Hilary Weston won plaudits for her work as Ontario’s lieutenant-governor

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When Hilary Weston was appointed lieutenant-governor of Ontario in late 1996, the press reaction was almost uniformly negative and at times vicious. “Prime Minister Jean Chrétien couldn’t have made a more inappropriate choice for the position,” Richard Brennan wrote in The Toronto Star, calling the wealthy former model “our version of a society debutante.”

The late columnist Allan Fotheringham called Mrs. Weston the “wife of a billionaire,” whose “only politics is Chanel,” predicting with biting sarcasm that she would quickly tire of handing out mine safety certificates in Sudbury, one of the duties he imagined she would be burdened with.

Coming to her defence, the opinionated journalist and novelist Sondra Gotlieb hardly made things any better. “What’s wrong with wearing Armani or Saint Laurent if you can afford it? Perhaps it would be deemed more acceptable if Mrs. Weston’s signature apparel was a Toronto Blue Jays jacket and cap.”

Yet the critics were soon proved wrong. Mrs. Weston, who died on Aug. 2 at age 83, dove into the role of lieutenant-governor with the same enthusiasm and dedication that characterized her involvement in the Holt Renfrew retail chain (owned by her husband’s family), her writing career and her diverse philanthropic endeavours.

Mrs. Weston crisscrossed the province, opening hospital wings and meeting with countless community groups, mingling easily with the public and displaying deep empathy with people facing personal challenges. Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente, initially a harsh critic, turned into an admirer. “I confess, Hilary won me over,” she wrote in a column at the end of Mrs. Weston’s five-year term in office. “Hilary Weston is very good at her job.”

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Penny Collenette, who was director of appointments in the Prime Minister’s Office in the Chrétien years, said Mrs. Weston was initially reluctant to take the job. “She had so many questions. She was serious and concerned that if she took the position she wanted to do it right.” Recalling the early attacks on Mrs. Weston, she said, “I can only assume it was a mixture of jealousy and misogyny.”

“In the end, everybody realized that she was an outstanding lieutenant-governor,” says Ms. Collenette, who later worked for the Weston family and was a director of Holt Renfrew. Among Mrs. Weston’s most concrete achievements was establishment of the Lieutenant-Governor’s Volunteer Award. She donated her salary to charity.

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Hilary Mary Frayne was born in Dún Laoghaire, a seaside town outside Dublin, Ireland, on Jan. 12, 1942, the eldest of five children of Michael Frayne, an appliance retailer, and his wife, the former Noel Guerrini. She attended Loreto Abbey Dalkey, a fee-paying Catholic girls school where she showed interest in acting and planned to pursue studies in drama. “We were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination,” she once said.

Those plans changed when her father died and 17-year-old Hilary went to work as a fashion model. She left school to help her mother out and allow her brothers to attend university. Tall, blonde and strikingly beautiful, she was a precursor of the supermodels who followed. Deirdre McQuillan, fashion editor of The Irish Times, said that Hilary made her name modelling on behalf of Sybil Connolly, a designer who “put Irish fashion on the international map,” and travelled to the United States to model Ms. Connelly’s collections. “I was sort of a muse,” Hilary said later.

Galen Weston, the youngest son of Garfield Weston and the Canadian-educated heir to the bakery and retail fortune, was sent to Ireland in the early 1960s to expand the Weston-owned supermarket empire. The story is that Galen, in his early 20s, spotted a billboard of Hilary in hot pants and arranged a date with the young model.

“I recall that we were introduced by friends on a blind date and that we both had colds and were not terrific company,” Hilary recalled years later in a memoir. They started dating and within three years, in 1966, they were married in a Klondike-themed wedding at Henley, a posh town near London, England. The Westons’ retail business in Ireland was expanding but Galen was called to return to Canada to turn around the declining fortunes of Loblaws, the struggling supermarket chain. “It was a terrific mess,” Hilary recalled.

Her introduction to Toronto was not happy. “I nearly died,” she recalled. “Total shock. It was freezing and so far away. I had no thought I would be staying. It took me two years before I could feel that I belonged.” During that period, Mrs. Weston gave birth to two children, Alannah and Galen Jr., born less than a year apart.

