Zombies and Graduates – and Hooker Shoes

I looked up what’s trending on Google  (US) and saw Elizabeth Warren, Howard Stern, Bath salts, amelia earhart, hatfields and mccoys, belmont stakes, devils, scott walker, college baseball, zombie apocalypse, oklahoma city thunder, full moon.

Hmm. Yesterday I went to my son’s convocation and during the drive to the National Arts Center where Ottawa U conducts its convocation ceremonies, my son asked me if I had read about ‘that zombie attack.’ I knew immediately what he meant, but I, myself,  hadn’t thought of this icky unsettling bath salts induced assault as a zombie attack.

Zombies have been a part of popular culture since my kids were young, starting with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show my husband liked for some reason. (Critics deconstructed the show as being about teenage angst.) I wasn’t surprised my son would see this bizarre event, widely published in the media, this way.

No,  I’m not surprised my son and obviously many other probably very young people are seeing this weird Miami news story as about zombies – and not about drugs.

Apocalyptic literature is very popular among young people. The rest of us older folk just follow the stock market (or those doom and gloom accounts on the economy) to get the beegeezus scared out of us, to get that sense that our security (and bank account) is not entirely in our control.

Anyway, the convocation was pleasant enough. I enjoyed seeing young people performing a modern rite of passage, even if getting a degree isn’t quite what it used to be.

Many of the female graduates were wearing high high heels under their graduation gowns, often shoes in scintillating colours, bright red and especially bright YELLOW.   No one tripped, but not all the women so shod looked comfortable.

Athena (in what some might see as) hooker attire. They all seemed like vivacious young woman to me. I seem to recall  that at my son’s high school graduation the females wore flip flops under their very fancy designer dresses.

We’ve come a long way since 1910, when woman scholars were  dull and sexless like Miss Carrie Derick in my book Threshold Girl.  Derick was the first full university professor in Canada – and also President of the Montreal Council of Woman. She was a botanist.

In my book the protagonist, Flora Nicholson, wonders why a woman who studies flowers  doesn’t wear any flowers on her hat (as was the fashion in those days).

Biology and Ambition is the story, in epistolary form, about Marion Nicholson, an ambitious and sexy woman who had to choose between career and love – because in those days that was the case. Eventually she got both, but only due to family misfortune, her husband died young in 1927 and she went back to work, and became the best in her field.

1910 was the era when planes first took to the air. (Aeroplanes.) In those days, before WWI there were many many stories in the press about women pilots. In fact, one article in Technical World Magazine claimed women were flocking to flight school. Although most working women were domestics, shopgirls, or teachers, the era media (newspapers and magazines)liked to say women could enter any field, medicine, law, aviation.

There may have been one or two women in each of these fields, but one or two does NOT make a trend. (Even back then the media coloured people’s perceptions, by focusing on the  rare “man bites dog” story -and then making that very exceptional event seem like an everyday event. Like child kidnappings and zombie attacks today.)

Flying was the ultimate ‘new woman’ activity. Below, a spread about early flight fashion, from a later 1937 Marie Claire.

Below: Baroness Delaroche and her plane crash. 1910. Before Amelia Earhart

Anyway, as the University of Ottawa Arts Convocation began I thought the first speaker looked like Michaelle Jean, the former Governor General of Canada, and it was! (We were up in the Mezzanine so I couldn’t see clearly.) She had just been made Chancellor of the University a few hours before.

Another speaker was Daniel Lamarr of the Cirque de Soleil, a good choice I thought, although my son wasn’t so sure.

Lamarre received an honourary doctorate.  Lamarre spoke about the importance of the arts in society.

The CPR, Raitt, and 1910

Saskatoon in 1910, Valentine and Son Postcard

I started watching the series Madmen when it first was aired, but stopped, because it hit too close to home. I want to get into it again. I’ll just buy the DVD’s and watch the whole thing at one shot.

I worked as a radio copywriter many moons  ago, a mixed bag as a job. I like the job, I liked my co-workers, but the atmosphere….it was poisonous.

