages were nearly covered with these coloured bits of paper with their endless variety of designs. Some pages remained empty.

To this day, I can’t resist the temptation to tear off the corner of an envelope if it contains an interesting stamp from an interesting place. My desk drawers contain the detritus of this haphazard fascination.

When I began to earn enough money to take my interest in stamps to another level, I “invested” in Canada Post’s sheets and booklets of special issues. I still have them: “Winnie the Pooh,” a sheet of sixteen 45-cent stamps with booklet ($7.20); a sheet of twenty-four 46-cent stamps marking the 75th anniversary of the RCAF ($11.04); World Figure Skating Championships, a sheet of twenty-four 47-cent stamps ($11.28); Jean-Paul Riopelle, six very large stamps representing the great painter’s work, each with a face value of 48 cents ($2.88); and for the first time, a sheet of “self-adhesive stamps” – ten of them, featuring a photo of the Queen which, the margins note, was taken by Bryan Adams, then known primarily as a rock star – 49 cents each, for a total of $4.90.

Note the steady inflation of a price of a postage stamp. In September 2019, Canada Post introduced its Leonard Cohen commemorative. Instead of a price, the stamp contains the letter “P” superimposed on a maple leaf. That means that the stamp can be used to send a letter anywhere in Canada at whatever price Canada Post determines is the current rate for domestic delivery. Right now, it will cost you $1.05 for a single stamp, or 90 cents for a stamp in a booklet. It now costs about twice as much to send a letter now than it did when I was collecting sheets in the 1990s.

Back then, I thought that untouched, sometimes-unopened issues of stamps would have great value for the true collector. I didn’t realize that I was one of a fast-diminishing species of hobbyist. I wasn’t a serious collector; I was a gatherer of things that I thought might be worth some money some day.

None of us really caught the stamp collecting bug. It was different in the 1930s, when Bill and his younger brothers Allen and Fred, wrote to penpals around the world, trading stamps and saving the postage. This brings me to the other item I brought back from my father’s estate in 2013: the small cardboard box.

It contains two albums that were the collection of my father’s younger brother, Allenby Cummer. He was named after the general under whom my grandfather served in the First World War, and went by the name Allen.

His albums have “spring-back” binding so that new pages could be added and the cardboard box also contains loose pages that had yet to be added to the albums. The frontpiece of one album proclaims that it was made by G.F. Rapkin of Goswell Road, London, “album maker to the world.” No black and white representations of stamps-to-be-found on the pages of these albums. No indeed. In fact, the pages of high-quality paper are lined horizontally and vertically like graph paper. In an instruction sheet titled “Hints on Mounting Stamps in this Album,” the grey lines are called a quadrille, and are to be used to help arrange the stamps. Uncle Allen’s collection follows the advice on ways to organize the number of stamps on a page for symmetry and balance. On the top of the pages, titles and dates have been written in India ink with a hand that would have done credit to any draughtsman: “Georgia 1919,” for example, “Germany Winter Games 1936,” and so on around the world. The latest date listed among the titles are various “Coronation Issues” for Canada, New Zealand, Bahamas, and Barbados is 1937, at which time Allen would have been 13 years old.

The “Hints” instruct a collector to anticipate new additions by pencilling in dots at the corners where the stamps will eventually be placed. Uncle Allen’s collection is much bolder. Instead of light pencil dots, someone has carefully drawn with India ink and a straight edge a series of rectangular frames. On some pages there are as many as 14 of these frames, each so exact that lines never waver and never cross. Many pages contain only three spaces and three stamps. Some pages have as many as 14, all carefully arranged for the symmetry of the page.

On one page, there is but one rectangle drawn, big enough to frame a small envelope and is entitled “United States 1935.” The glue from the hinge has long-since dried out, and the envelope is now tucked between the pages. It is addressed to the Cummer Family at 1221 13th Avenue SW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and contains a 25 cent stamp showing a clipper-style airplane with a caption, “Trans Pacific Air Mail – November 1935.” The postmark is “Kohala December 21 7:30 AM.” My grandmother’s sister, Aunt Dorothy, used to live in Hawaii. A Christmas card from her to the Calgary Cummers perhaps? The envelope is rubberstamped “Via Air Mail,” but someone else has written carefully above, “Via Clipper Ship.” Evidently this example of an early airmailed letter was considered exotic enough to warrant its own page in a treasured stamp album.

The earliest stamps in the album include British stamps to commemorate the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The latest are from Canada, New Zealand, the Bahamas and Barbados to commemorate the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (known to my generation as the Queen Mother). This was a hundred years after Queen Victoria’s coronation commemorated in the earliest stamps.

