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’.

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.

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

Love and Loss Story 1910 Montreal.

Edith Nicholson 1884-1977 and her ‘unofficial fiance’ Charles Gagne 1883(?) – 1910. This picture is likely 1909.

Edith Nicholson, my husband’s great Aunt, never married. She told her nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews that she lost her ‘great’ love in a hotel fire. They weren’t ‘officially engaged’ but they had ‘an understanding’.

In 2004, I found the Nicholson letters and in a letter dated May 3 1910, Edith writes of the loss to her Mother, Margaret in Richmond Quebec.

Your letter received this am. It was so good to hear your voice over the phone. It was quite natural. Oh, how I wish I could talk over everything with you. It seems terribly hard to think it all for the best, when there are so many that are of no use living on and others that are held in esteem cut off in a moment. One thing, I am very thankful for that he wrote me. No doubt one of the last things that he did. I can’t express my feelings. I never felt so badly in my life. But I suppose there are few who have had so pleasant a one as I have, and trouble comes to all.

It took me a while to figure out, but her beau was a Charlie Gagne. (She mentions many young men in her letters, sometimes only with initials.) It seems Edith and Charlie had an on-again off-again type relationship through 1908-1909. In the summer of 1909 I have  proof that he spent time stepping out with Edith as I have a few pictures of the couple on outings in the Eastern Townships.

In September 1909 her mother Margaret writes her father Norman and says “Charlie has gone to Mexico. So that flirtation is over.”

In October 1909, Edith writes her Mom saying she hasn’t heard from Charlie G and that she has no intention of trying to contact him. “He could still be in Mexico, for all I know.”

Then there’s NOTHING but the May 3 letter. Edith writes that she is looking at his picture in the Montreal Star and that “it does not do him justice.”

About 5 years ago, I tripped over to the McGill Library to check out the May 1910 Star. I found a story about a Cornwall fire, where a Charlie Gagne, bank clerk, perished.

No picture though – so I was confused.

I found the Nicholson family album a little later and saw these pictures. Could this man be the Charlie of the letters? I wondered. But, again, I couldn’t prove for certain.

Then Google News archives came online and I saw that the Rossmore Fire happened on April 29!

Yesterday, I ventured down to Concordia’s Webster Library to check out the January-April Reel of the 1910 Montreal Star. Sure enough, the Cornwall fire was front page news on April 29 as the Star was an afternoon paper. The next day’s issue had a back of the newspaper follow up article on the fire with a picture of Charlie Gagne, Levis born bank teller at the Bank of Montreal.

The picture was of a sober-faced Charlie, but it was without a doubt the man of the family album. (I didn’t have a library card so could not buy a photocopy of the picture.)

Mystery over.

Right now I am heavy into writing Milk and Water, my story of 1927 Montreal… but I’ve already plotted out Edith’s Story, “The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, Militant Suffragette Sympathizer and Inadvertent Opium Addict.”

It’s told from the future (from today perhaps by her spirit..or from 1976 the year before she died.)

She starts with hearing the news of the death, on the Saturday, April 30. (She won’t have heard of it the day before.)

She is at Westmount Methodiste Institute – a boarding school, where everyone has Saturday afternoon off.

She is planning to go to see an art exhibit at Phillip’s Square.

She is going to wear her new hat, she just purchased on the 19th of April for 7.50 (a huge amount of money for a teacher making 200 a year) a big black shape with pink flowers and a black velvet bow.

Dr. Villard, the principal tells her of the death. She takes to her bed, in the boarding school.

She is given strong medicine.  She sleeps for a few days and then wanders around the school in a fog for a few days.

The Next Saturday she awakes and takes double or triple the amount of tonic she is supposed to. She puts on her white dress (not appropriate for street wear) and new hat and drifts out down the stairs of the boarding school on her way  to the Art Exhibit.

Edith on Opium

But before she gets out the door of Westmount Methodist, a young male student tells her the big news:The KING is Dead.

She wanders out the door up Greene Avenue to Saint Catherine

to the streetcar

 

that takes her past Peel and Ste. Catherine

to Phillip’s Square and the Montreal Art Association Building and the exhibit of modern Canadian artists.

The Streetcar is abuzz with talk of the King’s death and new King, George V.  She is confused. Why is everyone talking about her beau’s death?

Edith is keen on seeing a painting by  F. S. Coburn, the Eastern Townships artist from Melbourne, the town adjacent Richmond.  A painting of a red sleigh in winter being pulled by a happy white horse. She is homesick for the E.T.