Montreal English radio was already in free-fall collapse, and our station was at the bottom, so we were over-worked for little pay by people with much better salaries desperate to keep their jobs.

My friend Nora and I helped get the Union in there, and then, burnt out, we left. All the people who were too afraid to help with the union were the ones who eventually benefited, big time as they could then flow into the TV side where pay and working conditions were excellent. So it goes.

Hard work never hurt anyone, and we worked hard. (It was a burn out job.)

But it was the psychological games some managers played that was most demeaning, humiliating.

For instance, two of us won awards one year, called Canadian Soundcraft.

Instead of congratulating us, one VP arrived in our office (no windows, full of cigarette smoke) and showed us a clipping from the Ottawa newspaper.

The CJOH copywriting department apparently won 10 awards or so.

“Why can’t you do that?” he asked.

My astute friend pointed to the picture and counted, one, two three..”Ten copywriters for one radio station.” Then she counted us, “Three copywriters for 2 radio stations.”

The fact was, we each wrote 10 to 20 ads a day on top of much clerical work which copywriters at other stations did not perform. Our station was struggling and most of these ads were last minute, to be aired that night type of thing. I once was asked to write an ad for a strip club, imagine, where the meaty sandwiches were named after the strippers. I refused and was called into the GM’s office and he said “Do it or get fired.” I did it, (in a joke way) but the announcer refused to voice it, anyway.

The Catch-22, the harder you worked, the less respect you got. Weird!

Anyway, this is really water under a far away bridge, but I write this because yesterday I see a news item saying that our Labour Minister Raitt is intent on dismantling unions. Strikes are bad for business.

Well, of course they are!  That’s the point. That’s the leverage. Who cares if I go on STRIKE. My husband, maybe, and even then, he’ll just cook his own meals. (I’ve been injured and he’s done all the work lately, anyway.)

I’ve spent the last five years on a personal project about the Edwardian Era and I’ve been chronicling the life of Laurier Era teachers, mostly. Flora, Marion and Edith Nicholson of Richmond Quebec working in Montreal.  Threshold Girl and Biology and Ambition are two ebooks in a series of three.

Back then most people worked long long hours for low low pay. Their brother Herb in 1910 is working for the CPR in Saskatoon (Yes) 10 am to 10 pm for 50 dollars a month. He had Academy III from Richmond’s St Francis Academy, a very high-class  high school diploma and about 5 years experience in banks. (OK, he’s a bit of a crook. ) The cost of living is very high out West in 1910, due to the Wheat Boom so the salary is extra paltry. And the hours, he writes in a letter home, make it difficult to  look for another job. (And he got that job due to connections.)

So Herb is making 600 a year, the same salary as Marion Nicholson is making working the in big city with a diploma. Teaching 50 kids, mostly very poor and many newly landed immigrants without English. Edith was making 200 a year working as a teacher without a diploma at a boarding school, so her hours were 24/7. Her boss would have claimed hers was a ‘vocation’ not a ‘job.’

According to historians, in 1910, a Canadian family needed 1,500 a year to live in dignity. Few families in Canada, in Montreal were making close to that.

There was a great disparity, in the Laurier Era, between the Haves and Have Nots. A gaping divide, actually. The 1911 Census is online, you just have to read it.

My Threshold Girl story has a child labour theme. I created a French Canadian character who works at Dominion Textile in Magog.

The Census page for Magog Textile workers shows EVERY employee working 60 hours, even part time ones. Hmm. 60 hours was the legal limit. Someone fudged the numbers. That company was powerful, they could buy off the enumerator, maybe??

Biology and Ambition is about Marion Nicholson’s early years. She went on to become a Union Leader and fought for better salaries and pensions for teachers. Threshold Girl contains a great deal about ‘the servant problem’.

Canada’s Would be British Suffragette Leader

Barbara Wylie, From WSPU. She was on her way in September 1912 to convert Canadians to the cause, taking the Empress of Ireland (which would soon sink, I think).

