Stark, William Redver, 1885-1953 : William Redver Stark was born 4 February 1885 in Toronto, to William Mackenzie Stark (1843-1922) and Ethel Copps (1854-1921). Prior to the First World War, he studied art at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, as well as a fine arts school in the United States.
He enlisted for the Great War on June 16th, 1916 in Toronto, Ontario. He listed his career as a stenographer, and wrote his birthday as March 4th, 1886. Assigned to the Canadian First Construction Battalion, later renamed the 1st Battalion of the Canadian Railway Troops, he was trained at Valcartier, Quebec. He left aboard the ship Northland from Halifax, bound for England, on Sept. 13th, 1916. He arrived in Liverpool ten days later. He landed in France on the 26th of October. His battalion worked behind the lines, constructing and repairng roads, bridges and railways to speed the passage of materials to and from the front; the men also built dugouts and bomb shelters for hospitals, and prepared lines of defence by digging trenches, demolishing pre-existing buildings, stringing wire and clearing brush. Throughout the war, he was posted in the north of France and western Belgium, specifically in the Pas de Calais and Somme regions. His battalion was active near Amiens during the offensive of 1918. Throughout the length of his service, Stark visited many small towns between the Somme and Amiens. He also visited a number of famous ports as part of his work as a sapper. He saw Dunkirk, Wimereux, Boulogne and the Chateau d'Olhain, which housed a number of Canadian troops. Between 1916 and 1918, in his spare time, he did numerous sketches of the areas where he was posted or the locations that he visited, when on leave. He was granted three separate leaves throughout his service. His first leave was for approximately three weeks, from January 11th, 1917 to February 4th, 1917. He spent that first leave in the United Kingdom. His second leave was for two weeks that began on Dec. 18th, 1917, which he also took in the United Kingdom. However, he rejoined his unit late and had his pay docked. His final leave was a ten day furlough to Paris, taken just before the war ended, on October 18th, 1918. His battalion returned to Toronto at the end of war and, on March 26th, 1919, he was discharged from the military with the rank of private as part of the general demobilization occurring at the time.
After the war, he worked as a free-lance graphic artist for the "Toronto Star Weekly". At the same time, he also worked as a free-lance illustrator of educational and children's books. Stark was married to Marjorie Crouch (died 1963), and the couple had one daughter, Anita, who died in her late teens. William Redver Stark died in Toronto on 26 November 1953. He was survived by his two sisters, Muriel Ethelwyn Carolyn Stark (1887- ?), also an accomplished and widely travelled Toronto artist, and Doris Lillian Agnes Stark (1892-1979), who was married to the Toronto portrait painter and illustrator of women's fashions, Gordon Albert Davies (1890-1982).
