bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2005) — Summer/Fall 2005 // Été/Automne 2005, p. 7
Tom Carter died peacefully in hospital in The Hague, the Netherlands on May 18, 2005, after a brief bout with cancer. His funeral took place on May 23 at the Church of Saint Philip and Saint John, The Hague. He is buried in the Dutch capital. Tom was in his ninetieth year.
He was predeceased by his first wife, Marie Louise Pattin, a member of the French foreign service, whom he met and married while he was serving in Warsaw in the early 1950s. She died in 1973. His second wife was Alice Landwehr Clejan, a Romanian-born Dutch citizen, whom he met while serving as Ambassador to the Netherlands. She died in 2004. Tom is survived by his stepdaughter Monique (Olivier Romieu) and three grandchildren in Paris and by three Dutch stepdaughters and their families in The Hague. In Canada he leaves nieces and nephews in Toronto.
Tom was born in Toronto on June 10, 1915, and was educated at Upper Canada College and Bishop’s University (BA 1934). In 1937 he won a scholarship to the London School of Economics and completed an M.Sc.Econ. in 1939. A self-declared pacifist in his student years, Tom joined the Canadian Army in 1940, enlisting in the 2nd Field Unit of the Royal Canadian Artillery. Commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, he served in the United Kingdom and then in Italy, where he was wounded and won the Military Cross for outstanding action at the Moro River. Sent to hospital in England, he recovered and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy. He was wounded for a second time and in 1945 was discharged with the rank of Captain. Tom was among the first of the war veterans to join the foreign service, entering the Department of External Affairs in June 1945. His brother Harry, also a veteran, had joined in January of that year. Tom was posted to Brussels in October 1945 and then to Rome in 1947. He returned to Ottawa in March 1950 for a tour of duty and in April 1952 he was appointed Chargé d’Affaires a.i. to Warsaw. Following a three-year period in Ottawa from 1954-57, he was appointed Canadian Commissioner, International Commission for Supervision and Control (ICSC), in Vietnam. In 1959 he attended the Imperial Defence College, London.
In April 1960 Tom was made Commissioner to Nigeria pending the declaration of its independence. He then became Canada’s first High Commissioner to that country in October of that year. Concurrent with this appointment, he became High Commissioner to Sierra Leone in 1961 and Ambassador to Senegal, Dahomey and Niger in 1962. His subsequent ambassadorial appointments were to Egypt and Sudan, 1967-70; to the Netherlands, 1972-76; and to Austria and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, 1976-79, where he was a member of the Board of Governors. Following his retirement in 1979, Tom Carter took up residence in The Hague, home to his second wife, Alice. He remained there until his wife’s death in 2004, when he made a visit to Canada seeing relatives and friends in Toronto and Ottawa.
Tom was devoted to the work of the foreign service and to the friendships he made during his career. He was much respected for his professional abilities and he could be a hard taskmaster. He could on occasion take advantage of his height, his stentorian voice and his didactic manner to strike momentary terror into the hearts of officers, young and older, whom he reckoned were scanting the demands of the task at hand. Yet he was quick to provide with sympathy and good humour the support and encouragement that deserving staff members required. He always gained the respect and affection of those who served with him.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2005) — Summer/Fall 2005 // Été/Automne 2005, p. 7. Read the rest of this issue →
