Sonja Bata was a young bride from Switzerland when she settled in Ontario with her husband Thomas shortly after the end of World War 2. She joined him in the challenging task of building and expanding the Canadian branch of the world-renowned Bata Shoe Company. Their partnership, both as husband and wife, and business partners, is the stuff of legend. And in this episode of Countless Journeys we hear from their daughter Christine Schmidt, about what drove her mother’s incredible success, which apart from the business, included a rich volunteer life, as well as the creation of the Bata Shoe Museum, home to the world’s largest collection of footwear. “They found Canada as a fairly young country, just a land of incredible opportunity where you could if you really wanted to do something, you could jump right in and you could do it.”
Countless Journeys - Legends - Bata Episode
OPENING MUSIC
PAOLO VO
There’s a remarkable building at the corner of Bloor West and St. George Street in downtown Toronto.
It’s made of limestone and glass. It’s three stories high. But it doesn’t look like any other three storey building you’ve seen. For one thing, it has a noticeable tilt, with the roof swooping up from one end to the other, and the walls askew.
The inspiration for the design was a shoe box.
That’s because the building is home to the Bata Shoe Museum, the world’s largest collection of footwear - more than thirteen-thousand shoes - some of them almost five thousand years old.
Today on Countless Journeys - you’ll hear all about the woman who was the driving force behind that Museum - Sonja Bata - a key partner in the Bata Shoe Company that she and her husband Thomas led for many decades.
Christine Schmidt
she really felt strongly that every single person should use whatever talents we have to better society and preserve the planet.
PAOLO VO
That story today on Countless Journeys.
OPENING MONTAGE
PAOLO VO
Welcome to Countless Journeys, from the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.
I’m Paolo Pietropaolo, and I’m with Countless Journeys producer Tina Pittaway. Hi Tina.
TINA VO
Hi Paolo.
PAOLO VO
You’re here to help us get to know the amazing Sonja Bata.
TINA VO
That’s right and what an incredible life she led. Have you ever been to the Bata Shoe Museum?
PAOLO VO
I’ve never been inside - but I must have walked past it hundreds of times during my years at U of T. It was always on my list of things to do someday - and then before you knew it, life took me away from Toronto. But I can easily picture it just by closing my eyes. It’s not a building you easily forget!
TINA VO
It’s a remarkable building. The Museum is what she’s widely known for, so I was interested to learn more about that, as well as the story of what brought her and her husband to Canada in the first place.
PAOLO VO
And what brought her here was the Bata Shoe Company?
TINA VO
That’s right.
Christine Schmidt
to come to a country like Canada that was free and open to opportunity and open to multiculturalism, I think they found that very, very exciting.
TINA VO
This is Christine Schmidt.
CS
I am Sonya and Thomas Bata's daughter
CS
they found Canada as a fairly young country, just a land of incredible opportunity where you could if you really wanted to do something, you could jump right in and you could do it.
PAOLO VO
When did they come to Canada?
TINA VO
Well Thomas Bata moved to Ontario prior to he and Sonja dating actually. He was born in Prague in the former Czechoslovakia.
And he was working for the family business that his father had co-founded in 1894.
PAOLO VO
The roots of the company go that far back?
TINA VO
Yes, and in fact the Batas had been shoemakers for some 300 years if you can believe it! Going back 8 generations by the time Thomas’s father is involved.
PAOLO VO
That’s amazing.
TINA VO
Now by the time Thomas arrives in Canada, as I mentioned, it was 1939. He was 29 years old.
His father, Thomas Sr., died in a plane crash several years earlier in 1932.
So Thomas’s uncle, Jan Bata, had taken over as the head of the Bata Company, which was a huge multinational company that encompassed a lot more than shoes.
They were in the energy sector, agriculture, forestry, transportation, and much more beyond that…
PAOLO
How many people did they employ?
TINA
Well at the time of Thomas Senior’s death in 1932, the parent company employed more than 16,000 people around the world.
So by 1938, 1939, with war looming - Thomas and his uncle Jan made it a real priority to get operations up and running in Canada.
They chose an area in Southeastern Ontario to build, essentially from scratch, a company town called Batawa.
PAOLO VO:
Batawa?
CS
And the name comes from a combination of the name Bata and Ottawa.
TINA VO
Batawa is on the west bank of the Trent River, in what is today the city of Quinte West.
Christine Schmidt…
This was, in fact, where my father really started his leadership of the business and it was their landing spot in Canada and he came with 100 Czech families, set up a business here, and Batawa was elected for various reasons for location, so the families actually arrived, most of them in July and August of 1939.
There was a small village nearby and families that arrived stayed with local families for the first few months because they have to build these little buildings that I remember as a child, which were somewhat reflective of Le Corbusier in design. very sort of square little houses.
