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’.

You’ve Got Mail: Titanic Era

A Pile of 1910 era letters. I have 300 of them.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. Cliche, no kidding. True? You bet.

Right now I am trying to publicize my ebook Threshold Girl, a story about my husband’s great Aunt Flora and her year at college in 1911/1912.

No vampires, no lesbians. Just Presbyterian teachers in the Edwardian Era. All corseted up to keep their morals from spilling out at the seams. See the problem?

(The newswires were abuzz  (ancient metaphor) with a story about X Files actress Gillian Anderson. Apparently she had a lesbian affair in high school or something. “Boy is her career that much in the toilet?” I wondered.” Actually, I like her a lot and she’s been working in Britain. And she starred in a fine production of the House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.

Anyway, it’s coming up to the 100th anniversary of the Titanic Era,so I’m using that angle to get attention, to try to get some publicity.

But I’m not living in the past,  my pitch is more about trying to promote an ebook. Ebooks are “IN” right now, and even if Amazon and a few others are trying to get control of the whole ebook thing, it’s still pretty much up in the air, I think. At least, I HOPE.

So I’m pitching my Threshold Girl as both an ebook story AND a Titanic Story.

The trouble is, who do I pitch too?

Arianna Huffington posted an interesting article last week on her Huffington Post. She worries that the  ’traditional’ news media was caught up in a dubious habit of playing second hand rose to Facebook and Twitter by covering little but  ’top trending’ stories on these social media, as if  ’top trending’ means IMPORTANT.

Of course it doesn’t, it likely means just the opposite.

That or Crime Stories. That seems to be all the traditional press is covering these day. It’s cheap: it draws readers through titillation. It’s tabloid. It’s lowest common denominator, but it seems to be all we’ve got lately.

My Threshold Girl story IS NOT a top trending topic on Twitter. (And there’s no Dead-Young-Women in story for titillation. No the women it in are all very alive.) The book popular in a few classrooms in Canada and the US, that’s all. (The follow up to Threshold Girl about Flora’s sister Edith, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, does have a love-and-murder theme. So I’m learning.)

The question is? How to make a story about teachers in 1910, Presbyterians at that, ‘sexy.’

A headline I read (somewhere online) last week claimed that ebooks are making reading “sexy” again.

(I don’t think it was ever considered sexy. I know. I read a lot in my teens and twenties.)

Another article, I scanned quickly, says that ebooks are changing how we read: while texting, uploading, watching videos. Sexy because it’s so chaotic, I guess, so unpredictable.

Reading is no longer this ‘sit by yourself under an old oak tree by a bubbling stream’ type of activity.

Yes, we’re going through a period of exponential change, similar to the 1910 era, when the motion pictures (and they’d only been around for a few years)  were becoming more popular each day, and when telephones were becoming widely used- although LONG DISTANCE was still very expensive.

The Nicholsons of Richmond Quebec wrote a LOT of letters in the 1910 era, because they couldn’t afford to use the telephone for long distance. (That’s why I could write Threshold Girl, I have hundreds of their letters from the Titanic Era.)

The Nicholson women wore off a lot of calories walking to and from the mail in their town, Richmond, Quebec. About a mile each way.It was a favorite thing to do, after going to church. (Radio wasn’t yet around, although wireless technology was, so sermons were their only daily entertainment. ) They got mail twice  day! Even on Saturday.

I am guessing that for a couple of centuries now walking to the mail has been the highlight of many a person’s day. (Or even just getting the mail at the home.)

I’m not guessing. I KNOW it has been.

And even if the mailman mostly brought bills, junk mail and bad news, the hope always was that on THIS DAY, it would bring something better!  Amazing News! Or merely good news. Or just an entertaining letter, a happy letter, from an old friend maybe. A long lost friend, perhaps. A letter to lift our spirits, to make us feel valued, loved and less alone in the world.

(In 1910 people often wrote letters to vent or to complain, (like Greg Smith at Goldman Sachs, yesterday) so many letters the Nicholsons received from friends and relatives were major downers. (And in those days they had things to complain about: typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever.)The Nicholson letters are written in a time of family turmoil, so they are not careful sometimes and write things they shouldn’t.) If one of them writes something nasty about a family member, BURN THIS LETTER is often written in large print at the bottom. I have a couple of those. )

So nothing much has changed in that regard. 100 years later. With email, and texting, and all the rest that is evolving so quickly whatever I write now will be obsolete before I finish typing the sentence. (Maybe TYPING is obsolete, I haven’t checked.)

No, little has changed, if considering the human heart, the human condition: We’ve just got so much more media to build our hopes and dreams on, that’s all.

