If I Had a Million Dollars... Camp X Artifacts Up For Sale

The Camp X Exhibit at the Oshawa Airport is full of neat stuff: a dagger hidden in a lipstick case, a fountain pen that shoots poisonous gas and a revolver concealed in a hollowed out book, to list but a few items. As Toronto Star reporter, Carola Vyhnak, points out in her March 4th article, this is the stuff of fiction. In fact, it's exactly these type of gadgets that you might expect to read about in a James Bond novel.

This comparison between fact and fiction is hardly surprising when you consider that Bond author, Ian Fleming, spent part of WWII in Camp X, a spy training facility on the Oshawa-Whitby border near the shore of Lake Ontario.

The collection, which was compiled and largely owned by history buff Robert Stuart, has spent the past 33 years exhibited to the public, most recently in the Ontario Regiment building at the Oshawa Airport as part of the Robert Stuart Aeronautical Collection. Poorly advertised and rarely open, I only discovered the existence of this collection 3 or 4 years ago. Since then school, work, and a year spent in Korea has kept me from visiting the exhibit. And now, the opportunity may be lost to me forever - a pretty harsh lesson in "(s)he who hesitates" for an historian to learn.

On February 24th, historian Lynn Philip Hodgson (mentioned in my February post on the Battle of Bowmanville at Camp 30) contacted local papers after discovering that the entire collection of Camp X artifacts were poised for an internet auction block. Since then, a flurry of controversy has surrounded this usually obscure collection.

Since Stuart's death nearly seven years ago, the collection has been privately owned by his wife, Lois, and his daughter, Deidre, two women who are about to become responsible for selling off a significant piece of Durham Region's (and Canada's) rich wartime history "for personal reasons."

Like many private collections, the Camp X artifacts came together relatively organically over a period of several decades, with many of the pieces attained through private sales and auctions. Other items were accessioned into the collection through donations or long-term loans from veterans or the families of those that had worked at the Camp. Many of these donations and long-term loans were made in good faith in the form of a "gentleman's agreement" and a handshake between Mr. Stuart and the donor. Little, if any, paperwork was ever completed to outline the terms of these transactions.

Now, with the impending sale of the collection, a number of donors and family members have come forward to demand their family heirlooms back. As far as they were concerned, the items were on loan only so long as they were being displayed locally and in a respectful manner; they never intended for the Stuart family to profit off of their history and memories.

Deirdre Stuart has little sympathy for the people who donated to her father's collection. In an interview with the Toronto Star she was quoted as saying, “[i]f you didn’t put it in writing, you pretty much gave it to us... Like, hello? How stupid are people. We’ve had this museum for 33 years. It’s ours.”

Clearly, Ms. Stuart is no gentleman.

Although the loss of local history that would accompany the sale of this collection is immensely disturbing to me and it saddens me to say this, it is my understanding that the Stuart family is well within their legal rights to sell the artifacts however they see fit (provided that they adhere to all applicable laws concerning the sale of cultural artifacts). Public museums are legally restricted from selling artifacts unless they can provide extensive paper records proving their ownership of the item(s) (e.g. a receipt of purchase or a deed of gift). In instances where items are found in a collection but lack proper paperwork, these museums are legally required to keep and care for the artifacts for several decades before they may deaccession them. Unfortunately, private collections are not bound by the same standards. And, since theirs is a private museum, the Stuarts, in the absence of paperwork, have implicit legal right to items in their possession.

Thankfully, it at least seems as if the Canadian government isn't going to let this collection leave the country without a fight. As of March 20th, the Canadian Department of Heritage has "opened a dossier" on the artifacts and is looking into whether some of these items may be able to be protected from international sale under restrictions outlined in the Cultural Property Export and Import Act. For Canada's sake, let's hope this is so. Better yet, let's hope that a Canadian cultural institution (*cough* Canadian War Museum *cough*) steps up and buys the entire collection so that Ms. Stuart is not allowed to break it up and sell the unprotected items piece by piece.