Was it my Uncle Allen who collected stamps and took such care with the handwriting? Was it he who wielded a straight-edge and nib pen to create these pages with such precision? Did a 13-year-old Allen spend his evening hours with a steady hand poring over the pages, preparing them to receive the specific stamps that had been set aside? Without the temptations of video games or the demands of competitive hockey, there was much more time back then for a boy to devote to hobbies like stamp collecting, but this stretches the imagination beyond anything I remember as a 13-year-old, or observed in my own son at that age.

Allen was popular in school. Like his two brothers, he was intelligent and hard-working. He joined the Boy Scouts and he was an athlete. In 1940, he would go on to play rugby for Central High School, and two years later, would play on a collegiate hockey team that won the championship for Northern Alberta. In spite of these activities and interests, did Allen also have the time and inclination to create all those hand-drawn frames with such exquisite penmanship? Was he some kind of prodigy, destined for a career as an architect, perhaps?

Allen, Jack (father) and Fred Cummer ca 1935

But as I turned the pages of the albums, another theory took shape: maybe Allen had a partner who shared his enthusiasm for stamps. I looked for clues as to who might have helped him.

The cardboard box contained more than the two albums. It also held extra pages that could be added to the binding, along with the instructive “Hints” on how to mount the stamps. I also found two Christmas tags saved from presents that had probably been placed under the tree in the mid-1930s. Each read: “Allen from Grandpa and Aunties.” Could this be a clue as to who might have helped Allen with his stamp collection?

“Grandpa” was Frederick William Cummer, who was a frail 74 years old in 1935. He had recently suffered — or would soon suffer — a stroke and was in no condition to prepare the pages with a clear eye and steady hand. That left the “Aunties” – Ada and Wilda, maiden aunts who kept the house running for their father, their widowed brother, Jack, and his three boys, Billy, Allen and Freddie.

The theory that one of the Aunties wielded the nib pen was reinforced when, among the album pages, I came across a photograph from around 1914. It’s a picture of my grandfather, Lance Corporal John Wellington (Jack) Cummer, in the uniform of Lord Strathcona’s Horse in which he shipped overseas with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He looks into the camera with an earnest and determined expression. He’s about 24 years old. On the back, he has written “Your loving brother, Jack.”

Working hypothesis: one of the Aunties had kept this photo for some 20 years and had tucked it away or left it behind while working on her nephew’s stamp album. But which Auntie?

The younger sister, Wilda, was the housekeeping Auntie – quiet, shy and nurturing. In 1910, at the age of 15, she had been wrenched from her school chums and familiar surroundings in Florence, Ontario, to make the trip out West with her parents and siblings to join the two older brothers who had established themselves in Alberta. Two years later, tragedy struck the family when her mother Margaret Ellen (né Robertson) died suddenly. Wilda quit high school to run the household, keeping the house immaculately clean, and cooking for her father, sister and two younger brothers. The youngest brother, Carl, would later write, “She always went about her household chores in a methodical and lighthearted manner, singing or whistling as she did so.”

In 1917, Carl was severely injured and hospitalized on and off for three years. Wilda nursed him. “No one ever had greater loving care than she administered,” he recalled. Her nursing skills were called upon again in the late 1930s when her father, Fred W., suffered a stroke and was bed-ridden. He died in 1939 at the age of 78. In 1953, aged 59, Wilda would marry and have a household of her own, and in the years to come she would administer the patient nursing required for the deteriorating health of her husband, Heywood Birchall.

Auntie Wilda was a natural-born nurse, but was she the kind of woman who would work with her nephew on his stamp collection, organizing the pages and carefully drawing the frames? When would she have found the time?

The other Auntie was Ada, six years Wilda’s elder. Where Wilda was soft spoken and compliant, Ada was frank and direct. Wilda wore owl-like glasses and tended to stay in the background. Ada was a stunner with good bones and thick tresses of hair that began turning snow white while she was still a teenager. She tended to the business side of running the household, paying the bills and keeping accounts. They both played the piano. They both sang in the church choir. Both had lost sweethearts overseas in the carnage of the Great War.

