Campbell, Barbara Alexander (Hampson) 1919 -

Barbara (Bar) Alexander Campbell (nee Hampson) – 1919 –

Barbara was born in Montreal, January 21, 1919. She attended Trafalgar School and then Elmwood, in Ottawa. Her early summers were spent in Cap a l'Aigle where her parents, Greville and Winifred Hampson, rented a house.
When she and her sister Mary were teenagers, they came to Tadoussac where they stayed in the hotel. On their first arrival aboard the Canada Steamship Lines ship, the usual gang of young people was waiting on the wharf to see who would get off. Among them were two boys who would become their future husbands: Jimmy Alexander and Ted Price.
Barbara and her sister, Mary, and younger brother, John, joined the gang of young in all their fun of tennis, golf, picnics and bonfires on the beach: there was Nan Wallace (Leggat), Jackie Wallace, Billy Morewood and Betty Morewood (Evans), Jean Alexander (Aylan-Parker), Jimmy Alexander, Mary Fowler, John Turcot, Phoebe Evans (Skutezky), Ainslie Evans (Stephen), Dennis Stairs, Evan Price, Ted Price.
In 1939, the war came, and everything changed. Bar sailed to England to marry Jimmy Alexander who had joined the RAF. Their son, Michael, was born there in 1940. As a pilot in RAF Bomber Command, Jimmy was posted to bases in England and Northern Ireland, and Bar and Michael joined him, living nearby. In August, 1941, Jimmy was killed leading a bombing raid over enemy factories. Bar returned to Canada in November, 1941, with Michael sailing in a convoy on a troop ship, the Uangibby Castle. The United States had not yet entered the war but the US Navy came to help and mistakenly rammed Bar’s ship. It survived, but Bar never forgave the Americans!
In the summer of 1942, Bar returned to Tadoussac. She and Michael stayed at Brynhyfryd for the summers, and Bar spent time with many of her friends from before the war, including Betty and Lewis Evans at neighbouring Windward. In 1948, she married Alistair Campbell, a Scot who had immigrated to Canada at age 23, and joined the Sun Life Insurance Company. During the war he served in the Royal Canadian Artillery with his good friend Bob Leggat in the invasion of Sicily and Italy. Bar and Alistair lived in Montreal and later in Ottawa. Bar spent some time almost every summer in Tadoussac, bringing their daughters, Cathy, Barbara (LaForest) and Jill and later with her grandchildren. She was a keen tennis player and loved the Tadoussac Tennis Club. She painted, and some of her pictures of Tadoussac were turned into cards with her favourite poems. She also painted the wildflowers, and she and others in the community stitched these into needlepoints for kneelers in the Protestant Chapel.
Bar had rented a house for years but always dreamed of having her own. When land in Languedoc Park became available, she designed her own Tadoussac cottage. It was completed for her 80th birthday and to celebrate she invited everyone in Tadoussac to join in one of her famous treasure hunts where teams traveled on foot to every corner of Tad and returned to her new home for a barbeque supper on the lawn and the treasure found in the “fairy circle” on Pointe Rouge.
Bar continued to enjoy her house in Tad with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and her friends. She even came to ski one winter. As her health declined, she came less in her final years, but still she sang the old favourite songs and dreamed of happy times in the place she loved the most.