Irony, Irony, Irony

Parc Jules-Crepeau in Ahunsic, off l’Acadie, near Henri Bourrassa.

It’s a tiny little park, the one the City of Montreal named after Jules-Crepeau. The street too is named Jules-Crepeau.

City streets are known for what exists on them,  not for whom they are named.

It’s ironic. Someone has posted a complaint on the Internet, saying that this area of town has fewer green spaces than the rest of Montreal.

But who uses parks anymore, except to walk dogs?

It’s doubly ironic. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, the subject of the play I am writing, Milk and Water, was often on Committees that wanted more parks and playgrounds in the City.

In 1927, the date of my play, I notice, he was elected campaign chairman for the year’s Clean UP Week (coming up in May) when all citizens were asked to get up, get out and clean up. Mayor Mederic Martin accepted the position of Honorary Chairman.

This was an initiative of the City Improvement League.

Triple Irony. A certain doctor, Atherton, talked at the Press Conference/Launch about how this year it was especially important that the city’s bylaws  be enforced, what with the Laurier Theatre Fire and the Typhoid Epidemic. (At that point they didn’t know that the epidemic was caused by milk from a farm somewhere.) Atherton says that the  police should be instructed to carry out their duties with respect to the bylaws.

My grandfather was accused by the Coderre Commission in 1925 of hampering police in their duties, with respect to movie theatres. And he has just given testimony to the inquiry into the Laurier Fire.

Of course, Jules Crepeau was just the ‘Go-Between’ in the City. I could call my play just that, except L. P. Hartley got there first.

Dr. Boucher of the Health Department had something to say, deeply relevant to my play. “Measures of personal cleanliness should not be neglected. They are of daily necessity, especially the washing of hands. All young babies should be brought to clinics established for them. Mothers should seek there the teaching necessary for the good observance of health rules when it comes to nursing babies.”

Milk and Water deals with the delivering of clean water to Montreal homes. Once the City had done this (and it wasn’t a given throughout the century that homes had the right to clean water)then it was up to the individual to stay clean.

This typhoid epidemic was annoying, in that it put the blame back on the City.

One other initiative of the City Improvement League was school gardens. GEEESH. School gardens initiatives have been promoted since the beginning of the century,  starting with the Macdonald-Robertson movement. But they never get a foothold. Why?

I suspect that it’s a touchy feely program, no one can object to, so it is brought up again and again, but it either isn’t feasible, or it’s counter-culture…as in against the flow of industrialization.. or the Powers that Be really don’t like the idea…

Today, actually, while looking up stuff on archive.org, I unearthed a 1910 booklet about the Macdonald-Robertson Movement called Children of the Land. It was aimed at Americans. The M-R movement was about training children for rural occupations, moving them back to the country from the city. (Against the flow, you see.)

A very misguided notion of course. But the movement did promote the agricultural sciences. So now we have mega-farms with few employees providing food for the people of the cities.

In 1927, a US Department of Health group examined the typhoid epidemic, and traced it to one milk company. 1,200 to 1,500 farms supplied milk to this company, their report published in JAMA said, so it was hard for the scientists to trace the exact source of typhoid.

This fact helps support the plot of Milk and Water. The Americans were so concerned with this epidemic, they sent up their own people.  This epidemic didn’t help tourism, or exports. So my grandfather has a right to be mad at Thomas Wells, President of Laurentian Spring Water, who has spent 3 decades trashing the city tap water, so to speak, in his advertisements.

Macdonald of course was the tobacco tycoon so this health movement was funded on ‘iffy’ money. Or money derived from promotion of a  ’vice’ that causes illness and death. (And let’s not talk of the slavery, etc, involved in the growing of the plant.) So it goes.

Denmark, and Food Supply.

Near Borup, Denmark

This week, I visited my son, who works in a high end resto in Ottawa. He’s interested in food, of course, and has been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He’s about to get a philosphy degree, so he’d better he interested in food! He told me about the book (which he will lend to me when finished) and mentioned that the author suggested that Denmark was the model for food production we should be following. (Or something to that effect.) Well, it is well-known that the Scandinavian countries lead the way in the world when it comes to sustainable, healthy food production,

Well, I joked to my son, now 23,”You sure know about Denmark and the grocery stores.”

My brother has lived in Denmark for 30 years, in Roskilde (on the fjord) Nascov and near Borup, on a collective farm of some kind, and my son has visited there.

