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.

Start of School 1909 and 1910

Dominion Park, postcard, colourized. The woman looking at the camera looks like Marion! Similar white dress!

This is one of my favorite letters from the Nicholson stash. Margaret is talking about being forced to buy a big hat…Hats were getting big in 1909. But the latest fashions are worn by young women. Trouble is, in towns like Richmond, in 1910, young women (like Edith and Marion) were moving to Montreal and buying their big fashionable hats at stores like Ogilvy. So the local town milliner had to push her hats on reluctant older buyers. (Seems that way.)

Anyway, Edith spends TWO days ironing to get ready for her work at Ecole Westmount Methodiste.

She starts later than Marion, who works on the Montreal board. I was just writing a scene for September 1909, when both Marion and Edith start jobs in the big bad city, and Marion has already gone in and visited Dominion Park.

Margaret warns her not to see Pauline. Pauline is a hypnotist.

Edith tells her mom that she has no interest in going to Dominion Park, but Marion had to go because their brother Herb has gone many times and told them all about it and Marion is not to be outdone.

Dominion Park was a thrill park opened in 1904 in the East End of Montreal. It had a fun house, an exhibit re=enacting the recent San Francisco quake and famously, the Infant Incubator exhibit, with real babies on display and nurses taking care of them. Shades of things to come with the Dionne Quintuplets.

October 2, 1909 Dear Marion, I had a letter today from Father written from the Queen’s. You saw his new suit, do you like it. He says it is all right. Also said he met Edith at the train. He did not say he met Charlie G. Of course, that is their last flirtation as he is going to Mexico. Grandma is here and we are not entirely alone but we feel lonesome. Father said you were well. You have got over your cold. I am glad that you are out of the church. Today we had Mr. Ross of Montreal as it was our Anniversary Service. Tomorrow we have our usual supper and entertainment. After seeing E off I went to Miss Hudon’s to cancel the order I had for a hat. She had already trimmed it, she did not wait for some trimming I was bringing. I think the hat too large. It would look well on you. Still, Mrs. Montgomery thinks it is becoming to me so I shall have to wear it. I met Edith McCourt at the church door with an immense black one on so I told her to come and sit with me. Mine would not look so large. So she did. So I guess it was all right. I don’t know whether Healy could see the Minister or not. We had a grand sermon, so I forgot about the size of my hat. I heard an old story that suited me about an old Scotch man who had two sons Jamie and Willie. Jamie went away from home to earn his living. The old man was praying that Jamie might be kept from all danger, sickness and evil temptations. But he said, don’t bother your head about Willie. I’ll keep him straight. I was telling them, that was like me, always worrying about the absent ones. Edith went away being tired. Just as you did, she ironed for two days. Have you heard from Herb? Write soon, Your loving mother, Margaret

Me in the Press

In was on the Front Page of the Sherbrooke Record this Easter Weekend. The story: Century Old Townships Letters Capture Titanic Era Life. I was promoting Threshold Girl my ebook, the first in a digital trilogy as the Record Reporter Corrinna Pole described it.

Last November I got some press in Cornwall promoting the second book in the trilogy: Diary of a Confirmed Spinster. I had expected to have that book finished by now, indeed, I gave myself until the Anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking, but I got sidetracked with injuries and a trip to California. Lucky for the trip, I got my hair done so I had a decent pic for the Record Story. I was on the front page, yikes!

The Cornwall Story is still online, without the pic. Here’s the pic. Edith and her beau Charlie, who died in a 1910 hotel fire in Cornwall.

Anyway, I am getting to the story. The Cornwall Standard Freeholder reporter will likely report on it when it is posted, just like Threshold Girl, on my www.tighsolas.ca website for free.

Anyway, another reason I haven’t finished the Spinster story is because I was missing a piece. I finally found it! An article from the April19, 1912 Votes for Women Magazine about Teachers and Suffrage.

I will have Edith get this issue and read this article and be incensed at a certain part, where an older teacher mocks younger ones for being so radical. (Edith was a radical suffragette, but never did anything about it. )

Here’s the article.

From Votes for Women Magazine, April 19, 1912: The Question of Women’s Suffrage was again discussed by the national congress of teachers at Easter. As was the case last year there was a very heated debate.

