Lupins and Ideology

A high school class in the 1910 era.

It’s hard to find pictures of elementary school classes.

Anyway, as I write Biology and Ambition, about Montreal teacher Marion Nicholson in 1910, the follow up to Threshold Girl about her sister Flora;s year at Macdonald Teaching College and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about her older sister’s life and loves at Westmount Methodist Institute, I have decided to look over some textbooks from the era to see what she was teaching her 3rd and 4th grade students.

It’s not that hard to find. Years ago I found a document at Mcgill  revealing the curriculum of the Montreal Board.

I have a list of recommended text books, from Flora’s Mac portfolio and see they used Ontario Public School texts in their courses.

These texts are online at archive.org

The Hygiene Text is most interesting. Hygiene was a subject taught, although I read that it was basically a ‘free marks’ class – which means it wasn’t really about knowledge but about something else.

Ideology, perhaps. Remember with the age of Purity and the Hygienist movement was quite racist and classist.

The book I have must have been for older classes, middle school perhaps. It has typical topics (see below) and one not so typical. Family Stock. The final chapter is on eugenics! And amazingly it uses the same case study Jukes/Edwards by a Mr. Winslip that Carrie Derick used in her speech to the Montreal Literacy Society in 1910 and that I put in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

Now, imagine a child of poverty who just happened to be a good scholar and who got himself or herself through to Middle School or High School on scholarship or something. There he would meet with an official text that says he was ‘inferior’ and destined to remain so, due to genes. He might also be confused by the chapter on housing, that claims that a family home at minimum  should have 1000 sq foot per family member, since he might well live in a two room flat with 8 siblings with no windows or running water.

Now, people might ask what does it serve to bring up these ‘embarrassing’ bits from history. I think it provides a great service.

Because one thing doesn’t change and hasn’t changed over the century: human nature. No doubt, there’s a lot of ‘official blah blah’ today that passes for ‘truth’  that is nothing but ideology. Well, as Homer S says “DUH.”

Well, take Finance Minister Flaherty’s remark the other day ‘that there are no bad jobs.’  If you interpret bad to mean ‘beneath human dignity’ well, then it’s debatable, I guess. Although a question best left to philosophers and kept out of the hands of conniving politicians. If you interpret bad to mean undesirable, dirty, unsafe, disgusting, soul-crushing, stressful, tiring,  stultifyingly boring, not respectable or not respected, or merely not paying enough to raise a family in this day and age, then there’s no debate. The statement is patronizing ideological bunk, coming out of the mouth of a privileged patriarch who thinks he knows best but who is way way WAY out of touch, but who controls the country’s money, our money! You know that Monty Python Sketch. Dennis Moore. Takes from the poor, gives to the rich, Stupid Bitch. I love that skit. What more Lupins?

Also one of my favorite 1909 excerpts. A college undergraduate degree ain’t worth much these days (although it may put a student from a poorer background  in great debt.)  And Flaherty seems to want to help turn the middle class into the working poor, wage slaves by cutting UI which helps people with good jobs keep their good jobs in uncertain times…like today.

 

 

From Educational Foundations June 1909

(A.S. Barnes and Company)

 

Opening to Essay Education-The Economic Side by Will Scott.

 

The state would educate the young in order to make them better citizens; in order to advance civilization. It being desirable that all of its people be good citizens, the state strives to educate the children of all.

 

The theory held by the state is also the theory of the individual – so far as other people’s children are concerned. They are to be educated so they will not violate the law – not cross swords with society.  But as to their own children, that is quite a different matter. They should be educated not only to make them good citizens, and not chiefly for that purpose, but to give them an advantage in the struggle for existence.  The object of education for one’s own children is not so much to live better but to get a better living; not so much to do better work but to get better pay….Education gives the individual an advantage in the struggle for existence only when he has more of it than his fellows…From an industrial viewpoint, education is a labor-saving machine, enabling one man to do what ten did before. Like other improvements, it tends to decrease the number of jobs, and thus to sharpen competition and decrease wages.

 

….

Excerpt from School Power: A Pressing Necessity (Frank Tate, Australian Director of Education).

 

We must recognize, that in the struggle for existence, the law of the survival of the fittest applies to nations as to individuals, and that in this struggle for existence there is not only the struggle that results in the open shock of war, but the less obtrusive but no less intense struggle of peace, the struggle for trade supremacy. We must realize too how different modern conditions are from those that obtained even fifty years ago. The history of the past thirty years yields ample evidence that command of markets is to be won by the nation that brings knowledge and training to bear upon the operations of producing and marketing commodities which the world wants.

