J.B. Priestly and Me

Yesterday I listened to the Saturday Drama on BBC Radio 4. It was An Inspector Calls with  Toby Jones, who I just saw in Titanic and Tinker Tailor, in the lead.
The play takes place in a factory town in the UK in 1912, and covers the same territory as my digital trilogy about the real life Nicholsons of Richmond, Quebec. Read Threshold Girl.

Now, I hadn’t ever heard of this play, which shows there is a gap in my education. I studied Drama and Theatre in Junior College or CEGEP as they call it in Quebec.

According to its Wikipedia entry, An Inspector Calls is a classic play by J. B. Priestley, that is requisite reading in English and Welsh schools.

The play has what some might describe as a socialist point of view, telling the story of a bright and pretty factory girl who ends up killing herself due to a series of unhappy events, all perpetrated my members of the same prominent family.

Funny, the Priestley  girl is a bit like the fictional character I created for my trilogy, Miss Gouin! (And I hadn’t read this play, really I hadn’t.) Miss Gouin is a milliner’s assistant in Richmond in 1911.

My ebook is based on REAL letters, real people, real events, so it shouldn’t have any point of view, right? Well, good question.

My play also features middle class women. Middle class women with high aspirations and not much in their purse.

I am now writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl. In fact, I have the ebook totally plotted out and I’ve written all the key scenes.

What I haven’t done is stick Miss Gouin in the story. But I think I should. When I last left her at the end of Threshold Girl, things don’t look good: she is marching in a labour parade and  working at Dominion Textile. This is June 1912.

I suppose I can have her at at Montreal Council of Women meeting in Spring 1912, the one Edith attends where Carrie Derick talks about eugenics (and says inferior people have big families) possibly brought as an ‘exhibit’ by a social advocate society lady, as an example of something or other. Or I can have her in Boston in 1912, working in a big department store, pretending she is French from France. That is her dream.

Then she could marry Henry, the Boston doctor, who in real life never married. Happy ending for her.

Scene from An Inspector Calls. Shiela Burling, Brian Worth, getting engaged at the beginning of the play. They both play a part in the demise of a working class girl. IMDB gives the move, with Alistair Sim as the Inspector, 7.3. It’s on YouTube.

In An Inspector calls, the girl in question is a factory worker who gets fired for union activities, but who gets a decent job in a Department Store, but is let go for no good reason and who goes to work in a      cabaret-brothel, who ends up pregnant and kills herself.

From everything I have read about the 1910 era, this is pretty much the trajectory of working class women who have bad luck.  (Coco Chanel would be the working class girl with good luck.) So Priestley’s Point of View is based on reality. He makes no bones about it. He has his main character say out loud “This is what happens to millions  upon million of women.”

The Social Evil…Prostitution, it looms large in the life of EVERY woman in 1910, poor, middle class, and rich (who aim to eradicate it without empowering the lower class women involved- quite a trick) – and it is a raison d’etre of the Suffrage Movement in the UK, US and Canada.

Christobel Pankhurst wrote a pamphlet claiming that prostitution would be eradicated should women get the vote.

Men, she claimed, should be as chaste as women.  You see, as long as young men feel they need a sexual education before marriage, they will need rubbish women to practice on.

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

Newswatch: Anglo-Quebec style

I spend a lot of time  reading the news on the web, reading US, UK and Canadian sources (the sensible ones  so so I thought I’d check out the Google News ‘favorite search’ list for today, 20th of August – to see what the hoi polloi is curious about.

I started with the letter A for Canada (English). Amy Winehouse is first, then Ayano Tokumasu,the poor girl who fell over fence at the Niagara Falls, apple, air canada and aecl which is a story related to Fukishuma, some rod provided by Canada, whereas in the UK, although Amy Winehouse is top search subject, Arsenal comes in second, Andy Murray, Amir Khan, aston villa, Amy Childs are also on the list. Hmm. Arsenal is a soccer team. I’ve read Fever Pitch. Andy Murry, wasn’t he on one of those Extras episodes?  Hmm. I spend a lot of time on the Guardian website, but I know none of these names. Wait, Andy Murray is a tennis player. (I didn’t watch the Rogers Canadian Open last week; too busy watching my savings go down, down down, up, down, UP UP, down down down. Who needs tennis. (The next thing you know, my cat will be watching the Financial Channel.)Amy Childs is a person on Big Brother. So entertainment issues were tops here in the UK.  I guess they need a break from the week or two of heavy duty news they just endured.

