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’.

Ebooks and Funding

 

Tighsolas in 1910 era

 

This is Tighsolas, or House of Light in Gaelic, the Queen Anne Revival Style Home that Norman Nicholson, my husband’s great grandfather built in 1896, the year Sir Wilfrid Laurier came to power.

 

I discovered letters belonging to this family in 2003, transcribed them and posted a website in 2005 Tighsolas with the letters in raw form and background about the Laurier Era.

 

And then I decided to write a digital trilogy around the letters, featuring each of the three Nicholson ‘girls’, Flora, 18 in 1910, Edith, 27 in 1910 and my husband’s grandmother Marion, 25 in 1910.

 

All of the young women were teachers in the era, not a ‘sexy’ profession, but, alas, the profession most well-educated middle class women went into in 1910 (despite the going belief that women had ‘made it’ and could enter any profession, although housewifing was the most desirable profession.

 

 

 

Threshold Girl   is the first book in the trilogy and it is available for free online. It tells the story of Flora Nicholson’s year at Macdonald Teachers College in Ste Anne de Bellevue during the ‘in their proper place’ era.

 

Marion and Edith figure incidentally in the story.

 

I am writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, Edith’s story, and it is almost complete.  It tells the story of Edith’s job at a Missionary School in Westmount, where Catholics, mostly French Canadians were educated and oft times converted to Protestantism. Not a slice of history normally discussed today.

 

It also tells the story of her stormy courtship with one Charlie Gagne, a former Roman Catholic for all I can see, who died in a hotel fire in Cornwall in 1910, the Rossmore.

 

In Flora’s story, I include a child labour theme; in Edith’s a eugenics theme. The suffragette movement is included in both books.

 

The trick is, I am being faithful to the 300 letters I have, but filling in the gaps with invented stories. I call this a ‘re-imagining’ of their lives.

 

Marion

Edith

 

It took me a long time to figure out what was going on in the letters with respect to Charlie Gagne, but once I did, I noticed gaps.

 

I have turned his story into a murder/mystery, which probably didn’t happen, but certainly could have. And then I can cover the drug issue for 1900. Opiates in medicines.

 

I haven’t been able to type out Edith’s story, as I have a neck injury, but once I do I will embark on Marion’s story, yet to be titled. Marion was already a teacher at the Montreal Board in 1910, at Royal Arthur School.  She was also helping out her family the most, especially financially. And from 1911 and 1913 she was courted by Hugh Blair, whom she married. She was also the most dynamic of the young women, later becoming President of the PAPT Teachers Union.

 

When all three books are written, they will complement each other, and also fill in gaps in each other’s story. For instance, Flora had no idea what was going on with her brother, she was protected. Edith had some idea, but since she had lost her love in a fire in May 1910, she too didn’t know it all. Marion, however, knew it all!

 

The social issue I am tackling with Marion’s story, possibly called The Push Pull of Biology and Ambition, or maybe just Biology and Ambition (yes!) is the Jewish Problem in schools. Jewish teachers were not allowed to work in the Montreal Board, however qualified.

 

Maybe one day I’ll be invited to the Blue Metropolis, the big ‘non-profit’ event in Montreal supported, of course, by Heritage Canada. People from Heritage Canada occasionally come to my website, (even downloading the ebook Threshold Girl)  but my project doesn’t fit into a comfortable niche, not with respect to Canadian politics. I’m guessing, anyway.

 

I’m discussing eugenics and suffrage in ways that only scholars have done in the past. Even the Two Solitudes issue. It’s shades of grey I like exploring.

 

Anyway, basically EVERY Anglo-Quebec initiative is funded by Heritage Canada, so what does that say? That it’s the only funding available, sure, but also, that they control the message. That’s what I think. How could they not, if  they are the only funding? I’ve worked with many non profits, I know how hard it is to get funding as a Quebec Anglophone Project, even for innocuous projects like literacy. (Whoops, that’s political here too.) We are a minority within a minority, that’s how the government sees us.

