The view of the St Jean Baptiste parade celebration in 1929, from my grandparent’s house at 72 Sherbrooke West, Montreal. (I know because someone actually wrote it on the back of this picture.)
Nice hats in 1929!
Well, as I write Milk and Water, , my play about Montreal in 1927, using my grandfather, Jules Crepeau and my husband’s grandfather, Thomas Wells, as characters, I keep doing more research.
I’ve reached the part on my first draft where I have to UNDERSTAND this Montreal Water and Power deal, and then figure out how much Thomas and Jules know.
Well, I assume Jules knew everything, the TRUTH, inside-out but, thank goodness, he doesn’t have to tell Thomas anything in the play, or I’d be in trouble.
Because the truth will never be known, only guessed at.
The Executive Council of the City of Montreal decided to purchase Montreal Water and Power post haste in February 1927, just a day after a majority share had been bought out by industrialist Lorne Webster.
They held an unofficial council meeting (breaking protocol with respect to the morning publication of the agenda of said meeting) and the aldermen present voted unanimously to buy the company – after dallying for a dozen years.
My grandfather wasn’t present at said session.
The Montreal Star (Hugh Graham) criticized the purchase, insinuating that some bribery must have gone down. An aldermen sued for slander (on behalf of all city aldermen) and he won in court.
The presiding judge said, in his June 1927 decision, that newspapers were supposed to attack the action, not the person.
But still the Star continued pressing on this issue, until they got satisfaction when Mayor Mederic Martin lost his job in 1928. The head of the Exec Committee, one M. Brodeur, had died in November 1927, while seated beside Mayor Martin in a limo in New York.
Unknown quantity, Camillien Houde was elected Mayor, and in two years my grandfather was forced to resign over this same Water and Power purchase, and he hadn’t even attended the unofficial meeting.
Anyway, as I read one of the articles in the Gazette on this ‘scandal’ – right beside it is an account of an other inquiry, into the Laurier Palace fire, an issue that personally involved my grandfather.
A Judge Lacroix is giving testimony, which sounds very familiar and very Presbyterian for a Catholic:
(I’m guessing this is translated.) “As a result of watching lurid tales of robbery and crime, small boys went out and emulated the doings of their favorite movie villain, while girls developed elaborate tastes by setting up the toilettes of the heroines of their standard. The prolonged love scenes, with their obscene open-mouthed kisses, “that are not human kisses. Not the kisses that French-Canadians give” do untold harm to the persons of both sexes who view them. For as a result of the artificial stimulation, they commit gross immoralities, the tragic result of which form a large proportion of the juvenile court cases.”
Well, the presiding Judge, Juge Boyer, comes out with his decision in late August, two days before my Milk and Water Play is set, and says that movies are not immoral as such, but recommends that children under 16 be banned from attending motion picture shows in future, even in the company of an adult
It’s a safety issue, he says. It was kids who got crushed in the Laurier Palace Fire, therefore kids are in danger in movie theatres, period.
Of course, the talkies were about to come in and I suspect this was the real reason for banning kids from movie theatres: it was a kind of compromise to please the clergy (both Protestant and Catholic) and the government. Protestants (in Canada and the US) had pushed for a ban like this since the Nickelodeon era, but as only immigrants went to ‘nickels’ and as they were all in the City, the Catholic Church didn’t seem to care that much. But by 1921, there were as many Quebeckers living in the city as in the country. And by 1927 motion picture houses were being built in towns.
The judge said he consulted with parents of the working class during the Inquiry, and although some parents may have been freaked by the awful tragedy (well, what mother wouldn’t be) working class parents, as a rule, certainly didn’t think movies were terrible. Movies were the one leisure activity they could afford and many families went to the pictures together, parents and kids!
And some children, boys mostly, went in peer groups or alone. I mean, working class mothers weren’t stupid. They couldn’t watch their kids’ every move; they didn’t have nannies; so the movie house was a great place to ‘park them’ and the kids, especially as the boys really enjoyed the flicks.
The ‘teenager’ was being invented at the time, in the US and English Canada, thanks to ‘high schools.’ Quebec was a bit behind the times, with respect to ‘higher education.’ Even in the English Quebec, the ‘teenager’ was not a concept yet. Perhaps this ban contributed. My mother- in -law, born 1917, says that she had to dress up like a grown woman, hair make-up, to be able to sneak into movies underage, at 12 or 13.
The idea that cops and robbers films were a bad influence on boys, I think has been sufficiently debunked over the years. However, the fact that Hollywood images make girls want ‘things’ isn’t a fallacy (mixed metaphor) it’s as true as can be. But only in Quebec did they think this a bad and dangerous thing. (Remember, many men believed one reason young girls entered the sex trade was for a love of luxury.)
Anyway, this is all in my play, Milk and Water. Just got to make the dialogue Ebb and Flow. There’s an ebb and flow of characters in the play, as people come and go from the Dance Hall as Thomas and Jules have this long talk about politics and business and the ethics of selling water in 1927 Montreal, when that City was a place to reckon with.
PS. I read in a thesis on Parks in Montreal that in 1927 a group of teenagers were brought into the magistrate’s office for having sex in public and they blamed it on the outdoor movie they just saw.