 

The Yorkshire Observer refers to Women’s Suffrage as “the great bone of contention at Aherysteryth in 1910 and as the topic hotly discussed by local associations throughout the year and, again, as the dividing whirlwind at Hull. ‘No man,’ it said, “could hold the storm. It broke with the violence of a northerly gale. Again and again the meeting was stopped by rival cries and calls. The assembly heaved with crosswinds and currents of feelings churned by an angry sea.”

 

Eventually, the previous question was carried and the discussion was once more shelved as far as the Congress is concerned.

 

But we shall be greatly disappointed if the women teachers, who are in an enormous majority as members of the NUT allow the question to remain where it is.

 

When the Congress arrived at the motion of Parliamentary Franchise for Women, it was met with deafening applause.

 

Miss Isabel Cleghorn, M.A. ex President of the Congress, moved the following resolution.

That this conference expresses its sympathies with those members of the National Union of Teachers,

who desired to possess and exercise the Parliamentary Franchise, but because they are women, and for that reason alone, are by law debarred from it.

 

She remarked that there were three reasons given last year why the suspension of standing orders should not be carried so that this resolution could be discussed: 1)That the motion had been sprung upon the executive; 2) that the associations had not had the opportunity of discussing it; 3)that this was a political question and should not be discussed by the National Union of Teachers.

 

This year they could not advance these reasons.

 

The association had discussed the motion and the result was that the motion was now sent forward by 17, 062 votes for its discussion and 6,728 against it. (Applause)

 

In addition, the associations had sent it up as the number 3 resolution to be discussed among the members.

 

 

Parliament from the London Eye, 2006. Taken by Me.

 

With reference to the argument that it was a political question, she said that the conference would agree, that  the parliamentary influence of their union was one of their greatest assets (Applause) that they were continually in their meetings and in their conferences discussing politics. They had not only discussed the question of the franchise but they had expended union money to extend the franchise to people who resided in their schoolhouses. (Applause.) And in the past they had discussed education bills. It seems to her that if their political power (and they had political power)depended on the vote, then if they were going to add more of their members as voters it must increase their political power. (Applause). Women were earning their own living. They were teaching in the schools of the country. They had to teach their children citizenship, loyalty patriotism and all that was necessary to make them good citizens of the future and  yet they had not the power of the vote which made for the good of the  country in the making of its laws. (Applause)

 

Mr. Dakers VP seconded the resolution and amidst cries of dissent reserved his remarks.

Mr. A E Cook NW London was loudly cheered on rising to move the previous question. He belonged to a large association in connection with which was an active ladies committee and they unanimously decided that it was not part or parcel of the union to interfere in this question. One of the objects of the association was to unite the member and this would bring disunion. Another object was to extend influence and dignity of the profession. The only cause of their object which touched the question was that which referred to securing of effective representation in Parliament. But this was not an education question: it was absolutely a political question.

 

Mrs. Bergwin seconded. She said all the sophistry, all the arguments of the suffrage association dissolved when she thought of the  actualities of life as she knew them. (Loud and prolonged applause and one call of Traitor). She had been asked if her position was not illogical. She reminded council that she had to support illogical things before when common sense opposed them.

It was no argument at all to say that because men had the vote women should too. What women would have the vote? ( Cries of ‘That’s the question’ and an interruption from some young women delegates who Mrs. Bergwin addressed as ‘dear girls’, adescription which created great laughter.

 

They might soon be happy wives but they would commence their married life with a grievance. “See what I have had to give up? I am not fit to have a vote now.”

I have a personal grievance, said Bergwin. We have had a government who would have carried social reform, remedied evils burning to be remedied.(Applause). But that government has been hampered and hindered…(Cries of dissent drowned out final words of sentence..

And this in atime that men’s passions may have been easily aroused. It was the job of her sex to shout PEACE. Peace with honour. Because her sex, womanhood and motherhood convinced her that this was not the time, nor was it opportune to give votes for women.

Mrs. Allan Croft said he was responsible for the appearance on the motion on the agenda. And he was proud.

Mr. Cook had missed out the very object of the NUT which was the justification for the motion on the agenda.  Object number 5 is to secure effective representation of education in Parliament. What better way could we devise to secure effective representation of education in Parliament than by greatly largely augmenting the ranks of voting members of the NUT.(Here. Here.)

 

The women members of the NUT provided the greater part of the parl. Fund. (Here here.) Over 4,000 pounds went every year into the fund directly from the pockets of the women members of the union.

