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Ingeborg Woodcock and Canada India Village Aid
David Gordon Duke of Canada India Village Aid provided the following obituary notice for The Vancouver Sun:
One of the most intriguing guest appearances in Canadian biography-and certainly the briefest-occurs on page 259 of the first volume of George Woodcock's autobiography Letter to the Past (1982):
"In 1943 at a party in Great Russell Street, I met the very private person who became my wife, and so began the relationship that has sustained my life since then. Her exemplary desire for anonymity I have to respect, even though I do not share it.";
Enter and exit the unnamed Ingeborg Woodcock, whose long and remarkably active life changed those of many thousands of people around the globe, none of whom ever knew she existed. A lifelong, defiant chain smoker, she died of cancer on Thursday Dec. 11; she stipulated there be no memorial service. Yet those who knew and (mostly) loved her must break faith now in making, finally, some slight public acknowledgement of her accomplishments and example.
To write about someone who refused to be written about means I must write about myself. I first got to know George and Inge when my partner Russell and I house-sat for them in 1979 while they travelled abroad researching a new book. Our main duty was feeding their beloved cat Alfie his daily rations of cornflakes and chicken livers, and the racoons who came each evening to the back door their nightly rations of chocolate chip cookies.
That tiny house on McCleery Street in Kerrisdale was one of the most remarkable dwellings in Western Canada: utterly spartan, yet filled with Asian art, artifacts and crafts collected on the world travels, and paintings (mostly gifts) by a who's who of the Canadian art world. There were no luxuries: Inge kept a cheap transistor radio in the kitchen tuned to the CBC, and George typed his books on a tiny plastic portable typewriter sitting atop a home-made desk. Only two "modern"; gadgets stood out in this resolutely self-sufficient environment: a huge kiln in the basement (Inge studied pottery with Bernard Leach), and in George's study an ancient photocopier on which they duplicated newsletters for the two charities they created and directed: the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society (TRAS) and Canada India Village Aid (CIVA).
Spending a couple of weeks there was an indoctrination into the Woodcock code of moral anarchism: being good meant working hard, with no complaints and no expectation of thanks.
Here is a little bit of what Inge did not want you to know. She was born Ingeborg Hedwig Elisabeth Linzer in 1917, her mother Polish, her father a minor German aristocrat. She fled Nazism in 1936 for London, and was briefly married to British journalist Frederick Roskelly. Her friends there included Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester and (after that fateful party at which she met George Woodcock) George Orwell. In later life Inge became a particular intimate of the Dalai Lama, who in the late 1990s sent his personal physician to Vancouver in hopes of curing her arthritis.
How Inge would scorn such name-dropping! She was notoriously sharp at the slightest manifestation of swollen ego, once storming away from the head table at a charity banquet when the celebrity host began praising his own charitable endeavours.
She wasted no energy on tact. A phone from Inge usually started: "I have found a trustworthy agency helping the victims of [insert latest international emergency]. How much will your cheque be for?"; The most efficient fund-raising tool in Western Canada was an open secret: fear of Inge.
She and George exploited their friends and acquaintances ruthlessly for good causes: you quickly found yourself straining your back in a human chain gang transporting boxes of sale books into St. Mary's Church, or licking stamps for an appeal on humane treatment of farm animals. Many fled her bluntness; those who stayed frankly adored her, however warily. Whenever Woodcockists met we shared Inge anecdotes: her denunciation of seatbelts as an infringement of civil liberties; her scorn for the cultural bureaucrats who had "ruined"; the CBC; her passion for driving George along Highway 0 and across the US border for hamburgers at the Fairway Café in Linden, Wa.
She got crankier in old age, as we all shall. After George's death she spent months taking down poems he dictated to her in the small hours. She completed his translation of Proust, mocking the errors made on every page "by Scott-Montcrieff! and by Woodcock!,"; but was unable to find a publisher who would return her calls. She railed against her "imprisonment"; in a care facility. ("The staff are very nice, but everybody here is nuts! Including me!";) She refused invasive medical treatment at the end, determined to die as she had lived, at her own pace. She continued to see straight through everything and everyone. She is irreplaceable.
She continues to do good: the proceeds from the sale of her home go to the Woodcock Fund of the Writers' Trust of Canada "to provides emergency financial assistance for established Canadian writers who find themselves in crisis.";
[This obituary appeared in the Vancouver Sun in December 2003.]
