The Hern Cousins: Wally (pt. 2)

In the previous blog I introduced Wally Hern, the first cousin of Lois' father Bob. Wally was an excellent athlete who, as a member of the Stratford hockey teams, won three provincial championships: junior in 1900, intermediate in 1904 and senior in 1907. As such, he was one of only two people who could claim to have earned the "triple crown". In this photo of the Hern family, Wally is the young man with the straw hat standing next to his mother.


Wally appears prominently in stories told by Wally's nephew George Johnston. The reminiscences which began in the previous blog, now continue:

Margaret and her family visit the Herns in Stratford

"After two or three nights with Benson's folk [i.e., Margaret's in laws] on Nile Street we migrated to Water Street to be with Myrtle and Wally and their young. Life brightened up for us all. The bond of sisterly affection between Margaret and Myrtle was strong and remained so throughout their lives. Benson [Margaret's husband] and Wally were not compatible in the same way, but they were both young and as yet not burdened with the varieties of seriousness that awaited them. Both had loud laughs and gave them much exercise while they were together.

A child dies

Myrt had her woman's glory cropped and became a new person. All agreed that she looked younger and prettier. She had also been fetched by the alteration out of a winter of grieving for a daughter, Ruth, who had been born sickly and died after the first two months of her life. Spring came, and one fine day she took the notion, walked down town and had it done.

Wally's business fails.

Myrtle and Wally moved to Toronto with their daughters Margaret and Edith and son Walter. Wally's haberdashery business in Stratford failed, as Aunt Jen had foretold from reading his tea cup. Someone is taking money from your till she said. Her reading proved true. An important cause of his business failure was considered to have been the dishonesty of his one clerk, who seems to have got away with considerable money without being caught at it. So the story went at any rate.

The Hern's new home on Castlefield Avenue in north Toronto, a pleasant walk away from us on Eastbourne Avenue, through Pears' Park. Margaret and Myrtle rejoiced in the propinquity the move had brought them.

Wally tries being a Life Insurance Salesman

"Wally, impressed by his [brother-in-law] Benson's success, thought Life Insurance salesman would be right for him too, and Benson did not discourage him. The Sun Life was persuaded to take him on and train him. He made one small sale and then, after a long while, another. The sociability of contacting prospects gave him much pleasure, he could while away hours chewing the fat with almost anyone, but aside from that he was no salesman. Neither did he have the necessary convictions about life insurance. Finally, he gave up trying to be a salesman."

"Times were becoming depressed. After he was let out of Sun Life there seemed to be no other employment for Wally in Toronto. He settled down, uncomplaining, to reading the newspapers, for the positions vacant ads, he said, and rolling cigarettes for himself, and others who wanted them in the household, on an apparatus he had bought. Myrtle took in a boarder or two. Then Margaret and Edith began working and contributing money for their keep. They were loyal children to both parents, and seemed to accept that Wally should not contemplate employment beneath the dignity of an ex-mayor of Stratford, who had also, in other respects, been one of its prominent citizens."

Wally finds work in England.

George Johnston's stories continue: "In October '36 Walter Hern found employment again. He was brought to London, England, as referee for ice hockey, a newly popular spectator sport there. It seemed a gift for him. He set himself up in a comfortable flat in St. John's Wood and invited me to use it sometimes as a warm location for my labours with the pen. I went one evening when he was at a practice, but found it so warm I could not stay awake." .... "Uncle Wally, or U. Wally as we knew him among ourselves invited [me] to a hockey game at which he was officiating. He urged me to make use of his flat again, and I gave it another try, with no better success."

Wally gets hit by a bus

"On this second occasion, having dozed off as before, I was roused by the phone at abut eleven p.m., and a man's voice asked me in a London accent, if I knew one Walter Hern. I said I did. Well, don't be alarmed, sir, the voice said patiently. Your mite's been it by a bus. The calmness of the voice alarmed me from the first, but I was sufficiently alert to ask for more information. Walter Hern is in the Outpatients' at St. Mary's Ospital, the voice told me. Being attended to. It game me directions for getting there, and I followed them at once. The Outpatients' Clinic was dimly lit by a gas jet. Behind a desk in an alcove that was somewhat more brightly lit, sat a mildly authoritative-looking young woman in a white smock. A row of men and women, middle-age to elderly, all with unhappy expressions on their faces, were partly visible in the gloom, seated on a bench next to a wall, some with bandaging on a hand or foot or forehead. When they heard me tell the lady at the desk that I should like to know about Walter Hern they looked unhappier than ever. Ow, e did look orful! they all agreed. I joined them on the bench. After a while the desk lady gave me a sign and I stood up. A door opened, a wheeled stretcher came through it and across the waiting room to another door and on it was U. Wally, covered by a sheet except for his head, over one corner of which was a neat bandage. Hoo! hoo! hoo! he was saying through a tube stuck in his mouth, and he stunk of anaesthetic. For the week and half that he was in hospital I visited him regularly, and then I arranged a room for him at Thirty Doughty Street, rooming house and of the Admirable Mrs. Crichton, as we called her" .... "U. Wally got tea and toast for himself in his room and then came to our flat in Lamb's Conduit Street and spent much of each morning sitting by our coal grate, burning our coal, as we never did during the day, and reading our copy of The London Times. He would stay for lunch and then go the the Strand Palace Hotel and write letters home on their stationery. If a flunky eyed him he would say to himself, I don't have to care for you, you're nothing but a shit! or so he told us, at any rate." My roommates' "patience with all this must be considered supererogative, though they did find him and his ways somewhat entertaining, if unintentionally so. He would tell us about his sightseeing in London, how impressed he was by the Albert Memorial, for example. We were not to miss it, it must be one of the really great monuments in the world. He also informed us about one of our own favourite haunts, St. James' Park."

(On the right is a picture of the Albert Memorial at it appeared in August 2009 when Bob McEwan, Wally's first cousin twice removed, visited London. The memorial is just as impressive and unchanging in 2009 as it was 70 years ago when Wally visited it.)

Wally goes home

"At last he ran out of money, he had completed his convalescence, he was homesick and went home."

We have no record of what happened in the rest of Wally's life. The last note I have of Wally Hern dates back to the 1960's when his first cousin Bob Hearn (Lois' father) recollected that Wally had died sometime in the recent past.