 

Mr. Dakers pointed out that there was one department of social life in which women had a special interest. The department of the home. Therefore he claimed women had a special interest in the laws and regulations which determine the education of their children. Children were the shuttlecocks .of the party politicians. With their special interests in the welfare of the children who were a part of the home women would make a much better case of it.

 

 

Hot off the Press: the Truth about the Titanic Sinking (1912)

 

A 1908 pic from Technical World magazine showing where the Titanic and the Olympic were to be built.

 

I found this interesting article written about the Sinking of the Titanic in a magazine published in the US in June 1912 that tells the story from a working man’s perspective – and an engineer’s perspective. Here’s the first part of  Loss of the Steamship Titanic: the World’s Greatest Achievement in Shipbuilding. From Locomotive Firemen and Engineman’s Magazine. (Amazing what you can find on eBay.)

 

My ebook, Threshold Girl is about a college girl in 1911/12,is based on real letters, and contains information about the Titanic, from the point of view of the woman on the street, so to speak.

 

The sinking of the Whitestar Steamship Titanic, at about 2 o’clock on the morning of April 15, 1912, is the greatest disaster in maritime history, one thousand,six hundred and thirty five lives being lost, out of a total of 2, 340 on board, while many of the 705 who were rescued suffered hardships and terror, that will doubtless impair their health and mar their future happiness.

 

The Titanic was on her Maiden Voyage, she was the biggest finest ship afloat and her reign as Queen of the Seas was only of five days duration. On April 10th she sailed from Liverpool and on the following Sunday night, give days later, collided with an iceberg and sank, about 150 miles south of Cape Race Newfoundland and about 1100 miles east of New York.

 

Nothwithstanding the presence of much floating ice, and repeated warnings from other vessels that the icebergs were in the vicinity, she was steaming ahead when the collision occurred at a speed of about 21 and a half knots, about 24 and 3/4 statute miles and hour.

 

Some few minutes after 11 o’clock, accounts vary as to the exact time, a veritable mountain of ice was seen ahead, against which despite all efforts the ship crashed, a submerged portion ripping open the vessel’s bottom  on the starboard side.

 

The shock was not violent, but the officer’s soon discovered that the damage was such that it was just a question of how long the leaking bulkhead and pierced air compartments would keep the vessel afloat. (to be continued)

 

 

 

The Titanic and Olympic being built. Pic from Technical World Magazine.

 

This article is to be Continued next post.

 

Threshold Girl: Chapter 1 (a) Draft1

Edie and Flo 1912

All Rights Reserved 2011. Educators and students may download and distribute with attribution. This novel is a ‘re-imagining’ of events that took place in 1911, using the Nicholson Family Letters as a template. The chronology followed is that of the letters, and not of the historical events woven into the letters for the purpose of this story. Where real historical personages are described there is a very real attempt to have them speak their own words as recorded in historical documents and newspaper accounts.
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Give us a healthy home full of intellectual activity where the homely virtues prevail. Where complete honesty and frankness have free expression. Where the lungs expand with pure air, and the brain quivers with wholesome aspiration and sincere inquiry. Where souls bask in contentment and the sunshine of purity and peace. From Food and Cookery Magazine, July 1911

April 2nd.

A ‘threshold girl’ of 18, her thin, light brown hair still tied back in a ponytail, sits curled up in a weathered reed rocker on the veranda of her family home and reads a poem out loud. Or at least she tries to read it.

Ou vont tous ces enfants dont pas un seul ne rit
Ces doux êtres pensifs que la fievre mai-GRIT?

You see, the poem is a French one and the young woman is an Anglo-Quebecker.

The vines have yet to fill in on the verandah, as it is early Spring, so the girl’s long, pale, but not entirely unpleasant-looking face is being sweetly caressed by soft fingers of April sunlight.

Indeed, the same waning afternoon sunshine flickers playfully over the entire Western face of her comfortable Queen Anne Revival style house, a brick-encased 2 and 1/2 storey mini-castle, with the trademark corner tower and irregular roof and, unlike many of the surrounding Queen Anne’s, only a modest amount of gingerbread.

The threshold girl’s expression, though, is intensifying.
Ces filles de huit ans qu’on voit che-mi-ner seules?

Che – Mi- Ner?

Ils s’en vont travailler quinze heures sous des meules.
Meules?

The heels of the young female’s sensible shoes, laced knock-about boots in pebble calf, are dug into the edge of the seat cushion. Her boney knees, blanketed by the blue wool serge cloth of her school jumper, are but two inches from the tip of her nose. She can almost smell the page as she balances the French textbook on said knobby knees, and stares at the mystifying stanzas through wire-rimmed reading glasses.

