Doctor Nigel Rusted Remembers
Sir Marmaduke

Dr. Nigel Rusted remembers the kindness of Sir Marmaduke Winter, when the doctor, who has been a respected member of the medical community in St. John’s over the past 50 years, was interning at St. John’s General Hospital in March 1935.

“I picked up a bug in my throat which knocked me unconscious. There were no antibiotics in those days and I thought I would die,“ says Dr. Rusted, seated for this interview at the round dining room table at Winterholme Heritage Inn.

At that time, Dr. Rusted’s mother was a good friend of Marmaduke Winter’s first wife, Alice Lilly, and Sir Marmaduke visited the young doctor in hospital and gave him an
interesting present.

“It was a 75 year old bottle of brandy which had been owned
by local historian Judge Prowse,” says the slim physician, now retired and in his early 80s.

Whether or not the spirits did the trick, Dr. Rusted lived to
share 6 oz of the aged brandy 39 years later with Gordon Winter, when Sir Marmaduke’s grandson became Lieutenant Governor
of Newfoundland in 1974. By then he was also the doctor’s brother-in-law.

While Dr. Rusted was serving on the M.V. Lady Anderson, a medical ship which plied the island’s remote south coast in the mid-1930s, he became seasick from the reflections of the water. Sir Marmaduke, who was born on the south coast, presented the doctor with a pair of dark glasses to ease his nausea, and an army coat to keep him warm.

“He was a kind man”, said Dr. Rusted, who also remembers spending time with Sir Marmaduke in 1930, when the doctor
was medical officer on the S.S. Kyle which served fishermen on the Labrador coast in the summer months. Sir Marmaduke was going to Carbonear to spend some time with his parents and
the Kyle stopped at Foxtrap to allow him to lay the cornerstone for the Anglican Church. “He was given a trowel with his name on it”, remembers the doctor.

By this time, Sir Marmaduke was 73, and had a long and distinguished career in Newfoundland business. Born in 1857
the son of custom broker, James Winter, who was serving in Lamaline, Marmaduke, the youngest son, soon moved to St. John’s with his family. He was educated locally and at the prestigious Upper Canada College in Toronto. One of his first jobs at the age of 18 was working in the office of Lee & Company, a large leather manufacturer in New York. He stayed there a little over a year and when he returned home fresh with new ideas from the big city, he went into business as a commercial agent and importer with his brother Thomas. And so began the firm of T&M Winter Ltd which has been on the business scene in Newfoundland for over a century.

Marmaduke was knighted for service to the crown in 1925. He lived in “Winterholme”, a prestigious mansion on the corner of Circular and Rennies Mill Road, which he constructed when the city’s merchant princes were vying to own the finest mansion. The stately Queen Anne structure was painted white in its early days, but has since gone through several color incarnations, including beige, to its present day leaf green which was its most popular hue throughout the years.