On a local level, Hodgson and other concerned members of the community (including a number of local veterans from the aptly named Sir William Stephenson Branch of the Royal Canadian Legion) have stepped forward to coordinate fundraising efforts in order to save the collection. The Legion is currently accepting donations that will be used to purchase and house the collection permanently in Durham Region (an outcome that I selfishly find most favourable). If the campaign is successful, not only will the collection remain in Canada, but it will remain in Durham Region and on display to the public.

If you'd like to donate and ensure that the collection stays together and in Canada, you can do so by sending the Legion a cheque with "Save the Collection" in the memo section (see their website for more details). You may also want to follow this issue as it develops via the Save the Collection group on Facebook.


Sources by order of publication:

Whitby This Week - "Camp X artifacts up for sale"
The Toronto Star - "Historian fights to keep WWII spy-school collection in Canada"
--- "Veterans families angry over bid to sell wartime artifacts"
Canwest New Service - "Sale of historic espionage gear draws Ottawa's attention"
National Post - "Selling Secret History"

Visualization Tools Revisited

Six months ago I used Wordle to create a visual representation of my blog (see October's Wordle Wordle Wordle). By looking at the word cloud of my labels that was generated by Wordle, it was easy to see that I wrote quite frequently about public history, digital history, UWO, museums, human rights and the Holocaust. None of that is a big surprise when you consider that I'm a student at UWO in the Public History MA Program and that I am taking courses which deal with public history, digital history and museums and that I have a strong interest in human rights issues and the Holocaust.

In that entry, I wondered what a similar visualization would look like in six months or a year. Would it change drastically and reflect new interests and experiences? Or, would it remain the same, reflecting a constant interest in certain topics?

As you can see by looking at the word cloud at the top of this blog post, the visualization has gotten considerably more complex and diverse over the last six months (I have added dozens of new labels to the cloud). However, I would argue that it still largely reflects the initial trends of my blog. The single exception to this relative continuity is the inclusion of new labels which show an increased awareness of and interest in topics relating to local history and heritage (who knew Durham Region had such fascinating history?!).

That's a mildly interesting observation to make, but so what? What can a visual representation of my blog tell you that a quick skim of my labels list cannot? Sadly, I'm afraid the answer is probably nothing.

In October I had a cautious optimism for the use of digital visualization tools as techniques to help with the data mining process. Now, I am thoroughly unconvinced as to their usefulness. It might take me 2 or 3 seconds longer to scroll through the alphabetized list of labels that I have used in my blog since its inception than it does to glance at word cluster like the one above, but it tells me exactly the same thing. In fact, scrolling the list of labels actually saves me considerable time when you consider that I had to first go to the Wordle website and input my data before I could create the word cloud in question. Also, I can't help but notice that the picture that was produced by the generator is now so crowded with new, low-level labels that it has become an eye strain to try and extract any but the most obvious data from it.

In my humble opinion, Wordle and similar word/tag cloud generators may create pretty pictures, but they are a bust as far as their usefulness to the study of history goes.

But what about other visualization tools? Surely I can't paint all tools with the same brush, can I? You wouldn't think so. The esteemed Dan Cohen certainly doesn't. He used different visualization technologies in his research to map whether Americans prayed or watched CNN after hearing about the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. Cohen stands by the fact that it was only through mapping the results of his survey onto a satellite image of the USA provided by Google Earth that he was able to observe that people in rural areas of the United States were far more likely to pray after hearing of the attacks than they were to watch CNN. Conversely, people in urban areas were far more likely to turn to CNN for information and solace than they were to pray.