MEULES??????

So, sad, she suddenly thinks, that she didn’t bother to bring a French/English dictionary from school.

The 18 year old slams shut her textbook, with a whack, and makes a very unladylike sound with her mouth, something like Pooaffffssttt.

Renouf’s Progressive French Reader 11. Poooafffssttt.

She eyes said title set in dark green sans serif typeface on the unsoiled, unprotected cover of the textbook. True enough, muses the young woman, she has indeed progressed – to the point where she hardly understands a word of her assigned French text.

This crazy old poem by Victor Hugo.

Since September she’d been dreading this very day. At the start of the school year, 6 long months ago, she had opened the same light-green text (bought second hand off her cousin, May) and quickly flipped to the back of it, to see what was in store for her, like a fortune teller looking to read her own future. And what she saw for herself in the cards, back then, were some seriously-difficult assignments.

It was self-fulfilling prophesy. You see, this same girl, this high school student, had failed the French and Composition exam for both Model 111 and Academy I and (having to make it up in the summer school) and now she was well on her way to failing French in Academy II.

Only it couldn’t happen. This was the girl’s crunch year at school, her final year, and she simply could not fail, not any subject, not French, no Latin, not algebra, not botany. Not English composition or Canadian history.
Summer school was out of the question this year, not if she wanted to be admitted to Macdonald College and keep alive any hope of getting a good paying job as a teacher on the City Board, like her older sister Marion, who was making 600 a year. Six hundred dollars year. Imagine!

If she failed any subject, she’d have to think of something else to do with her life. She’d have to find another career, for the moment, anyway, until she married. If she could even find a husband. But what else? The idea simply sent her head reeling.

So, she directed her attention back to the matter at hand: the Hugo poem so aptly titled Melancholia.

She timidly re-opened the textbook to the appropriate page. Ever so slowly. As if hoping the print on the page had magically transformed itself into something more decodable.

Ou sont les enfants dont pas un seul rit?
Ces doux êtres pensifs que la fieve maigrit.
Rit? Maigrit?
Ces filled de huit ans qu’on voit CHE MI NER seules?
Ils s’en vont travailler quinze heures sous les meules.

“Oh, what is “rit” again. Such a little word, she should know it. Rice?

“No,” the girl/woman mumbled to herself and then she bit down on her lower lip. All she had to do was memorize the poem. But how could she memorize a poem without understanding it?

Ah, if only one of her sisters was on hand to help her. Either one would do. Both Edith and Marion had a better command of the French language than she. Which wasn’t such a difficult thing, after all.

Ils vont, de l’aube au soir, faire eternellement
Dans la meme prison le meme movement
In the same prison the same movement.

Well, that particular line was easy.

But both older sisters were 70 miles away at their jobs in the big city of Montreal. Marion at Royal Arthur School, in Little Burgundy, teaching her rag-tag group of 50 mostly very poor children, and Edith, around the corner from Marion but a world away, really, in elegant Westmount, at French Methodist Missionary School, helping wayward Catholics, mostly French Canadian, find the Protestant path.

And the girl’s mother, Margaret, who was quick with an opinion on most any modern topic, especially woman suffrage, and who especially liked Canadian history, wasn’t at home either, to offer sympathy, if not support, as she spoke little French. Margaret was next door, attending a tea given by Mrs. Montgomery.

She was getting the week’s gossip from all the other matronly drop-ins. No doubt there were many of them, possibly 10 or even 15 women. It was Mrs. Montgomery’s day at home and it was common knowledge that no one dissected ‘the local news’ with more acuity than their own nosy, neighbour-lady.

No doubt all the nosy ladies were asking after the girl, and her plans for the next year. “Any beaus yet?” they were probably enquiring as they leaned over the trays of devilled eggs and lettuce sandwiches.

L’aube. Lobe. That must come from Latin. How could she pass Latin, a useless language no one spoke anymore and fail French, the mother tongue of more than half the people who lived in her province?

Her teacher said most French words came from Latin, and she could see it, A BIT, but that only confused her more.

Oh, why had she been so stupid not to borrow a translation dictionary from school? “That’s what they are there for, young lady” Mr. Maxwell, her teacher, had intoned, sarcastically when she admitted to not owning one herself.

