Nicholson Family Saga: Letter 3: Visitors, Visitors

Magical Mystery Tours. Marion, seated in front in neighbour’s car. Possibly the Skinner’s, but maybe the Montgomery’s, They lived on the other side of Tighsolas.

Margaret to Norman

June 10, 1911

Dear Norman,

Your letter to Edith received Friday morning. As she was not here I opened it.

She had left an hour before with Dr. and Mrs. Skinner for an auto ride to Montreal left here 10 am arrived in Waterloo at 12.30 had dinner left at 2 o’clock arrived safely without any stop. In Montreal at six pm.

They said when leaving that they would be home Tuesday; she said they had a delightful ride. She was staying with Marion.

I had a letter from Herb Friday night. He is very well. Said the last letters went to Qu’appelle (Saskatchewan). They were diverted by some mistake and he was longer in getting them. (An excuse for not writing sooner?) He said the manager was going to have his holidays and that he was to be Manager for two weeks. Says he does not like the town one bit and if he does not get transferred will leave. I hope he will stay and get a transfer before long. I hope you will write him to stay until he is sure of something better. I am going to.

Just when Flora and I were preparing for the Ladies Aid meeting 16 women, Aunt Christie (Watters) and Malcolm arrived from Lingwick. Aunt C. was away two weeks. M. went up to meet her stayed one week. (That was his first trip to Lingwick. I don’t think he was much taken with the place there are not many young people there. Of their friends.)

They did not send any word that they were coming. Uncle Alex (Watters)came down about 5 o’clock to meet Christie and take her home.

Mrs. Nielson (Norman’s sister) went up to Bella’s And Clayton and Bella took her out in the auto. She stayed with me for 3 days.

So Flora and I are having a quiet time. It will be a rest for her as her exams begin tomorrow morning; she is very well.

I was quite tired after all this but feel quite rested now as we were alone last night. We did not get up until quarter to nine and we both went to Sunday school.

Morse cut the lawn once, took him three evenings, clipped it one eve, he does it well. But said he would not promise to do it regularly.

We put our plants out and beans in. Taylor said he would put the tomatoes in Tuesday. Says his own were not in Friday when I spoke to him. He is so slow.

I will enclose you a clipping from the paper about Dr. Moffatt’s loss. Mrs. Montgomery was telling me that they had offered him 50 cents on the dollar, that is a loss of 4,000, he was in Sherbrooke Friday. I supposed he made it on stocks so he need not feel it so much. Mrs. Moffatt was working at the sale but did not mention it to me. Only she was rather short in the temper. They have sold all their horses.

Uncle Alex had a great many questions to ask (about you.) He knows more about that part of the country than I could tell him. Had to come up to the office (home office!) to look at the map, of course. Cochrane was not on it. We found Lake Abbott, a mining town he said it was.

Is that place in the woods from Cochrane?

I was trying to tell him it was quite civilized around there.

I hope you will like the crew. Too bad you have to walk so much.

I will tell Alex all the good points, he always wants to know your business before you know it yourself. He is jealous if anyone is doing well.

Dan and Grandma are well. (Maragaret’s brother and mother.)

I did not get the Herald last night, hope you got it. Let me know if you feel any of the indigestion.

With Much Love,

Your Loving Wife
Margaret.

Visitors, visitors. They could be welcome and unwelcome in 1911, but you still harboured them, because in turn they harboured you. Alas, with no maids, visitors were a lot of work.

Dr. Moffatt was the Nicholson’s GP and he also was related to them by marriage. He was a victim of an Eastern Townships stock market swindle, the Nicholsons cut out a newspaper clipping.

He soon moved to BC and wrote many letters to Norman during the First World War (he felt young British men were signing up merely to get a free ride home) and even one during the 1918 flu epidemic where he described himself as “dead on his feet.”

