Opium, Habitues, and Edith Nicholson

 

After the 1909 Monterrey Hurricane.

 

Well, I do have the first rough draft of my story Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl, about women in 1910 Canada. I printed it out on hard copy and am  now editing it and integrating the Nicholson letters into it..Not an easy job… so maybe I still have a ways to go.

 

Yesterday, I listened to a BBC radio 4 broadcast of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, an episode about the Mexican Revolution. Zapata and all that. That program is always excellent and features Bragg and usually three scholars discussing something, anything, everything in the universe and sometimes the universe.

 

I was hoping they’d mention something about Canadian Industrialists and water works. They didn’t.

 

I also researched opium and Mexico and 1910, to find that in April 1909, the Americans created the Opium Exclusion Act, outlawing the importation of Opium and essentially giving birth to the War on Drugs which would eventually drive up prices and create vast criminal syndicates.

 

In 1910, Opium was legal in Mexico (and would stay so until 1927, I think). In Canada, as I wrote earlier, in 1910 for about a year, it was only illegal for Chinese, not Whites.

 

According to one source, most morphine addicts in 1910 were wealthy women (habitues) who no one really worried about. Edith Nicholson wasn’t wealthy, but she sure liked her cold medicines. She was always getting a cold. In fact, if there’s one theme dominating the 1908-1913 Nicholson Family Letters, it’s ‘colds’ and ‘la grippe.’

 

 

So anyway, it all fits in nicely to my murder mystery around Edith’s fiance Charlie Gagne I am fashioning around the letters from 1910 I have on hand. The one issue, really, is that in early 1911, opium wasn’t that expensive, so smuggling it wouldn’t make that much money for anyone. But I’ll assume there was some money to be made by white men, all ‘legally’ or in grey areas.

 

Edith’s Story: Chapter 1, Draft 1

June 20^th.

HBC has arrived.

He is sitting on the green corduroy chesterfield in our casual parlour, the back parlour, off the kitchen, just three feet from where I myself recline in the sturdy cherry wood rocking chair my Mother usually sits in. When she has time to do so.

She has draped it, I notice, to cover the threadbare cushion, in the canary yellow afghan I crocheted for her at Christmas.

HBC is staring at me with a look of confusion more than compassion, patiently, maybe anxiously, waiting for me to say something. This boyish man is politely allowing the shock of it all to sink in.

With his head of  straight sandy hair and the beige cardigan he is sporting over boney, broad shoulders, HBC, indeed, looks just like a school boy.

And he is so informally dressed, when compared to me, we are quite the ridiculous pairing.

But as he explained, he was heading out to a summer camp near Potton Springs with some Montreal friends, when he decided to hop off the train at Richmond. And I had invited him to drop by at the first chance, so he did.

There’s no one to bear witness as we sit so close together in the family room of Tighsolas. An awkward couple, despite our age-appropriateness. Both 27, you see. In another universe we could have become suitors.

HCB, the bank clerk, in my mother’s favorite rocking chair. Me, the school marm, in my father’s world-weary leather wingback.

HBC  in his casual summer country-outing attire and me in my formal white dress. I look like quite the eccentric, even Miss Havisham-like. Not a look I previously had aspired to, but quite fitting, these days.

When he first arrived, and I immediately invited him to come into the house to sit and talk privately in our parlour, I told him to spare me nothing.

I wanted to know all. All about the ‘mercy’ trip to Mexico. All about the job transfer t to Cornwall. All about everything leading up to and after the fire. That horrific fatal, fateful fire. The conflagration that converted me, in the space of one week,  from a blushing bride-to be to be, perhaps a little on the ripe side, to a opiate-addled spinster-in-training.

As he began, the small, subtle muscles on HBC’s smooth-shaven face, the one’s around his mouth and especially on his temples, pulled taut, so I knew there was more to this sad sad story than even I had guessed.  So much much more – as it happens.

I wanted to know, I had to know. Still, I wished on some level that he hadn’t dropped in this particular morning, despite his standing invitation to do so, despite his obligation to do so as Charlie’s closest friend. My dear fiance’s partner at work and leisure at the Bank of Montreal in Danville, Quebec.

Because as he ambled up the street, we were all in our white dresses, standing in front of the house, having our picture taken my Mr. Montgomery, our neighbour. Me, Mother, Marion and Flora.

We were all wearing our new spring hats, too. Well, Marion and I had brand new Easter Bonnets. Purchased at Ogilvy in Montreal on April 28, a day before the terrible event.

