The Work of Greg Clark and Jimmie Frise

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The Gentle Art of Flim Flam

A-“Could you give me a ten-dollar bill for ten ones?”
B-“Oh, never mind that $20! I’ve got the right change.”
C-An elderly man who had a remarkable lockable purse.
D-The stranger protested that the ring was his.

By Gregory Clark, February 11, 1922.

The flim-flammer is the hardest kind of crook to catch, for he neither breaks in nor leaves traces. His victim usually sees him but a moment. He operates like the hawk – out of the blue and back again.

A humble little man in his shirt sleeves and bare head came into a Yonge street drug store. In his hand he carried an envelope stamped and addressed, but not sealed.

To the clerk he said:

“Could you give me a ten-dollar bill for ten ones? I want to mall the money in this letter, but the ones are too bulky.”

“Sure,” said the clerk.

The small man removed a bunch of one dollar bills from the letter and handed them to the clerk. The clerk handed him a ten spot.

Then the clerk counted the bills and found only nine.

“Hold on,” he said. “You’re one short here,”

“Oh,” exclaimed the stranger, taking the ones and counting them. “That’s funny. Too bad.”

And he stuffed the one dollar bills back in the envelope in full view of the clerk. Then he said:

“Here, hold this till I run back and get another dollar.”

And handing the clerk the letter, but keeping the clerk’s ten in his hand, the little man in the bare head and shirt sleeves, left the store – never to return.

But it was not just one dollar he got away with. For when the clerk, after ten minutes had elapsed, examined the letter, he found nothing in it but paper. The flim-flammer had switched envelopes. In some neighboring hotel or shop, he had left his hat and coat. This man worked his game on six stores in three Yonge street blocks in twenty minutes.

Another form of flim-flam recently worked successfully on several stores on Roncesvalles and Queen street is the $20 bill stunt. The crook picks a store where there is a girl in charge. He buys some small ten cent article and hands a $20 bill. After he has got his change, he says:

“Oh. never mind that $20! I’ve got the right change. Just give me back my $20”

The girl hands him the $20, he pays down the ten cents, and before the girl grasps the fact that there is $19.90 coming back to her, the crook is out the door and gone.

It is astonishing how this swindle works. There is a confusion in most people’s minds in money-changing that provides the cover for this particular flim-flam.

Foreigners are particular victims of flim-flammers of their own race. An Italian, who was carrying $3,000 trust funds on him, made the acquaintance of an elderly man who had a remarkable lockable purse. The elder man offered to buy his young friend a similar purse for the safe keeping of his $3.000. He did so. And in St. James Park he presented the purse and locked the $3,000 in it for him.

“Now,” said the elder man, “this is my key. I’ve left yours at the hotel. Meet me at the hotel for lunch, and I’ll give you your key.”

The young Italian, his new purse containing the $3,000 safe in his pocket, was on hand for lunch. But his friend failed to turn up. Growing suspicious, he tore open the locked purse and found some clipped newspapers. The crook had switched purses.

Strangely enough, this young Italian, returning heart-broken to Italy, met his crooked friend on board ship and had him arrested in England. But the Canadian government would not go to the trouble of extraditing him.

One of the oddest swindles, not much removed from the flim-flam yet based on a system by which respected citizens of Toronto have made themselves wealthy, was recently pulled off in New York, with a few Toronto people involved.

Two respectable and well-known financial men went up to Petrolea1, Ont., and bought a tract of land.

Then they went to men with money in New York and put up a novel scheme.

“Give us your money,” they said, “to invest in this oil property. We will dig only one well, and if we don’t strike oil within one year we will give every cent of your money back to you. To safe guard you, we will bank our money in care of a well-known trust company.”

This unusual plan at once attracted money, and the two operators sold in all three million dollars of stock.

This three million they deposited with the trust company.

They then spent ten thousand dollars on sinking a well near Petrolea. And at the end of the year, no oil was struck. So the two financiers returned to New York, drew their three million out of the trust company, and returned every cent to their investors, with the remark that it was a gamble and nothing lost.

But the trust company paid 4 per cent. on that $3,000,000 deposit. which amounted in one year to $120,000!

This the two financiers took for themselves, no mention having been made in the promise to the investors of interest!

A tale is going around about a well-dressed man buying a $500 diamond at a big Toronto Jewelry store, for which he offered his check. The Jewelers asked for references, and the stranger gave the name of the manager of the big hotel at which he was staying. Calling him up, the jewelers were informed that the man was undoubtedly good for the $500.