Well, earlier I referred to Barbara Wylie as a rogue suffragette for the brazen way she promoted militant values in the speeches, when all the other visiting suffragists were much more careful to tone down  their rhetoric.

But she wasn’t rogue. She was sent by the WSPU as their representative.  They mentioned it in their magazine. Of course, one wonders why they sent her away to the colonies at all.

A short biographical paragraph about her I found on the Net from a book on the Suffragettes says she stayed in Canada from 1912-14, but not true, as I saw another article where she entertained a US journalist in her London home in August 1913. And she becomes spokesperson for the WSPU for a short while in 1914, with the Pankhursts in Jail again.

She had been the head of the Glasgow  branch of WSPU (some say Edinburgh) and then she came to London. She was one of the suffragettes put in jail for civil disobedience, window smashing in 1912, but apparently she was allowed out due to her mother’s ill health (ie. her parents had pull.)

She came to Canada as a brother was a MLS in Saskatchewan. (Perhaps she had dreams of becoming THE Suffrage Leader in Canada, as there was a vacuum, but that didn`t pan out.)

Anyway, Wylie figures in my story Threshold Girl. I fidget with dates, tho, bringing her to Montreal in May of 1912.  Flora Nicholson and Edith Nicholson go to see her speak in a church but miss the actual speech. I use dialogue from the Montreal Daily Star account in the book, the account I have on a news clipping belonging to Edith.  Yes, Wylie was militant, as in unapologetic about the more violent acts of the suffragettes, including attacks on the Prime Minister.

And the WSPU magazine, Votes for Women, figures in the follow up Diary of a Confirmed Spinster. Edith reads the article about women being tortured in jail and gets inspired to act out on an injustice in her own life, a perceived injustice.

Canada’s official women suffrage history centers on the Famous Five out west, Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung and those others  And like Carrie Derick in Montreal, who founded the Montreal Suffrage Association in 1912 maybe after  meeting Wylie, their women’s rights activism is all tied in with murkier things, like eugenics and temperance and moral and social reform.

Emily Murphy also got into the ‘war on drugs’ business, in the 20′s, a decade later than the Americans, but with the same racist slant.

That’s probably why they didn’t teach about suffrage movement  in City schools in my day.

As I’ve written, the Nicholsons of Richmond were tea-totalling Presbyterians, but only father Norman ever wrote about the dangers of drink. The women seemed more intent on getting all they  could out of life for themselves, love, nice clothes, great jobs, lots of travel, the right to earn a proper living, suffragettes in the truest form, wanting the same rights as the men.

There were not interested in social welfare per se, but as teachers in the big city, they were thrown head-long into the problem and given hands on experience.

Biology and Ambition, the epistolary novel about Marion Nicholson’s early life reveals that this future union leader just wanted an even playing field. She was willing to work for the rest. (Boy, would she have made a great suffragette!)

Anyway, the press covered Miss Wylie (that was the point and she was so PRETTY! sic) in Toronto her speech is reported on and in Calgary I found an article that makes fun of her militancy, light of it.

Actually, a ‘snippet’ tour I just took of Google Books shows that Miss Wylie has left a legacy as a suffragette, in the scholarship, mentioned in Dame Pankhurst’s 1930′s autobiography.

And her Canadian tour aroused interest, at least converting women journalists to the cause. One account said she received a cold shoulder in the East but a nicer reception out West. After the Calgary talk, a suffrage association was started up, so even with the mocking, it worked. And she was active in BC. Her brother, the MLA, pushed for women suffrage in Saskatchewan.

Pretty in pink and blue and gingham and galatea

The August 1911 edition of the Delineator has a feature on children’s outfits, so I thought I’d scan them for those who might be interested. In Threshold Girl I weave in a tale about a woman working at Dominion Textile in Magog.
The second dress on the left is a practical school dress, if developed in serge or flannel. Unlike many of the sailor models, the five gored skirt, which is attached to a belt or underbody, is fitted about the waist and left quite plain except for the inverted plait, which is made at the back. The blouse is regular naval style and may be slipped over the head or closed in front.