 

 

Politics, Education and Quebec

 

Education in Quebec is getting worldwide attention these days, and many would say ‘negative’ attention, although not all. Line Beauchamp, the Education Minister resigned yesterday over the issue and the Charest government is struggling with how to deal with the politically charged protests.

 

But I’m living in the past, 100 years ago, when it cost money to go to school, elementary and high school, let alone college and when the issue in education in the Protestant sector was “the Jewish Question.”

 

I am writing Biology and Ambition, about Marion Nicholson a teacher in Montreal in 1909-1913, the follow up the Threshold Girl (about her younger sister Flora in 1911/12 when she attended Macdonald Teachers College) and available on free ebook, and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about her older sister Edith, who was a teacher at French Methodist in Westmount in the same era.

 

The ebooks are based on real letters, but I am weaving into them political issues. Marion’s political issue is this Jewish Question and I have been reading up.

 

In 1909, an MLA, Mr. Finnie, introduced a bill in the Provincial Legislature, allowing for the Directors of the Protestant Board of Education to be elected rather than appointed.
In those days most of the Board Members were clergyman. (It is always said the Catholic Church had too much power in Quebec in the old days(keeping the people down) but so did the Protestant Clergy. The difference being the Protestant Clergy promoted education, as their constituency was more elite.)

 

There is a heated debate and a Commissioner, Dr. Barclay slurs the Jews and has to backtrack a bit. Also P Mackenzie, the member for Richmond ( and a ‘friend’ of the Nicholsons) seems to argue against the bill.  Finnie and his supporters say that the Board has to have more businessmen. Most Board Members are Clergymen. He brings up to recent fires in Montreal Schools (one in Marion’s Royal Arthur in 1909 and one other one where a teacher and some students died.)

 

It is a private members bill and is quashed early on. Those for the bill, Finnie and others, claim that the clergyman are just trying to save their good jobs.

 

But during that period, apparently, a lot of fear mongering happens, saying that Jews will take over the Board and change the Christian character (at least two schools in Montreal are overwhelmingly filled with Jewish students.) And that Jewish teachers will be allowed to teach and they too will start preaching their religion in the schools. (The Canadian Jewish News reminds people that Jews don’t proselytize like the Protestants do.)

 

Anyway, by 1913, Jewish Teachers are allowed to teach. The Board has consulted its lawyers (Greenshields!) and they said it is legal as long as Jewish Teachers don’t teach Bible Class.

(From Images Montreal)

The New Royal Arthur, Canning and Workman in Ste. Cunegonde or Little Burgundy. The school was built in in the 1860′s, but partially burnt in 1909, when Marion was a teacher, but in January when empty. Her mother remarks, ” I read about the fire. Is that your school? It is so lucky school was out.”

 

A Dr. Scrimger is all for it. He is a preacher very familiar to the Nicholsons. He preaches at Macdonald when Flora is there and she remarks upon it to her father.

 

I see by reading the papers that the Jewish Question of Representation on the Board was still going strong in 1965 when I was at school.

 

Anyway, this story will be edited into Marion’s actual letters. She doesn’t mention it. Oddly, none of the 1909 letters I have mention the typhoid epidemic either. It killed people in Westmount and Ste. Cuengonde, so both Edith and Marion must have been aware. I’ll have to add something about that. My play Milk and Water (taking place in Montreal in 1927) covers that issue well.

 

Another thing Marion didn’t talk about directly in letters was about the classroom. I guess that was confidential. Too bad, I’d like to know what went on.

 

The only time in a letter she remarks on students is in 1906, her first job, as a summer teacher in a town in the ET. She says she has two new students, the dirtiest people she ever saw and both dunces. She names them and asks her Dad if he knows the family. Beginner’s mistake, I guess.

 

I will put the letter in the book, changing the names and place. It speaks to why teachers didn’t want to work in rural schools.

 

In the same letter she mentions she is bored to death because there is nothing to do and she asks Mom to send some needlework, ‘fancywork.’

 

When she starts work in a city school, there’s no  time for such things. 50 children. And plenty of outside distractions, like Dominion Park and the Nickelodeon!

Husband hunting 1910

Sophia Nicholson, Norman’s niece gets married in October 1912.