Nicole Eaton, whose husband was from the family that ran the eponymous department store chain, met Hilary in that period. Both of them felt like outsiders in wealthy circles, Ms. Eaton told The Globe. “She was Irish and I was French Canadian. It was very much old Toronto.” They became fast friends and years later collaborated in writing In a Canadian Garden, a coffee-table book featuring profiles of Canada’s most distinctive private gardens.

“We’d never published anything before,” Ms. Eaton said in an interview. But the book, with photos by Freeman Patterson, turned into a bestseller. A follow-up book on entertaining at home was less successful as was their effort at creating a new Toronto garden show. But Ms. Eaton, later a Conservative senator, said Mrs. Weston was always a hard worker. “She was fearless and dynamic.” The two women later had a falling out but eventually reconciled.

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The Westons continued their connection with Ireland over the years, particularly after the family bought control of Brown Thomas, a high-end clothing retailer in Dublin, where Mrs. Weston became a director. The family also acquired Penneys, a thriving fast-fashion chain that was rebranded as Primark outside Ireland. And she and Galen were active socially as well. “They were considered a bit of a golden couple in Ireland,” Ms. McQuillan said.

All that ended in 1983 when the Weston family were targets of a kidnapping plot by the Irish Republican Army. Because of a tipoff, the family was absent from Roundwood Park, their estate in Wicklow, when police arrested the assailants after a shootout. Galen was in England at the time playing polo at Windsor with Prince Charles. But the experience was nevertheless traumatic and the estate was sold.

The Weston family’s interests kept expanding in Canada, with the purchase of Holt Renfrew in 1986. There were suggestions that Mr. Weston had bought the chain as a plaything for his wife.

“That’s nonsense,” she responded. “Galen bought it because he felt it was going at a very good price.” Mrs. Weston became deputy chair and though she didn’t run the company on a daily basis, she was actively involved in its direction.

When the Weston family also bought Selfridges, the exclusive British department store chain, she also became a director and their daughter later became creative director. The Westons sold Selfridges in 2022.

All this time, she and Galen maintained an active social life, including with the Royal Family, and their homes and luxurious events would feature regularly in Vogue, Town & Country and Vanity Fair.

Besides homes in Toronto and on Georgian Bay, the couple also owned a flat in London and a home in Fort Belvedere, an 18th-century pile near Windsor Castle, leased from the Crown Estate. The sprawling home, which includes a polo facility, was the home of Edward VIII before he abdicated in 1936 and is rumoured to be a possible future home for Prince William and his family. It’s also where Mrs. Weston died.

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After wintering for several seasons in the Bahamas, the Westons decided they wanted a place of their own in Florida. So in the 1980s, they purchased 416 acres of old citrus groves north of Vero Beach and transformed it into an architecturally curated planned community for the super-wealthy called Windsor. Several Canadians joined them there. Mr. Chrétien and his wife, Aline, would visit Windsor when their daughter, France, had a home there with her husband, André Desmarais, the Power Corp. of Canada heir.

She also worked with her daughter in establishing a small art gallery at Windsor in Florida that included works from the family’s collection and was its creative director. Over the years, there have been exhibits of art by Peter Doig, Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns, open to the public by reservation only.

Mrs. Weston’s philanthropy was as diverse as her other interests. In 1978, she founded the Irish Fund of Canada, which contributed to peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, and she was founding chair of the Mabin School in Toronto. She later was chair of the Renaissance campaign for the Royal Ontario Museum, helping raise $300-million for its controversial renovation, including $20-million from the Weston family.

She founded The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation, which has committed close to $150-million since 2021, supporting organizations innovating in health care and research, social services, refugee settlement, art and culture, education and the environment.

Aside from those big-ticket items, Mrs. Weston also took over funding in 2011 for the nonfiction prize awarded annually by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, renamed the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Charlie Foran, who won the prize that year for his biography of Mordecai Richler and later served as the trust’s executive director, said that she was committed to promoting nonfiction, even though it is not as high-profile as fiction.

“I knew her to be someone who loved books and writers,” Mr. Foran said. Mrs. Weston later also launched an international version of the prize.

Mrs. Weston was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2003 and received honorary degrees from 10 universities in Canada and Ireland.

Mrs. Weston leaves her daughter, Alannah; son, Galen Jr.; four grandchildren; and her siblings Deirdre, Josephine and Robert.

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