Fire and Water and Milk.

My grandfather’s letter of resignation to the City Council, dated September 23, 1930. It is stamped by the City Clerk’s office, Sept 29 and was debated in Council that very evening.

(Before Jules Crepeau, my grandfather,  was appointed Director of Services in 1920, he was the Assistant City Clerk. I thought that ‘ a little job ‘ but it wasn’t. EVERYTHING pertaining to City Business went through that office and my grandfather had a memory like a steel trap.)

Anyway, I have transcribed part of the long debate over my grandfather’s resignation, that has it all, anger, indignation, innuendo, veiled threats, humour and buffoonery, even some wit and clever repartee (a skill now extinct among politicians of all stripes and levels.)

I put it on my other blog, which mirrors this one: Flo in the City:

http://flointhecity-aworkinprogress.blogspot.com/2011/11/mayor-houde-picks-up-gloveand-loses-his.html

Hmm. The more I read this front page Gazette report, the more questions I have about the REAL reason my grandfather was fired. Indeed, the opposition keeps asking this very question. I suspect EVERYBODY knows, but no one wants to spell it out.

The given reason, that it was his job as Director of Services to STOP the purchase of Montreal Water and Power is nutty. As if it was his job to tell the elected officials what to do.

During this debate, towards the end, Houde brings up the Laurier Theatre Fire, totally out of context. Now, that was, from what I have dug out of Internet archives, a troubling issue with respect to my grandfather….That’s the infamous fire where many children were killed and the reason why I couldn’t see movies in theatres as a child in Montreal.

So much so, I am wondering whether I should change the working title of my play about Montreal in 1927, Milk and Water, to Fire and Water.

My grandfather’s brother was VP of United Theatre Amusements. He ended up falling from an office window in 1932. In 1926, My grandfather is accused of allowing theatre owners to break the rules and let in young children unattended(by controlling the Police) by a Mr. Raney testifying before a US Senate hearing on Prohibition. Raney is a former Ontario Attorney General and one of those anal anti-everything fun Presbyterians. )

(I thought my mother once told me another brother was Fire Chief, but I have found no evidence of that.)

The 1927 Typhoid epidemic was caused by milk, not water, although the US scientists brought in to investigate couldn’t pinpoint the genesis of the epidemic, which  afflicted 5,000 and killed a few hundred.

An article was published in September in the Journal of the American Medical Association. My grandfather will talk about this in the play, which takes place in early September.

The scientists gave Montreal Tap water a clean bill  of health then. My grandfather will get down on my husband’s grandfather for exploiting the situation to sell his bottled water. As he did in 1909 the date of the last big typhoid epidemic, and since.

“It was from MILK, not water, ” my grandfather will say.

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other, “my husband’s grandfather will say. (This is an inside joke, as my husband uses this expression a lot!) It’s also what most people thought.

“Then why are we here?” my husband’s grandfather will ask.

“The Prince never drinks tap water, anywhere,” will reply my grandfather.

“I’m here to get him to approve of my new ginger ale, ” says my husband’s grandfather.

Something like that.

Here’s the ironic part. I found an article from the 1927 in the Gazette which claimed that 3,000 caught typhoid (“not alot in a city of a million”) when 4,500 did, according to the JAMA report.

That May article doesn’t say where the contagion came from though, so they didn’t know then. The article says city water is tested for bacteria daily and then goes on to praise Montreal’s wonderful water works.

So, in early September, when Milk and Water takes place, because the Royal Princes are in town to decompress and have fun, it probably wasn’t widely known that the epidemic came from milk.

I can play around with this.

The article mentions that the last great typhoid epidemic was in 1909. Funny,  no one seems too concerned about city water in the Nicholson Letters. There are no warnings from Mother Margaret, and she worries about EVERYTHING. Especially about her daughters catching colds and La Grippe.

I think this speaks to another key ‘angle’ of the MILK AND WATER  story… The Presbyterians weren’t worried so much about water and stuff, as they were CLEAN in spirit and body and habits.

Disease was a French and immigrant problem. Or so it was thought.

And the French and Immigrants looked skeptically upon the HYGIENIST movement because they were aware, of some level, that clean and pure meant WHITE and Protestant. They were aware the PURITY MOVEMENT was as much about ridding the world of certain races, as about health and well-being.

Father Norman, who had typhoid in 1896, says he doesn’t trust the water up North on the railway and goes around parched all the time. Funny.

Milk and Water

The Crepeaus.Old Orchard Beach. mid 1920′s.

Terry Copp’s The Anatomy of Poverty is one of the few books out there about Montreal’s Working Class in the 1910 era.

