The More Things Change..

Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services.

Today, I saw that Montreal’s Police Force was coming under fire for being soft on organized crime.  It came up on my Google News as it is set for “Quebec” (automatically I guess) but it’s a Vancouver Sun article reprint of a Postmedia article by Henry Aubin. According to Aubin Montreal has a huge police force that is very ineffective, against all crime.

Hmm. That’s what they said in 1927 with the Coderre Report. It’s all in my play MIlk and Water  -about Montreal in the Jazz Age, where I have my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services have a talk with my husband’s grandfather, Thomas Wells, Westmount Businessman.

Anyway, another article in the same box is from the Montreal Gazette: Best Treated Minority? Think Again. Apparently, an economic think tank has come out with figures showing that Angl0-Quebeckers are underfunded. Surprise! I have written before how virtually all projects focusing on Anglo Arts are funded by ONE government agency, Heritage Canada that also funds French outside of Quebec and since we’re ‘a minority within a minority’ we get short shrift. I’ve given up on ever getting any funding for my projects, which don’t fit the bill anyway. They are big into funding projects to do with the Military these days.  It’s all a scam, let’s face it. It’s all about Control.

But this article, by Don MacPherson discusses a report that compared Provincial funding across Canada for minorities and apparently, Quebec came out dead last for funding for minority language by far.

How is this a surprise, tho?

It’s sad that Anglo schools are poorly funded though. As I have written elsewhere, in the 1960′s the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal was the best performing in North America.

And so many of these students went on to brilliant careers, mostly in Ontario.

I was thinking of this last night. Sometimes I play this game, where I try to invoke a ‘new’ childhood memory… It seldom works.. But last night I remembered my grade six play. I won the lead, the Princess.  I recalled going to the audition, wearing this old purple sweater I had.  We wore tunics in those days, uniforms, but there were still opportunities to show off nice clothes. I had none. (My mother had grown up rich as my play Milk and Water shows, and didn’t know how  to manage a family on a middle class budget.

Anyway, I went to the audition after school and the director was not a school teacher, but some ‘older’ woman who looked like Agnes Moorehead – who we knew as Samatha’s mother on Bewitched. Everyone made fun of that, and then they made fun of my sweater (can’t recall the context, I think because it was “royal” purple and our play as about Royalty. It had a Prince Charming. A spinning wheel. I guess it was Cinderella/Rapunzel.

So, as I said, I won the lead, perhaps because of my sad sweater (maybe Agnes Moorehead was sorry for me)… Then again, at the performance, (I recall being scared to death and HATING being on stage), my Dad said I was the only one who articulated properly.

Anyway, Prince Charming was a guy called Lorne Abugov and he refused to kiss me, (as 11 years olds tend to do) which was traumatizing enough. I think (although not 100 percent sure) that Lorne’s brother is Jeff, a man who went on to write for Hollywood, and on top shows. Cheers the Golden Girls, producer Roseanne and now he’s producer of Two and a Half Men.

Well,  maybe not a typical career of a former ango-Montrealer, but an example.

 

As it happens, I’m getting to work on Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about two teachers in 1910, (Edith and Marion Nicholson) the follow up to Threshold Girl and I am contemplating that angle, wondering exactly how classrooms ran in those days. Probably not unlike the way they ran in my day. Marion left behind a diary during her first year of teaching, but it’s all about her boyfriends and her activities at the skating rink. No shop talk. (Well, I guess diaries for teachers are considered an invasion of privacy. Tell that to What’s his name, Gervais Gervase Phinn, the guy who writes his experiences about North Yorkshire schools.) Or maybe they don’t have time to keep work diaries. Marion didn’t have time with her 50 ‘very bad’ students. Or maybe teachers, as a rule, are ‘action=oriented’ not introspective. Marion was totally action-oriented. That’s why she became a union leader during the War.)

I know a diary exists at Harvard, of a more serious girl who did no dating….

Apparently teachers who were interested in getting boyfriends (the majority) didn’t mention that they were teachers. A teacher was not a profession that attracted the boys. So it goes. Marion was an exception and this makes Edith jealous (in my story).

Strike! 1912

1910 Striking Garment Workers in NY. Library of Congress stamp.

Hmm.

I have a new IMPORTANT scene for my Flo in the City novel.