Mother’s hat was a year old, refurbished with a few pink silk apple blossoms and Flora’s, well I can’t recall when she got hers. It was of an ordinary sort, with no up to-date flourishes, no velvet ribbon, very a la mode in the 1910 season, just a few faded sprigs of some imaginary bloom, so likely she trimmed it herself with remainders from the basket in Mother’s sewing room.

It was Mothers’ idea to get all dressed up and have  a tea party out on the front lawn, as we had done in the past, although much later in the summer. Usually as a way to to escape the clinging heat in the house.

But it was not hot this day, in June.  Mother was desperate, that’s all: desperate to save me from my spiraling sadness.  Desperate too to forget her own escalating set of  family problems.

So after church (Mr. Carmichael’s sermon was on the Garden of Eden) we ceremoniously donned on those white dresses, a fashion from the turn of the century, white dresses being  genteel dresses, for they stained easily. And that was the point.

People with white dresses, dresses that showed the dirt so easily, had maids and washing women.

We didn’t. It took  us two days to wash, dry and press our white dresses. Our  genteel impractical white dresses.

As we sat there, teetering on kitchen chairs on the grass, my mother’s brainstorm had a negative effect on me.

I could see, through my fog of depression,  how ridiculous we looked, how pretentious, in our fashionable over-sized hat and ridiculously anachronistic white dresses. Queen Victoria, Victoria Regina,  had started the fashion, decades before, in an effort to promote British lace to the world.

I felt out of body and I could also see how pretentious we looked, from the street, and I suddenly I hoped no one was  watching.

With the card table and kitchen chairs set out on the lawn and or best china and silver, too over a fine linen tablecloth embroidered in blue, on display, like animals in a zoo.

“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen: on view The Canadian Middle Class. Of Prime Minister Laurier’s Time. Aspiring to the finest lifestyle, theatre, opera, music recitals, afraid of falling into the lower class. Working Class, really, on paper, but with an education in Latin, Botany, History and Euclid’s geometry. Tennyson. So instilled with an appreciation of beauty.

Relying on creams and potions to disguise the rough and reddened skin of their hands.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these specimens are unique to all Canadian Society in that they WASH THEIR OWN CLOTHING.
(Sometimes it felt that way.)

But before I could feel too ashamed I saw him, HCB as I coyly referred to him in letters home, walking up from College Street and the station. “I was on my way to Kingsey Falls  to see, so I dropped by,” he said. “We’re’re off by the 3.10 to Potton Springs. A group of fellows from the bank. I am sorry, I decided right there on the train, about five minutes before the Richmond stop,there was no time for a telegram.”

“Yes, but I told you to drop in anytime. So please don’t apologize.” I said, wondering if he wanted the Oyster Canapes we had prepared for our tea or should I offer him some cold tongue.

We couldn’t ask him to join us for tea, that would have been absurd and uncomfortable.

And that wasn’t the point, anyway so we quickly went into the empty house. Straight to the parlour. The casual parlour, as there was not time to prepare the formal parlour for a visitor.

He asked only for a glass of water.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” he repeated. “You are celebrating something. A happy occasion? A Birthday.”

“Quite the opposite,” I assured him.

I brought him the glass of water, in a light green glass tumbler. And then I asked him to proceed. Without further delay.To tell me all he knew of the circumstance of the death of my Charlie G,  right from the beginning, from that Trip to Mexico in November up until that dreadful night, the night Haley’s comet ominously passed directly over Cornwall, Ontario.

I wanted to know all the details of all Charlie was doing the three months since our informal engagement over Christmas, especiallywhat he was doing that he didn’t tell me in his letters.

He couldn’t have spent all his off work hours in the Presybertian Church on 2^nd street as he claimed to me.  Even I knew he wrote that just to please me. To prove his conversion to the WAY had stuck.

So HCB began, leaning back on the couch, his right elbow at right angles to his body as he combed the hair on the back of his head with his hand; his bicep was a muscular one, much more muscular than Charlie’s, I guess you call men like him wiry, deceptively strong.

But then suddenly taking on a posture and air of a much older man, possibly imitating his own father or a beloved Academy professor, he opened his mouth to speak.

About Mexico, about Cornwall, about… the circumstances of the Rossmore Hotel fire.…I think it took over an hour in all, but I can’t be sure, and then when it all began to sink in, the horrible truth, the numbing realization that I had been protected from the truth this past year, protected by Charlie and HCB as we older siblings protect our little Flora from the unpleasant truths of our own dear, devoted but deeply troubled family.

I had been protected from the real reason Charlie went to Mexcio to help out that Canadian concern after the typhoon and protected from the real reason he got transferred away from Danville to the Cornwall branch immediately upon is return. And worst of all I have been protected from knowledge about myself, my self-centeredness,  my  female narcissism. My shallow solipsistic existence.