 

I’ve also written Milk and Water about Montreal in 1927, using my own grandfather, Jules Crepeau as a character.  This story is more of interest to French Canadians, I can already tell, but I must polish it before I can get it translated. In this eplay, I put a new twist on the infamous Laurier Palace Theatre Fire.

 

Freedom 1910 Style

In a 1911 letter home Marion Nicholson describes catching up with the Montgomerys who are in town to buy a new car, their second in two years. This may be a pic from that event. They are at Atwater Street.

I am writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl and I’ve got to the part where Edith Nicholson goes on a 6 hour car trip from Richmond, Quebec to Montreal in June 1911.

In a letter she describes all the places she passed through.

My job is to describe the experience.

Now, today, 6 hours on bumpy hills in a car with no shocks (I don’t think) and in a tight corset would be torture, but for Edith it is euphoric.

That’s the word I’ll use.

The freedom of it! Before long trips were taken by train or by horse carriage. This car, going 14 miles an hour over the hills and dales of the Eastern Townships, must have thrilled the passengers, much like a long long ride at Dominion Park. And there was always the danger of breaking down to add spice to the occasion.

14 miles an hour is the speed limit in the country. 7 miles an hour in the city. (Horse drawn vehicles and autos were beginning here to fight over the road space, a fight which would continue until the late 1920′s, when cars WON.

Ad for Piece Arrow. Car Rides were classy thing! No kidding, cars cost as much as a house.

A recent Salon.com article claims that statistics show that Americans at least are driving much less. The author of the article ascribed this to the Internet, saying young people would rather surf than drive.

(I thought maybe GPS’s had something to do with it. Or Google maps. No getting lost. No spending hours driving all over town looking to buy some item. Etc ete.

Whatever the reason, the thrill is gone. The high price of gasoline doesn’t help either, I’m sure.

In the 60′s I went for a lot of car drives with my dad. It was his recreation. Cheap and he got out of the house. We had a little Austen Cambridge, but my father, a former ferry command pilot, drove fast, 80 miles an hour on the highway.

As his daughter, I wasn’t afraid, although I do distinctly remember almost getting killed by an oncoming 16 wheeler as he passed a car on the highway.

But he swerved in on time, obviously.

Marion sits in her Uncle Clayton’s car.It broke down a lot.

The T Can wasn’t as crowded with trucks as it is today.

I liked looking out the window.  On long distance treks to the US for vacation, my Dad had a game. He had great long distance eyesight (Pilot!) so we called out the state or province of the licence plates ahead,the minute we could guess them. And then there was I Spy..

Today kids don’t look out the window. They are too busy playing or communicating on their iPads, etc. Or watching movies.

We experience the world second hand today. Technology changes us.

Free at Last: In the 1910 era, men drove the cars, but by the 1920′s women went it alone! Here’s Flora second from last. Cars gave women and teens unprecedented freedom.

1912 in Boston, via the Nicholsons

Well,  a final piece to the puzzle that will be my ebook Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl - about a college girl in 1911/12, the Titanic Era.

Threshold Girl tells the story of Flora Nicholson, of Richmond Quebec and her year at Macdonald Teachers College and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster will tell the story of her older sister, Edith, already a teacher in Montreal, who loses her ‘great love’ in 1910 in an infamous hotel fire in Cornwall. The two stories overlap – and there`s the trick.

As it happens, Edith and Marion Nicholson, both older sisters of Flora, visit cousin Henry Watters in Newton Center Massachusetts in August 1912.

They visit Norumbega Park and go to a ball game on August 14. I found an ad for the same ball game in a now defunct Boston newspaper, placed under an ad for a Burlesque House.

Baseball wasn’t classy in 1910! Indeed, this newspaper,the Evening Transcript doesn’t cover the games. The sports page has news about tennis, sailing and even lawn bowling.

Now this April 14 newspaper is a real find for me. Because within its pages is a long article on a eugenics conference in London England.

Henry`s House, I think so. Today.