He went for a summer once, when he was a teen, and like most North American boys of a certain tweenage, he was a little chubby from too many chips and video games.

He game back much thinner, despite the fact he said he did little at my brother’s home in Nascov back then but play video games.

You see, no junk food!

I visited Denmark for a few weeks in 2006 with my other son, who had just become a vegetarian – after seeing a film on slaughter houses in CEGEP.

I am a foodie myself and I take an interest in any grocery stores I find in foreign countries. In Denmark, in 2006, I found it very hard to cook vegetarian for my son. I also found it difficult to find ‘convenience foods’. I recall I wanted sliced chicken and what the stores had was expensive and came in teeny tiny amounts. Lots of pickled fishes though.However, you could buy booze anywhere, even in shoe stores. At least I think I saw some booze for sale in a show store The fish aren’t the only thing pickled in Denmark.

Anyway, we ate great, because people still know how to cook in Denmark, or at least my brother’s relations can cook, as can my brother, although he’s usually pickled when he cooks. They still have to know how to cook from scratch.

Which is all the more ironic, as I downloaded J.W. Robertson’s 1908 report to Parliament about The Macdonald-Donaldson movement, in which he says that his inspiration for the movement came from visiting Denmark at the beginning of his career as a civil servant!

“Shortly after I had the honor of being appointed a public servant, to help in the forward movement for agriculture and education in Canada, some twenty one years ago, I paid a brief visit to Denmark. I saw and learned very much there from which I tried to bring back the lessons to the Province of Quebec.”

Now, my sister in law is a retired nurse, but she grew up a farmer’s daughter, I guess in the 40′s and 50′s, and as she descibes it, her life was very peasant-like. So I dunno.

“The foreward movement for agriculture and education.” That phrase, I guess, summarizes the Catch-22 or whatever about the Movement. It was a ‘forward movement’ that waxed nostalgic for a kinder, gentler past that had never really existed. In 1910, people were ‘herding to the cities’, a bad thing, Robertson believed. The solution, in his mind, was to educate the farmer. But the clock can’t be turned back, and all his movement did, from what I see, is provide the science for the industrialization of the food supply, that fed the ever increasing urban population.

For Our Safety…

Marion’s Children 1912. Well, some of these children very likely were children in the catchment area of her school. This picture is taken from a 1912 brochure for a charity camp at Mont Chapleau in the Laurentians for deprived children of the city and their moms. No boys over 8.

Boys in this age group were no doubt working in the summer, anyway, as they did during the school year. 1912 saw a record tide of immigration, more immigrants came to Canada that year in relation to the population than ever before and ever since. 475,000 people. 400,000 came in 1913. Most came to Montreal to work in the city, others went out West.

Western Canada was begging for families with strong boys to farm, but the Canadian establishment preferred American immigrants over those other people, like Eastern Europeans.

Marion, and later Flo, were trained as teachers because teachers were sorely in need of them in the city. Marion taught in Little Burgundy and Flo in Griffintown. Poor areas.

I found a document online The Educational Record of the Province of Quebec for 1914, in which both Flora and Edith are named as teachers attending teacher’s convention. More interesting, it compares the state of teaching in 1903 to 1913. www.tighsolas.ca/page806.html. This is basically the story of Tighsolas (or Flo in the City, my novel based on Tighsolas)in statistical form.

Here’s a bit from a speech, given in the Canadian House of Commons in 1907.

House of Commons Committee Room 34
Ottawa, Wednesday, April 3, 1907
Robertson speech about Movement for Rural Education.

“Some of the problems we Canadians have to face and solve for ourselves are common to all self-governing nations, but others of them are peculiar to us. For instance, there are special problems due to our youth; to our size; to the character, vastness and potential values of our undeveloped resources; and to the large amount of foreign blood pouring into our citizenship. The large inflow of foreigners who come to mix with our people adds difficulties to the ordinary problems of agriculture and education. These people bring in not merely different methods of doing things but different social standards and ideals. The traditions they have inherited, the conditions under which they have been brought up, their outlook on life, these are all different from ours. For our safety and their welfare it is necessary that these people should be educated, so led and so guided by competent leaders that they will be inclined to live on the land and not to herd to the cities; that they will be able to live on the land with profit and contentment to themselves and thus join our own people in making our civilization progressive and wholesome for the whole of us.

CIHM Document