She wanders into the next room and sees, front and center,  the painting Maternity by Mary Riter-Hamilton – of a woman breastfeeding, and it occurs to her, all of a sudden, that she will NEVER MARRY and never have children. So, she faints.

Dr. Villard’s daughter rouses her and takes her home. She has been with Edith all along,  following her, knowing something is not right.  But Edith hasn’t been aware of it….(That’s my first chapter.)

In Levis, in 1901, according to the Canadian Census, there is only one Charles Gagne, 17. A French Canadian Catholic. He has not father, but a mom who is a seamstress, a high end one.

If this is the Charlie, and I think it is, he must have converted. Edith works at a school where French Catholics are ‘brought up to the light’ as Dr. Villard says in a book he writes a decade later.

Phillip’s Square in 1910 was considered a very proper place for women. The park had no benches, so no place for leering old men to sit and no place for women to rest and ‘invite’ men’s attention.

Morgan’s Department Store was on one corner (and department stores were considered safe havens for women), the Art Association building at another, Birk’s Jewellers at yet another and there was a church at the other corner.

Coincidentally, a statue of Edward VII was soon erected at this square and so remains.

In 1910, PROPER young women were allowed to be good consumers, but not ‘a product’ to be consumed by society, especially by men. That would smack of the Social Evil, prostitution. This “Social Evil” or “the world’s oldest profession” (as Kipling coined it) informed the life of every era woman, upper, middle and lower class, especially in the Big City.

And yet, every young woman was “on the market” and in the business of selling herself to a man, if the father didn’t have the money to ‘buy’ her a man with a dowry. Edith Nicholson, 27, in this story, effectively takes herself ‘off the market’ at this moment.  I will play with history and have a very sad story to tell: about a young couple in love  and wanting to marry, but without the money to do so. I will have her Beau make a desperate attempt to earn cash (as bank clerks made little money) by going to Mexico – and eventually be murdered for it!

They never did identify the body of Charlie Gagne. All the bodies in the stairwell, (where the fire started, allegedly by a cigarette)were incinerated. They identified his body because a tie pin he owned was nearby.  As you can see, Charlie was a natty dresser, and that likely impressed Edith, who liked to dress just so herself.

Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (among a billion other classic novels of the period) centers on this issue in this time.

 

Phillip’s Square, Birks at Left, Church at right.

Morgan’s from Phillip’s Sqaure

Hags and Whores and Fashion Mores

Footwear 1909, from the Delineator, an article on the technique of the proper walk. Luckily, women had corsets to hold them up in those days, morally and physically, just don’t try running for the streetcar! If you visit YouTube you will find some wonderful era footage of city streets in those days. Pandemonium!

Highly dangerous to walk those crazy streets constricted by clothing. That’s one reason Coco Chanel claimed her clothing became popular: It freed the working woman up. In Flo in the City I describe how Marion had to take three streetcars to work at her school. Imagine this in winter with all the snow! There were heavy snows in February 1909. I think I will add a scene where Marion tumbles in a snowbank…

Hmm. So here’s a picture of stylish footwear from my copy of the Delineator. This style seems ‘witchy’ to me, since movies and such portrayed witches wearing this style. A witch, in movies made in the 30′s and later, was merely an old women, wearing old styles.

A witch today might be an old lady in bell bottom pants! Of course, for a short period in the late 1960′s, early 1970′s the Granny Look came back, with Granny boots and Granny glasses.

Ain’t fashion weird? Of course, nothing is weirder than Madonna bringing back the corset, but wearing it on the outside.

I’ve decided to read this copy of the Delineator, front to back, for research. have not done so, already, because as a modern girl I find it hard to read such wordy magazines.

But almost every article within it strikes a cord with me and seems useful for my novel in progress, Flo in the City, which I am writing on this blog.

My novel is based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ my social studies website.

Remember, the Delineator, unlike the Ladies’ Home Journal, mixed fashion news with social activism…and sometimes to odd effect as reflected in the excerpt I reprinted in the previous installment.

Here’s a rundown of some of the articles in this August 1909 edition:

Styles of the month

Concerning us all (infant mortality)

The Present Unrest Among Women (Gertrude Atherton article printed in my blog a while ago)

The Art of Mary Cassat (Impressionism!)

The White Peril (Bad Milk)

Saving Sunday for America (I’ll write about that next)

The Technique of a Graceful Walk

Good Style in Parasols

Rheumatism: It’s cure

The Delineator Child Rescue Campaign

Dauville Days (Social whirl)

And many fashion and dressmaking pages.

I may only have one copy of the Delineator for the 1910 era, as they are expensive to win on eBay…but I feel I have a representative issue.