At the end of Threshold Girl I have Edith take Flora to a suffragette meeting in Montreal, where Carrie Derick, suffragist and biologist, is presiding. It’s a meeting of the Montreal Council of Women.

Edith points Derick out and tells Flora “She has many strange ideas.”

You see, Derick, a botanist, was a supporter of the eugenics movement.

So, here I can have Edith read the article and then ask her cousin, Dr. Henry Watters, his opinion.

It’s a great article. Ironically, it begins by saying that the most vocal opponents of this new fad, eugenics, are the Germans.  The Americans aren’t too keen either, (although their President was all for it, I believe.) Anyway there is some wonderfully weird stuff in this article, some of it pertinent to today, I mean with respect to how people view  scientific inquiry. (We have NOT come a long way, Baby!)

And better, right beside is an article about Canada: Our Up and Coming Neighbour: How Canada is Becoming a World Power. (Yea, right.)

The same edition has an advertisement for prime real estate in Montreal, on Ste. Catherine. So it is clear, the border is not as defined as it is today. The Nicholsons had many Massachusetts relations.

The reason the US is more skeptical about the eugenics movement, it is claimed, is because Americans marry for love, while Britons still marry for money and status. (The story of the Nicholson women (a true story based on real letters) reveals that money played a  BIG part in all middle class marriages. In fact, money and marriage is a key theme in my Spinster Story, for Edith`s beau is murdered trying to make enough money to marry her.

All so weird. Henry, if he likes baseball, wasn`t for eugenics. (or at least he won`t be for the purposes of my story).

Hmm. I will have to place them in a box seat though. I can`t imagine Edith sitting with the mob.

Funny, back then (and through the century) poor people went to baseball games. Now only the wealthy can afford to go and pay 10.00 for a hot dog, etc.)

It`s been years since I went to a game. To see the Expos, in the late 80`s I think. The roof was up and we were boiling. I had kids then and it cost a fortune, all the drinks. As a teen I went to Jarry Park and spent about 2.00 max!

I think I will have Edith ask Henry how much baseball players earn. He`will say Ì think they work for the  beer.

Now, I MUST get to writing the new outline of Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.  I still want the book to end when Edith faints in front of a painting of a woman breastfeeding mumbling to herself, I will never marry. I will never have children.

And that takes place on May 6, 1910, the day King Edward dies, (I think) so I am going to go back and forth in time.

Maternity, Mary Riter Hamilton. On exhibit in Montreal in 1912, but I`m making it 1910.

Titanic, Period Pieces and Gambit to get your hubby to watch TV with you.

Colette in her cutting edge fashion hat from Marie Claire Magazine 1937.

My husband and I watched the new 2012 Titanic miniseries last night,well, the first two episodes, anyway.

 It was on the History Channel (in Canada) and that channel had just played a programme with ‘new evidence’ about the Titanic’s sinking (due to mirage/glare, a researcher says) which clashed with some of the old theories put forth in the mini-series.

But this Titanic miniseries was just Upstairs Downstairs on a big boat, a soap opera, so it didn’t matter. Julian Fellowes of Downtown Abbey fame penned this miniseries, which has a kind of Groundhog Day style of plot development, so the first episode seems weird.

Anyway, he clearly had lots of money so the hats were right on, with the first class women wearing Huge Merry Widow style hats and the French mistress of one rich guy wearing a smaller style more like Colette’s up there.

(In 1912, Coco Chanel was making her smaller hats for her boyfriend’s rich friends.)

Gee, you have to wonder if people are going to get tired of 1912, just I get my story Threshold Girl up on the Internet (it’s a free ebook) and I start writing the follow up Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

But my story is about the middle class in Canada, and even though it has suffragettes, I’m going to paint a more complex picture of the movement, from a Canadian Point of View.

This 2012 Titanic miniseries starts with a rich girl being released from jail for breaking windows or something with the suffragettes. (Played by Perdita Weeks, the girl who played Lydia in Lost in Austen but super thin now.) Yesterday I posted a first person testimony from the WSPU magazine,  suggesting something just like that happened. In April 1912.