So it was with this conflicting ringing endorsement by Dan Cohen (digital history guru) and growing personal skepticism that I attended the Historical Geographic Information Systems (Historical GIS) lecture given several weeks ago by Don LaFreniere, a colleague from the Geography Department. Don is a huge fan of GIS and the objective of his lecture was three-fold:

1) To teach us the basics of navigating GIS software
2) To introduce us, as historians, to the potential applications of GIS programs to our research questions and future careers in public history
3) To explain how he is currently using GIS visualization tools in his research process

Extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic, Don did a fantastic job of patiently leading even the most technologically challenged of us through his tutorial. But even Don's enthusiasm couldn't convince me of the usefulness of visualization techniques. In order to get to the point of visualization Don and a team of undergraduates had to spend more than two years compiling a database of census materials from which they drew the information they mapped using the GIS software. For my money, it was the database that was truly the incredible feat, not the mapping we were able to do with the data points. Using the spreadsheets that he had created, we were able to search for specific criteria and filter the overall findings according to our desired specifications. At this point we were able to see all of the relevant details and make (in my opinion) the same observations that we were able to make after applying the visualization tools to the data set.

I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe, as Sara Sirianni suggests in her blog post about the workshop, visualization techniques are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe.

For now I remain skeptical.

Fallout on the Farm: Blueprint for Survival No. 3

Several years ago I came across this thin, yellow booklet on the shelf of a combination antique store/swap shop in Dunnville, Ontario, a small farming community on the banks of the Grand River where my father grew up. Crammed between thick coffee table books on gardening and brightly coloured romance novels, I almost didn't see it. What a shame that would have been! A few minutes later and $2.00 poorer, I was the proud owner of Blueprint for Survival No. 3: Fallout on the Farm (as opposed to Blueprint for Survival No. 1: Your Basement Fallout Shelter and Blueprint for Survival No. 2: Basement Fallout Shelter, a guide for use in the design of new homes).

Produced by the Canada Department of Agriculture at the request of the Emergency Measures Organization in 1961, this booklet is a wonderful encapsulation of early 1960s nuclear knowledge and fears. The book aims to answer several questions about how nuclear fallout will affect Canada's farming communities, including why farmers need to know about the dangers of nuclear fallout, how their crops and livestock may be affected by it, who will warn farmers of an impending nuclear attack, where they should find shelter and lastly, if it will be safe outside after fallout.

Reading it now, the whole document comes across as simplistic and naive. The general consensus of the pamphlet seems to be that in as little as 14 days after fallout, it will be safe to leave your shelter. But, if you have to leave your shelter before that to milk your cows or take care of your livestock, you can safely do so as long as they are in a barn. Just don't forget to wash all that nasty fallout off of your skin afterwards with soap and water! Also, don't worry, it's totally safe to slaughter and eat animals that were left outside during the fallout just as long as you don't use the bones or offal (because that's the only part of them that will retain radioactive materials, you know). And, even though you should be shielded by 12 inches of concrete (or 15 inches of brick or 18 inches of earth) during fallout, peas and beans will be safe to eat because only their pods will be contaminated. Riiiiiiiight.

Reading this booklet, I'm alternately amused and horrified. Knowing what we do now about the outcome of the Cold War and the effects of nuclear radiation and fallout, it's funny to look back and see how "quaint" the understanding of our parent's generation was. On the other hand, it's also incredibly frightening to think about how little they knew about a weapon that had such deadly potential.

I've never come across a booklet like this before or since and I'm constantly thankful for the stroke of luck that helped me find Fallout on the Farm that day in the swap shop. It never ceases to amaze me the kinds of insights an historian can gather when they are able to look firsthand at documents from the past.

Since I'm currently working on an essay for my Understanding Archives course about the Baker-Cox debates of 2001-2002, I found myself considering Fallout in a completely new way: What if I had never encountered the physical copy of this book? What if, to save shelf space, some librarian somewhere had microfilmed this booklet, destroying and discarding the original in the process? Would my experience with the document have been the same?

