Jim Fraser Legacy / Centurion / Learning lesson

[Robin Craig]

I have never been a jeep guy as many will know.

However I was privileged to have met and been friends with the late Jim Fraser of Arnprior, ON.

I met Jim while living in Ottawa and moving with that crowd over 25 years ago.

Jim was always saving relics and passing them on to folks as project trucks or parts. I had a number of pivotal discussions with Jim and he taught me about saving rather than junking parts and vehicles if at all feasible.

As Jim was on the rebound from one of his bouts of cancer a number of years ago he asked me to go up to his shop and help him clear out a couple of his storage highway trailers behind the shop.

The tale had been told to me by him, that when a major museum moved across Ottawa, they left a lot of boxed parts in a dumpster outside. Jim saw it and over the course of a number of trips he salvaged a large number of boxed and wrapped parts of British military origin. Jim knew of my passion for Land Rovers and Ferrets.

We, through anecdotal discussions, and then later, labels on boxes, realised that the parts had come from the British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS) in Alberta.

That day, with a then friend, loaded up a large cargo trailer with as much material that we could identify or reasonably reassure ourselves as being worth saving.

Once I got all the material back to the farm, I rounded up crates and boxed it all up and put it under cover for safe keeping. Slowly over time I have been identifying the parts, with a lot of difficulty.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of being able to donate one armoured grenade stowage box for the inside of the Centurion turret to the Ontario Regiment Museum (where I am a member).

The picture shows me handing over the box to Matt Ruttledge of the Museum.

Malcolm Towrie and his "crew" are slowly making progress on the vehicle along with Brian Butts and Ian and others.

While Jim's treasures yielded two of these boxes, the second one will likely go out to BC to another collector who is restoring another Centurion and he can use it as a pattern to make more for his vehicle, as Malcolm can for theirs. I know it isn't like donating an NOS Meteor engine or new tracks and sprockets, but it is something.

I just want to say that Jim Fraser had a big affect on how I view saving all this NOS or used parts and is responsible for me dragging around boxes of parts for years now and tormenting my partner by doing so.

Thanks Jim, wherever you are, thank you for setting me straight and god speed my friend