I had spent the past year believing myself to be a woman misused, mistreated. Because I enjoyed the part of being tossed in love.  I had taken to my bed like a wealthy Victorian lady in novels and guzzled heart tonics, to elicit pity more than to recover from grief.

HCB told me in plain English, that everything Charlie had done the last few months he had done for me, for love of me. Out of a desire to marry me, and as soon as possible.

He did not get cold feet in October! We was not trying to weasel himself out of our understanding in March.

Charlie was trying to make this marriage happen – and as soon as possible.

How could HCB  look at me, now. How could I look on myself?. I wasn’t a victim. I was the victimizer.

And I knew he had to be thinking the same thing.

This handsome man of the middle class, son of a farmer, nowa bank clerk, like Charlie, (although not as handsome as Charlie, nor as charming) stuck in a respectable but decidedly dead end job.

A well educated man with no serious connections, so no real hope. A young man thinking of moving out West, to Alberta or Saskatchewan, like just about everyone else around, including my own father.

And what he didn’t say was even more hurtful. (If it hadn’t been for YOU,  Charlie would still be alive!

He’d still be alive._ And through wall of my pitch black state of mind, my depression, I still felt sick to my stomach. Because the truth was truly shocking. The appallingness of it. The Uncleanliness..

So that’s why Charlie spent his off hours in the Presbyterian church.

Not to please me or to impress me, but to hide from those who would harm him?

So HBC just sat there, letting it sink in. Not knowing what more to say. Perhaps trying to stave off his growing repulsion for me. He examined the dark oak moulding around the doors and windows of the parlour, the Moulding my father had installed himself in 1896, with such pride for decoration like this added greatly to the cost of a house.

Then he spoke. “You must  know. He wasn’t doing anything illegal.  He’d want you to know that. Opium is legal to buy opium in Mexico.  I’m telling you this because he wouldn’t want you to think ill of him.

And with that HBC sprang up to leave.

Think ill  of Him? How could I?  I was the villainess in all piece. Not dear Charlie, dear dead Charlie.

Burned beyond recognition. Immolated.They identified his body by his tie pin, found nearby. In that stairwell. Half of  his body, anyway

“I have to catch the next train,” he said. He actually had a full hour and it was only a 15 minutes walk to the station, but I merely nodded.

“Are your sure you  don’t want us to make a pulled pork sandwich for your trip.”

No, we’re planning on getting an early supper at the Hotel in Potton Springs..

And as this  was getting set to walk out the door, I knew I  had to ask him one more question. It was loathsome, but there was no keeping me from it.

He was  turning toward the door, pirouetting elegantly on his lithe legs. Athletic young man.

” I’ll see myself out.”

I could tell he was dreading passing my family out on the lawn.

So, I stopped him, extending my arm.  ”Henry?”

“Yes.”

“I have something more to ask you….Do you know where I can get any, for myself. The opium.,  For my own use? My own medicinal use.”

And now it was his turn to be shocked.

I continued.

” It’s not like in Montreal where it’s easy to get prescription medicine. This is a small town and everyone knows me. The drug store is owned by Mr. Sutherland, and Dr. Moffatt is related to me by marriage….You say it isn’t illegal for us, only the Chinese.”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t,” he replied, stuttering. “Edith. I’m sorry.”

He folded his straw boater in his hand. And then he rushed out the front door. And right by my silly-looking sisters and Mother taking tea on the front lawn.

Without so much as tipping his hat to them. Well he couldn’t possibly as he had twisted it like a dirty rag between his pale fists.

End of First Chapter

Edith’s Story is the follow up to Threshold Girl and is based on the The Nicholson Family Letters

Love and Loss Story 1910 Montreal.

Edith Nicholson 1884-1977 and her ‘unofficial fiance’ Charles Gagne 1883(?) – 1910. This picture is likely 1909.

Edith Nicholson, my husband’s great Aunt, never married. She told her nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews that she lost her ‘great’ love in a hotel fire. They weren’t ‘officially engaged’ but they had ‘an understanding’.

In 2004, I found the Nicholson letters and in a letter dated May 3 1910, Edith writes of the loss to her Mother, Margaret in Richmond Quebec.

Your letter received this am. It was so good to hear your voice over the phone. It was quite natural. Oh, how I wish I could talk over everything with you. It seems terribly hard to think it all for the best, when there are so many that are of no use living on and others that are held in esteem cut off in a moment. One thing, I am very thankful for that he wrote me. No doubt one of the last things that he did. I can’t express my feelings. I never felt so badly in my life. But I suppose there are few who have had so pleasant a one as I have, and trouble comes to all.