What has changed dramatically, is how PRIVATIZED our lives have become.  Threshold Girl reveals how, in the days before media, people had to rely on each other much much more. Changes were abreast though.

In 1910 Richmond Quebec was losing citizens to the big city and the West. It was getting lonlier in small towns, especially for younger people.

A Soap Forgotten

Sapolio Soap, a brand forgotten, but according to Wikipedia a best selling soap at the turn of the last century, one that advertised heavily and one that subsequently lost its market because it stopped advertising heavily.

Hmm.

A soap with a name that sounds like the most dreaded disease of the 20th century (also off wikipedia).

In the era of light, soap and water and above all PURITY.

Not a mention of the P word in the copy.. What was the copywriter thinking?

“Look into the homes and see the service Sapolio gives cleaning pans, kettles, paint, marble, woodwork and floors….Cleans, scours, polishes, works without waste.”

Virtues certainly, but not the appropriate one for the new century. Just ask Procter and Gamble and their advertiser J. Walter Thompson and anyone back then who read the Ladies’ Home Journal.

OK. So I turned my very very messy house upside down looking (once again) for my 1911 Magazines, the Delineator and the Pictorial Review.

That’s because I have figured out how to design my Threshold Girl e-book or ebook, with bits about fashion…High fashion and low fashion that are self-explanatory. That will interest girls and also underscore my point about child labour.

And it will look pretty.

The Delineator, in the public domain, has beautiful plates and also little drawing of fashion items, many the delicate ones.

I want to scan and put them in the book at areas where the reader can pause for a moment.. and at chapter heads.

Anyway, I will spend the next few days cleaning the crap out of my house, while still looking for those magazines. My sons are home for a few days and all they do is talk about violent video games and poker. One is an astrophysicist and one is about to finish a philosophy degree while training as a high end chef, but because they are so advanced in their fields the ONLY subjects they appear to have in common, today, are video games and poker.

Driving me berzerk, except my son made great lamb burgers and fennel salad the other day. (Neither is big anymore into pro sports.)

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

Child Labour in Cotton: Then and Now

1911 Census Page: Everyone worked 60 hours at the Dominion Textile Plant in 1911 in Magog. Even Occasional Jobbers. That’s because the Quebec Factor Act said no factory employee could work more than 60 hours…Someone fixed up the salaries too.

Well, as I write Flora in the City, about Flora Nicholson in 1911/12 where she gets a chance to learn about the human cost of her clothing, but really does nothing about it, just like most of us, I have decided to give Miss Gouin, the milliner’s apprentice ,another scene.

Flora will see her in Richmond, possibly sitting on bench in front of the Post Office. She will be reading a book. An English Book. The Handbook for Department Stores: Linen and Cotton Department. This will be to show how smart and ambitious she is. She will tell Flora she wants to go work for Dupuis Freres, in Montreal, or even one the big American Department Stores, where they sometimes like a girl with a French accent (she will say) as long as the girl says she is from Paris. That’s where Flora will hear that Milliners can make as much as 1,000 a year.

I’ll have Miss Gouin turn the tables on Flora and ask for help reading a portion.. How can Flora decline? A relevant bit.. which one? The book thoroughly describes all the kinds of cotton. Maybe I’ll just have her read it out, and ask Flora if the pronounciation is good.

I found a paper online about child labour in the cotton industry, TODAY. I am reading it carefully, of course, so that I am able to make my 1910 story relevant. I have to find some points that overlap. I am sure there are many.

The paper is by Alejandro Plastina and is called Child Labour in the Cotton Sectors and was written for the International Cotton Advisory Board in Washington DC.

According to the introduction, there are 300 million children, aged 5-17 working worldwide. Of those 200 million are child labourers.

Here’s a quote from the paper defining child labour. “Schematically, child labor includes all types of work conducted by children 5-11 years old, non-hazardous work conducted by children 12-14 years for more than 14 hours but less than 43 hours per week, and all worst forms of child labor conducted by children 5-17 years (including hazardous work in specified industries and occupations and work for more than 43 hours per week in other industries and occupations). In essence, child labor is work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity and is considered a violation of fundamental human rights (ILO 2008b).”

I’ll have someone in Flora in the City use the same rationale for child labour, that it’s the parents’ fault. That it is better for the kids to work than to starve… or be forced into worse kinds of work or sexual slavery, which is a big concern in 1911, and called the “the social evil”. Even people who could care less about the well-being of children were interested in eradicating prostitution.

And as for the older women workers, during my scene at the Montreal Council of Women, where Lady Drummond discusses the Eaton’s strikes, someone will yell out “It is lucky they are getting paid for what most women do for free.”

Mrs. Drummond won’t agree, but that line is an important one.