The stranger then crossed Yonge street to a small jeweler and offered the diamond for $100. This jeweler, sensing something crooked, slipped out his back door on pretence of testing the stone and went across to the big jewelers. When they heard of the offer, they immediately called the police. When the detectives arrested the stranger he protested that the ring was his, and he could do what he pleased with it. But he was taken to headquarters.

Then by telegram the jewelers made enquiry of the stranger’s bank in an American city, and found to their dismay that there was plenty of money to cover the check.

They went up to withdraw their charge and apologize, and the stranger said:

“Gentlemen, this episode will just cost you $1,000.”

The story goes that they paid it.

But the unfortunate part of it is that there appears to be no truth in the story.


Editor’s Note:

  1. Petrolia is a town in Ontario. A little searching around seems to indicate that it was once called Petrolea but the railway companies misspelled it as Petrolia later, and that stuck.. ↩︎

City Council Meeting a Symphony in Jazz

Hanged if City Clerk Littlejohn, who has seen 46 Councils come and go, can tell for a minute whether this is 1920 or 1895.

To the Bewildered Ordinary Citizen It Is Merely a Cacophony of Sounds.

Like a Big Bass Fiddle, the Mayor’s Voice Croons Steadily On Through It All.

By Gregory Clark, January 31, 1920.

Toronto’s brand new City Council is assembled functioning. It had its first business meeting and all went merry as a marriage bell. But it is so like all its predecessors that hanged if City Clerk Littlejohn, who has seen forty-six City Councils come and go, can tell, for a minute, whether this is the year 1920 or 1895. You might say, nothing changes in Toronto’s City Council but the names of its members and the fashion in clothes. And as for the latter, they change but slowly – in Toronto’s City Council.

The one thing that marks this year’s Council, the one bright incident that brings a faint ray of relief to the dreary round of City Clerk Littlejohn, in the ennui bred of nigh half a century of the company of City Fathers, is the presence of Alderwoman Mrs. L. A. Hamilton, the first City Mother1.

In the assembled Council, Mrs. Hamilton sits at the toe of the big horseshoe of benches, directly facing the Mayor’s throne. Should any alderman so far forget himself as to us open up one of those pre-1920 barrages of vituperation, the vain cry of “order, order!” is now reinforced with the presence of a lady. And some of our most irate civic parents have thus had their best teeth pulled.

But City Clerk Littlejohn, whenever the day grows drear and the Council meeting unduly tangled, scrambled and undone, raises his melancholy gaze to the toe of the horseshoe, refreshes his spirit with a glance at the lady member, and returns to his task of keeping the Mayor on the tracks, as one who breathes – “Ah, well! There are signs in the sky! A new day may dawn!”

After the manner of college magazines, we might categorize the new Council as follows:

This year’s Handsomest Man: Either Controller Alf. Maguire or Alderman Brook Sykes. It all depends how your taste runs. Controller Maguire is of the rich, autumnal type of manly beauty; somewhat on the stout side of what is called a man’s prime. His election photos temper justice with mercy. Brook Sykes is the youngest-looking member of the Council; blond, quiet, is alert. One could easily imagine him a movie star of the Doug Fairbanks or Tom Moore type; the manly kind, easy to look at. At any rate, he looks like one apart in that circle of Fathers. He looks like a Civic Son.

Homeliest Man: (Censored).

Youngest Man: Alderman Josephus Singer (who, not being Irish, and therefore not superstitious, occupies Seat No. 13).

Heaviest Man: Alderman Birdsall.

Lightest Man: Alderman Miskelly.

Noisiest Man: His Worship the Mayor.

Most Silent Man: This is a race, of apparently, between Aldermen Winnett and F. W. Johnston, with Alderman Cowan running up. Alderman Cowan’s ordinary speech consists of an ejaculation. A sentence is good going. Two sentences is his limit.

This Year’s Prophet: Mrs. Hamilton. The male members are regarding her as a sort of Mrs. Elijah. They are waiting for her to wave her mantle and hurl the challenge magnificent.

Most Serious Man: Alderman Plewman. He engages not in argument or vain clamor. When he sees his chance he points his order paper confoundingly at the assemblage, and says his say.

This Year’s Poet: Alderman Donald MacGregor.

The Most Aggressive Man: Controller Cameron, who in spite of his recent illness. still dominates the meeting, whenever he feels like it, with his Celtic fire.

At any rate, he looks like one apart in that circle of fathers.

Now, the plain citizen might regard with some awe and not a little sneaking veneration the assembling of the City Fathers. One would expect of them, dignity, precision, ease.