I don’t know her story, but she visited Richmond area in July 1911 before going out West. She visited Tighsolas twice, ‘but did not take off her hat’ despite being asked to spend the night.

(Interesting! She must have stayed a while, not a few minutes I gather. So if in those days you came for say, tea,you kept your hat on. Was this because putting on a hat was not an easy thing? Or fixing up the hair once the hat was taken off was not an easy thing.)

Her Father Gilbert and Brother were in Edmonton already. Gilbert is widowed, so likely Sophia was raised with someone else and just then rejoined the family.

And then she goes out West and within a year is married.

This is not an invitation,only an announcement. Maybe Gilbert was afraid the Nicholsons, who were having money issues, would descend on him and stay. His brother Norman often asked him to if he should go West and Gilbert said NO, This is Young Man’s Country.

 

Marion Watters marriage announcement, 1914. She is often mentioned my books, especially Threshold Girl but also in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster (about to be posted) and Biology and Ambition, Marion Nicholson’s story, being written.

In 1912/13, Mae lives with Flora and Marion on Hutchison in the great experiment. She has another boyfriend named Minty. Edith calls her ‘a great flirt.’ Well, it worked and Edith never married.

All this goes to show is that the two years Marion and Hugh waited to get married was a long period.

There were reasons. Firstly, Hugh was seeing another woman in May 1911, when he meet Marion. I know because he blew her off in a letter in September. He told her they had ‘no understanding’ and he only thought of her as ‘a very good friend.’

 

Letter from Donald Nicholson of Lingwick to Norman Nicholson “Bark Dealer” in 1893. “Sorry they are so poorly at Gilbert’s.” May be when wife died.  Beautiful handwriting for a man.

Burn This Letter- A Tribute to Mothers on Mother’s Day

Probably from September 1917..Marion Blair and kids

I have decided where to start Biology and Ambition the story of Marion Blair in the 1910 era, the follow up toThreshold Girl about sister Flora and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster about sister Edith (all part of a big volume called School Marms and Suffragettes.)

I will start it with this war time letter from her husband. 

He is home in Montreal  being watched over by his sister in laws, Flo and Edith. He is not happy.Marion is with her mother in Richmond with her babies very likely. Flora is a teacher, so not at work and Edith is at this time, I believe, working for Sun Life Insurance. And there’s a lot of war work, volunteering.

I’m guessing Marion, with two young kids, is in no rush to get home to Westmount.  I have other era letters than say the house gets hot…and there’s fresh veggies and butter at Richmond. In another earlier letter Marion is telling her mother about all the local gardens cropping up in Westmount and she sort of mocks the city folk, who she suggests have no idea what they are doing.

It’s getting towards the end of the war her. In two months Edith and Marion will be visiting their friends the Tuckers in Montreal who learn they have lost their son Percy. Then they learn he is alive. Then they learn he is dead. I don’t think they felt sorry for Hugh. Married men didn’t have to go to war in Canada. Hugh would be about 40 anyway.

July 26, 1918

Hugh to Marion

My dearest sweetheart,

I cannot express in writing how pleased I was to hear your voice over the telephone a little while ago and was very sorry when I learned that due to the circumstances, you were not able to come home…Dearest, I have never written you on this strain since I have known you and before I say what I have in mind, I beg of you to please try and understand it in the light that I mean it.

For Marion, dear, I love you with all my heart and it is because of my affection for you that I try to pave the way a little. I honestly, would not intentionally hurt you Marion. 

Now sweetest, here it is: You know, Dear, that you have left me alone at different times for indefinite periods, but may I say that I have never yet found one month to be as long as this one. 

Really, it has seemed to me almost like years. I would a thousand times rather be left entirely alone than to be left again with the girls, as I cannot get them to do anything which appears to me to be reasonable.

 I have come home on several occasions and the front and back doors were not locked. They will not close the windows and the house is almost like an oven. They forget to order food. The refrigerator is left open; the ice is melting as fast as you can put it in. 

Cawlice. (French swear word, euphemism for chalice)

Water is running all over the floor and things are lying about. I am sick and tired of the whole place.

 Take pity on me Darling before I go crazy and come home to me to look after and love me. *but under no circumstances take chances (with mother’s health). 

 Take it from me, God help the poor man that gets either one of them, if they don’t change. You can do more in five minutes than they can do together in a day. You have forgotten more than they’ll ever know. 

