A Toy for All: The Automobile 1911

Edith’s Sister Flo (second on right) on an all girl trip in the twenties, I suspect.

One sunny afternoon, back in June, my husband and I took a car trip from our home near Hudson, Quebec to Richmond, in the Eastern Townships.

Nothing new: we drive to Richmond at least once a year to pay our respects to my husband’s  dearly departed laid to rest in St. Andrew’s  Presbyterian cemetery up on the hill, the place with the view pictured on the old orange Canadian two dollar bill.

This year, though, we tried something different.

We attempted to follow the same route my husband’s great aunt Edith took EXACTLY 100 years  before, which she enthusiastically described in an June, 1911 letter to her father.

“As you will see by the address, I am in Montreal. I came in with Dr. and Mrs. Skinner (next door neighbours) in the motor Friday. Left home at 10 am and got to Waterloo at 12.30. Had dinner.  Saw all we could of the town and left at 2pm for Montreal. Got here at quarter past six. Without one break down. It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed every minute of it.

I will name the places we passed through so you will know the country we passed through. Melbourne, Flodden, Racine, Sawyerville, Warden, Waterloo, Granby, Abbotsford, St Caesar, Rougemont, Marieville, Chambly, Longueil, St. Lambert, Pointe St Charles.

Don’t you think I was a very fortunate girl to have such a trip?..PS I just loved driving on the smooth roads in the city.”

So I plotted the route out on Google Maps and my husband programmed the same route into his trusty GPS, and off we went, in our comfy Malibu and comfier modern stretchy clothing. But still, this was going to be a HISTORY lesson. I was determined.

I think it’s been decades since I took the Victoria (Jubilee) Bridge and I found it kind of scary, noisy and rickety-looking and all rusted to boot. But to get onto that venerable span (inaugurated in 1860 by the future King Edward VII who lent his name to the era that birthed the motorcar) we had to pass through remnants of industrial Montreal near the Lachine Canal and for that I was grateful. It got me into a Laurier Era mindset.

But within a few minutes the GPS landed us in bustling, box-store-pocked St. Hubert (right in front of, UGH, a HOOTERS).

So, after a short, heated ‘argument’ over how to proceed, we decided to forget the GPS and follow the silver church spires. Because they would be in the towns, right?  The strategy worked, for a time.  For instance, we saw a slew of charming waterfront heritage homes in old Chambly.

You know the song, “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road?” Well, after Chambly we had trouble telling which is which. So we just drove East on any road that wasn’t a superhighway.

Downer! Not much of a history lesson at all! The most interesting part of the drive was near the end, where we drove by FLODDEN (a field?) where my husband’s people, the Isle of Lewis Nicholsons, settled after landing in Quebec in 1851.

And where we passed a sign for Kingsbury, where my husband’s other people, the Isle of Lewis McLeod’s, settled in 1848.

Even in 1911, these farming villages weren’t  exactly bustling metropoli. They were losing all their young citizens to the towns, which, in turn, were losing many of their youth to the Big City or the West.

That’s why I have so many letters from the 1910 era – and due to the favourable date, the automobile figures largely in all these letters. You see, 1910 is when many middle class men, especially in the towns, decided they couldn’t live without a motorcar.

In an April 1909 letter, Margaret Macleod Nicholson, my husband’s great grandmother, remarks that  her  neighbour on the other side is going to buy a car.

“Mr. Montgomery is going to buy an auto. Nothing will satisfy now. He is going to sell his horse. Mrs. Montgomery does not want to buy one. Too bad he is so foolish, don’t you think?  

How strange, how restless men are. I suppose at one time he would think, if he only had a house in Richmond and could live comfortable, he would be happy (SIC).

Poor man, putting himself and everyone else in danger. I would have lots of money before I would want an auto.”

But soon Margaret learns that neighbours who have autos, or motors, or motorcars, are very useful, especially to take her down to the mail in rainy weather.

Margaret misses her husband and 3 grown children, who are all far away working and she longs for daily news of them.

Later in the summer of 1910, Margaret  loses her vehicular virginity. Edith refers to it in a letter. “I can just see you sitting in state waiting for your first ever car ride!”  No mention of who is taking her but it might very well be good family friend Mr. Wales.

The Richmond County Historical Society, in their book The Tread of Pioneers claims that Mr. Wales, the town tycoon, was the first to own an automobile in the era, obviously sometime before 1909.

But by 1911, the Delineator Magazine was slyly proclaiming “There are only two social classes these days, people who own an auto and people who do not.”

