Lupins and Ideology

A high school class in the 1910 era.

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

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

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

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

These texts are online at archive.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

From Educational Foundations June 1909

(A.S. Barnes and Company)

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

….

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

 

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

 

 

Love and Marriage, Consent and Dowry

Marriage place settings.  Marion Nicholson Hugh Blair 1913. Home-made and on the cheap.

I’ve completed my draft of Diary of a Confirmed Spinster the follow up to Threshold Girl.

It has to be typed and put into pdf.

As I turn to Marion’s Story, I have marriage on my mind, 1910 marriage.

It’s still considered cute today, on sitcoms at least, for men to ask the father of their intended for his consent to a marriage.

I’ve only heard of one or two real life people who did that.

I think Wolowitz did it on Big Bang. He got married to Bernadette yesterday. Not a bad episode, the wedding on the roof with Google Earth was cute. (It’s hard to write an original marriage scene and that was fairly original.)

But I think I’ve figured out what a father’s consent meant, at least in Canada in 1910, at least for the middle class. It meant the father would give money, a dowry, set the young couple up.

So when a father didn’t give his consent, it didn’t mean he didn’t like the guy or want the daughter to marry, it meant he couldn’t afford it.

This reality is at the heart of my story Diary of a Confirmed Spinster. Norman Nicholson, Edith’s father would not even comment on her favorite, even when introduced to him. So in the book I have her beloved, Charlie, go to extremes to make money for marriage – and get killed. In real life he died in a fire at at Hotel in Cornwall, the Rossmore. His body was never identified.

As for Marion, well, she gets engaged in May 1913, a decision made only by the couple, although she has indeed ‘asked’ her father for his opinion of her intended earlier in October 1912.

In June 1913 Edith writes to her Mother, saying she wishes father would write and give his FULL CONSENT as Marion has to tell her principal whether she wants her teaching job back the next year. And Hugh, her fiance, wants to start looking for a house.

Norman does write to Marion a long letter saying “He doesn’t know what to say as he is dead broke.”

Norman and Marion’s fiance, Hugh Blair, come to some agreement and I have a letter from Hugh saying he as received whatever  and thank you. (In letters, if someone is thanking someone for money, it is never spelled out. Thank you for ‘the favour’ of the 12th instant.)

Hugh also asks for something from his own father (not sure what) and the father writes a jolly letter back but never mentioning Marion or the marriage.

Hugh’s parents do not attend the wedding in October in Richmond.

I also have a marriage contract, drawn up in Richmond a few days before the wedding, saying that Marion brings nothing to the marriage but her clothes and wedding presents.

So if she leaves Hugh, he keeps the furniture.

In 1910 In Canada, marriage was still a financial contract, although like Marion and Hugh, couples in love could get married without consent and suffer the consequences. Hugh had to go out into business on his own as a lumber merchant. He got shut out the family business, for a while at least.

The ideal marriage is where a man with prospects and education, although perhaps no money of his own, married a woman whose dowry could set him up in life and business. My own grandfather married 1901 was an example. He was Jules Crepeau and Assistant City Clerk in Montreal in 1901. He married the daughter of a master butcher, who brought if my mother is correct, 40,000 to the marriage. (Hard to believe, although Master Butchers were prominent citizens. The woman he married also had prominent connections, a Monsigneur and such.)

So what if they spent their marriage throwing crockery at each other.

Hugh and Edith

From what I see the Nicholson marriage was on the cheap. 6.65 for a cake and a few dollars for material and new shoes for outfits from Hudon’s.

Love and Marriage Dear Sir, I wish to consult you on a subject that deeply interests me while it indirectly concerns you and I hope that my presentation of the matter will meet with your approval. For sometime past your daughter Marion and I have been on intimate terms of friendship which has developed into affection on my part, and I have reason to believe my intentions are not indifferent to her, so I would therefore request your consent to our marriage. Yours sincerely, Hugh Christian Blair (PIC BELOW: Marion draws her ring!)

Titanic Era Life of Women

Coats from Eaton’s Catalogue, winter 1913-14, range 12.00 to 25.00. Mid range. The catalogue opens with glamour coats, fur coats worth 80 dollars or more, muskrat, seal and the most expensive, persian lamb.. There are also some coats for 10.00 and 5.00. In the 16.oo range, cheviot, vicuna, or, a bit more expensive, wool.

Following is an ‘edited’ letter from late 1912. Margaret Nicholson is visiting her girls in Montreal. You see, Marion, her gung-ho daughter, has taken the brave step of finding a flat for herself and her sister and two friends, all teachers, very bold of her. But it’s near impossible in 1913 for working girls (sic) to  keep a flat and a job. So Mom has to come to help. (Besides, without Mom there, people are very suspicious.