The dress on right is very simple in construction and it is particularly effective in poplin or pique, when a contrasting colour is used for the collar and trimming bands. A very lovely reproduction of the design, which closes in front, was composed of white linen, with a sailor collar and belt of lilac linen, the edges of the collar, belt and peasant sleeves and and closing were finished with a scallop worked in lilac floss.

Nice writing! I wonder if Theodore Dreiser wrote it. He was editor of this magazine, which also covered many of the social issues of the day, focusing on ‘child rescue’ …adoption. (Nah, his style wasn’t as nice!) He got fired when he, ahem, had an affair with a underage woman… or something.

Well, these clothes were for the Middle Class and higher, I imagine. Marion’s children, students at Royal Arthur in Montreal’s Little Burgundy, were working class and probably dressed more like the above pic of poor kids vacationing at Camp Chapleau.

If any kids in Marion’s board dressed like the magazine kids, it was at the new Roslyn School in Westmount.

In September the schools reopen and you mothers are already beginning to find that the question of pinafores and school dresses is much on your mind. For children who live in the City, where there are steam-heated houses and schoolrooms, the smartest materials for their dresses are the linens, piques, poplins, repps, galateas, percales, ginghams, chambrays and cotton drillings.

Of course, for children who live in country districts where furnaces and radiators are unknown, wash dresses in Winter are out of the question. They should wear pretty little dresses of serge, flannel, or any good woolen material and washable pinafores and aprons.

I haven’t shown a boy, there are only  few pictured, but they are wearing knickerbockers or shorts, not skirts. In Richmond, Quebec, at least in and around 1910, Flora’s nephew, Stanley Hill still wore a skirt. And her brother Herb wore one in 1889 or so.

Not sure who kids at bottom are or when it is taken. The Dalmation may be Floss around 1909, but the Nicholsons may have had an earlier Dalmation. It is possibly Stanley Hill younger, so 1905ish?

The coat: A serviceable box coat for a girl is displayed. The model may be made in full or 7/8ths length with the fronts closed to the neck and rolled open.  Many of these coats for girls are made with striped or plaid weaves and they look very smart when the collars or cuffs are faced in a one tone contrasting material.

In the Laurier era in Canada the vast majority of children lived in poverty. Many of their moms could sew, but they did so in factories, making clothes for the burgeoning middle class.

Margaret Nicholson made her daughters’ clothes, until they got into working suits, then she made just the ‘waists’ or blouses and skirts. However she bought her son’s and husband’s clothes.

Below, Nicholson invoice 1901, sewing notions

Beauty Beware!

 

August 1911 Delineator, clothes for school girls. Caption: the long vacation should help school girls grow tall and rosy. Pretty dresses and trim outing costumes help towards the fun and exercises which they need. The dress on the right is a semi-princess for a small woman. “The model looks extremely well-developed in a foulard, round or sailor collar and cuffs. A feature of the waist (blouse) is the kimono sleeve.

In Threshold Girl  I have Flora Nicholson peruse this very edition of the Delineator magazine. (Indeed, the cover is the cover of my ebook.) I have lots of nice colour plates in the book from various era Delineators.

This is the page that would have caught her attention: She was 18 in 1911, but a small,thin 18. In those days they tried to make thin 18 year olds look bigger. Today, the ideal woman (see Kate Middleton) is so thin she can blow away.

The ideal woman. She is a problem!

A couple of days ago my husband, on vacation, was watching Dr. Oz. He likes the show. But Oz was promoting some silly sounding method to instantly reprogram people (ie, women, his audience) out of their bad habits.

He brought a young woman out. Her problem, she wasn’t happy with her looks, her nose, her mouth, her skin, whatever. She was a plain woman.

I turned to my husband, “This woman isn’t happy with her looks because she has been bombarded with media images since birth saying her features are NOT the ideal! That’s NOT gonna go a way in five minutes. If if did, the stock market would crash. More than it has, anyway.”