It took me a while to figure out, but her beau was a Charlie Gagne. (She mentions many young men in her letters, sometimes only with initials.) It seems Edith and Charlie had an on-again off-again type relationship through 1908-1909. In the summer of 1909 I have  proof that he spent time stepping out with Edith as I have a few pictures of the couple on outings in the Eastern Townships.

In September 1909 her mother Margaret writes her father Norman and says “Charlie has gone to Mexico. So that flirtation is over.”

In October 1909, Edith writes her Mom saying she hasn’t heard from Charlie G and that she has no intention of trying to contact him. “He could still be in Mexico, for all I know.”

Then there’s NOTHING but the May 3 letter. Edith writes that she is looking at his picture in the Montreal Star and that “it does not do him justice.”

About 5 years ago, I tripped over to the McGill Library to check out the May 1910 Star. I found a story about a Cornwall fire, where a Charlie Gagne, bank clerk, perished.

No picture though – so I was confused.

I found the Nicholson family album a little later and saw these pictures. Could this man be the Charlie of the letters? I wondered. But, again, I couldn’t prove for certain.

Then Google News archives came online and I saw that the Rossmore Fire happened on April 29!

Yesterday, I ventured down to Concordia’s Webster Library to check out the January-April Reel of the 1910 Montreal Star. Sure enough, the Cornwall fire was front page news on April 29 as the Star was an afternoon paper. The next day’s issue had a back of the newspaper follow up article on the fire with a picture of Charlie Gagne, Levis born bank teller at the Bank of Montreal.

The picture was of a sober-faced Charlie, but it was without a doubt the man of the family album. (I didn’t have a library card so could not buy a photocopy of the picture.)

Mystery over.

Right now I am heavy into writing Milk and Water, my story of 1927 Montreal… but I’ve already plotted out Edith’s Story, “The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, Militant Suffragette Sympathizer and Inadvertent Opium Addict.”

It’s told from the future (from today perhaps by her spirit..or from 1976 the year before she died.)

She starts with hearing the news of the death, on the Saturday, April 30. (She won’t have heard of it the day before.)

She is at Westmount Methodiste Institute – a boarding school, where everyone has Saturday afternoon off.

She is planning to go to see an art exhibit at Phillip’s Square.

She is going to wear her new hat, she just purchased on the 19th of April for 7.50 (a huge amount of money for a teacher making 200 a year) a big black shape with pink flowers and a black velvet bow.

Dr. Villard, the principal tells her of the death. She takes to her bed, in the boarding school.

She is given strong medicine.  She sleeps for a few days and then wanders around the school in a fog for a few days.

The Next Saturday she awakes and takes double or triple the amount of tonic she is supposed to. She puts on her white dress (not appropriate for street wear) and new hat and drifts out down the stairs of the boarding school on her way  to the Art Exhibit.

Edith on Opium

But before she gets out the door of Westmount Methodist, a young male student tells her the big news:The KING is Dead.

She wanders out the door up Greene Avenue to Saint Catherine

to the streetcar

 

that takes her past Peel and Ste. Catherine

to Phillip’s Square and the Montreal Art Association Building and the exhibit of modern Canadian artists.

The Streetcar is abuzz with talk of the King’s death and new King, George V.  She is confused. Why is everyone talking about her beau’s death?

Edith is keen on seeing a painting by  F. S. Coburn, the Eastern Townships artist from Melbourne, the town adjacent Richmond.  A painting of a red sleigh in winter being pulled by a happy white horse. She is homesick for the E.T.

She wanders into the next room and sees, front and center,  the painting Maternity by Mary Riter-Hamilton – of a woman breastfeeding, and it occurs to her, all of a sudden, that she will NEVER MARRY and never have children. So, she faints.

Dr. Villard’s daughter rouses her and takes her home. She has been with Edith all along,  following her, knowing something is not right.  But Edith hasn’t been aware of it….(That’s my first chapter.)

In Levis, in 1901, according to the Canadian Census, there is only one Charles Gagne, 17. A French Canadian Catholic. He has not father, but a mom who is a seamstress, a high end one.

If this is the Charlie, and I think it is, he must have converted. Edith works at a school where French Catholics are ‘brought up to the light’ as Dr. Villard says in a book he writes a decade later.

Phillip’s Square in 1910 was considered a very proper place for women. The park had no benches, so no place for leering old men to sit and no place for women to rest and ‘invite’ men’s attention.

Morgan’s Department Store was on one corner (and department stores were considered safe havens for women), the Art Association building at another, Birk’s Jewellers at yet another and there was a church at the other corner.

Coincidentally, a statue of Edward VII was soon erected at this square and so remains.

