WEYMAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-06-30 published
WEYMAN,
Ronald▼ C.T. (1915-2007)
It is with great sadness that the family of Ron
WEYMAN announces
his passing on June 26, 2007. Ron left this world peacefully
in his sleep at the place he loved best - the Weyman farmhouse
outside of Flesherton, Ontario, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in Erith, Kent, England in 1915, Ron came to Canada with
his family at age 8. His artistic pursuits started early and
he was acting, painting, writing and taking photographs, before
joining the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1939, serving
as Lieutenant Commander in the North Atlantic, D-Day and South
East Asia theatres where his achievements were 'mentioned in
dispatches' to the Admiralty. He was also recognized as a war
artist, with his work hanging in the National War Museum. He
joined the fledgling National Film Board of Canada in 1946 and
took his award winning documentary filmmaking skills to television
in 1954 when he joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
in Toronto to produce and direct television drama. Over a 26 year
career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Ron was a broadcast
pioneer responsible for thousands of hours of television and
the establishment of hundreds of careers. His key contribution
was taking television 'out of the studio and into the streets'
in the 1960s with the groundbreaking series 'Wojeck'. His programs
won critical acclaim, attracted millions of viewers, and created
the template for Canadian drama that continues to this day. After
retiring in 1980 he continued to direct, traveled, wrote three
novels and a book of memoirs as well as several screenplays,
learned to play classical guitar and returned to his first love
- painting. In 2001 he was recognized for his contribution to
Canadian culture, receiving the Governor General's Masterworks
Award. Slowed only by age, he was finally felled by a stroke
four years ago and has now found merciful release. Ron will be
greatly missed by his loving wife Vanna with whom he shared 60 years
of marriage and raised five creative children - Cindy
(BISAILLON,)
Jenny (WEYMAN-
CHARTOFF,)
John ('Tiki',) Peter ('Bay') and James.
He enjoyed watching his family grow with the arrival of 11 grandchildren
- Tosh, Kit, Raffa, Caley, Jesse, Teo, Luke, Riley, and Emma
WEYMAN; Chloe
BISAILLON and Miranda
WEYMAN-
CHARTOFF. Holidays
and weekends often saw the gathering of the family tribe at 'The
Farm' where Ronny presided at the head of the table with his
toasts of 'yo, yo, yo!'. Ron also leaves his dear sister - broadcaster,
writer and sculptor Rita Greer
ALLEN, widow of Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation veteran Robert
ALLEN; sons and daughters in-law Robert
CHARTOFF, Heather
GILMAN, Anne
LINDSAY, Anne
McCLELLAND and Richard
PARTINGTON; and nephews and nieces Astrid
WEYMAN,
Pief
WEYMAN
and Wendy THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON.
His family is so grateful for the time they
were able to share with Ronny, even in his twilight days, and
for the enormous, loving legacy that he has left behind. Fare
you well, old sailor. Thanks to all the caregivers who helped
Ronny through his last years, especially those at the Queen Elizabeth
Centre, and the South West/Grey Bruce Community Care Access Centre,
Care Partners and Red Cross. Cremation has occurred and a gathering
of Friends and family to honour his memory and celebrate his
accomplishments will take place at the Arts and Letters Club,
14 Elm Street, Toronto from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, July 8,
2007. Memorial Celebration at noon with reception to follow.
No flowers please but donations are encouraged to the Heart and
Stroke Foundation.
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WEYMAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-07-07 published
Pioneer filmmaker turned hard-hitting social issues into popular
television
He returned from naval duty in the Second World War to pioneer
such shows as Wojeck, writes Sandra
MARTIN, and to set standards
for 'what an archetypal Canadian drama series ought to be'
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page
S11
Forty years ago, when John Vernon as Wojeck and Gordon Pinsent
as Quentin Jurgens, M.P., were upholding Canadian attributes
of social justice on the country's black-and-white television
sets, Ron WEYMAN was in his golden age at Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation Television drama. A visual artist and a navy veteran
who had seen H.M.S. Hood go down and landed at Omaha Beach in
the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Mr.
WEYMAN learned to make documentaries
at the National Film Board and to shoot film on location by watching
Italian directors Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini in
action. That's the cultural baggage Mr.
WEYMAN brought to Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation-television in the mid-1950s. Within
a decade, he had persuaded the corporation to shift from videotape
to film and to send directors out of the studios and into the
streets so that they could use real locations in home-grown stories
that reflected contemporary social issues. And he had put Wojeck,
a short-lived but stellar dramatic series, into the imaginations
of viewers.
One early fan was Ivan Fecan, president and Chief Executive Officer
of CTVglobemedia. Back in 1966, when Wojeck premiered, he
was a 12-year-old boy. "In Wojeck, I saw performances and stories
and images of Toronto in a way that I had never seen before and,
frankly, rarely afterward. It made a huge impression on me,"
he said in a telephone interview this week. Of Mr.
