September 8, 2003
There’s a special reunion slated to take place in Ottawa from Sept. 19 to 21. Fifty long years have passed since 50 high school girls from Canada got to travel overseas to witness, first hand, the coronation of a young Queen Elizabeth II.
Affectionately known as "the Weston girls", the bright-eyed 17-year-olds are now matrons. Chosen from across Canada, the girls were given the opportunity of a lifetime by Canadian entrepreneur Garfield Weston. Leading the girls on the trip were Weston’s daughters Miriam and Wendy, whose younger sisters Camilla and Gretchen were members of the tour. Garfield, who served as a British Member of Parliament for Macclesfield and Reta Lila Howard Weston, were the parents of nine children (six girls and three boys).
For the visit to see the coronation of the Queen, all 50 Canadian teens were turned out in identical blue suits and hats, with red leather handbags and white gloves.
It was a time of cashmere sweater sets and pearls, organdy-skirted bedroom vanity tables, a day when girls wrote in leather-bound diaries and pressed the petals of corsages in a favourite book of poems. It was an era when Jo Stafford sang You Belong to Me, when girls wanted to look like the exquisite Grace Kelly, when deportment, penmanship and ladylike really mattered. A handwritten letter bearing a stamp was savoured to read after supper out on the porch swing. It was a time when well wishers turned up shipside to catch the colourful paper streamers thrown out from travelers overseas-bound. It was a gentler more innocent time. The year was 1953.
It was a long way from home for the girls, some of whom returned to family-run farms. One can imagine how every detail of the trip could be recorded forever in the memory of a 17-year-old. The VIP list, including Winston Churchill and Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, the queens and kings of exotic lands, was impressive. But none were so infectious in their enthusiasm as the 17-year-old Canadian girls, some of whom keep the miniature model coronation coach on the mantelpiece, to this day were.
They were honour roll students in Grade 12 when they were picked by high schools across Canada to be part of Weston’s coronation tour, to be led by the irrepressible Miriam and Wendy.
The residents of small town-communities showed up in droves to see their girls off at the train station.
For one Weston girl, there was romance that turned into a wedding day when she married a man she met on the Empress of France on way to the coronation.
Garfield Weston, a father of six daughters himself paid for the entire adventure. There was the excitement of watching the ocean though the portholes of the Empress of France, the blue suits and hats, the matching luggage. The girls were awestruck to be at Stratford-on-Avon to take in The Taming of the Shrew. They witnessed the bombed-out cathedral at Coventry and were taken on a visit to Northern Ireland. Only their colouring set them apart when they attended a dance wearing identical party frocks. Crossing the English Channel, they took the train to Paris and saw Versailles--all at a time whey they were young enough to see the world with fresh eyes. They attended social functions with 50 English girls Garfield Weston had sent to Canada to strengthen Commonwealth ties.
The notion to bring them all back for a reunion, like all ideas, depended on fate. It was during last year’s celebrations for the Queen’s Jubilee in Calgary, when Weston girl Clarice (Evans) Siebens thought, "We have to do something."
Many of the girls, inspired by the trip to go on to many other wonderful things, had kept in touch.
Incredibly, 43 of the original 50 Canadian Weston girls have already been found. With the passing of half a century, only three girls had died and 34 plan to be there for September’s Ottawa reunion.
In the end, the generosity and understanding of a Canadian man called Garfield Weston made for a trip that was to change lives and to provide one of those rare adventures that last a lifetime.
Even after the passing of 50 years, the story of the Weston girls is a testimony to life.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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