That was last week, when she had messed up yet another French assignment. When she proffered an excuse that her sisters weren’t at home to help, the funny-looking little man, with curly red hair, had glared down at her and sputtered, “Then, Miss Nicholson, you must try to be more resourceful.”

Today, upon returning home from school at mid-afternoon she found some freshly baked baking powder biscuits, called scones, on the kitchen table and a note from her mother, explaining that her father, Norman, had taken the morning train to Quebec City on IMPORTANT business, with the word “Important” in capital letters.

“So, Flora,” continued her mother in the note (for that was her name, Flora Sophia Nicholson)”Please pick up the afternoon mail. But only AFTER you have finished studying. I’m expecting a letter from Herbert.”

Herbert was Flora’s only brother, the second oldest child in the family, who was far away in Saskatchewan, working.

Flora’s mother, it seemed, was always expecting a letter from her beloved Herb, her one and only son, who had left in a hurry for the West over a year ago. But these letters came few and far between. In one year, Flora herself had received just one postcard from her brother, who described the dizzying mix of races out there, Old Country Scots, Germans, Swedes, Hebrews, Poles and those Ruthenians in their brightly coloured costumes, and claimed that no one out West could understand how he was from Quebec and spoke only English. So he was as strange as all the rest.

Should she go to the mail now, or study some more, Flora wondered.

Continued next post or read entire story at www.tighsolas.ca.page10.pdf.pdf

Editing Letters: Editing Lives

From the 1897 promotional brochure of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Six types of American woman: in the home, in religion, in business, in society, in summer, in the beauty motherhood. In summer???

Magazines have always loved to reduce people to stereotypes. The six types of, or five types of, or four types of is a cliche feature of journalism even today. Along with 10 tips to fix everything. When I was writing for magazines, I was always asked to write a sidebar with ten easy tips, for those readers who couldn’t be bothered to read the article itself.

I had to write SHOW, not TELL and start with an anecdote of sorts, an illustration.

I doubt that I wrote anything of any use to anybody. But it sold the products between the pages.

The one time I wrote a really important article, about shiftwork, where I interviewed young parents and experts about the new 24/7 society, and revealed that it was the young families who suffered most from this new paradigm, the article was killed. And this was the only time an article was killed. No explanation, although I could guess. The major advertiser for the magazine had just gone over to 24/7 shifts at its factories.

(Sort of like writing about cancer and smoking for a magazine in the 60′s, which was all cigarette advertising. A real no no.)

Anyway, I’m beyond all that now. I’m doing something really important. I’m editing the Nicholson letters for 1912, to show HOW IT REALLY WAS, to dispel myths and to reveal what has changed and what has stayed the same.

I’ve spent over five years researching the background to these letters, so you’d think it would be easy. But it isn’t. Today, I have printed out the April 1912 letters, when the poop has hit the air circulation device, with deaths and fights over wills and Herbert’s debts, and I understand exactly what’s going on, but I have to put them in a readable form. An enticing form.

Most of the letters have a standard form.. a conventional form of writing these people all understand instinctively. They start out with a remark about receiving other letters and a thank you for these same letters.. then some news about who was home with respect to family members, then some local gossip and then, only then, the MEAT, of the issue. The big problems at hand.

Sometimes, the letters end the PS has all the meat, as if it couldn’t come out before, but suddenly pours out.

And occasionally there’s a jaw dropping line, or an insightful line, or a historically relevant line.

All very interesting.

In short, the letters are LONG, because it was understood that in the days before radio, and when only a few homes had a victrola or talking machine, letters were a form of entertainment.

It seems people liked to read them much more than they liked to write them.

It was a social time, too. Despite social media, we live very privatized lives today. At least I do, and I do not believe I am alone in this. Almost all socializing happens at work, and occasionally at a party on the weekend.

Yes, there is a lot going on, but it mostly costs money. FREE socializing hardly exists, except for young people.

Anyway, as I edit these letters, my main goal is for people to see What has changed and what has stayed the same.

While maintaining dramatic tension (already in the letters).

Yes, Rosie, there are English Quebeckers

My husband taped an edition of Who Do You Think Your Are, because it featured Rosie O’Donnell who traced an ancestor back to 1860′s Montreal.

Irish Catholic, baptised in Notre Dame Cathedral (where the first stained glass window was co-sponsored by my grandfather, Jules Crepeau.)

Rosie visited the Bibliotheque National and the National Archives on Viger, the same place I visited to find the dossier of what remains of the National Council of Women documents from the 1912 era.