God bless you Marion and may it be God’s will that he can spare you to me for many long happy years.

Lovingly,
Hughie,

PS. Don’t fail to burn this when finished reading.

Love and Marriage, Consent and Dowry

Marriage place settings.  Marion Nicholson Hugh Blair 1913. Home-made and on the cheap.

I’ve completed my draft of Diary of a Confirmed Spinster the follow up to Threshold Girl.

It has to be typed and put into pdf.

As I turn to Marion’s Story, I have marriage on my mind, 1910 marriage.

It’s still considered cute today, on sitcoms at least, for men to ask the father of their intended for his consent to a marriage.

I’ve only heard of one or two real life people who did that.

I think Wolowitz did it on Big Bang. He got married to Bernadette yesterday. Not a bad episode, the wedding on the roof with Google Earth was cute. (It’s hard to write an original marriage scene and that was fairly original.)

But I think I’ve figured out what a father’s consent meant, at least in Canada in 1910, at least for the middle class. It meant the father would give money, a dowry, set the young couple up.

So when a father didn’t give his consent, it didn’t mean he didn’t like the guy or want the daughter to marry, it meant he couldn’t afford it.

This reality is at the heart of my story Diary of a Confirmed Spinster. Norman Nicholson, Edith’s father would not even comment on her favorite, even when introduced to him. So in the book I have her beloved, Charlie, go to extremes to make money for marriage – and get killed. In real life he died in a fire at at Hotel in Cornwall, the Rossmore. His body was never identified.

As for Marion, well, she gets engaged in May 1913, a decision made only by the couple, although she has indeed ‘asked’ her father for his opinion of her intended earlier in October 1912.

In June 1913 Edith writes to her Mother, saying she wishes father would write and give his FULL CONSENT as Marion has to tell her principal whether she wants her teaching job back the next year. And Hugh, her fiance, wants to start looking for a house.

Norman does write to Marion a long letter saying “He doesn’t know what to say as he is dead broke.”

Norman and Marion’s fiance, Hugh Blair, come to some agreement and I have a letter from Hugh saying he as received whatever  and thank you. (In letters, if someone is thanking someone for money, it is never spelled out. Thank you for ‘the favour’ of the 12th instant.)

Hugh also asks for something from his own father (not sure what) and the father writes a jolly letter back but never mentioning Marion or the marriage.

Hugh’s parents do not attend the wedding in October in Richmond.

I also have a marriage contract, drawn up in Richmond a few days before the wedding, saying that Marion brings nothing to the marriage but her clothes and wedding presents.

So if she leaves Hugh, he keeps the furniture.

In 1910 In Canada, marriage was still a financial contract, although like Marion and Hugh, couples in love could get married without consent and suffer the consequences. Hugh had to go out into business on his own as a lumber merchant. He got shut out the family business, for a while at least.

The ideal marriage is where a man with prospects and education, although perhaps no money of his own, married a woman whose dowry could set him up in life and business. My own grandfather married 1901 was an example. He was Jules Crepeau and Assistant City Clerk in Montreal in 1901. He married the daughter of a master butcher, who brought if my mother is correct, 40,000 to the marriage. (Hard to believe, although Master Butchers were prominent citizens. The woman he married also had prominent connections, a Monsigneur and such.)

So what if they spent their marriage throwing crockery at each other.

Hugh and Edith

From what I see the Nicholson marriage was on the cheap. 6.65 for a cake and a few dollars for material and new shoes for outfits from Hudon’s.

Love and Marriage Dear Sir, I wish to consult you on a subject that deeply interests me while it indirectly concerns you and I hope that my presentation of the matter will meet with your approval. For sometime past your daughter Marion and I have been on intimate terms of friendship which has developed into affection on my part, and I have reason to believe my intentions are not indifferent to her, so I would therefore request your consent to our marriage. Yours sincerely, Hugh Christian Blair (PIC BELOW: Marion draws her ring!)

Me and Mrs. Dalloway and The Queen

Me in 1984 ish.

Mrs Dalloway said she’d buy the flowers herself.

I’m reading out Mrs. Dalloway from a free e-pub version online and watching a certain Youtube video, where a female dancer is shown pirouetting to the right or left depending on what part of the brain you are using. As a kind of mental five finger exercise in creativity.