In 1910, PROPER young women were allowed to be good consumers, but not ‘a product’ to be consumed by society, especially by men. That would smack of the Social Evil, prostitution. This “Social Evil” or “the world’s oldest profession” (as Kipling coined it) informed the life of every era woman, upper, middle and lower class, especially in the Big City.

And yet, every young woman was “on the market” and in the business of selling herself to a man, if the father didn’t have the money to ‘buy’ her a man with a dowry. Edith Nicholson, 27, in this story, effectively takes herself ‘off the market’ at this moment.  I will play with history and have a very sad story to tell: about a young couple in love  and wanting to marry, but without the money to do so. I will have her Beau make a desperate attempt to earn cash (as bank clerks made little money) by going to Mexico – and eventually be murdered for it!

They never did identify the body of Charlie Gagne. All the bodies in the stairwell, (where the fire started, allegedly by a cigarette)were incinerated. They identified his body because a tie pin he owned was nearby.  As you can see, Charlie was a natty dresser, and that likely impressed Edith, who liked to dress just so herself.

Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (among a billion other classic novels of the period) centers on this issue in this time.

 

Phillip’s Square, Birks at Left, Church at right.

Morgan’s from Phillip’s Sqaure

Milk, Water and Fire … Girls Imitating Women

Some Nickelodeon era motion picture houses in Montreal..

With the movie The Artist coming out to rave reviews (it’s a silent film,  a French romance directed by Michel Hazanvicius and starring Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo and some well known US actors) there’s likely to be renewed interest in the Silent Film Era.

I’ve written a great deal about nickelodeons in Montreal on this blog, as I wrote Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10. pdf.pdf

But you know, in my story Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927, motion pictures figure more strongly.

In 1927, there was a fire in a Ste. Catherine E cinema (the Laurier Palace where 70 children died). My grandfather as Director of Services was somewhat implicated.

Because of that fire Montreal became the only jurisdiction in North America not to allow children in cinemas, until 1967.

Children had been attending motion pictures, attended and unattended, since the beginning of the era. I assume many parents felt these places safer than the streets, although the moral reformers did not.

From what I have read, in the Prohibition Era, children under 20 made up the largest proportion of movie patrons. And although there was a law against under 17′s watching unattended, plenty did.

Mostly boys as is it happens, and it is mostly boys who died in the Ste Catherine Street E Laurier Palace Theatre Fire in January 1927.

In Quebec, drive-ins were also banned, so I had to wait for our summer vacation in Maine to see a drive in movie.

Oddly, I also thought it was children under ten who couldn’t attend movies in Quebec.. and I was sort of right. There were special viewings for children over 10, family viewings. I vividly recall watching the MUSIC MAN in a church basement, ST. Malachy’s church on Clanranald. Probably around 1964, when I was 10.

I remember, because it was a HUGE EVENT, I guess.  I recall sitting on the cold concrete floor watching.

Anyway, there were killer fires in theatres in the US too (These places were firetraps in general) but no such laws were enacted.

This must have truly hurt the revenues of the theatre owners in Quebec.

(My late mother in law, born 1917, said it was common for girls to put on makeup to look older to go to the movie houses. They also had to behave older. She says she went to a movie in Ontario and was shocked at the bad behavior of the kids, yelling, eating popcorn. Hmm. This seems to be a case of the law of unintended consequences.  The social reformers didn’t want young people, especially women, being corrupted – so they pretended to be older…which made them even more attractive to men. There was no ‘teenager’ in those days.. I recently found a picture of her, dated 1929, and she was 12 but did indeed look grown up. Hey, as I write this my husband turns to Turner Classic Movies and Guess what movie is starting: The Music Man! It’s  a sign Hey, it looks like it takes place in the nickelodeon era.. Another sign “We got trouble right here in River City.” My gosh, how ironic! I wonder if any adults in that church basement say the irony in that song…

My grandfather’s brother, as it happens, was the VP of American Theatre Amusements…(Can’t recall exact name of company.) That company often fought in court with the Provincial Government over the Lord’s Day Act, even before 1927.

Conventional Theatres that showed plays with live actors had to close on Sunday, Movie Houses were exempt.

Anyway, my grandfather is accused by someone testifying in the US at Senate Prohibition Era hearings, of pulling the strings of the police chief, and of allowing theatres to stay open, even ones that let in children unattended. This is a few months before the fire.

Cops were given free tickets for their children to aid in this. I read that one Constable lost three children in the fire and that underscores the point.

Who went to movie houses. The kids of the middle class.

I will have Jules Crepeau and Thomas Wells discuss this in my play Milk and Water… Thomas Wells will say his older sons seldom went to movie houses as they were too busy with their school teams. They attended wealthy Lower Canada College.