PAOLO VO
I’m just looking at some of the pictures online of this community and it’s remarkable. Those houses are just as Christine describes.
Where were these families from in Czechoslovakia?
TINA VO
They were from a community called Zlin which was a company town in the Moravia region of what is now the Czech Republic. And it too was a company town created by the Bata Company.
And as Christine mentioned, they arrived in the summer of 1939...
CS
and shortly thereafter Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Germans, and so they actually became enemy aliens, which was a little bit difficult, as you can imagine. Here they are in a new country. And with the start of war, there must been a huge amount of stress on on everybody.
PAOLO VO
So they flee Europe to escape the war and the effects of war follow them to Canada.
OK I see in these photos images of factory equipment - these are huge pieces of equipment, and there is a lot of it.
Was that shipped over from Czechoslovakia as well?
TINA VO
It was. In fact, you can imagine it being wartime. You know, manufacturing was basically being devoted to the war effort. So grabbing as much equipment as you can and getting it out of the country if it was, you know, tethered to your business and how how how you manufactured product was critical and a pretty fraught process, if you can imagine.
CS:
And there was a German freighter, apparently, that was carrying their possessions that arrived in the port of Montreal. And it was being requested the Germans requested it not to allow anything to disembark, but that the ship should return to Germany. And it was only through somebody who apparently notified my father that this was happening, who managed to make a few phone calls, and the RCMP they managed to turn the ship around and actually get it to unload all of this equipment. Otherwise, the factory never would have been built.
PAOLO VO
My goodness I can see how that would definitely be a stressful situation!
This is really incredibly challenging stuff for any business leader to be trying to manage.
And for Thomas Jr. what a way to cut your teeth in the family business.
TINA VO
It’s really high stakes stuff.
Now this as I say is all before Thomas and Sonja got married. But it’s important to just lay a bit of the foundation for what the roots of the business were here in the Canadian operations that she would be marrying into in a few years time.
PAOLO VO
So now that we know a bit of the back story of Thomas Bata, tell me more about Sonja.
TINA VO
Sonja Wettstein was born in 1926 in Zurich and was raised there. And her family and the Batas were connected through business.
CS:
my mother's father was an international lawyer based in Switzerland and worked with my father's company, so they had known each other, but there was a 12 year age difference. So although they had met a number of times, it really wasn't until she was 18 that they actually noticed each other.
my father was an amateur pilot and he actually took my mother on a flight in a little prop plane to propose, and so we've always joked that she had to say yes.
And it actually foreshadowed many millions of miles that they travelled together, building the business their lives together.
TINA VO
Sonja and Thomas were married in 1946, and that’s when she joined him in Canada.
CS:
And they were thrilled that they felt that they could in slightly different ways, but each in their own ways make a contribution to this country.
PAOLO VO
And so she joined Thomas in Batawa in 1946… I’m guessing that must have been quite the culture shock, moving from Geneva to small town Ontario.
TINA VO
Most definitely, but Christine Schmidt told me that her mother dove right in and got to work in what would be the first of a lifetime of volunteer projects in Canada.
CS:
imagine her finding herself pretty isolated in a small town in Ontario, not someone to sit around and cook dinner, although she did that too very well.
So she starts the girl guides there. And that culminated in her being on the international board of the Girl Guides for years.
PAOLO VO
Sonja Bata was also a key figure in the building up of the business wasn’t she?
TINA VO
Yes she was, certainly in terms of the Canadian operations being relocated from Czechoslovakia.
She was coming into the business several years after Thomas had started overseeing its transformation, which was really a huge undertaking given what had happened during the war.
CS
she she definitely believed in my father's vision. So she was one hundred percent a partner in that.
PAOLO VO
And in what kind of state was the company in the immediate aftermath of the war?
TINA VO
The parent company, Bata Corporation, was hugely affected by the war, with the Soviet-controlled communist governments across Eastern Europe nationalizing most industry, including many businesses owned by the Bata family.
The shoe operations of course were Thomas Bata’s main concern post-war. And being headquartered in Canada certainly provided stability for the company, and it was in a real position for expansion.
CS
His mission statement was to be shoemaker to the world. And he wanted to provide great quality, affordable footwear everywhere in the world.
There's actually a wonderful photograph that we have in our archives of a group of about 12 young men who are sitting around a blackboard. And on the blackboard are the names of about 12 companies.
And these young men were being trained to basically go forth and set up the business in these different companies. And they were given a thousand pairs of shoes to take with them. And that was their Start-Up Capital. So they had to land in this country on their own. I mean, there was no communication in those days. Sell the footwear, find how they were going to start producing. And they did have equipment that went with it, too.