Where Wilda’s strength was her kindness and empathy, Ada’s was her intellect and engagement. While the death of her mother prevented Wilda from completing high school, Ada had already graduated in Ontario at the age of 16 and had taken a job in a law office in Tillsonburg. After the move to Calgary, she quickly found work as a legal stenographer at twice the salary she had been paid back East. The firm was Lougheed and Bennett. Lougheed was James (soon to be Sir James), Leader of the Government in the Senate. Bennett was his young protégé from New Brunswick who would go on to become Viscount R.B. Bennett, Prime Minister of Canada 1930-35. At the time, there were no law schools in the West. Prospective lawyers would article themselves to practicing lawyers, and after three years of “sink or swim,” they would set up their own practices. Carl recalled, “As a secretary, Ada knew all the ropes, methods and procedures and would spend a lot of her time helping the young apprentices.” A retired judge once told him that he learned more about law from Ada Cummer than he learned in law school back East. When one of the junior partners left to start his own firm, he invited Ada to go with him and apprentice to become a lawyer herself. With the recent death of her mother, however, Ada felt she had too many responsibilities at home. When she retired in 1961, at the age of 73, she was in charge of the firm’s mortgage department.

Of the two Aunties, I postulated that it was Ada who had been Allen’s silent partner in preparing the stamp albums. When I began leafing through the loose-leaf pages that had not yet been inserted into the binder, my theory was confirmed. Some of these pages are still totally blank. Others have the same precise handwriting in India ink. But some of the pages have an innovation not found in the albums themselves: typewritten titles. The typewriter first makes its presence known on a loose-leaf page of stamps from the Belgian Congo: within the ink-drawn frames, the prices have been typed in red ink: 40c; 2 fr. Then, a few pages later, a title has been typed in red ink, “Gabon (Africa),” and a date in black ink, 1910. The next page is all in black ink: “1908 Madagascar 1917.” Sometime following the last hand-written entry (“1937 Coronation Issue”), someone had acquired a typewriter and was used update the look of Allen’s stamp album.

Her work at the law office made Ada a proficient and accurate typist. She applied her skill – as well as many sheets of carbon paper – to type out the 308 pages of a family history that had been published in 1911 as The Cummer Memoranda: A Record of the Progenitors and Descendants of Jacob Cummer, a Canadian Pioneer.[1] The typeface in the stamp album are the same as those in the pages of my own copy of Auntie Ada’s retyping of The Cummer Memoranda. On the balance of evidence, I’m reasonably certain that Ada worked with Allen on the stamp collection.

“The Cummer Memorandum” as typed by Ada Cummer in the 1960s.

Amps in trade. A boy in Queen’s, NY, was very demanding in how quickly he wanted Allen to reply to his letters. A girl in Japan wrote to Allen for stamps. In a few years, Japan and Canada would be at war.

The stamp album opens a little window into how the war affected the family. Tucked away safely among its pages is a letter from Allen’s younger brother, Freddie, dated May 31, 1945, and addressed from the 15th Field Regiment, 95th Battery, Canadian Army Overseas. Fred (19 years old) reported from Northern Holland, “the little children swarm around the school here begging for ‘cowgum, chocolate, cigaretten for papa.’” He described a daily routine of a little work in the morning and most afternoons devoted to sports. “Some life eh?” He was concerned that he might be “stuck in the occupational army” and was considering volunteering for service in the Pacific theatre. He was intrigued about the way that, even though the Germans had taken all the rubber when they retreated, the Dutch were able to ride their bicycles without tires. “It really jars you to hear a bike coming down the cobbled roads on its rims.” The letter was not addressed to Allen, but to the oldest brother Bill. By that time, the war had already had inflicted tragedy on the Cummer family.

In 1942, Allen had graduated from high school in Camrose, Alberta. In July, he enlisted with the Royal Canadian Air Force and took courses in Edmonton, Claresholm and High River. In July 1943 he received his wings from No. 3 Service Flight Training School in Calgary.

Proudly wearing his new wings, Allen walked down 8th Avenue (now Stephen Avenue) with his sweetheart, Helen, and their image was captured by one of the street photographers who used to ply their trade in downtown Calgary.

We know that Allen and Helen had plans for their future together the note that Helen wrote on the back of the photograph. To someone in the family, she joked that she and Allen were already married.

It was not to be. The following month, Allen was posted to Rivers, Manitoba, where he was a staff pilot. He was part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan which, over the course of the war, would graduate more than 130,000 pilots, navigators, gunners and flight engineers. So crucial was this initiative to the Allied war effort that American President Franklin Roosevelt dubbed Canada “the aerodrome of democracy.”

But training airmen and preparing them for combat overseas extracted its own costs. Over the course of the war, some 900 students, instructors and ground crew died in Canada. In the early morning of October 6, 1943, while on night navigation exercises, 19-year-old Sergeant Pilot J. Allenby Cummer was among nine flyers killed when his twin-engine Avro Anson collided with another training plane at the airbase.

