Preserved Stuart tanks in Canada ?

[David Dunlop]

Hello Hanno.

The late Peter Ford used to make regular stops at Levy's yard on his way through to Ottawa to research the Archives on Canadian Wartime Production records. I believe one of his last visits was with Brian Asbury at the time Levy's was shut down. The property was huge, as was their military parts inventory, and their entire inventory control system was based on a manual card file system. Each part was assigned a bin number, on a shelf, in a shed in a given row on the property. This system worked extremely well in the pre-computer days when all the staff were familiar with it.

Towards the end of Levy's, the system had started to fail them badly. Older, experienced staff left the company and younger ones just didn't give a damn. It was not uncommon at all for Peter to go into a shed and look at the label on a parts bin that said item "XYZ" was stored there. The front most box would indeed hold that part, but if you pulled that box out, one or more other boxes of completely unrelated parts could be found, pushed in behind. Staff would just shove a new box of parts onto the first available open shelf, relabel the shelf and walk away. Someone else would later come along looking for what had originally been on the shelf, see something new stocked there and just assume the original part had been sold off/no longer in stock.

Sadly, this all happened just as world wide interest in collecting and restoring military vehicles was catching on and the value of their property in Toronto was climbing. Pity they couldn't have held on long enough to convert all of their inventory to a computer system. They could have made far more of a fortune in the collector's market than they even did in the official government sales and commercial venues.

Levy's was probably the largest and longest active military surplus dealer in Canada. Princess Auto out of Winnipeg would have been a distant second. Levy's was also a major player in the inspection and repackaging of military parts and it has long been suspected they were a major supplier of surplus military parts to foreign governments "on behalf of the Canadian Government", when it was politically incorrect for the Canadian Government to be seen as taking direct action themselves.

Yes. There are probably some VERY interesting stories yet to be revealed about Levy's. Some of them probably worthy of a book at least, or a good movie!