Nina Ann Wiltshire

Nina Ann Wiltshire 17 Jan 1944 - 30 October 2025

Daughter of the late Rev. Errol Carlton Wiltshire & Ethel Adina Clarke of Barbados. Mother of Andrew & Rachel Delph of Toronto Dearly beloved sister of Murcot Wiltshire of Ottawa Cousin and adoptive sister of Joan Mary Goddard Milne and adoptive sister of the late Sita Gosine of Trinidad.

Cousin of Joanne Wiltshire Askew of New York, Colin Edwards of Pennsylvania, Francis Blackman of Florida & Margaret & Bill Blackman of Barbados, Selma Clarke Anstead of England, Dorothy Clarke Griffith of Barbados and many, many more Clarke, Tudor & Sealy cousins in England, Barbados & Trinidad.

Predeceased by her all her uncles and aunts, her cousins Linda & Daisy Edwards, Ian Chandler & the Rt. Hon. Tom Adams, Prime Minister of Barbados, adopted sister Sita Gosine of Trinidad, family friend Edris Dillon of Tobago and her dearest and closest life-long friend, Mags Sinclair Gasson of Tobago, England & Argentina.

Ann was born at the home of her great grandfather, Tudor Lodge, in St. Michael, Barbados, our family home for some two hundred years. She was very proud of her Tudor ancestors who settled in Barbados in 1638. Shortly after birth she began the nomadic existence that was to last throughout her childhood. Our father, then in training for the Methodist ministry, was first stationed in Princes Town, in South Trinidad, where she spent the first

two years of her life before returning to Barbados when he left for study at the Union Theological Seminary in Jamaica. In Barbados she attended kindergarten at the Ursuline Convent. In 1949 our father returned from Jamaica and we moved to St. Vincent where we lived for three years at Mount Coke, overlooking the village of Stubbs and with a stunning and unforgettable view out to the beautiful but sometimes stormy Caribbean to Bequia and the Grenadine islands.

It was there that her earliest friendships began thanks to her outgoing personality: she loved people. Among them were the Samuels of St. Vincent, the Commas, nieces of family friend Barbados Prime Minister Errol Barrow, and the children of the Administrator, Walter Coutts, later Sir Walter Coutts, the last British Governor General of pre-independence Uganda. It was here that our schooling began at home with our mother.

On leaving St. Vincent in 1952 we moved to the village of La Brea, close by the Pitch Lake, on the oilfields of South Trinidad. It was in this isolated place that Ann developed a passion for reading which lasted her whole life, her special love being nineteenth century English literature. Our first real school was the tiny private school of the Antilles Petroleum Company where our mother had been invited to be principal and was our teacher. Ann flourished there again making lasting friends, before beginning secondary school at Naparima Girls High School in San Fernando. There she boarded at the home of the Methodist Minister, Rev. Crosby whose daughters became like sisters to her.

It was in La Brea that she began her music studies, becoming a proficient pianist and later in Barbados an excellent organist. it was wonderful to hear her play on the huge pipe organs of St. George’s Parish Church and James Street Methodist Church in Barbados, particularly when playing one of her favourite hymns, “I vow to thee my country”! In Port of Spain she also became the accompanist to a well-known Trinidadian quartet the Quavers.

From La Brea the family moved in 1956 to Scarborough, Tobago and a new school, Bishop’s High School, where she was to complete her secondary education. She was loved by all her classmates who soon dubbed her “Smiley Ann”. The friends she made there, and earlier in St. Vincent and La Brea, formed an extraordinary network, keeping in touch for seven decades, even though scattered around the globe. Among them: Joan Samuels Simien of St. Vincent & Hawaii, Margaret & David Crosby of England, Pat Crosby Halsey of Washington, Mags Sinclair Gasson of Tobago, Katie Haber Nahas of Tobago, Beirut & Montreal & her brothers Halim of Michigan and Andre of Florida, Una Wilson Anderson of Tobago and Washington, Angela Forgenie Ottley of Trinidad, Eleanor Ottley Gittens of Tobago, Orella Charles Warner of Trinidad and Chicago, Ingrid Barclay of Trinidad & Ottawa, Cynthia Mural Birch of Trinidad, Angela McNeil of Tobago and Boston & Maudlyn Piggott Crosby of Tobago.

On leaving Tobago the family was next stationed in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Ann began working at the Library of the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies. Having been taught by our mother to swim almost before she could walk, she became an excellent swimmer, a daily noontime fixture at the University pool. It was at the University that she met her husband, an engineering student, married and moved to British Guiana. She then emigrated to Canada, fleeing the political violence there, and settled in Toronto, finding herself in a city not very welcoming to non-white immigrants. But ever mindful of our father’s admonition never to be intimidated by anyone, she held her own and was never afraid to speak her mind! Loudly! She quickly obtained a position at the University of Toronto library where she remained until retirement.

Separated then widowed at a young age she struggled to raise her two children as a single mother, but in spite of the difficulties she was adamant that they should have an education at least the equivalent of the excellent British private school educational system she had enjoyed and which was far superior to the public school education system in Canada. She made huge personal sacrifices to ensure that Andrew & Rachel went to the best private schools in Toronto.

Raised a Methodist, when our father resigned from the Methodist Church to become an Anglican priest Ann followed in his footsteps: then living in downtown Toronto, she became a staunch member of St. James Anglican Cathedral, where Andrew also sang in the choir and where the Dean was Barbadian Douglas Stoute.

Ann never lost her childhood love of travel, and in later years actually was able to visit family and friends in Barbados and Trinidad, England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland and visit Italy, Mexico and Cuba and see much of Canada and the United States. Ann shared my own passion for Opera and for many years we had annual subscriptions to the Canadian Opera Company performances which we attended together. But she also developed a passion for cinema and for over twenty years never missed the Toronto International Film Festival, originally the Festival of Festivals, where she volunteered and assisted in its planning.

Eventually the strain and stress of life took its toll on her physical and mental health, ultimately leading to her untimely death. She is now at peace.

But in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais”:

“Peace, peace! she is not dead, she doth not sleep -

She hath awakened from the dream of life -

...

She has outsoared the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch her not and torture not again;

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

She is secure...

She lives, she wakes - ‘t is Death is dead, not she;

Mourn not for (her) ...