A linen duster coat, the magazine said, was now an essential piece of female apparel. An advertisement in the Richmond Times of 1911 reveals that the Wales general store sold motor suiting for coats and skirts in helio and navy stripe.

Car rides were a definite form of entertainment in the late Laurier era, for all the Nicholson women – and for most of the upper-middle class.  In 1910, Technical World Magazine declared the automobile “Our Billion Dollar Toy.”

Theatre owners blamed the auto for declining attendance.

The speed limit in Quebec, in the country, was 14 miles an hour, so I can  imagine how much fun Edith had in the back seat of, say, a Daimler,  flying up and down the picturesque green hills of Quebec’s Eastern Townships, holding onto her big BIG hat. Despite her tight corset. Despite the bumpy roads. Weeeee.

And imagine is all I can do, really, because I’ve discovered, you can’t  go back. Blame it on spandex  and independent front suspension.

Dorothy Nixon is a Vaudreuil-Dorion writer. Her latest word is Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

Helpless Vines

Everyone`s on the hammock this time.

So, in my last installment of Flo in the City (about a Canadian girl coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 era based on the letter of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ )I had Edith say to Flora that there was no reason for any woman to be a burden on her parents. I did a little MORE research. (Is this procrastination or due diligence?)

I wanted to find some book that someone (perhaps Edith) could give to Flora to help her out in her confusion about her future path.

I found this on Canadiana.org. Woman: her character, culture and calling. Published in Ontario. Fraces W. Willard, President of the Christian Temperance Union.

Now, people are products of their time (even iconoclasts) and Margaret and her three daughters lived in an interesting time, when women were told they could (finally!) have it all. (How did the 50′s ever happen?) Religious forces were at the fore-front of this movement. Read this bit from the book, written in 1890,if you don’t believe me!

“Hitherto, the education of boys and that of girls have proceeded upon an altogether different basis. Young women have been allowed to grow up without any practical education which they could turn to account in self-support, and sent out into life helpless dependents on the labour of others.

It seems to have been generally assumed that all young women would marry on the first favorable opportunity and that any kind of superficial training was good enough for those who were only charged with the work of home-building and housekeeping. Today, we have come to a profound conviction that thorough and practical education is important and necessary to makers and keepers of the home as it is to the professional, and with this in view, as well as for the purpose of self-support, every young woman should have the best, most practical culture and training.

The education of young women has been mainly literary in character, and in most cases, neither broad enough or deep enough to qualify them for teaching, while, within the last century, very few desired or received any practical training either for business or for an employment requiring trained or skilful service. Like plants, which cling for support to the strong oak, women, in vast numbers, have been taught to depend on characters stronger and better fitted to life’s stern battle.

It is hardly to be wondered at then, that when death or disaster removes the trusted support, women are thrown to the earth, like helpless trailing vines.”

Hmm. Margaret, born in 1854 was a brilliant homemaker, but she didn’t value her many useful skills. She wanted her children to have an education. She complained in 1912, when things were going terribly wrong, that “she couldn’t earn her own living.” Well, with many women thinking like this, the more conservative forces found a way to preserve the sanctity of the male workplace while giving women ‘what they wanted.’ They created the ‘new profession of home-making’ to enhance the status and perceived ability of homemakers(and to train servants). The only problem, in the case of homemakers, it was a profession with no pay, which is a contradition in terms.

And It Gets Complicated…

Edie and her hat 1910, again. I like this picture so much.

Oy. Researching the 1908 Quebec Tercentenary, for my book in progress Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/, I found a summary document posted on archive.org. It was written in 1911. So even though no Nicholson letter exists describing the pagent, I can describe it in detail… Margaret was there for two of the most eventful days! Better, I can put it all in perspective….

Now, the 1908 Tercentary, I just found out, was a huge pagent and military show and PR exercise in Canadian unity. Ironically, it was the St Jean Baptiste Society that first suggested that the 300 anniversary of Quebec’s founding should be commemorated. And, then it appears the idea got hijacked by everyone else and the Prince of Wales’ appearance (he only decided to go in March of 1908) ended up being the central event. Hmmm. British military might was on display bigtime. (Did they know a war was coming? They knew the Germans were building a huge army..)

At least two Canadian Highlander Regiments took part.. I’m sure the Nicholsons were interested in that fact.

Here’s a VERY INTERESTING quote from the document: “It is of profound importance to national life that the truth of history should be discovered and revealed. For the truth, once made manifest, is bound sooner or later, to affect the public’s point of view, even that of the masses that hardly reads anything except for daily newspapers…Many problems of today would be simplified, some might even be removed, by a true appreciation of the crises in our history.”… the general effect of the Tercentary was to show the French and British regimes as two haves of one whole.”