And his younger children have been a few times, but always with their nanny.

I heard a Brit reminisce about early movie houses on BBC Radio Four. It seems that in many cases, kids were the only ones who could read, so their parents and grandparents wanted them there with them.

As is well know, 1927 saw the first Talkie, the Jazz Singer.

Today, Quebec has very lax laws. I don’t know if kids go alone..well, they do but in groups at the Cineplex.

I saw the movie Paul last year and I was astounded, because it was full of swearing, and a bunch of children sat in front of me and my husband.

Anyway, the Artist may have a trajectory similar to the King’s Speech. It starts out sort of Art House and builds to great popularity. Yesterday, as it happens, I watched this 1988 movie THE WOMAN HE LOVED, with Jane Seymour and Anthony Andrews about David, Edward VIII. On YouTube.

It was a very sympathetic view of the couple, no S and M, no Nazis. No George VI  at all. How could it not be a kind portrayal with those particular actors? Anthony Andrews played Baldwin in the King’s Speech.

Well, the King’s Speech made Prince David look like a Sadist, or at least a mean older brother.

I learned that he only met Wallace Simpson after 1928. So great. David, Edward VIII figures large in my story Milk and Water. It is because of him that my grandfather and my husband’s grandfather meet to discuss life, business, politics and ethics. He’s visiting Montreal, at the end of a long official visit. He is on his own time and I read he liked to party with Mayor Mederic Martin.

White Wedding Dresses?

Here’s the ‘iconic’ pic from my website TIGHSOLAS, www.tighsolas.ca that contains the Nicholson family letters from the 1910 era. It is a detail of a ‘tea party’ on the grass in front of their comfortable brick-encased Queen Anne style home in Richmond, Quebec.
I like the picture because it is pretty, but it really does embody the hopes and dreams of the middle class in Canada in 1910.

I watched the show Sunday Morning, yesterday, taped and the comedic editorialist (I don’t know her name) talked about her upcoming marriage and the high cost of weddings and wedding gowns. She setttled on a off white number, floor model.

She mentioned that white wedding dresses didn’t originally signify purity; that Queen Victoria got married in white to promote the lace industry in her country

I suspect white came to signify purity around 1910, as we had the Purity Movement, which I have written about extensively on this blog.

The comedienne also mentioned that white was worn by some women because white cloth was more expensive, and hard to wear (stains) and hard to wash, hence wearing it was a sign of prosperity. Bingo!

That’s what these white dresses meant to the Nicholson Women, who did their own clothes washing most of the time, despite aspring to a genteen lifestyle. In 1911, it takes Flora Nicholson, 19, TWO days to wash and iron her white dresses on a weekend she returns from Macdonald Teaching College.

So this all underscores the points I want to make with my ebook Threshold Girl, about Flora at School in 1911/12 and based on the Nicholson letters.

Threshold Girl is about a lot of things pertaining to Laurier Era History, but it’s mostly about women and clothes and what these clothes mean to them and what their clothes lust means to other less fortunate working women in the textile trade.

http://www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

The picture above is deceptive. It is of Marion Nicholson, my husband’s grandmother, who went on to lead the Teachers’ Union in Montreal. She was no slacker: she had tonnes of energy and directed it in many useful ways. I will write about her later, in another book, which will deal with the Jewish question in Montreal schools.. Edith Nicholson, the subject of my next novellette was more of a dreamer, although she could could be a woman of action, if necessary. I’m turning her into an opium addict for in my next book, The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

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

Yes, Old Aunt Edie was zonked a lot of the time

Nadruco products. national drug company of Canada. I think this stuff was ‘over the counter’

Anyway, I am reaching a point in Edith’s Story, the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf where Edith gets zonked on prescription medicine, given to her so she can cope with the death of her boyfriend, beau, sort of fiance.

Am I overdramatizing?  I wondered, so I looked deeper into what she might have been getting in her nerve and heart tonics, let alone the drugs for La Grippe (FlU?) and those colds. Cough medicines, even for kids, contained these products.

Codeine, heroine, cocaine, cannabis, and alcohol, Yep -the whole shooting match.

These non-drinking temperance types were blottoed  a good part of the time. So,  if I have her getting an extra strong medicine from Dr. Villard upon the death of her beau, it probably happened. I mean, he gave her a heart and nerve tonic a few months before when the same man merely moved away to work in another town. They actually believed (from what I read in the letters) that events caused ‘heart troubles.’… They gave her heart medicine, which probably contained a good dose of heroine or even morphine.

And if she takes ‘a double dose’ of this whatver on her Saturday Afternoon off, the day of the King’s Death, well, I think it isn’t unfair at all.