I purchased it on Abebooks and read it as background to the Nicholson letters. I learned from Copp and other sources that in the 1910 era Montreal slums were second to none in the Western World with respect to poverty and that key indicator ‘infant mortality.’

But I later learned that infant mortality was highest among French Canadians. Jewish Montrealers for instance had a low infant mortality, despite their poverty.

They had smaller families and got their children vaccinated.

The report above, from the July 1, 1911 Montreal Gazette, shows that there exists an “anti vaccination league.” It reveals that Dr. Louis Laberge of Montreal’s Health Department would have liked to have a mandatory vaccination program (volunteer ones were in place at the public baths that had recently been opened up) but many didn’t want any such program in place.

It was a freedom to choose matter.

Well, too bad I can’t invoke the spirit my grandfather, who worked in the Health Department under Dr. Louis Laberge in the early part of the century before moving to the Greffier’s Office.

I could get the inside scoop.

A while back I clipped another bit from a 1911 newspaper claiming that Montreal’s water was so undrinkable ‘people had to buy bottled water’ (Laurentian Spring Water that belonged to my husband’s family, sold bottled water for 4 cents a gallon). The article claimed that Montreal had more cases of typhoid than any city in N. America. (Again, I wonder if this is true or a perception.) But, of course, the poor could not afford to buy water and no one thought it was important to give it out for free…

This article quotes a person: “It is better to have small healthy families than big sickly ones.” Now, it was not French Canadians who grappled with this: The Edwardians reveals that at the turn of the last century, the parents of poor industrial age families often understood that having too many children was detrimental to to them, but they weren’t equipped for family planning. These families were best off early on, when the parents were strong and fit and able to work and their families small, but as the families grew and as the parents aged, their earning power declined. When kids could go to work and contribute to the household coffers, there was a reprieve (Edwardian era youths were discouraged from marrying early for this reason) and then once the kids left to start their own families, well, it was a spiral into abject poverty for many parents and often meant an old age in the Work House, a kind of prison. According to this book, Edwardian Age children did not take their elderly parents in. They had their own problems by that time. (Was this the same in French Canadian families. Well, I don’t think we had Work Houses.)

So, you can see how raising the mandatory school age (a good thing by all accounts, especially for girls since they were the ones who left school by 12) also hurt some families, who counted on these kids (and the poor wages they earned in textile factories, for instance, for support.

Anyway, I have to get to the bottom of all this as I intend to write another book (once I’ve done with Flo in the City, my story of a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/. That book, tentatively called Milk and Water will be about my grandfather Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services and my husband’s grandfather, Thomas Gavine Wells, President of Laurential Spring Water and citizen of Westmount and will take place in 1927, the year of another typhoid outbreak. It will be a Two Solitudes style thriller with a social welfare theme.

Medicine Women

Flo, Marion, Edith, circa 1910. On the grass at Tighsolas

Nursing in 1910. In a few scenes of my novel Flo in the City, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ my social studies website, Flora will visit a doctor cousin in Boston.

She will write home about meeting nurses at Newton Hospital, some of whom are Canadian.

In the 20th century, nursing was a classic female profession. But I don’t think it got rolling as such until after WWI. Statistics Canada historical charts indicate that in 1911 there are 20,000 women working in the health services sector, compared to 13,00 men. This is one of the few areas where women workers outnumber men. Education is another and textile is another. Most women in Canada (one third of total workforce) in 1910 work in the personal or recreational services. I’m guessing this category is mostly made up of domestics. Domestics and dancers?

Nowhere in the Tighsolas letters is it indicated that any woman of their acquaintance was a nurse or was thinking of going into nursing except in Flora’s letter about Newton.

When the grandmother is dying in 1912, Margaret says that Clayton Hill can afford a nurse for her. She is exhausted staying up nights with her mom.

I think nurses came into the home, but only rarely, as most people relied on relatives to take care of them when ailing. Nurses, however, seemed to be routinely hired to care for newborns.

I have recently read a book by Vera Brittain, a classic called Testament of Youth. (It is being made into a movie in 2010.) Brittain worked as a volunteer nurse (VAD) during the war. Now, a bloody battlefield isn’t a hospital, but this book does give an idea of what nurses did back then. As my story will show, medecine was quite primitive.

As an article in Technical World Magazine in 1910 revealed, they were just beginning to see microbes under the microscope.

In 1910, Margaret tends her niece, Florance Peppler, who has typhoid. Norman had typhoid in 1896 (he lived on the same street, makes you wonder about the water supply). Anyway, he is worried for his wife and tells her to keep the windows open for fresh air and not to come into contact with any bodily fluids. Good advice, I imagine.

In 1912 in Richmond there are more untimely deaths than usual, it seems. They remark upon it in the letters. Perhaps a flu went around that wasn’t labeled as such.