Jon Vickers (Cottage 41) Jonathan Stewart Vickers was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, on October 29 1926, the sixth of eight children, to a family that was musical but poor. So impoverished were his parents that at one time the future Canadian prime minister, John Diefenbaker, a long-standing friend of the family, offered to care for young Jon. As a child he and his siblings sang with his lay-preacher father, a former teacher, at churches near their home. Summers were spent labouring on a neighbour’s farm, where he developed his barrel chest.
After his schooling Vickers worked variously for Safeway and Woolworth’s stores and eventually was selling tools for the Hudson Bay Company in Winnipeg. There, at the age of 23, he took part in a local production of Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta, the operetta that was to change his life. The Canadian soprano Mary Morrison encouraged him to take his hobby seriously, and in 1950 he arrived in Toronto with a scholarship to study with George Lambert. He married Henrietta Outerbridge, a missionary’s daughter, in 1953. She died in 1991. He married secondly, Judith Panek Stewart, in 1993.
He is survived by three sons and two daughters from his first marriage. In 1987 Vickers slipped quietly into retirement in Bermuda, where for many years he had lived, Jon Vickers, born October 29 1926, died July 10 2015
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