Uncle Carl recalled, “Allen radioed permission to land without circling the field because of the engines had given out. The control tower believed that all other aircraft had been warned to stay clear of the runway, but one other plane tried to land at the same time. Allen was buried in Calgary will full military honours.”

As was customary, the family received a condolence message from the King…

… and from the Minister of National Defence for Air.

Allen’s sweetheart, Helen, remained close to the family. When she married a man named Johnny Quarnstrom, she sent photos from the wedding and the couple continued to send the Cummers Christmas cards and photos of their growing family.

Uncle Allen’s legacy continues in our family with the name William Allen Cummer (known in the Cummer family as “Allen”), my father’s first,, who was born in March 1943, seven months before Allenby died in the crash.

Ada, Barbara (Nadeau) Cummer, Bill, Allen, Wilda ca. 1945

Writing this essay has carried me through to Remembrance Day. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, I remember those our family lost. Wilda and Ada’s brother, Roy, who returned from the Western Front with shrapnel that would strike him down at his post office station.

My father’s cousin, Ted, a paratrooper killed in the battle for the Rhine in March, 1945.

And Allen – the uncle I never met, but whose presence (and absence) I could feel in my father’s life, the way he would grow silent and reflective on the anniversary day in October, or how his eyes sometimes teared up when he heard the Royal Air Force March. My father kept Allen’s stamp collection all those years, and now I have it to remember them both.

And take a moment, as well to remember those who kept the home fires burning back in Calgary. Like Mexico’s Dia de Muertos earlier in November, Canada’s Remembrance Day gives us occasion to remember those we have lost and keep the family memories alive. Wilda passed away in 1984 at the age of 79. Her husband Heywood had predeceased her by 13 years. Wilda remained very much engaged in the social activities of both the Cummer and Birchall families.

Wilda with Stephen MacDonald (great-grandnephew) 1978

After Wilda married Heywood Birchall in 1953, Ada continued to live alone at the home on 13th Avenue SW until it was sold in 1964 to make way for an apartment complex. She lived alone in an apartment nearby, doing her own housework, cooking her own meals, and hosting family visits until the age of 92, when she moved into a nursing home. She died in Calgary in 1983 at the age of 95.

Ada on her 90th birthday, with Annette Cummer (grandniece) 1978

The memories of all those family members who are no longer with us brings me back to the stamp collections and their rich trove of family lore. I asked Richard, my stamp appraising Airbnb guest whether my father’s collection had any value. He said that the corner blocks could still be used as postage to mail any letter posted in Canada. Their value was limited to the face value on the stamp. But now it takes two of those 49-cent Bryan-Adams-photograph-of-the-Queen issues to send a letter across Canada, not just one. How often do we use stamps these days? In the era of electronic communication, not often at all. There are probably enough stamps in my father’s corner block and my full sheet collections to provide postage for the entire Cummer family for many generations to come (assuming stamps will still be used by future generations.) What about the Canadian first-day covers? Not much of a market for those either.

Ah, the collection of first-day Bermuda covers would probably be worth something to someone, Richard said. But in making the choices, I kept the Canadiana and left the Bermuda stamps behind. Good news, though: it seems that my sister Diane brought the Bermuda collection back with her to Texas. What she’ll do with it remains to be seen.

And what about Allen and Ada’s collection that has opened the doors to the past so that, for the past weeks, I’ve been re-entering the world of Allen and Ada, Wilda and Carl? Richard admired the handiwork and the draughtsmanship of the quadrilles. He appreciated the little details, such as the instruction sheet of “Hints” on how to use the album. The value of the collection as a whole? Probably around $10, he said. Or, if I preferred, I could probably donate the collection to Oxfam who would sort out those stamps that might have some value.

That’s it? That’s all? My family’s history encapsulated in a cardboard box, and all it is worth on the stamp collectors’ market is $10!

No, I’ll keep it, thanks. Not sure who will take it after I can no longer hold on to it. But in the meantime, there’s something I can do, and that’s what I’ve started here: I need to get these stories down.

[1] The 1911 Cummer history had been compiled and written by Wellington Willson Cummer and his nephew Clyde Lottridge Cummer, who were descendants of our common ancestor, Jacob, who had come to Canada as a Late Loyalist in 1797. In 2007 the book was republished by Kessinger Publishing and is available on Amazon. The facsimile is 308 pages and covers marriages, births and deaths of some 230 families. At some time, a copy of the original came into Ada’s hands, and wanting our own branch of the family (the records for which trail off in 1826) she typed out the entire piece.

Fred W. Cummer and Margaret (Robertson) Cummer and their children. (To be continued…)

Don Cummer

Don Cummer

Fire!

Don Cummer

The Stamp Collection

Don Cummer