I'm not convinced that it would have. On the surface the material would have remained ostensibly the same as the physical copy. That is, unless the person doing the microfiliming had carelessly skipped a page or misaligned one so that it cut off the beginnings of each line. Sadly this is a common microfilming error and one that is usually not caught until several years later when some intrepid researcher needs that exact page. By then, the originals have often been destroyed or lost and there is little or no way to rectify the error.

Then there's the fact that microfilm is largely a black and white medium. Many tones of grey and all colour are lost during the microfilming process. In the case of Fallout, much of the greyscale in the sketches would probably have been lost, and thus their effectiveness as visual aids would have been irrevocably diminished.

Also, on a good day microfilm machines tend to make me feel slightly nauseous (something about the text whipping across the screen at high speeds). On a bad day, using the machine gives me a monster headache and makes me feel like I'm on the verge of a seizure. Also, the forward/reverse button on most of the machines are ridiculously finicky - I want to be able to spend my time researching the material I need, not fiddling with making it aligned, focused and readable.

I think, with all of these extraneous things going on, I'd have a more difficult time focusing on the actual document itself than if I were reading the original paper copy. This could potentially affect my observations and thus my conclusions about the source. It would most definitely affect the overall pleasure that I get from reading a primary document like Fallout on the Farm.

Admittedly I have yet to research the Cox half of the Baker-Cox debate, but right now, Baker has me sold. Saving shelf space is not worth the loss of history and aggravation that goes with microfilm.


[Update: While I continue to sympathize with Baker, my own views on the Baker-Cox debate have definitely become more firmly aligned with Cox after completing additional research on the topic.]

"To Infinity and Beyond!" (Or, "Houston, We Have a Problem")

One of the greatest things about studying history is that there is literally a history for everything; if someone has been there, done that or invented whatever you’re interested in, it has a history. Sometimes the discovered past of individuals, events, inventions or movements can find a wide interest base in popular consciousness (e.g. the Titanic, the World Wars, 1960s counterculture, etc). Other times, a few hundred or a few thousand enthusiasts might come together to discuss their love of a particular subject (e.g. Civil War re-enactors, local historical societies or members of the steampunk sub-culture). And then there are those times when it seems like you are the only person in the whole world that appreciates the history of a certain thing...

Case in point:

A few years ago, my father introduced me to the Fisher Space Pen (pictured at the top right of this blog post). In his opinion, this is the greatest pen that has ever been invented. I’m serious. The way that my father loves this pen is akin to the way most parents love their children (except, come to think of it, I can hardly remember the last time my father praised me quite so effusively in front of complete strangers). Anyway, he carries his with him everywhere, never missing an opportunity to loan it to someone. Unfortunately, this also means that he never misses an opportunity to relate the pen’s virtues and its history to the user. Over the years this has been a constant source of embarrassment for me as he extolled the virtues of his Space Pen to everyone from waitresses to my best friend to our optometrist and the entire population of his waiting room.* His spiel usually goes a little something like this:

“Oh, you say your pen isn’t working? That’s a... shame.”

(At this point he gets a gleeful twinkle in his eye as he reaches inside his jacket pocket for the infamous pen.)

“Here, use mine. Neat, isn’t it? It’s a Space Pen. Seriously, it’s the only kind of pen that American astronauts have used in space since the Apollo missions. It’s amazing! It writes upside down, underwater and in -40°C temperatures!”

Now, my father (as a salesman) doesn’t spend inordinate amounts of time hanging upside down in his daily life. Nor does he scuba dive. Nor does he often travel to the Arctic Circle. Why he would need a pen that performs under all of these adverse conditions is simply beyond me.

I just didn’t get the appeal.

Of course, this all changed the day that my father gifted me with my very own Fisher Space Pen. On that day I held this small grey box with a picture of a space shuttle on it in my hands, read the accompanying brochure on the history of the pen, perused the historical facts on their website and was hooked. Now, every time someone asks to borrow a pen, I can’t just grab one from my pencil case at random and hand it over. No, now I deliberately choose to loan them my Space Pen so I have an excuse to launch into my very own spiel about the history of the pen. I’ve tried to refrain, but I just can’t help myself. Spreading my knowledge of the history of this tiny object has become a compulsion with me.