PAOLO VO REACT
Did Sonja Bata have a specific role or responsibility within the company?
TINA VO
Well, I asked Christine Schmidt what her mother’s role was within the business, and she said that her mother preferred to not have an official title.
She did not want to be restricted to one specific area…
CS:
she felt if she didn't have a title, that she could actually run different projects and influence in different areas rather than being siloed into into one title.
And so she she was a very significant player in the growth of the company.
So as she was travelling with my father, building the shoe business with her curiosities, she really became fascinated with the different ways that different cultures interpreted footwear because it was beyond just the availability of the raw materials or the climatic needs that would obviously influence that. When you think about creating collections of footwear for the different environments of the different countries that we were in in those days, it was very much looking at how to design footwear that was useful in that country at that time.
So it wasn't just a matter of taking European fashion and shipping it over there. It was a matter of really designing something that was useful that would fit because feet are different in different parts of the world and of course, climates are different. So she was very instrumental in that, sort of in the innovation of of products and collection design. And then she, of course, started becoming a more and more important partner to him.
PAOLO VO
That is so fascinating - to have this view into so many different cultures, and to be looking specifically at shoes, and what that says about a culture.
TINA VO
And really it’s a time where flight was really starting to open up the world, so getting to these far-flung corners of the world was all new, and its impact on business was unprecedented.
PAOLO VO
You can certainly see how these kinds of experiences, and her curiosity and passion for footwear would lead to her collecting shoes.
TINA VO
Yes - it’s this wonderful combination of a really driven focus on business, and understanding what would make their products relevant in various cultures-slash-markets. But also...
CS:
And here her love of design shows up againwhen she started collecting, she was really collecting for product development ideas for the business, she pretty soon understood that there were so many fantastic stories to tell.
And because she really celebrated different cultures around the world, she felt that this was something that needed to be preserved.
A lot of the traditional ways of making these shoes were disappearing with manufacturing like ours coming into these different countries. And so she started then collecting seriously for preservation and for research and never doing anything halfway.
The collection grew in importance and she started hiring a team that would help her with collecting with the conservation. And then she had to share it because it was I mean, for years it was in the basement of the the shoe company's headquarters, but when she decided that it should be shared, she wanted to create an institution that was not a corporate museum at all.
There are very few Bata Shoes in the collection in fact. She wanted it to be really a centre for learning and for celebrating all of these differences that would help us to understand the world and sort of the it's really the story of humanity through what we have on our feet.
TINA VO:
So in 1979, Sonja Bata established and funded the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation.
CS:
And she decided then that she wanted to create a permanent home for the collection and worked with Ray Moriyama, who's such a talented architect and who together they built what I think is the jewel of a building here in Toronto.
TINA VO
And that led to the creation of the Bata Shoe Museum which opened to the public in 1995.
CS:
So she really felt that design affected everything in our lives and that better design would make our lives better.
And then she wanted to create an atmosphere within the museum with changing exhibitions that would really excite people to that. It's not just a bunch of pretty shoes that every exhibition that we've done and curate our own exhibitions, for the most part, have real messages.
I mean, there's so many so many interesting messages that you can tell through the footwear.
Elizabeth Semmelhack
the oldest piece in the museum's collection is a pair of funerary sandals that date back four thousand five hundred years, they’re ancient Egyptian.
TINA VO
This is Elizabeth Semmelhack
ES
and I'm the creative director and senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum.
And what's amazing about them is that they clearly are meant to reference footwear and they are foot sized. But the way that they were constructed, they're there, wood that's been painted with gesso and then they have little pegs in them to hold the thong for the thong that would go around the foot to hold this pair of sandals onto the foot.
And so, you know, at first glance, they appear reasonable and actually like some kind of wearable footwear. But on closer inspection, you can see that they were never worn and in fact, they were created specifically for inclusion within a gravesite.
And so the ancient Egyptians had the belief that you needed to take it with you when you went, and that included everyday objects such as footwear. But the footwear didn't necessarily have to be real footwear that could be worn in real life. It could be symbolic footwear. And so that's what we have in this particular pair of sandals, is something that basically is almost a sculptural stand-in for for the sandals that the deceased would need in the next world.
PAOLO VO
My gosh do I ever miss visiting museums!!
Just hearing her describe one - one! - pair of the tens of thousands shoes that are in that collection is such a delight.
Did Sonja Bata have any favourites?
TINA VO
Well Christine Schmidt told me that it was always the last piece added to the collection, but she had a real passion for the Arctic, and over the years she was very devoted to preserving objects and fostering traditions from that area and other northern cultures.
Elizabeth Semmelhack tells us a bit more.