WEYMAN, he
said, "I didn't know him well personally, but I was a huge fan
of his work. He was the real deal, the real ground-breaker in
Canadian drama, and I don't think he ever got enough credit for
what he proved could be done."
A little more than 20 years later, when Mr. Fecan was program
chief at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he hauled six Wojeck
episodes out of the vaults and put them back on the air. Mr. Fecan
still thinks that Mr.
WEYMAN's work sets the standard for "what
an archetypal Canadian drama series ought to be today."
Ronald▲
Charles
Tosh
WEYMAN was the third
son of four children
of Margaret
(POTTS) and Joshua
WEYMAN, a machinist. He was born
in England in the middle of the First World War. The family immigrated
to St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1923 because Mr.
WEYMAN's older
brother Charles had settled there. Within a few years, the
WEYMANs
had moved to the Danforth area of Toronto, where Ron attended
Danforth and East York Collegiates. When the Depression hit and
Ron had to leave school to help out financially, he took on a
variety of jobs, including working as a tea taster.
As soon as he had some money in his pockets, he bought a small
boat and taught himself to sail. He was also very interested
in painting and acting and, with his younger sister (broadcaster
and sculptor Rita Greer
ALLEN,) became part of a local theatrical
group that swirled around Dora Mavor Moore. Through these connections,
Ron met University of Toronto undergraduates Alison (Ashy) Alford
and her older sister Giovanna (Vanna), the daughters of John
Alford, who was the founding chair of the university's fine arts
department.
After the Second World War broke out in 1939, Mr.
WEYMAN enlisted
in the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve. Despite his lack
of formal education, he was in the first group of Royal Canadian
Navy Volunteer Reserve recruits who were seconded to the Royal
Navy for officer training. About the time that France was falling
and Dunkirk was being evacuated, Sub-Lieutenant
WEYMAN was qualifying
as a specialist with anti-submarine detection equipment.
Among other ships, he was the only Canadian to serve on H.M.S. Achates
as part of the escort-destroyer group attending on the battlecruiser
Hood when she was sunk in 10 minutes by the German capital ship
Bismarck with the loss of all but three hands during the Battle
of the Denmark Strait on May 24, 1941.
After Achates hit a mine on the Murmansk run, with the loss of
half its company, SLt.
WEYMAN joined H.M.C.S. St. Croix on convoy
escort duty in the North Atlantic during some of the most treacherous
U-boat engagements of the war. He and Ashy were married in October,
1941, while he was home on leave. About 16 months later, when
he was overseas again, she died in her sleep -- probably of an
epileptic seizure.
As the balance finally shifted in the war, he was promoted to
first lieutenant on a landing ship, tank (LST) and responsible
for getting what he called a "floating radar palace" on Omaha
Beach in June, 1944. Subsequently, he received a promotion to
lieutenant commander and a new assignment: command of an LST
bound for Southeast Asia, where he was to lead Indian troops
onto the beaches of Malaya and Burma. Before he could see action,
the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
and the Japanese surrendered. In describing his war service,
he said he "was mined once, torpedoed once and got sunk a third
time."
Life was not all battle stations. He had continued to paint on
his various vessels and while on leave in London contributed
some canvasses to an exhibition of Canadian War Art at The National
Gallery in London. One of his paintings, U-Boat Attack, was purchased
by The National Gallery in Ottawa. Another dozen works (five
paintings and seven drawings) now belong to the Canadian War
Museum.
After he was demobilized in Halifax, Mr.
WEYMAN wanted to become
a serious painter and headed to Ottawa to consult with a curator
at The National Gallery. That same weekend, he encountered Sydney
Newman of the fledgling National Film Board, who suggested he
try film instead. By chance, Nick Reed had just come back from
Greece with the film footage that would later be used in the
film Out of the Ruins. He took Mr.
WEYMAN on as an assistant,
and when Mr. Reed returned to his home in South Carolina, he
inherited the film. "I was hooked," he wrote later.
He was also becoming hooked on his sister-in-law, Vanna. Her
husband, John
TERRACE, a bomber pilot in the U.S. Army Air Force,
had been shot down over Magdeburg, Germany, in 1944 and was missing
in action for two years until his death was finally confirmed.
She and Mr.
WEYMAN became close because of their bereavements
and their mutual interest in the visual arts. They married on
June 28, 1947, and eventually had five children: Cindy, Jenny,
John (Tiki), Peter (Bay) and James.
Mr. WEYMAN worked for the National Film Board from 1946 to 1953.
He made more than 20 films, including After Prison, What?, which
won the prize for best theatrical film at the Canadian Film Festival
in 1951, and The Safety Supervisor, which earned a first award
at the Venice Film Festival in 1952. After seven years, he quit
to freelance in Italy, the ancestral home of many in his wife's
family. While they were abroad, he wrote and filmed eight documentaries
in Italy and the Middle East for the National Film Board and
the United Nations, learning how to shoot film on location rather
than in studio, a skill that he brought back to Canada and to
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he began working
in 1954 under Robert
ALLEN, who was the head of television drama
and the scriptwriter/accountant who had married Mr.