In 191o, people (especially women who were always being given things for their delicate constitutions)  were going around zonked. And just like now, it was the middle class taking the drugs, because they could afford them. Not the poor.

Oh and I found the entry for Dr. Henry Watters, class of 05 Boston Medical School. He was a gyno. He must have been a nice one as he appeared to have an empathy with women. (And I’m guessing, most were HORRIBLE).. His mom Christie, was always ailing.

There’s a William H. Watters listed, class of 00.. President of a lot of societies. Likely a close relation..

Also in the 1911/12 letters many many deaths were mentioned. So many that Margaret’s sister remarked upon it. Weird. Some kind of epidemic? And of course, they only mentioned deaths in the Anglo community as the French Community appeared of no interest to them.

Edith in the Sky with Diamonds

Yesterday I read that the Province of Alberta has four times the amount of prescriptions drug abuse as Quebec. They don’t know why.

I can hazard a guess…:)

When I was in my 20′s I had a close friend who was hooked on some prescription pain killer. She had an important job and few noticed she was in la la land most of the time.

Can’t recall which drug it was. A powerful one. She had multiple prescriptions and one day she overdosed and I had to bring her to emergency where they let her writhe in pain on her gurney for hours.

I had an inkling they were doing this on purpose, but maybe not. I vividly recall that day I spent in ER because I wasn’t sick, so I got to watch all the human drama unfolding around, and that day ER I recall was like an episode of ER the TV show, I tell you.

A man died and his two kids (youths) were reacting in opposite ways:the daughter wailing and the son with his head in a textbook.

I heard a doctor tell another that the same man had presented the day before with a paralyzed finger and they had sent him home… and then he presented again…. anyway, it sounded like the doctor was describing how his case had been mismanaged, like Mrs. Haufnagel on St. Elsewhere.

Anyway, I took a Tylenol blue pill yesterday, just one, to see if it helped my blocked ears, which are acting up. I’m using a homeopathic remedy.. I don’t like taking drugs of any kind. (Except the one that pours from a bottle and comes from grapes.)

I am clearly a rarity today. And the modern doctor loves to give pills. (A recent Salon.com article claimed that in the old days doctors did everything they could not to give a pill, now they do the opposite. No time. Easier. They really are “pill pushers.”)

When my husband goes for a checkup, his doctor now always offers him Viagra, just out of the blue. My husband is totally healthy, but he is asked if he wants this ‘recreational’ drug, so the doctor must ask all the older guys. (Last time I told my husband to say that he didn’t need Viagra, but he could sure use Angelina Jolie. Viagra is not an aphrodesiac, as far as I know, but it is treated as one. Ps. and the ads say that 40 percent of men over a certain age have this condition on occasion. Then it isn’t a condition, is it? It’s normal.

The same goes for Prozac. If a huge proportion of the population is depressed (and the prescribing statistics for these anti-depression drugs seem to suggest it is.. One fifth of the population of Glasgow is on some sort of anti-depressant apparently) then depression is normal – especially in Scots.. So these drugs are merely mood enhancers. The same Salon article says that depression in now something to be ‘managed’ and not be ‘cured’. Managing makes more money than curing, you see. Almost 9 percent of Americans are on the drugs,and the figure is ever rising, but not African Americans, oddly, who have something to be sad about if the recent NYT article, saying that MLK is weeping in his grave is true.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/martin-luther-king-jr-would-want-a-revolution-not-a-memorial.htm

(But managing your mood with marijuana is bad, very bad. Well, were it legal, it couldn’t make money for Big Pharma, so better that it make money for Big Crime, and provide an excuse to abritrarily incarcerate certain racial groups. That’s the logic anyway.)

They don’t talk about this on the News, because were it not for advertising from Big Pharma, the mainstream media would be dead as nail in door. An awful lot has changed since they allowed Pharmaceutical Companies to sell directly to civilians and not just to doctors. And the way the announcers race through the list of possible side effects at the end of these drug ads, makes it sound funny, like a joke. Indeed, the side effect of Viagra have reached iconic joke status in TV sitcoms and movies.

The prescription drugs Alberta’s citizens are abusing are opiods. Probably akin to the drugs found in ‘tonics’ in 1900.

I am writing Edith’s Story, the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

 

and I have her stoned on some tonic as she goes to the Art Show.

I know for a fact her principal, who was also medical doctor, gave her tonics for ‘heart’ conditions. So he probably really dosed her here after the death of her fiance. And there were always those medicines for La Grippe.

So has it really changed that much? People in those days, women mostly, were going out stoned too. (It’s only coincidental that she was a Canadian Scot.) They were just outlawing opiates in every day products.. In the US, especially, which is why the Patent Medicine People all moved to Brockville, Ontario.