Linguick was nearby farm country, (the Malcolm in the letter above walked from Linguick to Richmond) and where the Isle of Lewis Scots of Quebec landed in the mid 1800′s. Norman’s people were from there (The Gore) although these Watters’ now live in Kingsbury, where Margaret’s people, the McLeod’s landed in 1838, with nothing but the clothes on their back. These people were poor crofters (tenant farmers) cleared from the land to make way for sheep. Margaret’s people, from what I have read, had to be thrown on the boats at Uig Carnish to come to Canada, they were so reluctant to leave their barren but beautiful homeland.

These were Gaelic speakers. Margaret’s mother spoke only Gaelic and Margaret was bilingual, but clearly not ‘trilingual’.

Both Flodden and Kingsbury are marked are on Google Maps despite the fact they hardly exist as destinations being just crossroads, houses and fields.

Middle Class Servant Problem

A book that was woven out of lost Depression Letters, A Secret Gift, by Ted Gup was showcased this weekend on CBS’s Sunday Morning, a show my husband tapes.

When I saw the intro, I didn’t feel like watching the actual show, because I knew I’d feel bad. I’ve been working on this book about the Nicholson letters for too long.

(This show had yet another interview with Colin Firth for the King’s Speech, so I didn’t erase it.)

This book, a Secret Gift, from what I read on the Web, was written because an OP Ed in the NYT about the same subject got a huge response.

When I found the Nicholson letters, I publicized them, too, but there’s been no huge response. Maybe I am pitching them wrong. Maybe it’s the taint of too much Anglo-cism.

The Sunday Morning host said that Ted Gup’s letters were ‘a window on the Depression.’

My letters at http://www.tighsolas.ca/ are certainly a window on the 1910 period.

Well, the picture above is of a baby nurse. I suspect it is either from 1914 or 17 when Marion had her first two children.

Reading a 1913 Montreal Witness, the Nicholson paper of choice, I found a want ad for a nurse maid and a maid to take care of two children and do light housekeeping. The ad was for a home on Grey Avenue in Westmount.

Grey Avenue is a middle class area around where Marion and her husband Hugh and Flora lived the next year.

So ordinary (well off) middle class families, with young children, hired help. I imagine the heavy housekeeping, like washing, was sent out.

Funny, in the same paper, there’s an ad for a ‘washing machine’ that a child can use and that cleans anything in 3 minutes. It’s a ‘vacuum washer’ that looks like a plunger in a tub. Technology would eventually take care of the servant problem.

As I have written before, The Royal Commission on Industrial Education and Technical Education came out with recommendations in 1913 and one was to train women for homemaking and housekeeping. I now suspect that the homemaking part wasn’t only for the unwashed masses, the poor. I suspect they wanted to train middle class women to be more efficient homemakers so that they didn’t need maids and so that what the rich could have them all to themselves. Just a guess.

As it happens, someone in the Nicholson family clipped this in 1913 from the Montreal Standard:

“The servant problem, why did not women solve it before asking to be permitted to regulate the affairs of the nation?

To that effect spoke Mrs. William Forse Scott, when addressing a women’s club in New York the other day.

“If women want to prove their ability to handle great public problems, let them solve their own first,” she said.
“The modern women are pushing into the market place, offering to help the men solve the tremendous problems of labour, transportation, the social evil or national destiny, and their own problem is left unsolved in their kitchens. They cry to assist the downtrodden woman in labour and 40 percent of those women are labouring in private kitchens. Why legislate for the factory girl when the parlour maid needs you?

This has drawn forth a number of replies from prominent suffragists of New York. One, Mrs. John Rogers claims the servant problem is not a domestic problem. “It is a municipal problem,” he says. “Take the question of nights out. I would be willing for my maid to have every night off if she wanted it, but I am helpless. Suppose I order dinner at 6 o’clock. Nobody would be there then. It is late before we dine so the maid’s evening is spoiled. It is the transportation – the rush hour problem, business hours, that keeps women worried about servants.”