I write this because the picture above features ‘models’ all with a certain round type of face. A few months later, Flora, who is not a pretty girl, writes home from college about a girl at school who is ‘one of those dolly face girls who pretends to be “so terribly nervous.” Dolly-faced girls were ‘in’ I guess.

This woman is popular and has stolen Flora’s roommate’s affections.

The Nicholson women were not brought up to be nervous, although they were somewhat  vain. Even the Mom, who was a beauty in her day from the early picture I have of her, but in the 1860′s and 70′s, young women were not bombarded with consumer-age images. That was only starting in 1900, for the middle class and only in these fashion magazines.

Beauty was considered dangerous by some people, mostly religious types.  ”Beware Beauty” advises the 1896 sex hygiene book, Light in Dark Corners.

I put that bit about Beauty in Biology and Ambition about Flora’s sister Marion, who was very popular with boys and girls, although not a classic beauty, just a charismatic girl. No shrinking violet she….no nervous Nellie.  I guess women in the era were taught that men liked ‘frail’ women but all evidence in Marion’s diaries proves quite the opposite. No one was more boffo than Marion Nicholson, who rose to be a Union Leader. (And even after that the men liked her.)

All this brings to mind an incident I heard of a few months ago. I was visiting a relation whose daughter was away at college in California. Her daughter was checking out sororities. She phoned her mother to say she was introduced, or whatever, at a certain sorority but she knew she wouldn’t get in. All the girls were beautiful.

“And your daughter isn’t beautiful? ” I asked.

“Not in the right way, ” my relation answered. Not tall, skinny and blond.

You see her daughter is a classic Egyptian or Middle eastern beauty. Indeed, when they visited the Louvre a year or so earlier, the Mom and Daughter went around comparing her to the statues there.

A goddess. But not the right kind of goddess!

Take about Dolly type of beauties. Barbie really has become the ideal. And Barbie doesn’t exist outside of Copenhagen. Not even in the suburbs of Copenhagen, because there you get Danish peasant stock, or so my sister in law (a Dane) told me.  Well, actually the modern ideal is not Danish, because most of  the modern (American) actresses and Kate Middleton are flat chested, pencil thin, modern day garconnes.

I recall a line from the bizarre satire 30 Rock, where most of the women except the protagonist are ideal women, blond pencil thin.  What’s her name, Jenna Maroney, the crazy blond lead actress with the preteen body, asks Liz Lemon if they can hire a big woman to stand behind her so she looks more tiny and vulnerable.

30 Rock satirizes society’s ideal woman while featuring loads of said woman – along with a lot of homely fat men. Kind of cake and eat it too…Like the very popular stage play Everywoman, Flora and sisters go to see in 1911, that proselytizes against female narcissism using gorgeous young actresses in pretty form fitting costumes.

Ok, to the other dresses. The first one on the right anyway: The top is a waist for a small women, resembling a Norfolk jacket . Applied straps, simulating box plaits, conceal the side seams front and back. The waist closes in double breasted style and is particularly smart when worn over a skirt with a patent leather belt. Linen, poplin, duck and serge are used extensively for the design and the cuffs and broad sailor collar are generally made of a contrasting material.

A neckband for wear with different high collars is rather better for the regular shirt waist style, that is usually made with full length sleeves.

If you are going to read any of my three books about the Nicholsons in 1911, you had better get it in your head what a ‘waist’ is. The women are always writing about them. Waists or shirtwaists are blouses or blouses in a male shirt style.

In the 1910 era, as young women went off to work in the big city, they adopted male dress habits (on top, not below, which was illegal…hence harem pants, ah, skirts) like shirts and ties!! and then they fancied them up!! Below, from the same magazine a ‘mannish’ shirtwaist.  I have no pictures of Marion or Flora in working women garb, but I do have a couple of Edith, so that’s good enough.

Edith, second top. In her Mannish Shirtwaist, 1911 era. Right in style, because she liked to be fashionable to her dying days. The Nicholsons made their own waists.. and wrote about it a lot.