My Threshold Girl story (on free ebook) tells the story of Flora Nicholson’s year at Macdonald Teachers College 1911/1912. I am writing the follow up, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about sister Edith’s life in the era, where she loses her great love in a Cornwall hotel fire. I end in August 1912, in Boston, where she is on a trip with sister Marion. Edith has no prospects, work or romantic, for she has quit her teaching job in May.

Marion’s story, the third book in the digital trilogy, will tell about her life between May 1911 to May 1913, the two years she is courted by Hugh Blair, while working as a teacher in Little Burgundy.  Despite her huge ambitions, she ends up giving up teaching to marry Hugh. This letter suggests some reasons why.

2401 Hutchison

November 11, 1912

Dear Norman,

You see by the heading that I am still in the city.

Marion and Flora won’t hear to me going home and E writes for me to stay as she is getting on all right – has one of the Pepplers when she stays in the house. I will not stay more than another week. I do wish Edith was here and that we could be together for the winter as they ought to have someone here. Your letter did not reach me until Friday pm, as Edith sent it–so I felt a little worried as I always got them Thursday.

I am so sorry about your coat. I gave the right add to Lann McMorine. You better make some enquiries there about it. Might be at Cochrane.

Edith writes that Mr. Dyson said he bought thirty cords of wood and would supply our winter’s wood and would bring a cord any time and to let him know so don’t worry any more about wood. She also sent me notice that taxes were due.

Now I am very sorry that Herb seems to be so careless, debt seems to be no worry to him. I hope you have just let him know how hard it is for you to be away from your family and that he might try and do better. He has not written me for several weeks . I really cannot understand how he can do it.

Well, the weeks are going by and Xmas will soon be here I don’t know what the girls can do with the flat; or if they will be able to get someone to keep fires if they want to go home. They will have two weeks holidays. They were talking it over but said they would decide when you came. The weather has been quite nice since I came in here.

I have not bought a coat. Takes more than I had. Marion got a long navy blue one that will be very comfortable this winter. Paid 16.50 and Flora got a brown the same price. They really needed them.

I have not gone anywhere not been up to Cleveland’s yet. I have been having trouble with my teeth and as Marion was having work done at Cleveland’s Friday, I had him look at mine. He said he would do an hours work for me Monday so I am to go at three o’clock, Too bad yours are giving you trouble. I think it is caused from cold, my front teeth at least one of them felt loose, but he said he did not think it was but found cavities in others. M. had five filled.

Marion said she was going to write you and tell you about Mr. Hugh Blair. He seems very nice. Went home Saturday to Three Rivers. There are a good many things that he can do such as fixing window blinds, but Marion won’t let me ask him much. We are trying to put the double windows on here. I want to see them on before I go, although so far they are not needed.

I don’t think there is any danger of them getting behind: the four girls pay 25 dollars each. They would rather do it than board. They say it amounted to about that at Mrs. Ellis’s.

Now don’t worry about Herb. We cannot help it now. If the work stops there you must just take a trip out west. See why he does not at least keep himself. He must know that Marion paid Aunt Han’s note. He never wrote her or mentioned it to me. Write when you get this and add to Richmond.

They say I will be here two weeks more but I don’t like to leave Edith alone . She said she would go to Kingsbury for a visit but she thought it was too cold and just stayed at home.

Your loving Wife

Margaret

Flora is always saying she is going to write but there is so much going on they don’t have time and when I write often they think I tell all.

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.

 

 

Politics, Strange Bedfellows and Motion Picture Laws in Quebec

The Laurier Palace on Ste. Catherine Street E. It burned down in January 1927, killing 78 children, mostly boys there without adults.

Well, I tracked down the legislation that banned ‘children’ in Quebec from going to cinemas from 1928 to 1967 .

It was passed March 22 of the next year.  Schools were given exemptions, hence those films we saw in elementary school, mostly NFB. Mostly about busy beavers Very wholesome, indeed! (I guess the NFB filled the void. Maybe that’s why they had (have) a head office in Montreal.

The fire was merely an excuse, a vivid  and heart-rending one, though, for keeping out the Yanks.

The talkies were coming in and the Quebec government was afraid of too much American Influence in Quebec. In response to the bill,  American Movie Distributors threatened to pull ALL their movies out of Quebec. A bluff that fooled no one.

The legislature also passed a bill for a ‘state radio station’ at that time.

The bill passed 57-5.