Anyway, the science documentary Titanic: Case Closed featuring Tim Maltin’s theory (he apparently has an ebook or e-book out called “A Very Deceiving Night”).. supplied the new evidence that centers around the icebergs in Labrador in 1912. As it happens I’ve already posted an article from the Canadian Magazine, published in April 1912!  about those very icebergs. They were so numerous and splendiferous,they were almost becoming a tourist attraction. Hmm. Although the article was called Iceberg: Floating Menace.

Ironic, the date of that article. The History Channel Documentary revealed that the ocean liners of the time ran a gauntlet of icebergs, but it was especially bad in 1912.

It was interesting, but I thought there were some contradictions in Maltin’s theory or his presentation of same.. He goes to Hamburg to look at old boat logs from Germany. He says they’ve never been looked at before. That’s why it took until the  80′s to find Titanic’s ruins. But, a German boat that sailed shortly after Titanic apparently ran into debris and floating bodies. So the Germans knew where the boat was (around anyway) but never told because war broke out? Please explain. This documentary then recites the testimony of someone on that very German boat that clearly was published somewhere else a long time ago. Case not closed?

Anyway, this same Titanic investigator says the Titanic was very well built and very manoeverable for its size.

That contradicts James Cameron who supplied an interesting and daunting metaphor on a Titanic program aired just previous: that the Titanic is like modern man, powering along in one direction, but about to crash, (Global warming) because it is too big can’t turn fast enough, and no one is paying attention,or the wrong people are at the helm of the world, ie industrialists.

I guess the irony is icebergs play a  big part in this 2012 tragedy in the making.

Anyway, back to the Titanic Miniseries, I see that Julian Fellowes name isn’t on the IMDB entry for the series. Hmm.

Anyway, this Titanic miniseries shows why Cameron’s Titanic movie worked. It had a simple plot! I’ll still watch the other two episodes.

I found one of the miniseries’ subplots especially perplexing, a French mistress is snubbed by an upper class woman. I mean from what I’ve read of the era, the Upper Classes were all fooling around. It was what they did. Prudery was a middle class thing. Alas! (You just have to read the Nicholson Letters, upon which I based Threshold Girl.)

I noticed a while back that for the upcoming movie Gambit, Colin Firth isn’t listed as a star on IMDB.

Alan Rickman is. And yet in all the publicity around the shooting of Gambit, Colin Firth was showcased.

Speaking of Gambit, I watched Get Carter on Turner Classics last week. I recorded it thinking it was an In Like Flint movie, but it’s about a hood and pretty gritty, even for today. Not my kind of movie. But I stayed with it, as it is stylish and Michael Caine is terrific. He was very good looking, wasn’t he? Never really thought about it. I was 13 in 1968 and David McCallum was more my type

And then I watched a bit of Withnail and I,  liked it and saved it for Saturday (Titanic Night) with my husband – but my husband doesn’t get British comedy. That’s why we watched Titanic the miniseries, although my husband doesn’t get period pieces either.

I said “Wait a while and there’ll be some pretty naked people” just like your Throne of Kings. (I knew it wasn’t gonna happen, though.) He said “Game of Thrones, not Throne of Kings.”

Marion Nicholson of Threshold Girl in her big hat for 1912. I think she’s on the Charles in Boston. I will have to write about that trip in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, as she went to visit Dr. Henry Watters with her sister Edith, August 1912. Relations were trying to fix her up with another man, Chester Coy, who later went to war and lost his mind. Henry Watters never married, although very well off and about as nice a man as you could find. Hmm. He is buried in Melbourne. He died in 1937, a decade before Marion.

A hat like that could sink a boat, and I wouldn’t be writing these books.

Watching the Squaws.

Drawing of Squaw and Papoose from Canadian Magazine 1911. For some reason the date signed appears to be 1995 or 45… Weird.

Norman Nicholson, Flora Nicholson’s father, was away working on the Transcontinental Railway in 1908-1912.

It was not an easy job for a 58 year old. Working on the railroad was dangerous, but he seldom wrote about that to his wife, because he did not want her to worry.

