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’.

A Safe Place to Shop

Dupuis Freres Department Store, Montreal 1910 era

The Nicholsons of Flo in the City lived in a town of 2,500 and I’ve written about the prestigious position store-keepers held in the community. These were prominent and influential citizens. In Richmond, Quebec there was JC Sutherland, Bedard, Mr. Wales, etc. But the times they were a changin’ and in the cities, the department stores were being established. London, Paris, New York, Chicago all had had them for a while. Flo visited a department store in Boston in 1908 and rode ‘the moving stair.’ She remarks on it in a letter on http://www.tighsolas.ca/

The BBC recently ran a dramatization an Emile Zola book that takes place in one of Paris’s first department stores. This book is a love story, but it describes how the department store owner tries to take over a city block (by putting the other shopkeepers out of business) but the young greedy guy is stymied by one obsinate old umbrella merchant. In this story, the owner of the store mentions that department stores are a safe place for women to shop. Yes, the cities were considered dangerous, especially for a woman alone. But now women had a respectable place to visit, alone, other than church. And so it happened that the female increasingly became the driving force of 2oth century consumerism. (By 1900, Carrie Derick described the home as no longer a center of production, but a center of consumption.)

Outside Simpson’s, Queen Street. 1910 era. Women shoppers…. Give us a place to stand and a place to go… Here’s an excerpt from the 1910 article.

“Canada has passed the “General Store” stage. There are now but a few memorials of the days when all the cities were towns; and all the towns were crossroads villages. More than thirty Canadian cities have a population of 10,0o0 or over; and of these, two are above 250,000 each. All these cities have stores which are in harmony with the size of the place; the larger cities have departmental stores.

From general stores to departmental stores is a far cry, but Canada has made it in a quarter century. The large wholesale and the large specialty store and the departmental store were as sure to come as the telephone, the electric street light and the electric street car.

The general manager of the departmental store must secure a capable and efficient head for each department, and each of these thirty or forty heads must be taught to work under one system without friction. The GM must secure an army of polite, well-dressed, patient and activc employees and infuse them with fidelity to his interests.

The success of the department store is self-evident. It gives low prices, convenience and ensures honest practice.”

(Then the article describes the mail order business of Simpsons, not Eaton’s.)