Holiday Musings

I posted a draft of my ebook Biology and Ambition a few days ago and within minutes the Googlebot came around and it was available on Google, second when a person enters Biology and Ambition.

Pretty fast.

Biology and Ambition is the follow up to Threshhold Girl and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, to make the omnibus School Marms and Suffragettes.

About 3 young women in 1910 Canadian, their hopes, dreams, disappointments. Middle Class Women. Pretty much like Middle Class Women today.

I’m watching the Djokavic Nadal final in the Spanish Open or something and just missed Nadal winning the second set.. Gotta pay attention.

My husband asks why I watching in French. I like the French commentary, that’s why.

The colour commentator whoever she is uses eloquent language, much different from hockey commentators.

Something to do on a nice Monday holiday, Victoria Day but not here in Quebec, where my husband is so bored he is cleaning out the BBQ.

The bugs get you outside and if we put the mosquito netting around our little shelter the idiot dogs run through it every time they hear a noise – and they don’t learn.

We live in a suburb and suburbs now are dead quiet, except on Saturday morning when the neighbourhood men (yes, men) do the lawn.

Two days ago we went Costco and bought an instant garden, a few ready made pots for next to nothing, 10 to 15 dollars.

I usually buy the flats, but this spring I am injured, I can’t use my arm.

Instant garden, like instant pudding or instant mashed potatoes. I usually don’t like instant things, but in this case, why not.

My magnolia. Just blooming now. Last year I rolled these potted trees out into the family room and they blossomed inside in April. But the aroma was disgusting!! The thought the cat had peed on the carpet.

Lupins and Ideology

A high school class in the 1910 era.

It’s hard to find pictures of elementary school classes.

Anyway, as I write Biology and Ambition, about Montreal teacher Marion Nicholson in 1910, the follow up to Threshold Girl about her sister Flora;s year at Macdonald Teaching College and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about her older sister’s life and loves at Westmount Methodist Institute, I have decided to look over some textbooks from the era to see what she was teaching her 3rd and 4th grade students.

It’s not that hard to find. Years ago I found a document at Mcgill  revealing the curriculum of the Montreal Board.

I have a list of recommended text books, from Flora’s Mac portfolio and see they used Ontario Public School texts in their courses.

These texts are online at archive.org

The Hygiene Text is most interesting. Hygiene was a subject taught, although I read that it was basically a ‘free marks’ class – which means it wasn’t really about knowledge but about something else.

Ideology, perhaps. Remember with the age of Purity and the Hygienist movement was quite racist and classist.

The book I have must have been for older classes, middle school perhaps. It has typical topics (see below) and one not so typical. Family Stock. The final chapter is on eugenics! And amazingly it uses the same case study Jukes/Edwards by a Mr. Winslip that Carrie Derick used in her speech to the Montreal Literacy Society in 1910 and that I put in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

Now, imagine a child of poverty who just happened to be a good scholar and who got himself or herself through to Middle School or High School on scholarship or something. There he would meet with an official text that says he was ‘inferior’ and destined to remain so, due to genes. He might also be confused by the chapter on housing, that claims that a family home at minimum  should have 1000 sq foot per family member, since he might well live in a two room flat with 8 siblings with no windows or running water.

Now, people might ask what does it serve to bring up these ‘embarrassing’ bits from history. I think it provides a great service.

Because one thing doesn’t change and hasn’t changed over the century: human nature. No doubt, there’s a lot of ‘official blah blah’ today that passes for ‘truth’  that is nothing but ideology. Well, as Homer S says “DUH.”

Well, take Finance Minister Flaherty’s remark the other day ‘that there are no bad jobs.’  If you interpret bad to mean ‘beneath human dignity’ well, then it’s debatable, I guess. Although a question best left to philosophers and kept out of the hands of conniving politicians. If you interpret bad to mean undesirable, dirty, unsafe, disgusting, soul-crushing, stressful, tiring,  stultifyingly boring, not respectable or not respected, or merely not paying enough to raise a family in this day and age, then there’s no debate. The statement is patronizing ideological bunk, coming out of the mouth of a privileged patriarch who thinks he knows best but who is way way WAY out of touch, but who controls the country’s money, our money! You know that Monty Python Sketch. Dennis Moore. Takes from the poor, gives to the rich, Stupid Bitch. I love that skit. What more Lupins?