The writer then says that Canadian history was misunderstood up until then, because the naval records only became extant in 1903 and that students of history only were able to study ‘what really happened’ through the logs of these men of war, with respect to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1909.

Hmmm.

Well, I couldn’t agree more. I’m an amateur historian, but the reason I have posted the Tighsolas letters and have started on a book for middle-schoolers is because I want ‘the truth of history’ to be revealed, with respect to women and their lives and feminism. It irks me that so many people have such a distorted view of feminism, the family, women’s lives past and present. Especially right wing evangelical types.

I was born in 1954, and most people in my generation think that the feminist movement began in the 60′s.

It was an eye-opener to me, to see how women in the 1910 era were every bit as ‘liberated’ in spirit as women in the 60′s…with some differences of course. It was an eye-opener to me that feminism was invented by religious types, the Quakers, Methodists, mostly and that women got the vote in Canada thanks to evangelicals, in large part, who wanted the fix all the social probems of industrialization. (My British grandmother was a daughter of a Methodist Minister, educated at a co-educational Quaker school.)

I still have a fair bit of research to do (and it’s Christmas!) before I can write the scenes about Margaret’s trip. I figure it will be a pivotal scene, not with respect to the Nicholson Family Saga, or Flora’s development, but with respect to the Context….where this family fits in Canadian History…

Funny, I found another article on the Net about the 1908 celebrations, written last year, on the occasion of the 2008 Quebec celebrations.

It was ironic, considering the quote above. The author, a professor of history at McMaster, claimed that the truth of history was inconsequential for these recent celebrations which were more about celebrity. The truth of history doesn’t serve politicians in Canada anymore, was what he suggested. No kidding! That’s another reason I am writing Flo in the City…English Quebec has a rich history and it is being erased.

PS. Another irony, my late mother was French Canadian and a descendant on her father’s side of the Forget…One cousin was the leading French Canadian Industrialist in 1910, Sir Rodolfe, and there was a Bishop etc. From what she told me, they are all descended from one Abraham Martin, L’Ecossais, the guy who owned the Plains of Abraham.

Now the Tercentenary Celebrations were being joined with efforts to make the Plains an historical site or to “preserve Quebec battlefields’.. apparently, New Zealand school children got together and raised money to help the cause.

In true Canadian fashion, the celebration almost didn’t happen, with the collapse of the Quebec Bridge (which played a part in the Nicholson Saga) and all the political in-fighting.

It all sounds very familiar to me, a Montreal native who counts Expo67 as one of the best times of her life. Actor Dan Ackroyd’s father was the brains behind the amazing Centennial Year Celebration. Expo almost didn’t happen. I think Toronto turned it down and Jean Drapeau, our mayor, had a dream which was realized.

An Era of Optimism

A blurry picture, taken prior to 1912, as the old lady, Marion McLeod died in 1912. Might be Flo standing right, certainly is Marion, bottom.

Success! I found the Tighsolas book, with all expenses. But it did not contain any notes of stoves or furnace.

I have found everything I’m looking for. Now that I have finished the very first rough draft of the first chapter of Flo In the City, Just a Change of Colour. 2 days in early June. I introduce Flo and her anxieties, Margaret and her news clippings, and Marion and her strong, purposeful character.

Before I get to the next chapter, or while I write it, I want to re-read my letters, to pick out good lines that illustrate the times. In my last blog I wrote about a letter from 1904, Montreal, where a man runs into a new mother on Drummond and says her plans for the future are rather optimistic, considering that her husband is a mere book-keeper.

I think this is the type of thing that resonates: All young people, all new mothers are optimistic, but the 1900 era was an optimistic time, when young people thought the world was their oyster.

This story, Flo in the City (about a young woman coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 era of history and based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ will reveal how the middle class felt in 1900, and also hopefull explain the truth of it.

I also spent some time this afternoon going through the pile of invoices I have from the Nicholsons, most from either 1900 or the war era. I don’t know why this is. I assume the stores and the prices from 1900 were pretty much the same in 1910. There must have been some inflation during the war… I think I read as much in a letter.

Anyway, these invoices in themselves are a peek into the life of these people.

One thing I do want to resolve… why was flour so expensive, 4.75 to five dollars a barrel. This was the wheat boom era, after all.

The big Red Roses flour mill, an enormous eyeshore and iconic building on Montreal’s landscape, was built in 1912.

The Nicholsons bought Red Roses flour, at least sometimes.

Anyway, I have my work cut out for me. The title of the next chapter of Flo in the City. Maybe A Modern Conundrum. Why? Because today I dug out a book called Modern Conundrums from 1906 from the Nicholson collection. A conundrum is a puzzle (usually wordplay involved). The modern conundrum will be around womanhood. How to be a family woman and feminist.

