Queen Anne carries on — and surrenders a secret
Anne Jones used to be in the news all the time.
More than 50 years ago, she was a new widow with two young children and decided to run for alderman. She topped the polls. One woman on city council, 20 men. And sometimes she wore shocking pink.
She went on to become the first chair of the new regional municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth and lasted a dozen stormy years. Then she served three terms as the province’s chief film censor.
This paper interviewed her many times back in the day. And one thing she would never tell us is her age.
Today, however, it’s a secret no more. “I’m 97,” she says. Amazing. As always, she is dressed for success. She wears a checked jacket, white shirt, gold-accent tie. And that hair. She’s been going to David Church for decades. Every two weeks, she takes a cab to his salon on Locke Street. She always rides up front. “I can hear better there,” she says. She asks questions, she listens. “Nearly all the drivers have good educations where they come from,” she says, “and their children are all going to university.”
Jones is mother of two. Rory was nine and Elizabeth just two when their father died. Rev. Aubrey Jones went to his study one day at Centenary United downtown and died there of a heart attack.
Jones, who suddenly had a family to support, started selling life insurance and soon ran for council in Ward One. That was 1962.
Her win amazed the city. How on earth could a woman cope? The Spectator arrived at her house one morning and photographed Jones in her housecoat serving up orange juice.
Jones ran for the city’s board of control and topped the polls for that, too. Then, in 1973, that surprise appointment as head of the new regional government. It came with a car and driver, an office in the sky atop the Century 21 building on Main East, and a salary of $31,000 a year — $5,000 more than Hamilton mayor Vic Copps.
Some started calling her Queen Anne. As it is with all royalty, most liked her but some called for her to be deposed. She sailed though it, head high.
For decades, the Queen’s castle was a classic Westdale brownbrick home, 82 Paisley North. But three years ago, the stairs got to be too much. Home now is a one-room unit on the second floor of the Caroline Place retirement home, just west of Jackson Square.
“I thought it would be like university,” Jones says. “It isn’t … But I do have a friend from Holland, another from Lithuania and a writer. You meet all kinds of people here.”
She has lunch and dinner in the dining room, where late lieutenant-governor Lincoln Alexander’s portrait hangs on the wall. She campaigned for him a long time ago. Just one of the fallen.
Another is Ellen Fairclough, first woman to serve in the Canadian cabinet, who once did Jones a big favour by telling her to stop parting her hair in the middle. Advice taken. So many others, all gone. “That’s what happens when you get old,” she says. “It’s not a happy thought. It makes me sad that I can’t see them, talk to them.”
She never remarried, and has no regrets about that.
“But I do remember one case … Well, I’m not going to tell you. You might guess. But I remember thinking, ‘Thank the Lord I didn’t marry him.’”
Jones has six grandchildren, one great grandchild. She does not dread death.
“I think everyone has a spirit. Part of our DNA is from people we don’t even know. Our spirit lives on.”
In the end, she says, it’s family that matters.
“I’d like to think that after I’m gone my children are glad I was their mother, that they have good memories of me.”