There’s so much in the Nicholson letters to address this servant issue! Well, it’s all timing. Depression Era stories are ‘in’ right now as the US feels it is in one. Almost 10 percent unemployment. Canadian-style figures.

Canada’s employment figures are not much better.

The Other Side of Child Labour

Boys Scouts in 1910. The Community picks up the slack for parents.

There’s a heritage site called Upper Canada Village in Eastern Ontario where you can see learn about village life in 1860 or so.

Each little house/home is a center of production, say a cheese making place or a shoemaker. I recall when I last visited, the guide explained that the home, being a workplace, was a bit dangerous for the children, so the younger kids were taken care of by teenage girls, as both the mom and dad worked.

The piece below is from a 1910 book called The Education of Women and is about the changes that happened to the family group when the home changed from a center of production to a center of consumption. You will see that a lot of the complaints made about modern families were made back then, 100 years ago.

(PS. My mother in law told a story about visiting her firstborn’s kindergarten class in the late 1940′s. There were pictures of MOM AND DAD on the board. Mom was this HUGE figure and Dad a tiny little guy in a buttoned down suit. Fathers didn’t figure large in the life of kids, even in the 50′s, despite what TV shows like Father Knows Best seemed to show. Maybe that’s why they had to create these shows, for fantasy. If you watch today’s sitcoms, you would think people all sit around on couches all day joking with a group of bosom buddies, but that’s just what we’d like to be doing. We’re actually sitting at home, alone, watching the show.)

“The changes in industrial, educational and organized life have greatly modified domestic life, so greatly, indeed, as in the judgment of many observers, to imperil it seriously. The removal of the father and often the mother to the office, shop, or factory during the day results in a lost to the children of association with one or both parents. Ease and cheapness in moving from one place to another are destroying the conception of home as a permanent abiding pace. The crowding of people into narrow quarters, flats, and tenements is resulting in loss of freedom, privacy, and sense of ownership, all of which have been thought essential to the best family life. As has been pointed out: the family has two functions; as a smaller group it affords an opportunity for eliciting the qualities of affection and character which cannot be displayed at all in the larger group and it is a training for future members of the larger groups in those qualities of disposition and character which are essential to citizenship.

Mrs. Gillman has rightly stated that he father and mother must work together for the interests of the family.

When the home was a skilled workshop, when father, mother and children jointly contributed to the making of the house in its material aspect, there was constant opportunity for the parents to train the child in many of his activities. They now have to send the child to the school for the large part of his training, physical, mental, social and religious. With the disappearance of household industries or their relegation to the hands of the unskilled (sic) foreigner, it has become necessary to introduce into the school curriculum matter and methods which will give the child some manner of command over his physical environment, and as yet only a beginning has been made in filling up the gap.

In spite of the satisfaction and comfort which come with the modern house, heated, lighted, drained, furnished with water, food and clothing at cost of little effort, many a parent longs for the ‘chore’ of household industry, as a means of training his child in usefulness and efficiency.

The gymnasium, the dancing school, the Sunday School, the club, and various outside agencies have come to take the place vacated in the child’s life through the changes wrought in the home by the conditions of modern life.

Under the former industrial system, the father shared much more largely than at present in the life of training the child. The part of which he now plays is often so small as to give rise to a series of humourous tales with the child’s ignorance of his father as the central theme. With fathers absent from the home and with the advent of communal control of sanitary and civic matters have gone many opportunities for training children to assume responsibility in matters leading to good citizenship demanded in public affairs. Obedience to law, respect for authority, intelligent interest in personal activities find little opportunity for expression in the modern home.”

Coco Before Chanel

From the Bain Collection on Library of Congress, Creative Commons, Flickr, so I can reprint it with attribution. A Helen Gould, philanthropist of New York is in a hat shop.

I posted that picture because I am now watching Coco Before Chanel on my TV. I bought it off the satellite. I saw it in the theatre. It’s in French and they speak very very fast. I recently read a bio about her: it’s all very interesting in relation to Tighsolas. In fact, the woman is emblematic of all that went on with respect to women in the era. But she is also an BIG EXCEPTION. Beautiful, ambitious and smart, she made her way, with the help of a man’s money, and then she paid him back every cent.

