Preserved Stuart tanks in Canada ?

[peter simundson]

There were at least 8 Stuarts against the back fence in Levy's.
In 1954 the hill was washed away and down they went into the ravine. Levy's promptly sent crews don to strip off the parts. The turrets and hulls were left on city property. Don then decided in 1976 to recover the three best hulls and turrets. He persuaded the Service Corps to help him do the recovery.
Off they went with wreckers and flatbeds After a month the three were at Base Downsview. The following Spring Don was short of cash so sold one for scrap. The scrapper took the wrong one. He took the one with all the hatches engine covers and back doors. The following year Don GAVE the other two, with turrets to me. I took the outside .30 cal mount off one turret. About two months later I phoned Elliott's and asked if they would store them (bad move). Any way one was sold to a Quebec restorer, who never picked it up (just a turret) and the other went to that hard worker Markus.
The other turrets and parts behind Levy's were scrapped by Weston about
15 years ago in a Park cleanup. More to come??

[Bob Phillips]

Thank you Peter for setting the record straight! You havent got any old recovery photos tucked away do you ????

[Dean (Ajax)]

I saw one earlier this year in a fellows yard somewhere North Of Toronto..needs total restoration..but I am sure "he" will get to it.

Dean

[Bob Cohoon]

Markus Schneider bought the M5A1 hull and turret last year, and he is working on it now and gathering parts for it. You can see it at his website " Wiliy`s Acres" on the internet. The other turret and engine cover went to a collector in Washington state a few years back. I am sure Markus will do a nice job on it, he is very capable of even fabricating missing parts. The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa has a restored M5A1 on display which I think they traded from the Littlefield collection in California.I heard of another M5A1 up near Sept Iles, Quebec, but I never heard too much about that one.It was supposedly bought from Southeastern Equipment in Georgia back when they were selling some from Portugal. I heard that hurricane Hazel washed some tanks into the river behind where Levy Auto Parts was on Black Creek Drive, but i thought they were Shermans.Maybe there was a Stuart or 2 in that, and they`re probably still in the river. One of the big companies that bought stuff from Levy`s was Tekmotiv, and they had an M41 that they were using as a yard tractor, wonder where that is now?

[David Dunlop]

Hello Hanno.

The late Peter Ford used to make regular stops at Levy's yard on his way through to Ottawa to research the Archives on Canadian Wartime Production records. I believe one of his last visits was with Brian Asbury at the time Levy's was shut down. The property was huge, as was their military parts inventory, and their entire inventory control system was based on a manual card file system. Each part was assigned a bin number, on a shelf, in a shed in a given row on the property. This system worked extremely well in the pre-computer days when all the staff were familiar with it.

Towards the end of Levy's, the system had started to fail them badly. Older, experienced staff left the company and younger ones just didn't give a damn. It was not uncommon at all for Peter to go into a shed and look at the label on a parts bin that said item "XYZ" was stored there. The front most box would indeed hold that part, but if you pulled that box out, one or more other boxes of completely unrelated parts could be found, pushed in behind. Staff would just shove a new box of parts onto the first available open shelf, relabel the shelf and walk away. Someone else would later come along looking for what had originally been on the shelf, see something new stocked there and just assume the original part had been sold off/no longer in stock.

Sadly, this all happened just as world wide interest in collecting and restoring military vehicles was catching on and the value of their property in Toronto was climbing. Pity they couldn't have held on long enough to convert all of their inventory to a computer system. They could have made far more of a fortune in the collector's market than they even did in the official government sales and commercial venues.

Levy's was probably the largest and longest active military surplus dealer in Canada. Princess Auto out of Winnipeg would have been a distant second. Levy's was also a major player in the inspection and repackaging of military parts and it has long been suspected they were a major supplier of surplus military parts to foreign governments "on behalf of the Canadian Government", when it was politically incorrect for the Canadian Government to be seen as taking direct action themselves.

Yes. There are probably some VERY interesting stories yet to be revealed about Levy's. Some of them probably worthy of a book at least, or a good movie!

[Bruce Parker (RIP)]

I recall going through Levy's yard just as they were closing. Row after row of long wooden buildings with narrow isles down the middle, floor to ceiling bins on either side. The light coming in from the tiny open door at the far end gave some idea of the size. In many places the roof had fallen in. Out back along the fence there was a stack of wood/composite CMP 60cwt boxes in great shape.

I collected about three crates of parts including a lot of carrier stuff and even a pair of periscopes for my Fox. The sales guy looked at what I had and said "$200". That was it.

The sad part was that I was in competition with the scrappers. I looked in a bin, picked up a part and said "jeep" or "carrier" or "CMP". The scrappers were doing the same except saying "steel" or "brass" or "aluminum" and then throwing them into the correct bin for melting down.

[Brian Carey]

A small mystery then: I attended a "Liberation of Holland" parade and display in Perth, Ontario in June of 1997. At this event on display was a restored Stuart tank with a placard on it that recounted the story of Levy's and Hurricane Hazel. The placard claimed that 3 tanks had been washed into the Humber but only one, that particular one was recovered and restored. It was parked so I can't say if it was a runner or not.

From the above statements, I am uncertain which tank I saw!

Also, has anyone done any metal detecting on the embankment behind former Levy's? I'm thinking that between 1954 and 1995 a great number of bits and pieces may have been buried and still lurk below the surface where the cleanup crews overlooked.

Anyone?