Unlike me, she found someone to help her who spoke English

Rosie’s ancestor was a Murtaugh from Ireland and she found all this out she joked “I guess that makes me part French Canadian.”

Just a joke, but it goes to show you how NO ONE understands that there were a lot of English Canadians in Montreal in the 19th and 20 th century and not all Rich Westmount Scots, and that there are STILL anglos in Quebec.

Rosie’s ancestor was a day-worker or journalier as it was usually written. As I’ve blogged about recently, that was a very common ‘profession.’

And this is believed despite that many Quebec born anglos went on to work in Hollywood. Mack Sennett, (Sinnott) from Richmond, Quebec being one them.

Norma Shearer from Westmount. Glenn Ford (Quebec, City). Let me check IMDB. Colleen Dewhurst, Ruta Lee, Ben Blue, Leonard Cohen (but of course), etc, etc. Oscar Peterson, Mort Sahl, the guy who wrote Hertzog (name temporarily escapes me, from Lachine and Vanessa Lengies, the young actress who went to high school with my son and the other contemporary actress from 24.. she’s from south shore.)

Anyway, I really like Rosie, causes she’s smart. And this was otherwise, an interesting program, especially for people who like genealogy.

Tender Passions

Sarah McLean McLeod, 1825-1912. She was illiterate. But her descendants put great store in the written word.

“A well written letter has opened the way to prosperity for many a one, has led to many a happy marriage and constant friendship, and has secured many a good service in time of need; for it is in some measure a photograph of the writer, and may inspire love or hatred, regard or aversion in the reader, just as the glimpse of a portrait often determine us, in our estimate, of the worth of the person respresented.

Therefore, one of the roads to fortune runs through the ink bottle, and if we want to attain a certain end in love, friendship, or business, we must trace out the route correctly with the pen in hand.”

From Light in Dark Corners, a popular “sex-hygiene” book of the 1910 era.

The first letter is from Light and Dark Corners, a sample Love Letter.

The Second is a sample Love Letter from the Nicholson copy of Martine’s Sensible Letter writer, 1860. You can see (hear?) a difference in tone.. and Light In Dark Corners was a very PRUDISH book.

There is no greater sentiment than love and why that reality should be obscured by mere sentimentalism with all its train of absurdities is incomprehensible…

How to begin a love letter: Never say My dearest Nellie, My adored Nellie, until Nellie has called you My Dear or has given you to understand that such familiar terms are permissable. As a rule a gentleman will never err is he says “Dear Miss Nellie” and if the letters are cordially reciprocated, the Miss Nellie, in time, can be omitted.

My dearest Laura:

I can no longer restrain myself from writing to you, dearest and best of girls, what I have often been on the point of saying to you. I love you so much that I cannot find words in which to express my feelings. I have loved you from the very first day we met, and always shall. Do you blame me because I write so freely? I should be unworthy of you if I did not tell you the whole truth. Oh, Laura, can you love me in return? I am sure I shall not be able to bear it if your answer is unfavourable. I still study your every wish if you will give me the right to do so. May I hope? Send just one kind word to your sincere friend.”

From Martine’s Sensible Letter Writer, 1853. Nicholson Family Copy. New York, Dick and Fitzgerald.

The letters beyond all comparison the most attractive and interesting are those written in the intimate confidence excited by tender passion. The language of the heart is universal; in all countries, and with all people where there is sensibility, it is understood. It is the language of nature, charming us with its simplicity, and by its true expression of our feelings, possessing the power of commanding our sympathy. The sentiments should spring from the tenderness of heart. Any extravagant flattery should be avoided, tending to disgust those to whom it is addressed and to degrade the writers and create suspicion as to their sincerity.

Sample Letter:

Dear Allie.

Will you allow me, in a few plain and simple words, respectfully to express the sincere and esteem affection I entertain for you and to ask whether I may venture to hope that these sentiments are returned? I love you truly and earnestly and knowing you admire frankness and candor in all things I cannot think that you will take offense at this letter. Perhaps it is self flattery to think that I have any place in your regard. Should this be so the error will carry with it its own punishment for my happy dream will be over.

Favorable Reply:

Dear Sir. In the same spirit of frankness you have used in addressing me, I admit that among the gentlemen of my acquaintance there is none that I esteem so highly as yourself. I must, however, have time to think your letter over and to look into my own heart before I give you a more decided answer.