One dissenter suggested it was weird that girls of 12 and boys of 14 could marry, but not go to the cinema. Another suggested that this law infringed on parental rights. Another said, many theatre plays covered topics inappropriate for children, but children still could attend these plays.

A year before, a Juge Boyer had held an inquiry into the fire with 427 witnesses) and in his report dated August 31, 1927, (a day or two before my play Milk and Water takes place) he declared that the fire was no one’s fault, that movies were NOT immoral (so no need to close all cinemas to everyone as some Religious types wanted) but he advised that kids under 16 not be allowed to attend motion pictures, even with a parent taking them, as an adult could not have helped these children during this terrible event. (It was a small fire, panic caused the crush of kids.)

He claimed parents, even working class parents, were in favour of this ban.

So he opened the door to his legislation passed a few months later by the Tachereau Government.(I can’t find the particular session online, only the Gazette report on it.)  Movies weren’t immoral, Boyer said, but many movie posters were, apparently. 50 percent of them or something.

Well, Quebec bounced back from this sad situation and now it has the most lax theatre laws in North America.

There are still language laws aplenty, and even more being pushed for.  American movies can only run a few weeks in Quebec, unless they are translated into French. Something like that.

This is a ‘politics makes strange bedfellows’ type situation. Protestant groups, especially the Presbyterians, had wanted this since the inception of cinema. But the Catholic Church got on the band wagon after the fatal fire.  Both churches were losing their customers to the cinema, especially now that small towns were getting theatres.

There was still a little problem to be worked out. The issue of Sunday showings. In 1908, the Presbyterians and the Labour People had gotten together to pass a Lord’s Day Act in Canada. Quebeckers, sort of ignored it. But it was being used to try to stop Sunday Showings of Motion Pictures. (Monsieur Ouimet claimed he couldn’t close Sundays as Sunday was his best day. About half of the other cinema houses (in 1910 at least) stayed open too.)

Theatres had to close on Sunday, but movie houses were generally given dispensation in Quebec.

The Motion Picture People and the Government battled in court over this in the twenties and a short time after this, the Motion Picture Lobby lost in Superior court.

I’m Worth Eleven Dollars!!

The Sun Came Out! Yea! My neighbour’s yard could use a mow.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry– or do neither. That’s probably most sensible.

I found this website that evaluates websites and it claims that my www.tighsolas.ca website is worth, get this 11 dollars!

I’m not rich!

The site also claims www.tighsolas.ca gets 65 unique visitors a day, but I know that it gets around 185 or so…about 3,000 a month.

But what they don’t know: that most of the visitors are Canadian students and when they arrive at Tighsolas, they find what they are seeking.

(If you want lots and lots of visitors to a website, just write ‘humungous boobs’ and you’ll get plenty. I know, I wrote this one time on my site when describing my grandmother. I’m sure the swarm of visitors who came to www.tighsolas.ca did not expect so see a fat French Canadian Mamma in flapper-wear strutting down the Atlantic City Boardwalk in 1928. A bit of a let down. But it wasn’t false advertising. She had ENORMOUS boobs.)

Information about 1910. That’s what visitors to my site are seeking. Information about fashion, transportation, family life, suffragettes and cost of living. The Titanic. Eugenics. IQ and Montessori. Marconi and Ford and Edison. Or era information on social etiquette and dating.

And I know these visitors are school children because most of the IP’s belong to various schoolboards, across North America, but mostly in Ontario and BC. Not Quebec, which is annoying, although someone from the Lester B. Pearson Board in Montreal made a thorough visit to Tighsolas last month.

I know that one high school teacher in BC has the kids read the letters and describe what has changed and what has stayed the same in 100 years. And you know, they get it, immediately. (That’s why I am writing Flo in the City: Kids get it!)

I posted this social studies website 5 years ago, not knowing what I was doing, and despite its many shortcomings, structurally speaking, it has been of some considerable use to students across Canada, I know this for sure – and that’s what matters. Not money.

Back then, in 2005, the info I dug up on the 1910′s, by purchasing era magazines off eBay, was new to the web. (Yes, it has cost me money, a fair bit, to post Tighsolas.) Today there’s a lot about the 1910 era on the web, even Edison videos on YouTube. And everything you could want at www.archive.org.

But my material on middle class family life in Canada is, indeed, rare and unique. And the pages of household accounts are also fascinating and one of a kind.

I have a new improved version of www.tighsolas.ca waiting to be posted (I hired a PhD in History to construct it) but I am awaiting news from an Academic Publisher I pitched before I do anything. This publisher is interested in the Tighsolas letters, for a scholarly book, and maybe I will use the new website as a complementary resource.

But that book won’t make me any money either. Only I will be making a difference, somehow, and that is what I care about.

