100 Year Old Christmas List

Christmas 2011 and is over, but most of us won’t be tabulating the damage until next month, when the credit card statements come in.

Lots of DVD’s and video games,  I imagine. And Apple products of the decidedly uncrunchy kind.  Some relatively inexpensive clothing made mostly in Asia.

Soaps from Lush and the Body Shop.  Packets of those fancy designer teas, including Green De-Tox for use after New Years. (OK. So that’s my list.)

Here’s a Christmas cost list my husband’s great grandfather, Norman Nicholson, tabulated exactly 100 years ago: He was the patriarch of a family from Richmond, Quebec.

1 gent’s shirt 1.75

One lady’s hair brush 50

Edith one pair gloves 1.25

Marion one pair gloves 1.25

Flora one pair gloves 1.25

Tuning piano 2.00

Nuts 18

1 doz oranges 20

5 pounds sugar 25

2 lemons

Allspice 2

Citron peel02

1 box honey 10

1 Barrel flour (Red roses 2.90)

I pair gents braces 30

Flat irons 35

Ice bill 5.50

Masonic Fees 4.00

2 tickets to Christmas Concert 1.50

6 lb turkey 1.20

I pound candies 25

½ pound almonds 25

3 pounds raisins 25

½ pound knitting yarn 80

One pair ladies boots 1.40

Church collection 20

1 ladies scarf 1.00

2 pairs ladies hose  95

One pair arm braces 10

Washwoman 50 (ah, everyone gets a break from the laundry duties)

1 bottle shoe polish 25

And the final item. Fare Flora home (To Ste Anne de Bellevue Macdonald College)2.20

I imagine his daughters, Edith 27, Marion 25, Flora 19,  gave each other gifts not on the list, likely ribbons and bows from the milliner, for their Easter bonnets, which would be the new hat for the season.

Ummm. Oranges in season. They must have tasted so good. I must admit, the clementines tasted good and juicy this Christmas, although these days you can get them all year around – but most of the time they don’t taste so good.

100 years ago! Imagine.

Ribbons Eaton’s Catalogue 1909

I printed this list in my ebook Threshold Girl, a story based on genuine family letters from the era, family letters belonging to a middle class Canadian family. I have 100’s of these letters, bearing stamps with portraits of Edward VII and George V and some earlier ones with Victoria.

So, you see, this was a middle class list.

I had to include this list in the story, because there exist no letters describing the family’s Christmas day habits. Everyone is home together at Christmas. I can only guess at what they did. Well, they went to church, probably often. That’s a no-brainer as they went to church often even when it wasn’t Christmas.  No radio or TV, you see. And the motion picture houses were only in the big city and mostly frequented by the working class.

I may still have something on that very list. The flat iron. I have two of this family’s flat irons. I use them as doorstops. They weigh about 7 pounds each!

My ebook covers the life of Flora Nicholson 18, from April 2011 to June 2012, for it was her year at Teachers College. The Titanic would sink while she was at school. Her sister would attend the funeral of Charles Hays, the President of the Grand Trunk Railway, in the American Presbyterian Church.

Flora’s sisters, Edith and Marion, were already teachers in the big bad exciting city of Montreal. Her brother was out West, in Saskatchewan, clawing his way up the ladder of success, or at least trying to.

Flora spent many a weekend in the City, going to theatre plays at the Princess on Ste. Catherine Street or His Majesty’s Theatre on Guy.

And on other weekends her sisters and their friends would head up to Macdonald College, especially if they were holding a dance. The family was close and protective of ‘the baby’ Flora.

In January 2012, Flora returns to school and graduates and gets a job teaching at a brand new city school, William Lunn, where the students are mostly the children of newly arrived immigrants from Russia.

Many of these immigrants would find work in the textile industry. In Threshold Girl Flora meets up Miss Gouin, a French Canadian textile worker, with eyes on the prize, a glamorous high paying job in millinery, that is the hat-making industry.

Textiles and clothing in those days was made right at home in Quebec – or imported from Britain and the U.S.

Miss Gouin is fictional. Her situation is not. In one scene she describes, all too vividly, the child labour at Dominion Textile. Flora, so protected by her family who aspire to the genteel life, is truly disgusted.

Fashion Magazines Sure Make You Want Things

 A page from the August 1911 Delineator. I have scanned most of the pages and I will post them to the eb00k Threshold Girl, to show the reader exactly what Flora saw that day in 1911.

My tag line is from the book:Magazines sure make you want things, thinks Flora.

www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

 

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.