Workopolis 1910

Because so many Canadian children were growing up with a view like this:

Or like this:

There was a movement to bring them back to the land. The school garden movement, in both the US and Canada. There is a park in front of the building that housed Royal Arthur, so I’m guessing there was some gardening activity.

My last post describes the journey I took last night, using the 1911 Census, through the streets of St. Antoine Ward, (or St-Henri) seeing who lived there and what they did for a living (sic) and what salary they pulled in.

After noticing that 500 was about an average salary for a skilled or semi skilled worker, I had to wonder. How come so few males wanted to become teachers?

In 1910, in Montreal, a male graduate of Macdonald earned an automatic 8o0. a year, while a female graduate like Flo made 550.

And the male graduate, however good at his job, would likely earn a principalship in no time, as they didn’t give women these jobs.

Of course, they had reasons for doing this. 1)Many women, like Marion, left the profession after a few years to marry.

(Although I have to wonder if Marion would have left the profession so quickly if a ‘young boy out of school’ hadn’t taken the job teaching 5th grade that she had been promised.

Now, there was no clear cut rule that a woman who married had to give up her job. At least I don’t think so. In the Nicholson letters for 1913, after she has become engaged, Marion is apparently debating whether to work another year. Of course, maybe that means she would have put off her marriage.

And I wonder if she would have given up her job if she had been able to find a nice place to live.

Whatever, she left the profession. And just one year before she had described herself in a letter as ‘on my way to the top.’)

Another reason the Powers that Be were trying to lure men into the teaching profession: 2)the male students in the higher grades were a rough lot and in the higher grades there were more boys than girls, because girls often dropped out at twelve years of age.

And another reason, often cited, was 3) that the feminine milieu of school was just plain bad for male students. Principal Robbins of McGill Normal School is quoted in the Montreal Gazette 1910 era as saying this feminizing effect of too many women teachers is having a ‘grave national effect’ and that boys need a strong masculine hand.

But back in 1907 Marion had been offered the Principalship of a school in Hatley, and in the letter offering her the job, the supervisor admits that the boys are a tough bunch “but you can handle it, I am sure.” The salary was tiny, though, 250ish, if I recall.

At her first school in the country, Marion had seen the Principal get into a fist fight with a male student.

So male teachers were given preference, despite being few and far between, which really irked ambitious woman teachers, especially the career women who never married. Marion wasn’t alone in how she felt.

She just had a way out: marriage. And then her husband died prematurely, leaving her penniless with four children to support.

Of course, prospective teachers would have had to be well-educated and maybe the well-educated men felt they had better prospects. Like Herb, who always thought he deserved more. Herb graduated from St. Francis College (I assume, I have no proof that he graduated, only that he attended). He became a bank clerk. Edith’s great love was also a bank clerk. Bank clerks didn’t make much, either.

But then they didn’t have to watch over “50 very bad children’ whose parents were the working poor, like Marion had to.

Jewish graduates weren’t allowed to work at all. Many of these girls were hired by the Jewish Community to go into the homes of new immigrants and teach them about hygiene, etc. This likely accounts (at least in part) for why infant mortality among the Jews of Montreal was the lowest in the city!!

A Real Mix!

Atwater Market in Little Burgundy, a trendy venue today, built in the 30′s, hence the beautiful deco styling.

Yesterday, I took a quick car tour of Little Burgundy, near the Lachine Canal, and near Canning Street, the site of Royal Arthur School, where Marion Nicholson taught in 1908-1912.

I seldom go to that part of town, despite the fact it’s so close to downtown and the Old Forum site and the AMC theatre, where I regularly watch my ‘adult’ movies. As in good movies. (I love that scene in the Simpson’s where Bart catches Moe coming out of the Adult Movie Section of a rental store and Moe is carrying a load of Truffaut’s and Woody Allen’s and Moe says in his sleaziest tone “Brideshead is going to get Revisited Tonight.”… My husband doesn’t get it.)

This area has been left behind by time, although people are working hard to gentrify it.

So close to downtown and on a canal, you’d think it would be easy, but I don’t think the plan is working all that well.

The area, despite the condo projects (and bustling Atwater Market) seems desolate and deserted.

Why, because it’s a former industrial area, and it just isn’t a pretty area. It isn’t Greenwich Village, if you know what I mean. It isn’t the Plateau.