Stamping out History

Canadian (and one British) stamp from the Tighsolas Collection.

I have a lot of pictures of King George V in my house: that’s because I have over 1000 letters belonging to the Nicholsons of Richmond Quebec and Montreal – and many of them are from the 10′s and 20′s and thirties.

They start at 1887, actually and end in 1938.

Most are from Canada; many are from the US. and a few, but not many, are from England.

These letters still have their envelopes so you’d think I’d have a chance at having a rare postage stamp or two.

But no.

Somewhere along the line someone cut out or steamed off most of the interesting stamps. I even know who: a little boy who lived with his family for a period in the fifties and sixties in the Nicholson’s house on Dufferin in Richmond. I know because but a few years ago the wife of said little boy contacted me about returning something else belonging to the Nicholsons, Norman’s Masonic Sword.

To find me, she had used the Internet and a clue from her husband’s stamp collection book; a letter addressed to Mrs. Margaret Nicholson.

So, George the V, portrayed as a typical angry and cold Victorian father in the recent movie, the King’s Speech enjoys a definite presence in our house.

His father, Edward VII, though is more important to us as he represents an entire era.

My http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website showcases the letters of Tighsolas between 1908-1913 era, which I call the Tighsolas era.

It’s really the end of the Edwardian Era. (We call it the Laurier Era in Canada.)

Edward VII reigned for but 10 years, but he lent his name to an entire ERA. That says something! That speaks to the incredible changes that took place in that particular decade. That’s why the 1908-1913 Nicholson letters are important, and not just frivolous family fun.

I have one postage stamp of Edward VIII. It’s from England. His reign was so short Canada didn’t get around to making him a stamp.

And I have a few pictures of the next guy, Queen Elizabeth’s father, George VI, whose image just got a revamp due to a compelling performance from actor Colin Firth, who, as far as I know, has no royal blood, just bloody good genes.

The only stamp I have of Victoria, who reigned a long long time and therefore it’s no surprise an entire era was named after her, is not really a stamp. It’s on a postcard from the 1880′s. Good enough.

I do however possess a likeness of her on a coin, one belonging to my husband. It’s a 1 and a half cent copper coin from Upper Canada. Remember that place? It was just above Lower Canada.

I asked him where he got these coins and he replied, “I dunno. They were lying around the house. ” More proof that little boys have a vague grasp of the concept of private property. These coins might have once belonged to Flo and Edie, who knows?

He also has a coin from 1779, a bit faded, with the image of another King on it. Don’t know which one, although I guess I could Google.

I have decided to carry this 1979 coin around in my purse as good luck, as it is the oldest thing in my house, if I don’t count the dust the dogs drag in.

Last Friday, before the ballet, my friend and I went to Chinatown and ate at a restaurant there. The waiter was an older Chinese man (by which I mean a man about 50) with a sunny disposition and very pleasant face. He caught me showing the coin to my friend across the table and he told us a story about a long time ago, in 1971,when he had reluctantly let go of a George VI twenty dollar bill he had in his possession in order to buy a record, perhaps Led Zeppelin, at A and M Records around the corner on St. Catherine Street. (So, some of these bills were still floating around in the 60′s. I don’t recall ever seeing one.)

That’s how I know this man was fifty. A bit younger than me, maybe but definitely in the same ball park. When I got up to pay, I realized he was very very short, about 5 foot, no more. And as I am 5 foot 11, so he seemed to get embarrassed around me. (He wouldn’t be the first.)

Such a nice man, I thought, but we’re world’s apart, even if we had met on the streets of Montreal’s Chinatown (or in A and M, where I might have been accompanying my older brother) back in 1971.

…Anyway, I read somewhere, maybe in the NYT, that someone is taking old Civil War letters and tweeting them on Twitter. I had thought about doing this with the Tighsolas letters. I even mentioned it in an earlier post on this blog.

But now it won’t be a novel thing. Alas.

I must think of a novel thing to do with these letters. And that precludes putting it in novel form.

Bubble Speak and Stuttering.

1910 aeroplanes and blimps

Today I was working on a Nicholson Family Saga letter from June 1911 where Flora Nicholson fails French in her last year of Academy, but still gets into Macdonald Teaching School. That’s because, as I explain in the footnotes, they desperatedly needed teachers in Quebec in 1911.

That was a big relief for the Nicholsons, who were struggling financially.

Then I went out shopping with a friend of mine, Lise, who is French Canadian- but one of those French Canadians who is fluently bilingual and who has floated effortless all her life between Quebec’s ‘two solitudes’.

