This Woman Disgusts Me

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/780267--veterans-families-angry-over-bid-to-sell-wartime-artifacts?bn=1

Outrage is growing over the sale of a significant Canadian military collection amid claims that many of the artifacts are family treasures belonging to people who never intended them to be sold.
Adding fuel to the fire are reports that hundreds of World War II items from the Robert Stuart Aeronautical Collection and Camp X exhibit housed in the history buff’s museum have already been sold on eBay, following his death seven years ago.
Since Stuart’s daughter, Deirdre Stuart, advertised the contents of the museum on the Internet last month, benefactors have come forward to say numerous personal possessions were donated or loaned by veterans or their families, who want them back.
Newcastle firefighter Cameron Smith is one of them. His grandfather Harry Smith, who taught Allied agents safecracking, lock-picking and explosives demolition at Whitby’s Camp X spy training school, handed over his uniform and single-shot pistol in a “gentleman’s agreement” years ago.
“My grandfather wouldn’t have intended this stuff to be sold,” says Smith. “They do not belong to (Deirdre Stuart). This is a Canadian heritage collection and should be treated as such.”
Stuart, who’s asking $1 million for the entire collection on an aviation website, Barnstormers.com, says Smith and other claimants are out of luck.
“If you didn’t put it in writing, you pretty much gave it to us,” she says. “Like, hello? How stupid are people. We’ve had this museum for 33 years. It’s ours.”
She insists her father purchased most of the military and aviation collectibles housed in a city-owned building at Oshawa Municipal Airport on Stevenson Rd. Accusing dishonest types of “coming out of the woodwork to get a piece of the pie,” Stuart says she’ll only return articles to a couple of people who had a written loan agreement.
But documentation is practically nonexistent, says a longtime friend.
“Bob was such a lovely man and everyone liked him so much, no one would ask him to sign a document.”
He says the collection includes a “priceless national treasure” — a 1944 oil painting of ace fighter pilot Lloyd Chadburn that was donated by Chadburn’s family.
Since Robert Stuart died, artifacts worth between $100,000 and $200,000 in total have been sold on eBay by a third party, says a collector of militaria who knows the museum’s contents well. The sales include an RCAF World War II pilot’s lifejacket he witnessed being given to Robert Stuart to display.
Some of the items are so rare there’s no doubt where they came from, says the collector, who didn’t wish to be identified.
Not true, says Deirdre Stuart. “Tell them to prove that anything was ever on eBay.”
A friend who helped out at the museum says benefactors never intended the collectibles “to make money for his wife and daughter.”
“He’d turn over in his grave with what’s happening now,” Brian Munro says of the kind-hearted man who enjoyed “enormous support and respect from the community.”
Local historian and author Lynn Philip Hodgson, who fears the collection might leave the country, has launched a campaign to buy it and find a permanent home in Durham Region. He’s received many calls and emails from people who loaned artifacts in the belief that the museum, which is open on Sundays through the summer, is government-run.
“Usually, the stipulation was that they must always be on display or be returned to the owner,” says Hodgson, an authority on Camp X who also loaned items that he’d like back. A committee he’s set up is applying for charitable status so they can set up a bank account and start raising funds.
Bomber pilot Angus Dixon’s prized sheepskin-lined RCAF flight boots seem gone for good, says his dismayed widow, Jane Dixon.
“Stuart kept asking him for his flight boots to complete the pilot’s regalia on a mannequin,” she recalls. “It meant quite a lot to him. I don’t think he’d be very happy about it being on eBay.” After Angus died in 2000 at age 85, she donated his dress uniform and three flight posters.
Engineer Brett McLellan is similarly upset after Deirdre Stuart told him she has no record of his grandfather’s things, which an ailing Robert Stuart pointed out when McLellan was at the airport on a job in 2003.
“I feel sick to my stomach,” he says, thinking about his grandfather’s RAF uniform, Distinguished Flying Cross, pistol and other belongings being sold to a stranger.
“I really, really want to get the DFC back,” he says. “It’s family history.”

This woman should be ashamed of herself, but I think it's safe to say she doesn't have a conscience. “Like, hello? How stupid are people. We’ve had this museum for 33 years. It’s ours.” Karma's a bitch, Deirdre, karma's a bitch.