The moral of this post: Unless you’re really interested in the manufacturing history of a ballpoint pen, you might want to ask someone other than a member of the Caughell family the next time you need to borrow a pen.


* This statement may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect.

Note: The Fisher Space Pen is so impressive that there's even an entire episode of Seinfeld ("The Pen") devoted to its awesomeness.

Blurring the Lines Between Fact and Fiction: Can Historical Fiction be Unethical?

If you've read my previous post on historical fiction, you know that I've long been a fan of the genre. Well, I may be more than a decade older now, but my taste in literature for pleasure reading has remained largely the same; I still read almost anything in the genre that I can get my hands on.

For example, I most recently completed Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, a novel about slavery, identity, power and self-determination in the early nineteenth century and found it a thoroughly enjoyable read right from the first page. Overall, I found Hill’s prose powerfully written and his main character both sympathetic and inspiring. I would strongly recommend this book to any lover of good fiction, historical or otherwise.

With Book of Negroes finished, my current novel of choice is Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us. On its most basic level, the book is about the lives of two women, a mother and a daughter, their relationship with one another, and the experiences which have shaped the way that they each view and interact with the world and each other. The narrative of the story bounces between the perspective of Anna, as a young Aryan girl living in Germany during the Second World War, and the present-day United States where her daughter, Trudy, is a professor of German History at an unnamed university somewhere in Minnesota.

The book’s dust jacket hails the novel as “a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame,” a summary which I think is actually pretty accurate thus far (I’m only about half-way finished the book at this point). So far, I’m finding the plot engaging and the characters complicated and flawed enough to be interesting. I certainly look forward to reading each new chapter.

That said, I think that I would have been better off not reading the blurb about the author at the back of the novel before finishing the book. Blum’s author bio states “Jenna Blum is of German and Jewish decent. She worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation for four years, interviewing Holocaust survivors. She currently teaches at Boston University and runs fiction workshops for Grub Street Writers.” That’s it, just three run-of-the-mill sentences that pack a lot of punch. In fact, these seemingly innocent details about Ms. Blum’s background are enough to make me, as a student of history, more than a little uneasy.

I’m sure that the details about her heritage were strategically included to legitimize her role as a storyteller whose work focuses on Second World War Era Germany and German history and culture more generally. Some of the issues dealt with by the characters in this book are of a sensitive nature and it’s understandable that the publisher would have wanted to underline Blum’s “authentic” voice as much as possible so that the readers would have confidence in Blum’s ability to speak for her characters. That’s fine. That’s not the part I find disturbing.

What does get under my skin is the fact that Ms. Blum worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation for four years before writing this book. This experience, combined with mentioning her current teaching position at Boston University, were undoubtedly her publisher’s way of placing Ms. Blum within academia, a position which many may perceive as giving her more “authority” over the historical aspects of the novel than the majority of the public reading it. A good thought, but Ms. Blum’s association with the Shoah Foundation ultimately leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Fair or not, I find myself wondering exactly when Ms. Blum began conceptualizing her novel and how/if she went about conducting background research for it. For instance, I can’t help but wonder how many of the details of her interviews with Holocaust survivors made it into this novel either consciously or unconsciously. Or, if these survivors had any inkling when they took part in interviews with Ms. Blum how some of their most painful memories might be used beyond the agreed upon Shoah Foundation oral history projects.

Like I said above, it might not be fair of me to question Ms. Blum’s integrity like this without any concrete evidence, but I feel I that have to acknowledge at least the possibility for the exploitation of Holocaust survivors to occur when an historian’s academic work is also reflected in their works of fiction. It all seems just a little unethical to me.