Also one of my favorite 1909 excerpts. A college undergraduate degree ain’t worth much these days (although it may put a student from a poorer background  in great debt.)  And Flaherty seems to want to help turn the middle class into the working poor, wage slaves by cutting UI which helps people with good jobs keep their good jobs in uncertain times…like today.

 

 

From Educational Foundations June 1909

(A.S. Barnes and Company)

 

Opening to Essay Education-The Economic Side by Will Scott.

 

The state would educate the young in order to make them better citizens; in order to advance civilization. It being desirable that all of its people be good citizens, the state strives to educate the children of all.

 

The theory held by the state is also the theory of the individual – so far as other people’s children are concerned. They are to be educated so they will not violate the law – not cross swords with society.  But as to their own children, that is quite a different matter. They should be educated not only to make them good citizens, and not chiefly for that purpose, but to give them an advantage in the struggle for existence.  The object of education for one’s own children is not so much to live better but to get a better living; not so much to do better work but to get better pay….Education gives the individual an advantage in the struggle for existence only when he has more of it than his fellows…From an industrial viewpoint, education is a labor-saving machine, enabling one man to do what ten did before. Like other improvements, it tends to decrease the number of jobs, and thus to sharpen competition and decrease wages.

 

….

Excerpt from School Power: A Pressing Necessity (Frank Tate, Australian Director of Education).

 

We must recognize, that in the struggle for existence, the law of the survival of the fittest applies to nations as to individuals, and that in this struggle for existence there is not only the struggle that results in the open shock of war, but the less obtrusive but no less intense struggle of peace, the struggle for trade supremacy. We must realize too how different modern conditions are from those that obtained even fifty years ago. The history of the past thirty years yields ample evidence that command of markets is to be won by the nation that brings knowledge and training to bear upon the operations of producing and marketing commodities which the world wants.

 

 

Husband hunting 1910

Sophia Nicholson, Norman’s niece gets married in October 1912.

I don’t know her story, but she visited Richmond area in July 1911 before going out West. She visited Tighsolas twice, ‘but did not take off her hat’ despite being asked to spend the night.

(Interesting! She must have stayed a while, not a few minutes I gather. So if in those days you came for say, tea,you kept your hat on. Was this because putting on a hat was not an easy thing? Or fixing up the hair once the hat was taken off was not an easy thing.)

Her Father Gilbert and Brother were in Edmonton already. Gilbert is widowed, so likely Sophia was raised with someone else and just then rejoined the family.

And then she goes out West and within a year is married.

This is not an invitation,only an announcement. Maybe Gilbert was afraid the Nicholsons, who were having money issues, would descend on him and stay. His brother Norman often asked him to if he should go West and Gilbert said NO, This is Young Man’s Country.

 

Marion Watters marriage announcement, 1914. She is often mentioned my books, especially Threshold Girl but also in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster (about to be posted) and Biology and Ambition, Marion Nicholson’s story, being written.

In 1912/13, Mae lives with Flora and Marion on Hutchison in the great experiment. She has another boyfriend named Minty. Edith calls her ‘a great flirt.’ Well, it worked and Edith never married.

All this goes to show is that the two years Marion and Hugh waited to get married was a long period.

There were reasons. Firstly, Hugh was seeing another woman in May 1911, when he meet Marion. I know because he blew her off in a letter in September. He told her they had ‘no understanding’ and he only thought of her as ‘a very good friend.’

 

Letter from Donald Nicholson of Lingwick to Norman Nicholson “Bark Dealer” in 1893. “Sorry they are so poorly at Gilbert’s.” May be when wife died.  Beautiful handwriting for a man.