I am writing out longhand  a first clean draft of Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl as I have a slight injury to my cervical disks in my neck. The ebooks are about Canadian women in 1910. It is Virginia Woolf who famously wrote that something dramatic changed in 1910.

I’m writing it out in a big fat Hilroy notebook, using one of those new gel pens that write so smooth. I feel so old-fashioned.

The first few pages were uncharacteristically neat. I didn’t recognize my handwriting: it seemed a bit high school or even elementary school.  I guess I still have some school girl in me. Like Mrs. D.

But now after 40 pages or so,  I’m back to my sloppy, almost unintelligible chicken scratches.

Mrs. Dalloway and all the other shoppers on Bond Street that post WWI day see a mysterious limousine and everyone wonders who it is. The Queen?  The Prime Minister? They all feel touched by some kind of magic. The ugly long war is over and they need some magic in their lives.

Reminds me of 1984. I was visiting friends in Toronto and going back to Kingston (where I was working in a TV Station)when I came face to face with Her Majesty.

It was odd though. A very Virginia Woolf moment.

Let me copy her style or try.

And Dorothy Nixon, working as a television operator in Kingson, a rather inept one, as she is a copywriter by profession, a radio copywriter, an English copywriter working up until recently in a province where English (good or bad) is not encouraged, no, not encouraged at all, drops her two heavy white fiberglass suitcases, right in the middle of Union Street, to give her tired hands a rest, and looks up to stare the Queen right in the face, the Old Lady, her Royal Highness whose limousine has just finished its long tour of the  grey Toronto streets and has stopped but for a moment, as it readies itself to speed the beloved Monarch away, (no doubt keeping to a a meticulously planned schedule) but the Queen.her Majesty, Ye Olde Grrrl always the trooper,  continues to wave, mechanically, distractedly, with a far away look in her glazed over eyes at this tired young Canadian woman, who is wearing a very used even ratty Muskrat coat she picked up at a thrift shop on St. Hubert. The girl wonders, Are thoughts of a young Albert Finney swimming in Her Majesty’s  queenly brain?and Dorothy knows that even if the Queen, Elizabeth Regina, is staring right at her, the Regal One is registering nothing but images of, perhaps, Tom Jones in tight pants. (She’d like to think so anyway.) Pity. And here she is, an ordinary middle class Canadian girl, by fate, by happenstance, on the feather-tip of history, for once in her life – her still young life, as it happens. Or at the very least she has bungled up someone`s meticulous plans by stopping right then right there in the middle of Toronto`s Union Street.

It is 1984 and Dorothy (who is named after her British grandmother hence the Victorian first name) still young and full of dreams and the Queen the same age as Dorothy is today, typing on her laptop, in bed, with an tiresome cervical disk problem (caused by old age, her son has told her and NOT from stooping over a laptop- so don’t bug me) that provokes her husband (whom she met at said Kingston TV station, so all was not wasted) to come into the room and say, “You aren’t supposed to be doing that.” And she replies, “I’m just writing my blog and then I will stop.”

I love Mrs. Dalloway, although my favorite is To the Lighthouse. But as I read Mrs. D this time I have more context. 1) I am older, like Mrs. Dalloway and 2) I know a lot about post WWI Britain, especially having recently read Juliet Nicholson’s The Great Silence.

War and Prices, the Cost of Living 1914-1918

A page from Oct 1914 House Accounts, Norman Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec.

I have 50 years of Household Accounts for the Nicholson Family of Richmond, 1883 to 1921 and in those years, not that much changed with respect to what they bought and how much they spent.

I’m assuming there was wartime inflation, so I scanned two pages from October 1914 and two from November 1918.

For the story, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about Edith Nicholson in 1910,  the follow up toThreshold Girl about Flora, I am using the Household Accounts to tell the story of her childhood.

This morning I had a bowl of Harvest Crunch. I haven’t eaten that for years. My husband found it on sale at Costco. That product was one of the first pseudo health foods. I could look it up, but I’m pretty sure I ate it in the late 70′s. I think it is pretty fattening. It has coconut oil.. but I don’t think that is as bad for you as previously thought. I mean the Thai’s live on it.

I usually eat Bon Matin 14 grain toast for breakfast with multi berry jam.

