Patricia Holden Collins
Actor David Niven called her Blue Eyes. General Dwight Eisenhower, then leading the Allied war effort in Europe, posed for her – the first time he'd been shot by a professional female photographer.
And she was one of only six photographers allowed inside Westminster Abbey to cover the 1947 wedding of The Queen and Prince Philip. After the ceremony, young Pat Holden climbed onto a building ledge high above Trafalgar Square to capture the panoramic scene – the cheering throngs greeting the royal couple as they made their way to Buckingham Palace.
It was with that same adventurous spirit that, five years earlier, the 18-year-old Holden had fudged her age and enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces. So that her British birth records would not be checked, she told recruiters that she'd been born on what was then the Nazi-occupied Isle of Guernsey.
In an age that would now find the absence of women in any camera pool puzzling, Holden's achievement might get short shrift. But at the time, it was a rare event.
Eisenhower – meeting in London with Air Vice-Marshal Robert Leckie – was so struck by the novelty of a female professional that he asked to meet the young shooter, and later autographed the picture.
One afternoon, in April, 1945, working on the photo desk, Holden received a call from a colleague in Germany. "Don't leave," he told her. "I'm sending you material you'll want to see."
The ensuing package contained the first incredible photographs of newly liberated Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp, where the naked bodies of emaciated victims – among them, doubtless, the corpse of Anne Frank, who had died there only days before – lay stacked by the thousands. Holden later called it the most memorable event of her career.
"It was horrible when those photos surfaced," she later recalled. "That will stay with me forever. We stayed late that night to develop the negatives."
Patricia Mary (Holden) Collins died on Nov. 26 of heart failure at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital. She was 87.
But for all her professional distinctions, says her son, Terry Collins, "What truly defined her in life was her profound success as a wife, mother, grandmother and friend to so many."
Born Aug. 28, 1924, in Wallasey, across the Mersey River from Liverpool, she was the second eldest child of Arnold and Dorothy Holden. To escape the German aerial bombardment, she came with her mother and younger brother, Larry, to Canada in the fall of 1939 when she was 15.
After a short period in Montreal, her mother returned to England, where she worked with MI5, scrutinizing the mail for letters written in code. Her father, wounded in the First World War when three machine gun bullets passed through his arm, was then serving in the Home Guard. Patricia and Larry went on to Winnipeg.
In a video produced at her final home, Sunnybrook's veteran's wing, she remembered standing with two friends outside an army recruitment centre, when three young men went in to enlist. On the spot, the women decided to join them, "as a way to meet boys."
Instead, she recalled, she was posted to the Women's Manning Depot – an all-female unit. "I'll never meet a man," she thought. Thus, when someone asked for volunteers to learn aerial photography in a co-ed environment, she grabbed the opportunity.
Trained during a 12-week course at Rockcliffe Air Station in Ottawa, she spent a year shooting air force graduating classes, and was then posted overseas. "That was like falling on my feet," she said.
From London, Holden covered military weddings, funerals and medal presentations, but was also dispatched – with her Speed Graphic press camera – to photograph scenes of London's war-time destruction. She eventually rose to the rank of sergeant.
"I think she took the whole thing as an adventure," says Larry Holden, her brother. "She was gifted with being able to get on with people. She made automatic friends."
With demobilization in 1945, Holden returned briefly to Canada. At a party in Ottawa, she met Flight Lieutenant Arthur Collins, a former Spitfire and Mustang pilot who had specialized in reconnaissance photography (winning the Distinguished Flying Cross and, in 2004, the French Legion of Honour). A whirlwind romance ensued.
But then her beau was sent to Winnipeg to work in air force public relations, while Holden won a London-based job with Reuters. There, she shot visiting celebrities (in addition to Niven, she met Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Shirley Temple and other American movie stars), fashion shows and Royal Family events.
Even then, she remained a novelty. At one point, Pathé Films chose her as the subject of a short newsreel documentary, Women Going Places, that ran in British cinemas.
In 1948, Holden returned to Canada intending to buy a new camera. To pay for it, however, she needed a job, so she applied at the Toronto Telegram. They rejected her, but found her personal wartime stories so compelling that they ran a story about her. Arthur Collins, then living in Toronto and working in advertising, saw the article, promptly tracked her down, and asked her out.
"I had no way of knowing that this date [at the Old Mill]would last for half a century or more," he later wrote. "But I was already convinced that the right bell had rung with the right lady at the right time."
They were married the same year and would ultimately have five children (and seven grandchildren). Thereafter, the children became the favourite targets of her camera lens.
Pat Collins was not good at everything, however. Before the wedding, she took a job as a $30-a-week elevator operator at the Royal York Hotel. There, she managed to jam the head of a guest between the doors. A few days later, she managed to lock herself out of the lift. It took workmen half a day to haul the unit into a position from which the doors could be pried open.
"When it was time for me to leave," she recalled – for a new job as a staff photographer with Canada Pictures – "no one protested."
Ironically, among her first assignments was the opening of Sunnybrook Hospital.
Her husband forged a hugely successful career in advertising, moving the family to Hudson, Que., in 1960 for three years and then back to Toronto to run Foster Advertising. Pat raised the children: daughter Kathy, followed by sons Michael, Terry, Kevin and Brian.
She also opened her home to a succession of pregnant girls, in need of support. Her husband, recalls son Terry, conditioned his approval on the assumption that he would not, "under any circumstances, drive any of them to the hospital at delivery time, and be questioned as the father."
Later, in 1972, with all the children in school, Pat Collins began volunteer work and earned her Realtor's licence, enjoying a long, successful career with Federal Trust.
One day, she stumbled upon a badly neglected farm property, then tenanted by a group of drug-happy rock 'n' roll musicians, their female admirers and 15 cats. She tracked down the owner and, overcoming her husband's skepticism, bought the 1.35-acre property for $18,000.
Over the years, the couple transformed what became known as The Farm into a gracious family retreat, adding a swimming pool, tennis court and other amenities.
Although everyone knew her wartime stories, it wasn't until she moved to Sunnybrook, a few months before her death, that Collins hung photographs taken during that period. "It was a wonderful way to introduce herself and revisit some of the memories with others," Terry said. "But she never made much of it. We had no idea until we discovered the Pathé newsreel."
His mother, he said, regarded the royal wedding as her professional highlight and was thrilled to have taken the Eisenhower photo and to have a signed copy.
Pat Collins seems to have lived her life with a reflexive can-do spirit. Rather than deter her, adversity seemed to challenge her.
Once, recalls her friend Bridget Lawson, they were driving from Pickering, Ont., to Toronto when they had a flat tire on Highway 401. "There we were in our long skirts and fur jackets," with no access to a telephone. "Pat was convinced that someone would help us, and of course a wonderful young man came along and in no time had the tire changed. What I remember most about this was Pat's conviction that all would be well, and how we laughed as we climbed back into the car, scarcely noticing the dirty splashes on our skirts."
Collins and Lawson became "instant soulmates" when they met following services at St. Georges Church in Pickering. They had a great deal in common: Both were English, had come to Canada during the war as teenagers, had joined the services, had married Canadians and were living in Pickering.
In a self-published family memoir, Before We Forget, written in 2005, Arthur Collins called his wife of almost 60 years "my invincible, indispensable and incredibly wonderful partner." Arthur died in 2008.