It has these looming heritage industrial sites, the Northern Electric Building and the Dominion Textile Building, all built with Victorian economy in mind, and other smaller such buildings and then a few tracts of era housing and no trees! A few cute churches, though.

I will revisit in the spring.

After, I took a tour of the area in 1910. Using the Census. I discovered that the immediate area of Marion’s school overwhelmingly was home to French Canadian Roman Catholics and Irish Catholics. (Although there’s a concentration of Protestants right on Canning, for good reason, I guess.)

A few Protestants and Hebrews (as they wrote) were scattered here and there, on adjacent streets, mostly newly arrived immigrants. Scotch Presbyterians, but only a few, Irish Protestants, but rare, Norwegian Lutherans, Italian Presbyterians (yes, one such family, who must have felt very isolated)Russian Hebrews, a real mix. English Anglicans too.

Which means Marion’s 50 bad students, as she described them, were a real mix too, with most not having English as their tongue (and the new Scots talking so broad she probably couldn’t understand them. (That’s how Herbert describes the Scots he meets out west.)

I did not see children marked down as ‘employed’.. all ‘students or ecoliers’ but they might have lied, and as I’ve said, many kids had to work outside of school. The two Russian Armenian families described the dad as a merchant. Well, if he had a store, his many children likely worked in it.
But if he had a push-cart, they worked at something else, delivery boys, babysitters.

The men and women of the 1911 era worked at the usual variety: drivers (horse) was a popular job, as was dayworker/journalier (someone who did anything anywhere); bricklayers (a reasonably well paid profession) and as waiters and shippers, etc.

There were many young women working as stenographers (which would be typists, I think.) Now, I knew this was an up and coming profession for women, but I can see it was well established in 1911, although not particularly well paid.

No family seemed to make the 1,500 deemed necessary to raise a family in 1911. Not even close. (That’s why it is obvious the kids worked.)

I found two foreladies, which sounds very modern. And people who worked in buanderies, or laundries. And I found a writer, in insurance.

Oh, and sometimes the job description was vague ..employee of manufacturing.

And sometime the person was more precise: Operator at Northern Electric; or at least precise about where they worked: flour mill (Red Roses?) Sugar Mill (Redpath?) and GTR as in Grand Trunk Railway but I found no one working at Dominion Textile….yet.

Operators put through the long distance calls, if my understanding of the term here is correct. I didn’t check to see if these were men or women. Women I assume. Certainly that job became a woman’s job.

The oddest entry I found was 5 or so adult men, who had just arrived in 1910 from all over, Mexico, Norway and other places, who all lived at the same address and who all worked in the same “roller mill.” Clearly someone brought in certain skilled labour to start up a business. That’s the only explanation I can think of. (My husband says a roller mill is where metal is turned into sheets.)

Dominion Textile is now condos and businesses and a fancy restaurant.

Northern Electric. I was in that building a few years ago when it was being turned into a Techy place… Scary and cavernous. My husbands tells me the operators strode around on roller skates, the distances they had to cover were so great. I’m not surprised!!

Oh, and I finally found someone else, not especially far away on Tupper in Westmount, who was making 7,000 a year. My husband’s grandfather, Thomas Gavine Wells, who was the President of Laurentian Spring Water.

The volunteer transcribing that page of the Census made an error, and mistook a T for a F, so I couldn’t find him originally and this perplexed me.

Well, he had his second or third wife, Beatrice, and also two sons, Edward and Jaimie. Funny, the two sons, as my father-in-law remembers it, were Ted (Edward) and Morris. So unless Jamie is James Morris, something fishy is going on.

Now, 7,000 was a huge income (if it’s true). He’s making more than my own grandfather in the era.

Anyway, this just serves to show the great gap in incomes in the 1910 era in Montreal. Hey, looks as if we are headed back that way. Well, we are already there. The average family makes 50 thousand or so and pays out most of that to taxes, their mortgage and food, (and bank interest) and then some people make 4,000.000. a year and hardly pay taxes. I’d say that’s pretty comparable to the 1910 era.

I always thought that when he remarried May Hardy Fair from Norfolk Virginia, in 1917 (the marriage certificate said he was a lawyer, a lie and also claimed she was widowed, another lie..the rich lied a lot, I guess , that they lived off her money.

She was a Hardy Fair, cousin to General Douglas MacArthur.

But he was still at Laurentian, so he must have still been making a lot.

In 19o9 there was a typhoid epidemic in Montreal and Laurentian capitalized on this, scaring people into buying their water.