The short of it is, we still eat ‘by habit’ but new products are being introduced every day. Not the case back then, although that era saw the birth of a number of iconic products that became favorites over the century, thanks to heavy advertising. As I wrote in an earlier post, Crisco was invented in 1911, but they tried to get Margaret Nicholson to use it in 1916. Likely because butter had risen in price due to the war.

as opposed to: 1918

Opium, Habitues, and Edith Nicholson

 

After the 1909 Monterrey Hurricane.

 

Well, I do have the first rough draft of my story Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl, about women in 1910 Canada. I printed it out on hard copy and am  now editing it and integrating the Nicholson letters into it..Not an easy job… so maybe I still have a ways to go.

 

Yesterday, I listened to a BBC radio 4 broadcast of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, an episode about the Mexican Revolution. Zapata and all that. That program is always excellent and features Bragg and usually three scholars discussing something, anything, everything in the universe and sometimes the universe.

 

I was hoping they’d mention something about Canadian Industrialists and water works. They didn’t.

 

I also researched opium and Mexico and 1910, to find that in April 1909, the Americans created the Opium Exclusion Act, outlawing the importation of Opium and essentially giving birth to the War on Drugs which would eventually drive up prices and create vast criminal syndicates.

 

In 1910, Opium was legal in Mexico (and would stay so until 1927, I think). In Canada, as I wrote earlier, in 1910 for about a year, it was only illegal for Chinese, not Whites.

 

According to one source, most morphine addicts in 1910 were wealthy women (habitues) who no one really worried about. Edith Nicholson wasn’t wealthy, but she sure liked her cold medicines. She was always getting a cold. In fact, if there’s one theme dominating the 1908-1913 Nicholson Family Letters, it’s ‘colds’ and ‘la grippe.’

 

 

So anyway, it all fits in nicely to my murder mystery around Edith’s fiance Charlie Gagne I am fashioning around the letters from 1910 I have on hand. The one issue, really, is that in early 1911, opium wasn’t that expensive, so smuggling it wouldn’t make that much money for anyone. But I’ll assume there was some money to be made by white men, all ‘legally’ or in grey areas.

 

Ebooks and Funding

 

Tighsolas in 1910 era

 

This is Tighsolas, or House of Light in Gaelic, the Queen Anne Revival Style Home that Norman Nicholson, my husband’s great grandfather built in 1896, the year Sir Wilfrid Laurier came to power.

 

I discovered letters belonging to this family in 2003, transcribed them and posted a website in 2005 Tighsolas with the letters in raw form and background about the Laurier Era.

 

And then I decided to write a digital trilogy around the letters, featuring each of the three Nicholson ‘girls’, Flora, 18 in 1910, Edith, 27 in 1910 and my husband’s grandmother Marion, 25 in 1910.

 

All of the young women were teachers in the era, not a ‘sexy’ profession, but, alas, the profession most well-educated middle class women went into in 1910 (despite the going belief that women had ‘made it’ and could enter any profession, although housewifing was the most desirable profession.

 

 

 

Threshold Girl   is the first book in the trilogy and it is available for free online. It tells the story of Flora Nicholson’s year at Macdonald Teachers College in Ste Anne de Bellevue during the ‘in their proper place’ era.

 

Marion and Edith figure incidentally in the story.

 

I am writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, Edith’s story, and it is almost complete.  It tells the story of Edith’s job at a Missionary School in Westmount, where Catholics, mostly French Canadians were educated and oft times converted to Protestantism. Not a slice of history normally discussed today.

 

It also tells the story of her stormy courtship with one Charlie Gagne, a former Roman Catholic for all I can see, who died in a hotel fire in Cornwall in 1910, the Rossmore.

 

In Flora’s story, I include a child labour theme; in Edith’s a eugenics theme. The suffragette movement is included in both books.

 

The trick is, I am being faithful to the 300 letters I have, but filling in the gaps with invented stories. I call this a ‘re-imagining’ of their lives.

 

Marion

Edith

 

It took me a long time to figure out what was going on in the letters with respect to Charlie Gagne, but once I did, I noticed gaps.

 

I have turned his story into a murder/mystery, which probably didn’t happen, but certainly could have. And then I can cover the drug issue for 1900. Opiates in medicines.

 

I haven’t been able to type out Edith’s story, as I have a neck injury, but once I do I will embark on Marion’s story, yet to be titled. Marion was already a teacher at the Montreal Board in 1910, at Royal Arthur School.  She was also helping out her family the most, especially financially. And from 1911 and 1913 she was courted by Hugh Blair, whom she married. She was also the most dynamic of the young women, later becoming President of the PAPT Teachers Union.

