Pretty in pink and blue and gingham and galatea

The August 1911 edition of the Delineator has a feature on children’s outfits, so I thought I’d scan them for those who might be interested. In Threshold Girl I weave in a tale about a woman working at Dominion Textile in Magog.
The second dress on the left is a practical school dress, if developed in serge or flannel. Unlike many of the sailor models, the five gored skirt, which is attached to a belt or underbody, is fitted about the waist and left quite plain except for the inverted plait, which is made at the back. The blouse is regular naval style and may be slipped over the head or closed in front.

The dress on right is very simple in construction and it is particularly effective in poplin or pique, when a contrasting colour is used for the collar and trimming bands. A very lovely reproduction of the design, which closes in front, was composed of white linen, with a sailor collar and belt of lilac linen, the edges of the collar, belt and peasant sleeves and and closing were finished with a scallop worked in lilac floss.

Nice writing! I wonder if Theodore Dreiser wrote it. He was editor of this magazine, which also covered many of the social issues of the day, focusing on ‘child rescue’ …adoption. (Nah, his style wasn’t as nice!) He got fired when he, ahem, had an affair with a underage woman… or something.

Well, these clothes were for the Middle Class and higher, I imagine. Marion’s children, students at Royal Arthur in Montreal’s Little Burgundy, were working class and probably dressed more like the above pic of poor kids vacationing at Camp Chapleau.

If any kids in Marion’s board dressed like the magazine kids, it was at the new Roslyn School in Westmount.

In September the schools reopen and you mothers are already beginning to find that the question of pinafores and school dresses is much on your mind. For children who live in the City, where there are steam-heated houses and schoolrooms, the smartest materials for their dresses are the linens, piques, poplins, repps, galateas, percales, ginghams, chambrays and cotton drillings.

Of course, for children who live in country districts where furnaces and radiators are unknown, wash dresses in Winter are out of the question. They should wear pretty little dresses of serge, flannel, or any good woolen material and washable pinafores and aprons.

I haven’t shown a boy, there are only  few pictured, but they are wearing knickerbockers or shorts, not skirts. In Richmond, Quebec, at least in and around 1910, Flora’s nephew, Stanley Hill still wore a skirt. And her brother Herb wore one in 1889 or so.

Not sure who kids at bottom are or when it is taken. The Dalmation may be Floss around 1909, but the Nicholsons may have had an earlier Dalmation. It is possibly Stanley Hill younger, so 1905ish?

The coat: A serviceable box coat for a girl is displayed. The model may be made in full or 7/8ths length with the fronts closed to the neck and rolled open.  Many of these coats for girls are made with striped or plaid weaves and they look very smart when the collars or cuffs are faced in a one tone contrasting material.

In the Laurier era in Canada the vast majority of children lived in poverty. Many of their moms could sew, but they did so in factories, making clothes for the burgeoning middle class.

Margaret Nicholson made her daughters’ clothes, until they got into working suits, then she made just the ‘waists’ or blouses and skirts. However she bought her son’s and husband’s clothes.

Below, Nicholson invoice 1901, sewing notions

Holiday Musings

I posted a draft of my ebook Biology and Ambition a few days ago and within minutes the Googlebot came around and it was available on Google, second when a person enters Biology and Ambition.

Pretty fast.

Biology and Ambition is the follow up to Threshhold Girl and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, to make the omnibus School Marms and Suffragettes.

About 3 young women in 1910 Canadian, their hopes, dreams, disappointments. Middle Class Women. Pretty much like Middle Class Women today.

I’m watching the Djokavic Nadal final in the Spanish Open or something and just missed Nadal winning the second set.. Gotta pay attention.

My husband asks why I watching in French. I like the French commentary, that’s why.

The colour commentator whoever she is uses eloquent language, much different from hockey commentators.

Something to do on a nice Monday holiday, Victoria Day but not here in Quebec, where my husband is so bored he is cleaning out the BBQ.

The bugs get you outside and if we put the mosquito netting around our little shelter the idiot dogs run through it every time they hear a noise – and they don’t learn.

We live in a suburb and suburbs now are dead quiet, except on Saturday morning when the neighbourhood men (yes, men) do the lawn.

Two days ago we went Costco and bought an instant garden, a few ready made pots for next to nothing, 10 to 15 dollars.

I usually buy the flats, but this spring I am injured, I can’t use my arm.

Instant garden, like instant pudding or instant mashed potatoes. I usually don’t like instant things, but in this case, why not.

My magnolia. Just blooming now. Last year I rolled these potted trees out into the family room and they blossomed inside in April. But the aroma was disgusting!! The thought the cat had peed on the carpet.