( In the US for the letter Amy Winehouse, apple, Anderson Cooper, android, Amanda Knox,Antoinette Stephen, amateur radio,amazon and yes, Arsenal. Was the team bought by US concern? I wonder….. No. Hmm.  Well, I know who Anderson Cooper is, and I know amazon, but why amateur radio? Checked, can’t see why it comes up so high. Amanda Knox is involved in a murder trial. and Anoinette Stephen is another murder story. Very taboid interests!

Oh, and since I live in French Canada, I checked their 10 ten news searches. Yes, Amy Winehouse first. Algerie, apple, ashton kutcher (who according to headline, forgets the details of his investments, and Angelina Jolie who is buying a house with Brad Pitt in England. At least they can afford it but how is this news? So what? Like I fed the cat this morning.

 The fact that I just had to check the spelling of these two pretty folks’s names, says something about me. Then Android. What is Android? I ask, sounding like one of the bubble-headed beauties in the  original Star Trek..Oh, something to to with Google.

burundi, bombardier, barak obama,bute, bell, bourse, black keys, britney spears, beyonce.. (I’m using this as a memory exercise, since I can’t keep both windows open together. I  am NOT good at this. I can keep three items in my brain at best. I keep having to go back. Scary, since I think this is similar to a test they give for Alzheimer’s. Note to self: Must practice more memory games!)

That’s the B’s for French Canada. Bourse is the Stock Market. It’s also the word for purse,as in “Je n’ai rien dans ma bourse.”I bet that’s been one the the favourites in all Western Countries all week.

English Canada: blue jays, big brother  Blackberry, brad richards.bluesfest, brad griffith, bombardier

UK: big brother, bbc sport, big brother 2011, bbc, bbcnews, (and they are cutting funds for teh BBC?)beyonce, beckham, british open, borders, black ops, boeing.beyonce bachman, breaking bad and then, funny enough, betty ford, brett favre

US: bank of america, booton shooting, burger king

and a random letter for fun: (I close my eyes and touch the keyboard)…mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

memphis 3, murdoch, machbook air, mumbai, mexico, memphis three, mobile, that’s the US for M.

The UK..man utd, that’s Manchester United for cool people,  mata, manchester united ,for boring people, madeline mccann (another alleged sighting) murdoch, metsut ozil, man city, modric (whaaa?)Manchester City, Michael Jackson

Canada Anglais: Montreal, Maple Leafs, Murdoch, mac book air, Mayor Rob Ford, Mumbai.. why Montreal? Did something happen here? OH, our major cities all show up tops in their letter.

Canada French:maroc, martine obry, monaco, meteo, mylene farmer,  messi, marseilles, mercato,mesut ozil (who is a footballer.)

Oh, and I noticed, these ‘favorites’ change pretty fast.

I don’t know what this proves… a sliver of a sample…..My top news searches would not fall into any of these catagories.. but that’s because I am an English Canadian living in Quebec. We just don’t fit in anywhere.

I guess I’ll get back to living in the past, 100 years ago as I write Edith’s Story, about a young woman and the suffragettes in 1910, which is a follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf  about a college student in 1910. L. P. Hartley wrote that the Past in a Foreign Country, but he’s wrong, I think. It’s familiar territory as human nature  is very predictable.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading era newspapers, especially the Montreal Gazette. People’s interests, when it comes to the news, has really not changed much. The big difference, Minister’s Sermons and lectures aren’t reported on in the newspaper any more. (I’m glad they were, for this is very useful to me as I write this book about Presbyterian women, after all.

 The Home Secretary, in 1910, (I think it was Winston Churchill) sure came down on the suffragettes, in much the same way Prime Minister David Cameron (who was No. 4 on the news list, after David Haye, David Tennant, and NO. 1 the Duchess of Cambridge, has come down on this year’s rioters in England, the education-fee protesters and the unemployed youth looters of last week.