But as I wrote on the http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website, it was the extremes of heat and cold and the boredom that got to him the most. Margaret visited him in La Tuque in 1908, at the camp. She was impressed by the food. He later went to Cochran and Hearst, Ontario. He wrote Margaret and described the natives.

“We have a band of Indians located or camped across the River from Residency. There are some squaws all decked up in great shape bright red skirts with white blouses and fur boots with the small shawl over their head. You should see these squaws rowing a canoe or handling an ax. Two of them have small babies and they have them strapped to a board and carry them on their back with a strap across their forehead”

The Canadian Magazine had an article about life on the Transcontinental Railroad.

Here’s an excerpt.

Driving Steel through Wilderness is the title of the piece.

It is one of the hallucinations of the human mind to imagine that the other fellow always has the easier job.The tendency to magnify the fburden of one’s own tasks is deep seated. That is why you find a divergency of opinion as to whose share in the work of building such a railway as the National Transcontinental has been the most onerous. Engineers sniff disdainfully at the part performed by the staff at headquarters. Contractors will sneer at the achievement s of the resident engineers. The navvy, if he takes time about it at all, will be convinced that he alone has actually worked.

Yet when it comes to the final analysis, it is doubtful if any one person or group of person has had to endure more genuine hardships than the men who located the road. One can cover the three or four hundred miles of completed track through northern Quebec and Ontario, comprised in the Cochrane district, with comparative comfort. It is even possible to go further and follow the grade for many miles on foot without any undue comfort. But what a journey that must have been before the hand of man had set itself to hew a path through the wilderness. Nor was it only the abundance of its rivers and lakes that rendered it difficult of passage. Above and beyond all this it was largely a water sogged waste. All though the woods, water was held in storage in soaking ground and springy muskeg. It is easy enough to be courageous when dry of foot and warmly clad but to struggle forward day in and day out through weeks and mouths with drenched shoes and damp clothing is truer test of endurance. This was the lot of the locating engineers.

Water is one of the great assets of this north country. It is the main element of contrast of scenery. Take away those brimming rivers that intersect the right of way at intervals of every few miles and a journey across the great clay belt would be more monotonous and almost stifling uniformity. To relieve this oppression, the rivers come as rifts in a cloudy sky. They cut deep into the forest growth and their valleys open up panoramas of great attractiveness. From the high steel bridges that span their current, one peeps into regions full of potentials for sport and exploration.

Very much like actual warfare has seen the building of the railway.
At the head of the engineering staff, stands the chief of engineers with his headquarters at the capital. Under him are the several district engineers, each of whom has charge of one or two districts. These districts are in turn divided into divisions and the divisions are subdivided into still smaller sections. Over a division, a divisional engineer takes charge, while resident engineers carry out the instructions of their superiors in the smaller subdivisions.

The rank and file are divided into gangs, corresponding to the companies in a regiment, while a camp may be considered as analogous to the regiment itself. As the work progresses, the camps are moved forward, carrying the attack over further and further into the enemy’s territory. There are in each camp officers and non commissioned variety, time keepers , pay masters, supply keepers,cooks an foremen, all of whom have particular duties to perform…

Nowadays the railroad builder is a pampered individual, living off the fat of the land within as easy reach of the big mail order house as the homesteader out West. Bereft of the many of the comforts of home, with no saloons or theatres within many hundreds of miles, your railroad navvy must be treated with no small consideration in the item of food. One may wonder at the plenty and variety that is placed before him at mealtime, but it must be regarded largely in the light of a bribe. He must be fed well to hold him and this the contractor recognizes. That is why one finds these hard worked navvies feasting abundantly on roast beef and port, steak and potatoes, beans, cabbage, tomatoes, corn, bread and rolls, pudding and pie, cookies and cakes, jam and preserves, crackers and cheese. All of these items of food are within the limits of the bill of fare at one meal. “

Norman Nicholson left behind a great deal of documentation about his job as timber inspector for the railway. It’s on the www.tighsolas.ca website.