Evans, Lewis and Betty (Morewood)

Robert Lewis Evans 1911-1988 & Elizabeth Anne (Morewood) Evans 1922-1993

In 1911, Emily Elizabeth (Bethune) Evans, at age forty-six, gave birth to her only child, Robert Lewis Evans. Her husband, the Very Reverend (Dean) Thomas Frye Lewis Evans, was sixty-seven, father of five adult children and grandfather of two young ones.
In 1922, Caroline Annie (Rhodes) Morewood, at age forty-two, gave birth to her second child, Elizabeth Anne (Betty) Morewood. Her husband was her first cousin, Francis Edmund Morewood, who was five years her junior. They already had a son, William Harold Morewood.
In the summer of 1944, at the Coupe in Tadoussac, thirty-three-year-old Lewis asked twenty-one-year-old Betty to marry him. She said yes, and their lives came together in December of that year.
Until the Dean died in 1920, the Evans family had spent their winters in Montreal and every summer in their house in Tadoussac, which at that time was the farthest east of the Price Brothers houses and would later be sold to the Beatties. After his death, however, mother and son moved to Toronto for the winters but still got to Tadoussac each year.
Emily sent Lewis to Trinity College School – a boys’ boarding school in Port Hope, Ontario. Lewis liked the school and had positive memories of it. This is remarkable because, on a personal level, these were difficult years. At the age of fourteen, he was hit by a severe case of alopecia, an autoimmune disorder whereby one’s hair falls out, and over the next year or so, he lost all his hair.
Between graduating from TCS and starting at Trinity College in Toronto, Lewis was taken on a European tour by his mother. They travelled extensively and visited many specialists in an effort to reverse the effects of alopecia. It was after this tour that Lewis chose to wear a wig, a decision he frequently regretted especially in the heat of the summer.
Meanwhile, Betty, one of Col. William Rhodes’s many great-grandchildren, was growing up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She attended the Baldwin School for girls and subsequently Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania. Her family would spend time in Tadoussac most summers, renting rooms in Catelier House (now the Maison du Tourisme). In 1936, her father designed and built a house, now called Windward. From then on, she never missed a summer in Tadoussac.
In 1948, Frank and Carrie Morewood sold Windward to Betty and Lewis for $1, and suddenly, Lewis, whose mother had died the year before, found himself with two cottages in Tadoussac. He chose to keep Windward, partly because it was newer, partly because it was politic, partly because of its view, but especially because he could see his boat at its buoy in the bay!
At university, Lewis had studied English, graduating in 1933, and Betty had majored in business, graduating in 1944. Lewis followed through on his plan to be a teacher and started his career in 1934 at Bishop’s College School from which he retired in 1972.
Any career plans Betty had upon graduation were trumped by her summer engagement and winter wedding... and in the fullness of time, by the arrival of Anne, Lewis, Tom, and Alan. She was of the generation when women were mothers and homemakers, and to these functions, Betty added the role of steadfast supporter of all that her husband did, and BCS benefitted from her unpaid and often unknown contribution. For the first eighteen years of their marriage, Lewis was a Housemaster. Betty knew all the boys and welcomed them into her home as a matter of course. Every teacher new to BCS was invited to Sunday dinner, and she frequently found herself hosting parties for faculty and friends. She has been called a world-class knitter and a world-class worrier (especially about her children no matter how old they were).
Meanwhile, Lewis was completely immersed in the life of the school – teaching, coaching, directing plays, and running his residences. He was one of the pioneers of ski racing in the Eastern Townships and spent many hours freezing at the bottom of a hill, clipboard in one hand and stopwatch in the other. He was an example of service and character. When he died, one Old Boy remembered him as “an oasis of calm in an otherwise harsh and demanding school.” Indeed, he was.
But his contributions went beyond BCS. From the mid-50s until his retirement in 1972, he spearheaded the Lennoxville Players, directing many plays from British farces to Broadway musicals. This was a group of amateur “actors” from all levels of the community who were, like their leader, looking for an enjoyable night out ... and all proceeds to go to a local charity.
In 1972, Betty and Lewis retired to Brockville, Ontario. Here, they joined Tadoussac friends, Ray and Coosie Price and Jean and Guy Smith. From there, they travelled to Tadoussac – for many years by boat.
An accomplished sailor, Lewis knew every cove and anchorage on the Saguenay, learned from his own experience, but even more, from local captains whom he respected and adored, and, it would seem, who held him in equal esteem. Over the years, his passion for boats gave way to his passion for fishing. There were many overnight trips up the Saguenay, often to the Marguerite, to fish the falling tide, then the rising, then up early to start again. One can still see him standing in hip-waders off the point above the crib, rod in hand, pipe upside down against the drizzle, as dawn was lighting the sky.
Betty and Lewis were practising Christians, and while their church in Lennoxville tended to be the BCS Chapel, the one that they were most committed to was the Tadoussac Protestant Chapel. Betty’s great-grandfather had been instrumental in its creation, and Lewis’s father, the Dean, had, for decades, been the summer priest. In 1972, Betty undertook to organise several summer residents to needlepoint the altar kneeler cushions with images of local wildflowers designed by her close friend Barbara Campbell, and for many years, Lewis served as the secretary on the church committee executive.
And then there was golf, which Betty loved, and Lewis tolerated, and bridge, which… Betty lovedloved, and Lewis tolerated.
For all their lives, home was where the family was, but Tadoussac was where the family was at home. Their love for Tadoussac is best articulated in Lewis’s memoir, Tides of Tadoussac, which included the Rudyard Kipling quotation:
“God gave all men all earth to love
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one place should prove
Beloved overall.”
His fascination with the history of the place was likewise revealed in his fictional book Privateers and Traders.
Theirs was a great love, a love of each other, a love of family and friends, a love of people and community, and a love of place, and that love of place, of that place, of Tadoussac, has been inherited by each of their four children and by each of their families.

William Lewis Evans