I think Mr. Churchill used the same confrontation rhetoric against any threat: women who rallied  for the vote and broke a window or two;  skinny Indians who promoted peaceful resistance; and the Third Reich. Churchill’s tone was appropriate for the war years, at least, and he was voted The Greatest Briton of the Century for it.

 Yes, no reporter has to sit through a sermon anymore, thank GOODNESS..The clergy has no clout today… but then, with Perry prayer vigils and the Tea Party people, maybe it’s deja vu all over again..

What Edith was Reading…

Suffragette Emily Davison under horse. “the suffragettes get their first martyr” says the 1913 Montreal Gazette

I wrote on my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website that the Montreal Gazette was anti-suffrage, because I had read it in a book on The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada.

But this morning, going over the 1908-1913 articles on the suffrage movement reported in the newspaper, I can’t see how Catherine Cleverdon, the American author of this work, came to this conclusion.

The headlines are colourful that’s for sure, “Suffragettes Look Like Hoodlums in the House of Commons” “Bomb Next Time: Suffragette Made a Direct Threat to Police” but not anti-suffrage, perse’ Indeed, at first glance, I’d say the reporting is (was) fair and balanced.(Most articles, it must be said, from the US and Britain are wire service articles.)

Sure there are some ridiculous reports, blaming every bad thing on the suffrage movement, some of which I’ve written about, but even these reports often have a tongue-in-cheek -or should I say info-tainment feel to them.

What I did this morning: I entered the word “women” into the Gazette archive search engine to see what comes up for 1908-1913. Most of the articles are about the suffrage movement.

Obviously suffrage is the key topic with respect to the female sex covered in the paper.

The only other newspaper clippings I have ever seen re: suffrage are from the Nicholson collection, the articles Edith (likely) clipped out from the Montreal Witness, the Montreal Herald and Montreal Standard, all defunct papers.

The Witness, being vehemently pro-temperance, was also pro-suffrage.

Anyway, scanning these articles all at once, it occurs to me HOW EXCEPTIONAL was Edith Nicholson. In May 1913, she attends a talk by Mrs. Snowden and says “She is not militant and for that I am sad.”

Considering the stories coming out of England in that era, about all the civil disobedience going on in the UK and US, I have to admire Edith’s ‘spunk’.

Edith is the Nicholson daughter who loved to gossip the most; who was always falling in and out of love and who was easily the most fashion-conscious of all the Nicholson women. (I have pictures of her in old age, perfectly turned out – and with a great figure too.) She was the lover of beauty and fine things, EXACTLY the kind of FINE woman men applauded in those days. (Well, she wasn’t big on homely arts.)

*And I think I figured out why each and every suffragette speaker from England or the US prefaced her talk by saying she was against militantism… That’s because many people thought these suffragettes should not be allowed into the country, that they were criminals and should be treated as undesirables.

About a month after Mrs. Philip (Ethel) Snowden gaver her 1913 speech in Montreal, British Suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under a horse, (perhaps by mistake) and was killed. I wonder if that news softened Edith’s views a bit. Nah, don’t think so.

Anyway, here’s a quote from Anna Howard Shaw (Edith clipped a drawing of her) that succinctly summarizes my last few blogs: “We do not fear that little band of professional anti-women going around the country advocating home, heaven and mother. The only purpose they serve is that by holding out their skirts they act as a screen for the liquor traffic, the gamblers, the vicious, and those interested in dance halls, and places where young girls are ruined.”

HIGH ANXIETY 33rd installment

Dresses, summer, Delineator 1909

Margaret was in frenzy. First Herb had finally written her,enclosing a picture of his new bank in Cowansville, but the letter, a short note had proven maddening:

Feb 28, 1909
Ormstown

Dear Mother,

Am going to drop you a new line to let you know I am well. I am doing ledger work here. I was awfully sorry to here of Sam McMorine’s trouble and I think I will drop him a line. Things are very quiet here except for a horse race on the river. I think I know everybody in town and it is not quite so bad.

