John Edward Barker.Courtesy of family
John Edward Barker: Chartered Accountant. Father. Curser. Optimist. Born Dec. 4, 1935, in Chatham, England; died May 6, 2023, in North Bay, Ont., from heart failure; aged 87.
John came a long way from Henry Street where he entered the world at home. An uncle before he was born, and left fatherless by the age of nine, John was raised by his feisty mother, Flo, who once threatened an intruder with a frying pan. The postwar Labour government meant John could attend a grammar school, something that only the wealthy could do in England before. First, though, he had to pass the entrance exam, and Flo made sure he did.
Always good with numbers, he went to Sir Joseph Williamson’s Mathematical School in Rochester. Athletic, tall, and skinny, John was a natural cricket bowler with a wicked arm. He also loved soccer. At 17, Flo insisted he leave England for a better life. She sent him to Canada to live with his war-bride sister and her husband on their orchard in St. Catharines, Ont. Used to rationing, John was delighted when he arrived at the airport in Gander, NL, to be allowed to put as much sugar in his tea as he wanted. On his first day on the farm, John assured his brother-in-law that he could drive a tractor, then promptly dumped half a load of carrots in the dirt when he gunned it.
John first met Yvonne in St. Catharines in the late 1950s. She had also arrived from England and was working as an English teacher. Yvonne was dating someone else, but one day, while pondering how to fix a broken fuse in her apartment, she thought John more likely to respond cheerfully to a request for help. She was right. He arrived in record time. In 1960, they went back to England to be married. Back in Canada, they waited five years before having children, first Jane and then Kate two years later.
John never questioned Yvonne’s immediate return to teaching after having children. He did not, however, cook, or do laundry, or change a diaper because that wasn’t what men did in the late 1960s and 1970s.
John became a Chartered Accountant, working first as an auditor for the tax department, then General Motors and the Bay, moving the family from St. Catharines to Oshawa, Ont., then to Winnipeg and Toronto. At every house, he built decks, sometimes fences, and happily used his two daughters as cheap labour, teaching them to mix concrete and drive nails straight by the time they were six. Things didn’t always go to plan, however. At their cottage in Ontario’s Kawarthas region, a 15-foot section of steps lay rotting on the forest floor for close to 30 years. John left the mess there in the 1980s after an explosion of curses and as a monument to epic SNAFUS.
John was self-employed at the end of his career, which allowed him to travel through the James Bay region, an experience that amazed him.
When Yvonne neared retirement, they moved to Cobourg, Ont., which meant still more deck building. Once there, they adopted a rescued Scottie dog and predictably named him Hamish. John proved his worth as a dog parent to the foster family by immediately dropping to his knees and asking repeatedly, “Who’s a good boy?”
When John turned 80, he and Yvonne made their last move to North Bay to be near Jane and her family. Generous to a fault, John was forever slipping his two grandkids a 20 or a fiver – whatever he had on him.
All his life, John maintained an ease with people and a curiosity about others. He was quick to laugh. One of his favourite expressions was, “What the hell?” usually given with a shrug and a smile that meant yes, let’s have ice cream, or a pint, or start a business.
Kate Barker is John’s youngest daughter.
To submit a Lives Lived: lives@globeandmail.com
Lives Lived celebrates the everyday, extraordinary, unheralded lives of Canadians who have recently passed. To learn how to share the story of a family member or friend, go online to tgam.ca/livesguide