 

When all three books are written, they will complement each other, and also fill in gaps in each other’s story. For instance, Flora had no idea what was going on with her brother, she was protected. Edith had some idea, but since she had lost her love in a fire in May 1910, she too didn’t know it all. Marion, however, knew it all!

 

The social issue I am tackling with Marion’s story, possibly called The Push Pull of Biology and Ambition, or maybe just Biology and Ambition (yes!) is the Jewish Problem in schools. Jewish teachers were not allowed to work in the Montreal Board, however qualified.

 

Maybe one day I’ll be invited to the Blue Metropolis, the big ‘non-profit’ event in Montreal supported, of course, by Heritage Canada. People from Heritage Canada occasionally come to my website, (even downloading the ebook Threshold Girl)  but my project doesn’t fit into a comfortable niche, not with respect to Canadian politics. I’m guessing, anyway.

 

I’m discussing eugenics and suffrage in ways that only scholars have done in the past. Even the Two Solitudes issue. It’s shades of grey I like exploring.

 

Anyway, basically EVERY Anglo-Quebec initiative is funded by Heritage Canada, so what does that say? That it’s the only funding available, sure, but also, that they control the message. That’s what I think. How could they not, if  they are the only funding? I’ve worked with many non profits, I know how hard it is to get funding as a Quebec Anglophone Project, even for innocuous projects like literacy. (Whoops, that’s political here too.) We are a minority within a minority, that’s how the government sees us.

 

I’ve also written Milk and Water about Montreal in 1927, using my own grandfather, Jules Crepeau as a character.  This story is more of interest to French Canadians, I can already tell, but I must polish it before I can get it translated. In this eplay, I put a new twist on the infamous Laurier Palace Theatre Fire.

 

Freedom 1910 Style

In a 1911 letter home Marion Nicholson describes catching up with the Montgomerys who are in town to buy a new car, their second in two years. This may be a pic from that event. They are at Atwater Street.

I am writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl and I’ve got to the part where Edith Nicholson goes on a 6 hour car trip from Richmond, Quebec to Montreal in June 1911.

In a letter she describes all the places she passed through.

My job is to describe the experience.

Now, today, 6 hours on bumpy hills in a car with no shocks (I don’t think) and in a tight corset would be torture, but for Edith it is euphoric.

That’s the word I’ll use.

The freedom of it! Before long trips were taken by train or by horse carriage. This car, going 14 miles an hour over the hills and dales of the Eastern Townships, must have thrilled the passengers, much like a long long ride at Dominion Park. And there was always the danger of breaking down to add spice to the occasion.

14 miles an hour is the speed limit in the country. 7 miles an hour in the city. (Horse drawn vehicles and autos were beginning here to fight over the road space, a fight which would continue until the late 1920′s, when cars WON.

Ad for Piece Arrow. Car Rides were classy thing! No kidding, cars cost as much as a house.

A recent Salon.com article claims that statistics show that Americans at least are driving much less. The author of the article ascribed this to the Internet, saying young people would rather surf than drive.

(I thought maybe GPS’s had something to do with it. Or Google maps. No getting lost. No spending hours driving all over town looking to buy some item. Etc ete.

Whatever the reason, the thrill is gone. The high price of gasoline doesn’t help either, I’m sure.

In the 60′s I went for a lot of car drives with my dad. It was his recreation. Cheap and he got out of the house. We had a little Austen Cambridge, but my father, a former ferry command pilot, drove fast, 80 miles an hour on the highway.

As his daughter, I wasn’t afraid, although I do distinctly remember almost getting killed by an oncoming 16 wheeler as he passed a car on the highway.

But he swerved in on time, obviously.

Marion sits in her Uncle Clayton’s car.It broke down a lot.

The T Can wasn’t as crowded with trucks as it is today.

I liked looking out the window.  On long distance treks to the US for vacation, my Dad had a game. He had great long distance eyesight (Pilot!) so we called out the state or province of the licence plates ahead,the minute we could guess them. And then there was I Spy..

Today kids don’t look out the window. They are too busy playing or communicating on their iPads, etc. Or watching movies.

We experience the world second hand today. Technology changes us.

Free at Last: In the 1910 era, men drove the cars, but by the 1920′s women went it alone! Here’s Flora second from last. Cars gave women and teens unprecedented freedom.