Lise was telling me about her mother, who is 92 and who has advanced dementia. Her mom, she says, can’t remember much of anything, but she can still understand both languages and beat her daughter at cards, Hearts or Cribbage.

The brain is a funny thing.

Anyway, my friend was also telling me that she went to see the movie the King’s Speech this week. I was surprised. I hadn’t bothered to ask her to go with me, assuming she would not like it. (And I would like to see it again.)

She went with a group of French friends, two of whom had already seen the movie once. “You have a rival,” she told me. “Rita can’t get over how handsome Colin Firth is. Maybe you should go to her house and play her my favorite DVD.”

Lise was being ironic. One Saturday evening a few years ago I brought my copy of Pride and Prejudice over and we watched it in lieu of the hockey game. Wet shirt or not, she wasn’t impressed. She has called Colin Firth “That guy who doesn’t smile,” ever since.

Yet everytime she sees Paul Gross on TV she remarks, “Quel bel homme.”

Lise enjoyed the King’s Speech, despite the fact Colin doesn’t smile here either. But she was really surprised how much her French Canadian friends liked the movie. One other friend was seeing it for the second time because “she cried all through it the first time.”

Now, I didn’t cry through the King’s Speech. I thought it was a funny film, for the most part. (Lise remarked, “OK, they had it bad, but that’s their job.”)

And I think I know why I chose not to cry. Because when I got home from my shopping excursion my husband was watching the CBS magazine Sunday Morning on tape and, as it is topical, that show had a feature on stuttering that showcased kids.

And THAT feature made me very sad, in a big punch to the stomach kind of way, because I ‘suddenly’ remembered that my twin brother used to stutter and that my father sometimes used to make fun of him.

I had repressed that in my memory, I guess, while watching the movie the King’s Speech and focused instead on the history and elegant period piece elements.

The brain is a funny thing.

My father, who was born in 1922, the year that Bertie and Elizabeth got married, had had a cruel Edwardian upbringing himself. His own father, a Malayan planter, used to lock him in a cupboard when he was bad.

That had once been a common Victorian practice, I have since learned.

Anyway, my father was sent away from Kuala Lumpur to Cumberland at 5 and hardly saw his mom and dad again. (He may never have seen his father again, although I’m not exactly sure.) That, of course, was a typical British practice among the upper classes and those in the middle classes who aspired to more.

He went to a public school, St. Bees in County Durham and lucky for him, he excelled at sports. He was Captain of all the teams. He told me that one day another student came up to him and said admiringly “It must be wonderful being you.”

“Yea, right,” he thought at the time.

Anyway, Sunday Morning also had a bit with fun visuals on the Wright Brothers that explained that Wilbur died in 1912 of typhoid fever.

Yesterday, I edited a letter from 1911 where Norman is worried for his wife Margaret, who is tending a relation with typhoid.

And then that same Sunday Morning show had a piece on Geoffrey Rush, who is going to be bringing Gogol’s Diary of a Madman to New York. That’s one of my favorite books, or stories, as it is very short. I love Gogol. He’s my favorite Russian writer.

A few years ago, I recommended Diary of a Madman to my bookclub and another person in the club, the widest read of all of us, objected passionately to its theme. She had a schitzophrenic sister and said that she found nothing funny about mental illness.

I don’t quite see this story that way, despite the fact that my twin brother, the one who stuttered as a child, also has severe mental health issues.

Anway, the final bit on Sunday Morning was the most interesting of all. It was a seemingly glib little animation describing how the brain works with respect to FEAR. In short, it showed that if a scary belief, however erroneous, gets into someone’s brain, it is next to impossible to remove it.

The brain is a funny thing.

The animation used the recently debunked autism/vaccination connection as an example, but I know it was really addressing the entire culture of fear in the US.

I’ve written extensively on that topic. And in this Flo in the City blog I’ve discussed all the fears rampant in Western Society at the turn of the last century: the white peril (tainted milk); the yellow peril of malaria; the social evil (prostitution); the evils of the Nickelodeon!! Aeroplane deaths. The Housefly. Typhoid. Immigrants. It was a true age of anxiety.

Fear is the key emotion underscoring the Nicholson Family Saga and it is in all the letters, either written flat out or lurking between the lines: the fear of destitution, primarily. The middle class generally lives in fear and flux as it is positioned between the poor and the rich. In good times, the middle class feels it can have it all. In bad times (or times of severe flux) it fears falling into the abyss.

In 1910, The Nicholsons were a middle class family on the bubble.

Today, 100 years later, most middle class families are on the bubble, whether they feel it or not.

So we go to see movies about rich, privileged people who are miserable, because it makes us feel better.