It takes place on Saturday, June 20th, 1912. Marion Nicholson is walking along Prince Arthur, with Mrs. Cleveland and as they turn the corner, they are met by policeman on horseback who is leading a parade of striking garment workers, men at the front, some with bullhorns, some carrying sleeping toddlers, and some women walking behind, all looking a bit tired but some yelling out, No More Sweatshops. No More Piecework. (No, I should have the women carrying the toddlers, as men didn’t do that in those days.)

Marion will have an idea about the reasons for this strike, because some of her pupils at Royal Arthur School in South Central Montreal will have parents in the garment trade.

The Montreal Gazette of June 25, decribes the route these strikers took, in the hot summer of 1912. Craig to St. Laurent, a long,long way to march in hot weather, so many marchers dropped out.

The women were described as ‘well-dressed, some even pretty.”

The men’s looks were not described. What a surprise!

Anyway, I have to figure out, for my book, what Future Union Leader Marion Nicholson might have felt on this occasion.

These female marchers would have been Jewish.

As it happens, earlier in 1912, in February, 35 male Eaton’s garment workers in Toronto went on strike. They were protesting against having to do women’s work, lining coats. Mr. Eaton threw them out on the street, so many other Eaton’s factory workers, in Toronto and Montreal went on strike in solidarity.

Ruth. A. Frager writes about it in an article for Canadian Woman Studies. She says this is a rare occasion where the interest of men and women workers came together.

Men didn’t want the lower prestige (and possible lower wage) lining work and women didn’t want to lose their jobs.

It was framed in the press as a kind of Jewish solidarity. And that was the problem. Non-Jewish workers failed to support the strike, so it failed.

A Mrs. Chown, suffragist leader in Toronto, tried to get the various women’s groups to support the strikers, to no avail. They were not sympathetic, in large part because these society do-gooders were, essentially, ahh, zenophobic. They couldn’t even be persuaded when told of how certain young, pretty female workers were forced to ‘go out’ with the bosses. THE SOCIAL EVIL. Oh my.

This is most interesting with respect to Flo in the City.

And, as it happens, on June 6, 2012, the Presbyterians held their annual Congress in Edmonton.

“We cannot close our eyes to an increasing foreign element,” they said, in their Annual Sermon.

The sermon also warned against the social evil as per usual (now an industry, they claimed) and the evils of drink (tied to the social evil) and the opium trade (tied to the social evil) and the danger of looming warfare among nations (true enough)and the danger of “the Industrial War” Class Warfare. Strikes.

“In the last twenty years, there have been 1,0o0 strikes a year on this continent. There is another war cloud, even more alarming, the industrial war, the war against the classes, becoming more and more acute year by year. In the past, this tension was not felt because there was a wide field for individual enterprise. In Canada, there is still an expanding frontier in which there is scope for individual energy. But even in Canada doors of opportunity are closing, natural resources are being exploited and the day for free and fair competition is largely past. Hence, capital and labour are highly organized and have locked horns and tested strength and endurance in many a struggle of varying lengths and intensity.”

They also warned about the dangers of wealth accumulating in the hands of a few. Hmm. (There’s been a lot of press lately about the salary of the top 100 Canadian CEO’s, whose salaries proved recession-proof and who, on average, make the average Canadian worker’s salary by noon, January 3.)

So, my issue, how is this event going to impress itself on my Marion? I know she was in Montreal, she returned to Tighsolas in the first week of July, Thorburn Cleveland in tow.

(I found an account of this Thorburn’s marriage in 1921, to a niece of Sir Montague Allen. Very ritzy. He was a dentist. The Cleveland’s were well connnected, I guess. They were an old Richmond family.)

Now, no article I’ve pulled up about the 1912 strike in the Gazette discussed the issues around the women workers (who were the majority). I will have to have someone (perhaps a mother of a student) tell Marion about how the system works, how PATRIARCHAL factory work was, how it mimicked family structures of male dominance and protection, how the male workers (often older) treated the female workers (usually younger) like baby sisters.

Because that is what Marion would have found distasteful.

In 1912, she has just been turned down for ‘higher work” at her school, teaching the 7th form. “They have hired a boy out of Macdonald and given him 800. to start. It makes me sick,”she wrote in a letter home.

The teaching arena was also patriarchal, with the Principal (often an inexperinced inept) lording it over his female workers, who were in the vast, vast majority.

This is a VERY INTERESTING and relevant bit about the boycott of Eaton’s from the Frager article which you can view in its entirety on the York University Website.