ES
She was very devoted to collecting footwear and information about footwear from the circumpolar regions. Mrs. Bata was Swiss and being a new Canadian, she became very interested in the indigenous or of Canada. And so one of the early things that she did was she sponsored field research into the Canadian Arctic and the researchers were charged not with buying boots left and right, but instead with working with community seamstresses and learning about how it was that they made their footwear, what the purposes were, where there was difference in cultural expression.
And so that was successful and resulted in a wonderful collection of Inuit material in our collection. And then she proceeded to sponsor those same researchers to go to all the circumpolar countries and again talk with the seamstresses there, stay with them for a while to learn their different footwear making practises.
TINA:
That’s Elizabeth Semmelhack - here again is Sonja’s daughter, Christine Schmidt.
CS
she was so interested in learning in depth about everything, she could look at a shoe and not only identify everything about that shoe because of her knowledge of the techniques of shoemaking in different parts of the world and throughout history.
But then she would go into a whole discussion on the importance of the symbolism that was on that shoe to the culture that it came from or how they were influenced by what was going on in the world. So you understand this curiosity just sort of encompassed everything that she did.
PAOLO VO
I just love that that sense of curiosity and taking an everyday, simple item that we take for granted like a shoe and being able to read so much into it and to use it as a starting point for so much, that's just fantastically cool.
TINA VO
Yeah. And, you know, to be able to take something that your business is reliant on and to turn it into such a passion from another perspective, I just thought it's just wonderful.
PAOLO VO
And pretty unique, you know, not not something you hear about every day now. Christine mentioned her mother's involvement with Girl Guides when she first came to Canada, but she was also involved with with other causes. Right. But what else was was she involved with?
TINA VO
There were certainly many over the years, but a couple really stand out in terms of her impact.
In the early 1970s she joined the International board of trustees for the World Wildlife Fund, and that was the beginning of a nearly five-decade commitment to that group, and their projects.
She was a key fundraiser for them, helping to raise millions over the years for research into ecosystems and wildlife around the world.
PAOLO VO
I saw in some of the background I was reading that her passion for the Arctic was evident in the projects she supported with the WWF.
TINA VO
Yes - and in fact she raised funds going back decades for WWF-Canada’s first conservation program called Whales Beneath the Ice.
Some of that funding went towards protecting Isabella Bay on North Baffin Island, for bowhead whales. And there were also projects that protected Arctic river estuaries that were important to Beluga whales.
And there was one whale in particular that she felt a special affinity towards.
CS:
And her her last project with the World Wildlife Fund is actually a narwhal project, the narwhal to her was like the unicorn. It was such a magical, magical creature. And that we had to do what we could to preserve it.
TINA VO
Mrs. Bata, before her death in 2018, funded a five-year project specific to narwhal research that is funded through to 2022.
PAOLO VO
That’s fantastic.
And I understand that she was also an honorary Naval Captain!
TINA VO
Yes indeed she was.
CS
Growing up during the war in Switzerland, every student had to do their part and she was part of what they called, I guess, the land army. So she was sent to a farm to help the farmers look after the children and bring in the crops and that sort of thing. And I think that was quite a big influence on her feeling that we all need to do our bit and we should all contribute.
And that especially for young people, having an opportunity to give back to their country is quite important. And so her big support of the armed forces was in the reservist programme. So she did a lot of work persuading other companies that it was an important opportunity for them to allow their employees to encourage their employees to be reservists. And so that that is what she used to take something called executrix. And she would take a number of business owners or leaders to one of the armed forces locations and actually have them see what the training was all about and what the armed forces were doing to help persuade them that this was something that they should be involved with. And she absolutely loved that.
PAOLO VO
What an extraordinary life - driven by wonderful curiosity and obviously an almost magical kind of energy - and - let’s not forget she was also a mother!
TINA VO
Not everyone has a life like Sonja Bata, and not everyone has a mother like her either. That’s something I asked Christine about as well.
CS:
you know, she was a somewhat unusual mother because she wasn't the mom that was at home having baked cookies when we got home from school. But what an incredible role model. She really she really pushed us to have serious purpose in our lives, to think about our lives as, again, a huge opportunity to look at how we could contribute. And I think having that imbued in you from a very young age, you really that is where you get the most pleasure. So it becomes not just an unselfish thing to do, but a selfish thing to do, because I think all of us really felt that the greatest, the greatest joy comes from actually feeling that you've made a difference in in some way and somebody’s life. So I think that was a very important, very important thing that that she actually sort of was our role model for. And then another, she she really opened our eyes at a very young age to how incredible this world is.
PAOLO VO
That's Christine Schmidt, daughter of Sonja Barta, what a what an incredible life and a fascinating story. Tina Pittaway, thanks for sharing the story of Son about it today.
TINA VO
My pleasure. Thanks Paolo.
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