I read an ad for a baby medicine that proudly claimed Contains no Opiates. Imagine.

Of course they famously sedated housewives in the 50′s with Valium.

Mary Riter Hamilton – Copycat?

The First Gift, by Mary Riter Hamilton.

This is the other Riter Hamilton painting Edith Nicholson will see in the Montreal Art Association Salon. Apparently, this woman is opening the first gift from her fiance and she is suddenly struck by the meaningfulness of it all. The gift is of slender  irises, in cool purple, which are supposed to be just like the ‘virginal’ girl.

This is how it was described in a newspaper report. Now,in my story “Edith’s Story” the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf  Edith either will read this at the museum in a paper brochure  or hear a living guide say it as he gives a tour. I almost wrote  ” as SHE gives a tour.” Highly unlikely, unless it is a society woman patron.  This sighting of this painting is of great significance, as a few days before Edith’s great love was killed in a fire. All true!!

So, seeing this painting and then the Maternity one will set her off on some kind of delirium. She has also taken too much nerve tonic, anyway, it being her afternoon off.

Well, ‘gift giving’  was codified in 1910 courtship.  I read in the etiquette columns and books of the 1910 era that a woman NEVER accepts a give from a man, however small, although she can give a small one. Or is it the other way around? (Again, it’s the prostitution thing, rearing its ugly head.)

This painting reminds me of Whistlers Lady with a Fan. Or Lady in White.. The one with Japanese tones.  A favorite of mine. I think I will look it up. (Just a minute…nah, just the dress, although if the colours are vivid in the still life beside her, maybe it does look like it. When was it done.. (Just a minute) Well, it’s called Symphony in White 2 and it was painted in 18 64, so likely Riter saw that painting in Europe somewhere. (Well, I just entered the two names into Google and it appears Riter Hamilton trained at an Academie (Vittie) that rivaled a certain Academie Carmen that Whistler supported. It was in Montparnasse. All things are connected!!

Marion Nicholson obviously gave a Christmas gift to Mr. Blair in 1912. He writes about it in a letter, then says that his gift (a nice one) must have got lost in the mail. A lie? Well, he had just extricated himself from a relationship where the girl obviously felt they had an understanding. So it was all very tricky for men and for women.

Alas, Marion wasn’t one to follow the rules of the day anyway.

Be Prepared to be Shocked, or not.

Maternity, by Canadian Painter Mary Riter Hamilton. This painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1911, according to one era source. Unlike Manet’s Dejeuner sur L’Herbe a few years before, it did not shock, apparently.

And it did not shock either when exhibited in Canada in 1912. Indeed, a newspaper account I have of a Riter Hamilton exposition says she avoids the freakish, sensuous and sensational.. painting ordinary subjects.

Did the reporter not find this painting sensuous?

According to another newspaper account, this painting is in soft tones and impressionist in style. This image is taken off a Western Canada Magazine article from 1912.

This painter, Riter Hamilton, is not considered important today. She’s no Emily Carr, who also went to France in 1910.

You know, the other day I watched the Terminator with my husband and, sure, I can see it is a good movie, but it’s just so violent. It amazes me, actually. And then, you read a story in the newspaper about someone, somewhere, who has objected to watching a woman breastfeed in public. And you have to wonder about our twisted culture.

I’m a little surprised to notice that in 1911, when women covered every inch of their bodies in public, even their heads, except perhaps in the evening, when neck and shoulders were sometimes bared, that this painting was considered mundane, something suitable for unmarried young women to view in public, because the art gallery, along with the department store and church, were public spaces deemed appropriate for women. There were not many such places.

Riter Hamilton went on to paint pictures from the trenches in WWI.. now that’s freakish violence for you and it is for these paintings that she is best known.

In my novel Edith’s Story, the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

Edith Nicholson will see this painting hanging in the gallery off Phillip’s Square and it will have a certain overwhelming effect on her. Because she will see it shortly after her boyfriend dies in a fire. And because she will find it sensuous.

I will have to fudge the dates. From what I can figure, this painting only came to Montreal in 1912, February 6… I will have it exhibited in 1910… May. Alas, literary license.

I will have Edith wander into this exhibit to see F.S.Coburn, the Canadian artist from Richmond (Melbourne) who was an alumnus of St. Francis College.  He has a nice painting “To the Village” of a white horse pulling a red sled in the snow that was exhibited in 1910 in Montreal. I see it online, it was recently auctioned, although the date given is 1941. And it is not exactly as described in a 1910 report… Hmm. But if it’s a slightly different painting, why give it the same name. Perhaps the original was destroyed.