Anthony Bingham-Wallis

Anthony Bingham-Wallis was a sailor, soldier, shepherd and storyteller. He died on February 5th from prostate cancer.

 Anthony was born on April 10, 1924 in Harrogate, England. His father Joseph was a storied-sea captain who fought in the Royal Navy Reserve in the Baltic in the First World War then survived Atlantic convoys of the Second World War. His mother, Ruth was a successful stage actress in the early part of the last century.

 As a youngster, Tony took to the sea, sailing up and down the coast with his father and twin brother Geoffrey. He was educated in part in an old convent that had been converted to a boys school, where he was taught in the old fashioned way. He recalled one teacher pulling rocks from his pocket and asking his students what they were and when they didn't know, the lecture began.

 As a boy at the onset of the Second World War, he watched the dogfights of the Battle of Britain over the coast.  Unlike his older brother Peter who joined the air force and Geoffrey who joined the merchant marine, Tony joined the Royal Artillery as a mobile radar technician, volunteering to remove mines and booby-traps in his spare time. Some of the mines were made of wood to avoid metal detection, so his bomb disposal tools were: a bayonet; his hands; his ingenuity and patience.

 Tony participated in the D-Day landings and with his unit under Canadian command, then headed into France, Belgium and Germany. While he claimed to have had a “good” war, he was witness to some brutal events and harrowing tales beyond the death of good friends, burying the remains of the missing and rescuing displaced women from marauding gangs of released prisoners of war.

 When he got back to England, he attended agricultural college and set off to shepherd in the Welsh mountains around Mount Snowdon. One day, he sought refuge from a fierce storm under a massive and imposing bolder. After the storm passed he returned to the farmhouse, he was told he wasn't the first to take refuge there, it was where the hymn Rock of Ages was composed. Tony returned to England worked the farm of his good friend Mr. Howe before immigrating to Canada in 1954.

 Times were tough and he was staying at the YCMA. But for the charity of a then stranger ($50 to pay his rent) he might have been destitute. Luckily, he found a good job shortly after, managing a vineyard in the Niagara region. Once on his feet, he moved to a basement apartment in Rosedale where by all accounts he and his good friends and roommates, Tom and Arthur Moody, lead a remarkable social life both in the city and in the near-north: prospecting, white water canoeing and camping up and around Bancroft.

 In 1964 he met and married Cecelia Bloomer, who like he, shared a joy of adventure and eccentricity. In 1980, he convinced Cecelia to move to Schomberg, Ontario with their son Timothy, where Tony purchased a farm to raise sheep after retiring from his final career - real estate. Since then, he spent  much of his time mending fences and cursing coyotes and regaling friends and neighbours with tails of an adventurous life well and honestly lived.

 Curiously, Tony's twin brother Captain Geoffrey Christopher Bingham-Wallis predeceased him by two days of the same disease. 

 Friends may call at St. Mary Magdalene Anglican Church, 116, Church St., Schomberg for visitation on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 from 10 a.m. until the time of a funeral service at 11 a.m. Interment Lloydtown Anglican Cemetery. Arrangements entrusted to SKWARCHUK FUNERAL HOME, Bradford (1-800-209-4803).

 If you wish, in lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Mission to Seafarers (www.toangels.ca).

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