Marion Nicholson figured it out, but at a price.

In the next chapter, Margaret comes home and announces that Edith is quitting her school and returning to Richmond. Is there a marriage in the offing? Apparently not. Edith goes to Montreal to work, very suddenly. Leaving Flo alone. But not before Flo and Mae go to Boston for a vacation, in August. And Margaret goes to Quebec for the Tercentenary celebrations, in July, and sees the Prince of Wales, who will soon become king.

Both Marion and Edith are tossed in love. Flora (sober-faced Flora as she is described in that 1904 letter) visits Henry Watters, bachelor cousin, who is a successful doctor in Boston. Henry is everything brother Herb is not, very successful and very attentive to kin. I have an earlier letter where a sister discusses how Margaret had wanted Herb to be a doctor. Instead he works at the bank, in Montreal. “He will be President one day,” the sister says. She also says she assumes he is ‘a ladies man.’

Well, Herb never became bank President. Far from it. And if he was a ladies man, he NEVER wrote about his loves to his mother. His life was a big secret. He was always in debt. I think I will have him visit prostitutes on de Bullion Street of Montreal. In the first chapter Mae brings up deBullion street. So I will have it that Flo told Mae how she overhead Marion tell Margaret that Herb has been hanging around de Bullion, where the prostitutes are.. Something like that. In an earlier blog I wrote about an article in a 1906 Ladies Home Journal that dealt with the double standard around sex, that a young man was expected to get some experience somewhere, but a woman had to remain pure. The very word pure says it all, right?

Marion will have heard rumours, from a friend of a friend. Maybe that dentistry student Flo has talked about..Somewhere in the letters are descriptions of a woman relation who appears to be a fallen woman.. someone visits her and says “she is worse than ever” . I should read that letter more carefully.

Organized in my disorganization

Margaret and a tired looking Marion. Possibly from 1912, when it is mentioned in the letters that Marion looks thin. Her 1907 diary, her first year of teaching in Sherbrooke, has her at 5 foot 2 and 137 pounds! (But she is weighed with her clothing on, and clothing was heavy.)Teaching was a tiring profession back then too. Marion, who was fiercely independent, was frustrated by the lack of freedom afforded unmarried women back then.

OK. So I had to go back and revise my story, as I got mixed up as to exactly when Marion went to teach in the city. It was in September 1908. So she taught two years at Sherbrooke. I have to find those 1907 letters. I put them in a separate shoebox.

I also cannot find the book that lists, in detail, expenses of building Tighsolas in 1896. I want to see exactly what kind of heating stoves they had. I know they had a kitchen stove and a furnace. The furnace was likely in the middle of the house.

These were all fired with wood, although coal ovens were for sale. In September, 1908 Norman asks Herb to buy 8 cords of wood – and to get a good price for it. Tighsolas was solidly built, but it was cold (the relations remember)in the house in the winter. And especially cold in the morning.

Little Flo was often the one who had to get up to feed the furnace.

Oh, I am disorganized! I found the newsclippings I had put aside for future use. I alread posted some intersting ones on Tighsolas.

All very interesting; they include sappy poems about motherhood and feisty articles about feminism. See, the push pull of biology and ambition.

And two articles debating ‘women and their dress habit.’ Anti-feminists liked to take women to task for being such clothes-horses.So narcissistic.

“You want to be like men, but you have this obsession with clothes” which indicated a weakness of spirit or something. There was a debate going on the in press and Marg clipped articles.

Anyway, I’ve tried to organize or re-organize my letters. I want to re-read them for interesting observations and turns of phrase. The first letter I grab is from 1904, someone who lives on Drummond in Montreal, a Lyster.

He describes a young mother, whom he meets as she walks her new baby in a perambulator on the street. The woman, Emma, ‘talks quite learnedly about child care” says the correspondent, a man, and the woman appears very devoted to ‘the little bundle of charms’. She has ideas, says the writer,that seem better suited to a person with an income of 20,000 rather than the wife of a book keeper in a dry goods store….
ONE LETTER with so much good stuff to copy in my story. So imagine the 700 others!

And that’s not all. The person, who has a milk company says, that the Montreal streets (in March) are awful and no one who owns a milk business would ever write spring poetry as they would not have time.

This is the letter that explains the relationship of the Clevelands to the Nicholsons. (Marion stays with them in Montreal later on.) Cleveland, a dentist, moves to Montreal and marries a cousin. This Lyster is also a cousin. I must dig out that genealogy I have.