A Tale of Two Montreal George Drummonds

Three Rivers in 1910

Well, in a letter from Radnor Forges Quebec in 1908, Edith mentions a “George Drummond’ who seems to be boss.. Was this the same George Drummond of Redpath Sugar who married Julia Grace Parker? I wondered… because wouldn’t that be useful for my story about Edith Nicholson, tentatively called the 1912 Diary of a Confirmed Spinster Edith Nicholson and posted at www.tighsolas.ca/page11.pdf.pdf, which is a follow up to Threshold Girl, published at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf.

But no.. George Edward Drummond was an Irish Canadian Business man who owned the Canadian Iron Furnace Company which owned the works at Radnor Forges, where Edith worked in 1908.

George Alexander Drummond was the Scottish Canadian businessman who married a Redpath and then Julia Grace Parker.

George Edward was younger and his original name was Drumm. I wonder if Drummond is Scottish, and that’s why he changed his name.

“At least I know where my  pots and pans come from, ” said Margaret after a visit to Radnor, a sad little company town, on the steep  decline. It would close right after Edith quit.. I guess she wasn’t that impressed. It was a company town. No ‘real’ town, no community, had sprung up around iron works la Mauricie in all the decades they had been in place.

But the Forges at the Mauricie were the first iron ore companies in Canada and they manufactured bog ore.

So they were significant. And there’s a heritage website involved. http://www.pc.gc.ca/fra/lhn-nhs/qc/saintmaurice/index.aspx

For the purposes of this story, they are significant in how Edith’s teaching job reflected how LONESOME it was to be a teacher in a rural place.

Anyway, in 1959, I also lived in a lonesome mining town, called Wabush. My family was among a handful of pioneer families who went out to Wabush Lake Labrador to live. We stayed two years, some families stayed much longer.A community did spring up around the iron ore mines, though.

The Three Rivers Forges were a Crown (Canadian ) concern, but the Wabush mines were owned by Americans.

Spreading the News "Broadcast"

Yesterday, my husband came into the house and told me, “It’s Williams.” He was referring to our neighbours. We’ve lived in this suburban development for 10 years but never learned the last name of our next door neighbours.

As it happens, I am in the midst of editing the 1911/12 Nicholson letters. I haven’t cut them down much. Mostly I’ve added background and clarification.

I expect my editor to get back to me and say that I left in too much gossip.

But I did it on purpose: I wanted to show what life was like in a town back then. How you had no privacy. Or, as Edith Nicholson put it in a 1908 letter, how “Everything is spread broadcast in a few hours.” (Actually, she was referring to Radnor Forges, an even smaller place than Richmond.)

I think this is important, because I hope these letters will be used (continue to be used) by high school teachers, and modern teens are apt to recognize or at least sense something familiar in these letters.

After all, they use Facebook.

There was been a lot of controversy over Facebook Privacy. Those who aren’t that concerned say that all Facebook is doing is returning us to an earlier time, when people lived in towns, and when everyone knew everyone else’s business.

I think it would be a terrific exercise to compare my 1911/12 letters to Facebook (when I’ve finished editing and annotating them.)

I already can see how the Nicholson Family Letters both prove and disprove this idea.

Yes, everyone knew your business but, in 1910, you sacrificed privacy for security. There was a kind of trade-off.

Mrs. Montgomery was a nosy and sometimes interfering neighbour, but she was always there with the chicken soup when Margaret was sick!

Anyway, privacy was considered an issue in 1911 with respect to the Census. I think they only released these documents to the public after 91 years.

The Census is online now and I’ve been checking it out. Firstly, I looked up McCoys and Watters and they spelled Watters WATERS and mixed up Isabel and Marie McCoy. On top of that, Margaret Nicholson lied about her age!

There must be tonnes of lies and mistakes on the Census. In the McCoy’s case, it looks like the Census person is French, so perhaps he didn’t understand. (“He” because I seriously doubt women were employed as Census takers; Norman Nicholson worked for the 1901 Census.)

I made a mistake,myself, reading the Census. On an earlier blog I said that the McCoys employed a live in-couple to do housework. Wrong. These were neighbours.

But many families on their street had maids. Just on this same Census page I found 4 maids: one West-Indian, one from France, one Swedish and one from England, all girls between 16 and 21.

I searched further up and down and street and noticed some ‘servants’ were as young as 12 and 14, and others in their 30′s and 40′s.

(It just occurred to me: a ‘servant’ is called ‘a maid’ probably, because it was usually a young, unmarried woman.)

I know these Hutchison flats were big, because Marion remarks upon it in a letter. But if the family was large, with lots of kids, they either had no maids (letting the kids do the housework) or they had live-out help. Or so it seems.

All very interesting.

I think I will pitch this story to someone.