One of the most intriguing guest appearances in Canadian biography-and certainly the briefest-occurs on page 259 of the first volume of George Woodcock's autobiography Letter to the Past (1982):
"In 1943 at a party in Great Russell Street, I met the very private person who became my wife, and so began the relationship that has sustained my life since then. Her exemplary desire for anonymity I have to respect, even though I do not share it.";
Enter and exit the unnamed Ingeborg Woodcock, whose long and remarkably active life changed those of many thousands of people around the globe, none of whom ever knew she existed. A lifelong, defiant chain smoker, she died of cancer on Thursday Dec. 11; she stipulated there be no memorial service. Yet those who knew and (mostly) loved her must break faith now in making, finally, some slight public acknowledgement of her accomplishments and example.
To write about someone who refused to be written about means I must write about myself. I first got to know George and Inge when my partner Russell and I house-sat for them in 1979 while they travelled abroad researching a new book. Our main duty was feeding their beloved cat Alfie his daily rations of cornflakes and chicken livers, and the racoons who came each evening to the back door their nightly rations of chocolate chip cookies.
That tiny house on McCleery Street in Kerrisdale was one of the most remarkable dwellings in Western Canada: utterly spartan, yet filled with Asian art, artifacts and crafts collected on the world travels, and paintings (mostly gifts) by a who's who of the Canadian art world. There were no luxuries: Inge kept a cheap transistor radio in the kitchen tuned to the CBC, and George typed his books on a tiny plastic portable typewriter sitting atop a home-made desk. Only two "modern"; gadgets stood out in this resolutely self-sufficient environment: a huge kiln in the basement (Inge studied pottery with Bernard Leach), and in George's study an ancient photocopier on which they duplicated newsletters for the two charities they created and directed: the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society (TRAS) and Canada India Village Aid (CIVA).
Spending a couple of weeks there was an indoctrination into the Woodcock code of moral anarchism: being good meant working hard, with no complaints and no expectation of thanks.
Here is a little bit of what Inge did not want you to know. She was born Ingeborg Hedwig Elisabeth Linzer in 1917, her mother Polish, her father a minor German aristocrat. She fled Nazism in 1936 for London, and was briefly married to British journalist Frederick Roskelly. Her friends there included Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester and (after that fateful party at which she met George Woodcock) George Orwell. In later life Inge became a particular intimate of the Dalai Lama, who in the late 1990s sent his personal physician to Vancouver in hopes of curing her arthritis.
How Inge would scorn such name-dropping! She was notoriously sharp at the slightest manifestation of swollen ego, once storming away from the head table at a charity banquet when the celebrity host began praising his own charitable endeavours.
She wasted no energy on tact. A phone from Inge usually started: "I have found a trustworthy agency helping the victims of [insert latest international emergency]. How much will your cheque be for?"; The most efficient fund-raising tool in Western Canada was an open secret: fear of Inge.
She and George exploited their friends and acquaintances ruthlessly for good causes: you quickly found yourself straining your back in a human chain gang transporting boxes of sale books into St. Mary's Church, or licking stamps for an appeal on humane treatment of farm animals. Many fled her bluntness; those who stayed frankly adored her, however warily. Whenever Woodcockists met we shared Inge anecdotes: her denunciation of seatbelts as an infringement of civil liberties; her scorn for the cultural bureaucrats who had "ruined"; the CBC; her passion for driving George along Highway 0 and across the US border for hamburgers at the Fairway Café in Linden, Wa.
She got crankier in old age, as we all shall. After George's death she spent months taking down poems he dictated to her in the small hours. She completed his translation of Proust, mocking the errors made on every page "by Scott-Montcrieff! and by Woodcock!,"; but was unable to find a publisher who would return her calls. She railed against her "imprisonment"; in a care facility. ("The staff are very nice, but everybody here is nuts! Including me!";) She refused invasive medical treatment at the end, determined to die as she had lived, at her own pace. She continued to see straight through everything and everyone. She is irreplaceable.
She continues to do good: the proceeds from the sale of her home go to the Woodcock Fund of the Writers' Trust of Canada "to provides emergency financial assistance for established Canadian writers who find themselves in crisis.";
[This obituary appeared in the Vancouver Sun in December 2003.]
Submitted on September 1, 2006 in By David.