Now about writing, I know it is about the least I can do to write every week and will try and do better in future and although your letters were not answered as soon as they should be, yours are the only ones out of two pocketfuls that have been. I am going to try to write to Father this week.

Your Son, Herb

Excuses, always some excuse. Although he seemed to be apologizing for his Christmas behavior, wasn’t he? He said he wasn’t minding being in Cowansville, after all those cruel words at Christmas, about his parents ruining his chances, a conversation she couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone, even Norman, especially Norman.

And then there was the Ladies’ Home Journal. Sister Bella had dropped it off the day before, the new February issue, the Valentine’s issue, saying that Flora might enjoy the article ideas for silks, ribbons and flowers as she was interested in going into the millinery profession. Millinery Profession. Wherever had she heard that nonsense? No daughter of hers would ever be a shop-keeper’s assistant.

And later, when Margaret had picked up the magazine, which was, after all, so hard to resist, with its vision of pretty new things and comfortable homes, the easy life, she noticed that the magazine contained not one, but three articles railing against women’s suffrage.

THOSE RESTLESS WOMEN screamed one headline.

Suppose we take the noisy clamor for the right of women to vote and reduce it to a practical test or two. Now we are certainly led to believe by the speeches of the female suffragists, that the American women really want the ballot – in fact, that definite statement is repeatedly made. But just what is meant by the phrase “the American Woman” isn’t always made clear. How large a part of American Womanhood does it include? Let us take an expression or two direct from women. Not many years ago an American President received the customary petition that is familiar to every President, asking him to incorporate into his next message to Congress a recommendation that the subject of women’s suffrage be seriously taken up with the view of giving women the right to vote. The President was fair-minded. He was willing to see both sides, so he determined to test the truth of the phrase in the petition, that is ” this was practically the unanimous desire of American womanhood as a whole,” but that “men had refused to recognize the fact.” That evening he handed the petition to his wife and asked her “What do you think of that?” “I really don’t know,” she answered. “I have never thought about it.” The President said, “but the petition says it is the unanimous desire of American women.”
“Perhaps it is,” she answered. “Why don’t you find out. Pick fifty women whose opinion you respect and write and ask them.”

The President did.

There were 46 answers. Thirty four had no desire at all to vote. They were ‘too busy’ or left politics to their husbands. Eleven were absolutely indifferent. One lonely lady said “she might vote” but added “probably, when the time came, I wouldn’t bother to vote.” Here, then, were forty-odd intelligent, representative women, and yet not a single one actually wanted the ballot!

…The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of American women have not only no desire to vote, but, to use their own words, they are not bothering about the question. This is the actual condition that American suffragists confront, not the antagonism of men, for men, as a body, are not antagonistic, they are indifferent, perfectly content to let women fight this question out among themselves and find consensus among themselves. And up to this date that consensus is distinctly that the average woman’s common sense, and particularly her knowledge of her own sex, teaches her that she is unwilling to run the risks, which she knows, far better than men, would accompany an extension of the franchise to her sex. The field of politics as a new excitement for a few restless American women is barred to them by their own sex.

Americans, Margaret thought. Who cares what Americans think? We live in Canada, and Canadians are more Progressive than Americans. Except for Uncle Alec and The Kellochs and Sister Bella, of course.

The magazine, these days is nothing but advertisements, she noticed. (The Nicholsons had long cancelled their subscription.) She was about to toss it aside when she noticed a full page article (or was it an advertisement?) The Cheapest Way to Warm a House that pulled her back in… “The fuel savings of hot water, steam or vacuum heating will pay from 15 to 50 percent over old fashioned heating methods like coal and wood…There are other savings more important than fuel, that cannot be accurately figured in dollars..All housewives know how much extra house-cleaning old fashioned heating methods necessitate…. no cold corners, no drafts, pure clean uniform warmth..which is why our system is used in all modern hospitals, which owe their existence to unsanitary, uneven heating conditions…

This time she threw the magazine down for real. How could a person find peace of mind these days? Even fashion magazines set fires under your fiercest fears.