A champion of Canadian history, education reform, and County living, David Warrick was fervent about the need to never stop teaching the story of Canada. 

He also got worked up about the need to adapt school curriculum to contemporary needs. Continually. He was a serious, big-picture guy, and once you got him on the Canadian narrative, he was off. Intent and engaged though he was, through endless commissions and planning boards, David also liked living room chat and afternoon confabs.  It was in fact the Warricks who introduced the cinq-a-sept to Picton as a simple way of entertaining. Enabled by his wife of fifty-three years, Marilyn, master planner to David’s dreams, the Warricks were celebrated for soirees that went long past ‘sept’ at their home on Hill Street.

That home, by the way, a miniature replica of the grand Merrill House on Picton Main, is another historical legend.

David Warrick taught literature, history and Canadian humanities at Humber College for thirty years. He was passionate about what he called our Canadian identity. As an immigrant from northern England, he took to his adopted country with ferocity. He and his two brothers arrived on the Cunard line in 1956, getting off by mistake in Montreal. The Salvation Army helped get the boys to Toronto, where they met their parents and crossed the country several times in search of a home. When David finally settled in Toronto after moving twenty times, he had to play catch up at Jarvis Collegiate. Catch up he did, and  then off to graduate work at Queen’s and Windsor before a Doctorate at York.

For me, a County friend, David was always “Mr. 3M,” and I don’t mean the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. Joanie and I met the Warricks at a fund-raising event for the South Bay Museum held at the Waring House. I was astonished to learn that the Warricks were the owners of what I thought of as the finest house in Picton. Sitting atop a bluff, with a commanding view down Picton Bay, Judge Edwards Merrills built his wife a version of the Merrill Inn in 1879. The fine double-brick house with its soaring gables grabs your attention right away.  

As an old house lover, I had long admired this red brick beauty with its own waterfront promenade.  The Warricks rescued the house in 1988 from its decline as a rooming house. It had also been a home for handicapped children. Over the years, they returned it to its origins. That house, henceforth dubbed “the mini-Merrill,” with its large public rooms and expansive deck, saw many cinq-a-septs through the years presided over by the giant sheep’s horns over the fireplace in the living room.

David Warrick’s second “M” was for “the Monet picnic,” a suggestion that David and Marilyn made to take advantage of the County landscape following the cooking journals of the French impressionist Claude Monet. It was La Belle Epoque revisited. We tried a number of venues, usually accessed by their ageing launch “The African Queen” (known as the FQ because weather had erased the capital “A” on the nameplate) loaded with the cheeses, baguettes, fruit, wine and charcuteries that were the ingredients of a Monet Table.  

Our favourite site overlooked the wharf on idyllic Waupoos Island, where time has stood still. We spread tablecloths on the slope and spent hours in bucolic Monet heaven. On one occasion the ferry, loaded with sheep coming home to their summer grazing pastures, capsized as it was about to land. My dog Roger, part short-haired pointer, plunged into the water to steer the bleating ewes to the shore. On another occasion, so successful was our picnic on the beach at Soup Harbour that I gave David and Marilyn the titles of Lord and Lady Soup.

The third of David’s “M”s, and the one that consumed the Warricks the most, was Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister. They conceived a larger-than-life bronze statue to recognize the young MacDonald as a Quinte boy. Endurance, or what the Romans called persistens, is a great virtue of people who get things done, and the Warricks had tenacity to spare. Ruth Abernethy’s Holding Court, which some critics have called the finest work of this well-known Canadian sculptor, was unveiled and installed in front of the Armoury on Picton Main Street on July 1, 2015. That was the 200th anniversary of his birth, marking a return home for John A.  

Six years later, at the height of the controversy over Macdonald’s role in the implementation of the Residential School Policy, Council voted to cart away Holding Court to municipal storage, where it has been ever since. It would be the highest tribute to David Warrick to find the resolve to bring Holding Court out of mothballs so the public can again appreciate our extraordinary Quinte boy.

David laughed a lot, his thick white hair bobbing like a buoy on water. He accepted the ebb and flow of life, looking to catch a wave wherever he could. Raised in Lancashire, and shaped by Canada and the County, David Warrick died satisfied he had lived a full life and left a mark. 

I spent a few hours with David and Marilyn, the ultimate ”M” in David’s life, in hospice the day before he bid farewell. Although his body was failing, he was full of laughter and curiosity and gratitude, just like the day he and his two brothers boarded the ship to Canada seventy years earlier to start a new life.