WEYMAN's
younger sister Rita.
His lasting contribution began in the 1962-63 season with his
invention of The Serial, a program that presented Canadian novels
on film and tape and employed Canadian actors, directors, writers
and producers. It was on The Serial that Mr.
WEYMAN produced
dramatizations of Thomas Raddall's The Wings of the Night, Morley
Callaghan's More Joy in Heaven and the pilots that would become
Wojeck, Quentin Durgens, M.P. and Hatch's Mill, working with
such directors as Paul Almond, David Gardner and later Daryl
Duke.
Tell Them The Streets Are Dancing, based on the files of Doctor Morton
Shulman, was written by Philip Hersch and starred John Vernon
(obituary February 4, 2005), Bruno Gerussi and Patricia Collins.
The plot pitted a crusading big-city coroner investigating the
deaths of five Italian construction workers against their greedy
bosses and corrupt government inspectors. Audiences loved it
and Mr. WEYMAN quickly commissioned enough scripts from Mr. Hersch
to run 10 episodes the next season, staring Mr. Vernon as Wojeck.
As a model, Wojeck (which ran from 1966 to 1968) was the forerunner
of NBC's Quincy, M.E., and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
Da Vinci's Inquest.
The series, which used the
WEYMANs' own home as the set for Wojeck's
house, attracted 2,900,000 viewers with an overall audience enjoyment
of 80 and climbed into the top 10 of most popular shows when
sold to Britain. Another pilot, Mr. Member of Parliament, starring
Gordon Pinsent as a naive and conscientious politician, and directed
by Mr. Gardner, became the hit series Quentin Durgens, M.P.
Both programs brought hard-hitting contemporary social issues
(abortion, suicide, abuse of power) into dramatic stories played
out in locations that Canadians recognized as part of their own
worlds. But none of it lasted, for the same reasons that have
beleaguered so many other "golden ages" in Canada's cultural
history: a lack of money, vision and commitment. The Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation couldn't commit to a third season of
Wojeck or promise steady employment to the actors, directors
and producers, so they all followed the jobs and the money to
Los
Angeles.
Even Mr.
WEYMAN toyed with moving to California.
In a brief to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation management in
April, 1970, a frustrated Mr.
WEYMAN complained that a vacuum
existed between the policy planners and the drama producers that
"threatens the future of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation drama"
and "the survival of our community of talent." He insisted that
"a given volume of production is essential on a continuing basis,
if we hope to maintain a healthy climate in which talent can
survive" and he outlined the various measures he thought should
be taken, including training and letting people make mistakes
in regional and local productions rather than on the network,
where the new writer or new director "falls on his face in front
of millions of people" while the public and the critics "quite
properly" wonder "if we know what it is we are doing."
He continued to make drama at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
in the 1970s with shows such as Corwin, The Manipulators, Welcome
Stranger, The Albertans and a dramatization of Margaret Laurence's
novel The Fire Dwellers, but nothing exceeded the audience rapport
he had achieved a decade earlier with Wojeck. "The tragedy is
that he got sidetracked," Mr. Fecan said. "He could have gone
on to do so much more, but he never got the chance and consequently
he didn't get the credit he deserved for what he did."
After he retired from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in
1980, Mr. WEYMAN turned back to painting and to writing screenplays
and a new form: novels. He borrowed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
famous fictional character Sherlock Holmes and created new adventures
for him after his presumed death at the Reichenbach Falls in
the Swiss Alps in The Adventure of the Final Problem. Instead
of mouldering in his grave, the famous sleuth was flitting about
Canada from 1891 to 1894 at the behest of Queen Victoria's son,
the Prince of Wales and later Edward VII. At least that was
the story Mr.
WEYMAN spun in his trilogy, Sherlock Holmes and the
Ultimate Disguise, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Mark of
the Beast and Sherlock Holmes Travels in the Canadian West. He
also wrote In Love and War: A Memoir, a vivid account of his
romantic and naval experiences in the Second World War. As well,
he directed the occasional film, learned to play classical guitar
and travelled.
About four years ago, Mr.
WEYMAN suffered a stroke that left
him paralyzed on one side and unable to speak or to feed himself.
Late last month, sensing the end was near, his family took him
to a farmhouse northwest of Toronto that he and Vanna had bought
in 1964, the fount of so many happy family occasions. "Every
time we left the farm, he would say, 'Goodbye, this place,' "
she said in an interview this week. That's where he died, two
days before they would have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.
Ronald▲
Charles
Tosh
WEYMAN was born in Erdith, Kent, on December 13,
1915. He died near Flesherton, Ontario, on June 26, 2007. He
was 91. He is survived by his wife Vanna, five children, 11 grandchildren,
his sister Rita and extended family. A celebration of his life
will be held tomorrow at the Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street,
Toronto.
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