Burn This Letter- A Tribute to Mothers on Mother’s Day

Probably from September 1917..Marion Blair and kids

I have decided where to start Biology and Ambition the story of Marion Blair in the 1910 era, the follow up toThreshold Girl about sister Flora and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster about sister Edith (all part of a big volume called School Marms and Suffragettes.)

I will start it with this war time letter from her husband. 

He is home in Montreal  being watched over by his sister in laws, Flo and Edith. He is not happy.Marion is with her mother in Richmond with her babies very likely. Flora is a teacher, so not at work and Edith is at this time, I believe, working for Sun Life Insurance. And there’s a lot of war work, volunteering.

I’m guessing Marion, with two young kids, is in no rush to get home to Westmount.  I have other era letters than say the house gets hot…and there’s fresh veggies and butter at Richmond. In another earlier letter Marion is telling her mother about all the local gardens cropping up in Westmount and she sort of mocks the city folk, who she suggests have no idea what they are doing.

It’s getting towards the end of the war her. In two months Edith and Marion will be visiting their friends the Tuckers in Montreal who learn they have lost their son Percy. Then they learn he is alive. Then they learn he is dead. I don’t think they felt sorry for Hugh. Married men didn’t have to go to war in Canada. Hugh would be about 40 anyway.

July 26, 1918

Hugh to Marion

My dearest sweetheart,

I cannot express in writing how pleased I was to hear your voice over the telephone a little while ago and was very sorry when I learned that due to the circumstances, you were not able to come home…Dearest, I have never written you on this strain since I have known you and before I say what I have in mind, I beg of you to please try and understand it in the light that I mean it.

For Marion, dear, I love you with all my heart and it is because of my affection for you that I try to pave the way a little. I honestly, would not intentionally hurt you Marion. 

Now sweetest, here it is: You know, Dear, that you have left me alone at different times for indefinite periods, but may I say that I have never yet found one month to be as long as this one. 

Really, it has seemed to me almost like years. I would a thousand times rather be left entirely alone than to be left again with the girls, as I cannot get them to do anything which appears to me to be reasonable.

 I have come home on several occasions and the front and back doors were not locked. They will not close the windows and the house is almost like an oven. They forget to order food. The refrigerator is left open; the ice is melting as fast as you can put it in. 

Cawlice. (French swear word, euphemism for chalice)

Water is running all over the floor and things are lying about. I am sick and tired of the whole place.

 Take pity on me Darling before I go crazy and come home to me to look after and love me. *but under no circumstances take chances (with mother’s health). 

 Take it from me, God help the poor man that gets either one of them, if they don’t change. You can do more in five minutes than they can do together in a day. You have forgotten more than they’ll ever know. 

God bless you Marion and may it be God’s will that he can spare you to me for many long happy years.

Lovingly,
Hughie,

PS. Don’t fail to burn this when finished reading.

War and Prices, the Cost of Living 1914-1918

A page from Oct 1914 House Accounts, Norman Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec.

I have 50 years of Household Accounts for the Nicholson Family of Richmond, 1883 to 1921 and in those years, not that much changed with respect to what they bought and how much they spent.

I’m assuming there was wartime inflation, so I scanned two pages from October 1914 and two from November 1918.

For the story, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about Edith Nicholson in 1910,  the follow up toThreshold Girl about Flora, I am using the Household Accounts to tell the story of her childhood.

This morning I had a bowl of Harvest Crunch. I haven’t eaten that for years. My husband found it on sale at Costco. That product was one of the first pseudo health foods. I could look it up, but I’m pretty sure I ate it in the late 70′s. I think it is pretty fattening. It has coconut oil.. but I don’t think that is as bad for you as previously thought. I mean the Thai’s live on it.

I usually eat Bon Matin 14 grain toast for breakfast with multi berry jam.

The short of it is, we still eat ‘by habit’ but new products are being introduced every day. Not the case back then, although that era saw the birth of a number of iconic products that became favorites over the century, thanks to heavy advertising. As I wrote in an earlier post, Crisco was invented in 1911, but they tried to get Margaret Nicholson to use it in 1916. Likely because butter had risen in price due to the war.

as opposed to: 1918