Coco Chanel is a character or should I say, ghostly presence in my story, Flo in the City about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era in Canada based on the letters of www.tighsolas.ca.

Before I stumbled on the Nicholson letters I knew little about the 1910 era in Canada, well, next to nothing. All that mattered to me was La Belle Epoque. The era was born in Paris, where the first motor car was born, where they had the 1900 exposition.

So in my first chapter of Flo in the City, available in first rough draft form on this blog, I have Flo joke about moving to France and starting a hat shop.

Marion jokes that she would need to improve her French.

You know, in 1912, Marion was invited to go to Europe with family friends, but she did not have the money. These friends bring her back a present, a real Parisienne blouse.

Filling in the Blanks

Kids on the grass at Tighsolas. The older girl looks like Edith, but since they are posing at Tighsolas, with (it looks like) Floss, then it must be around 1900 or later. Tighsolas was built in 1896.

Hmm. So I’ve reached the end of July 1908, with Margaret and Norman particpating in the Tercentary Celebrations at Quebec; Flora on her way to visit Henry and the Beach at Hyannis, even though she did fail some courses at school; Edith at home at a loss for what to do; Marion about to take a giant leap forward in her career and her life, move to Montreal.

There are not many 1908 letters in the Nicholson collection, but what I do have sets the stage for the Nicholson Family Saga of 1908-1913, which I am turning into Flo in the City, a story about a young girl coming of age in that exciting era.

I printed out the remaining 1908 letters and read them over. Not only is 1908 Tercentenary year, it is an election year. Norman goes home to Richmond for the election. (He has worked on elections for Liberals in the past.)

Marion leaves for Montreal in early September and has trouble finding a room. Mother Margaret does not want her to ‘eat out’.

Herb does not call on Marion, Margaret asks if they are fighting… Hmm. I can turn that into something.

Edith, it is clear, is in Montreal from October on. (She tears her blue dress at the cattle fair on Richmond in September.)But I have no letters from her and have no idea what she is doing. She does not start work at Ecole Methodiste for another year… So I will have her be a governess or English tutor in a French Canadian home… I’ll make that home my grandfather’s… It will fit in, as Ecole Methodiste is a school that hoped to convert Roman Catholics to Protestantism.. Edith was a convincing teacher, according to one of her pupils, whose diary is on another blog.

And of course, living and working in a RC home is an embarrassment for the Nicholsons and won’t be written about much.

In September, Margaret says she will go into Montreal to buy a suit for her and Edith. I have an invoice for a suite. 12.00. A nice Montreal hat costs about 7.00. Imagine!

Norman is in Richmond for the elections but he misses out on the St. Andrew’s Day celebrations next month. Flora and Margaret eat haggis. Norman, as a former President of the Saint Andrews Society, sends his regrets by telegram ( I have a copy of the actually telegram)and is angry when they are not read out at the Concert Intermission when the largest number of people are present.

Herb is transferred to Ormstown in February 1909. He claims he has no time to visit his mom. (I will suggest that he is transferred because the Nicholsons were worried about his behavior in Montreal, which is why he doesn’t visit Marion in September in Montreal and why the Nicholsons reluctantly agree for Edith to go live in Montreal, to keep Marion company.)

The fact is letters were important to the Nicholsons. Many letters ended with WRITE ME A HUGE LETTER. They were another form of entertainment, I guess. But people left very controversial things out of letters or they burned them. I’m just filling in the blanks here.

Now, as I may have mentioned, the Nicholsons seldom talked on the phone from what I can see, but it is twice mentioned to use the phone in the 1908 letters, for local calls.

Later on, long distance phone calls are made, but for important events. Edith’s loss (her boyfriend is killed) and Flora’s graduation from McGill Normal School.