Let us attend a Council meeting and see.

The meeting is called for two-thirty, o’clock in the afternoon.

At 2.20, we peek into the Members’ Room: a nice, comfortable room furnished with leather chairs and cigar-fumes.

The City Fathers are already gathering. A dozen of them are draped in easy attitudes over the leather chairs and benches. All are smoking either cigars or pipes.

“Hello, Bill!” yells one City Father to another across the room. “Did ye get yer house yet?”

“Sure,” replies the other in the same prevailing tone, “bet yer hide I did.”

“Well, well!” cries another, “if it ain’t my old friend Henry!”

“Yep. Large as life and twice ‘s natural!”

I quote thus to show the easy air of friendly banter, airy badinage, that relieves the lighter moments of the City Father’s life.

The members continue to arrive. The air becomes thick with cigar smoke. Alderman Mrs. Hamilton enters, gently pressing her kerchief to her nose.

Just before 2.30, in stalks the spectacled and solemn Mr. Littlejohn, City Clerk. Several of the older aldermen attempt pleasantries with him. He seems, however, to be thinking of other things.

He sizes up the assemblage, never relaxing his dignified aloofness. Then he disappears for a moment. He has gone to see if his Worship the Mayor is ready. He is.

A loud bell rings in the Members’ Room. City Clerk Littlejohn takes the up his position at the door and stands looking in upon the members with an air of menace.

The members file blithely into the Council Chamber.

Let’s also go there.

The Council Chamber is high, but none too large for the twenty-eight members of the Council. The horseshoe row of little desks is drawn up facing the Mayor’s throne. There is an empty throne on each side of the Mayor’s. These are for visiting potentates. The Mayor’s dais is guarded by the banners of the 180th Sportsmen’s Battalion, one of the unfortunately broken-up.

The members take their seats behind their little desks. Eighteen citizens and two policemen in the steep little gallery lean eagerly forward to see.

“Order gentlemen!” booms a solemn voice from the door beside the throne. It is City Clerk Littlejohn again.

Then, with long strides, cutaway coat-tails flapping, in flies his Worship, the Mayor. The members rise to their feet. It’s a sort of “Parade, ‘Shun!” affair.

Now comes the startling part of our adventure.

Our eyes have scarce left the flying figure of the Mayor to note the rising members, the members are just in the act of sitting down, when a sudden, droning, nasal and unintelligible voice begins-

“Controller Maguire the minutes of last meeting be taken as read, seconded, carried!”

In the rustle and confusion of all the roomful getting seated, we fail at first, to locate the sound. Just as the last syllable is sung, we trace it to his Worship, the Mayor.

Yes, sir! He started his incantation as his foot touched the dais; and just as his coat tails brushed throne, he had got through the first item on the program.

Thereafter that strange, droning monotone was the motif of the whole piece.

For there is only one way to describe a City Council meeting: it is a symphony in jazz.

To be sure, the various members, officials, clerks, etc., seem to enter everything that is being said or done. But to the bewildered, ordinary citizen, it is merely a cacophony of sounds, a human jazz symphony of the cubist school.

The aldermen talk to each other. Four aldermen make at once. The City Clerk and the Mayor’s amanuensis, Mr. James Somers are both explaining something to the Mayor, while the Mayor, in his low cello-jazz voice, is reading a bill and Controller Alf. Maguire, as the chairman of the Council, is on his feet, twiddling his watch-chain and serenely explaining to the Council the meaning of the bill the Mayor is reading.

It’s a sort of mild pandemonium.

Now and then, as in all good jazz music, there is a pause, and somebody with a voice like a piccolo or a melancholy saxophone (one of the aldermen), picks up a new theme, plays it lucidly, daintily, musically, and then with a crash, fortissimo down come fiddle and drums, trombone, cymbals and bazoo; and they jazz that theme to ribbons and run. And like the oom-oom of the bass fiddles, the Mayor’s voice croons steadily on through it all.

And when it’s all over and you buy a copy of the sporting extra, you are astounded to see, all set out, the items of business done.

It’s a miracle, that’s all! A spectacle de jazz.

One thing we did catch, however, Alderman MacGregor (whose mythical voice corresponded to the fiddle in that mad symphony), rose a couple of times to a point of order and found he was just a couple of jumps ahead of the party on the order paper. His musical protestations were rudely stilled by several members.

One alderman, levelling a withering glance at Alderman MacGregor muttered:

“Fer heaven’s sake, sing!”

“For Heaven’s Sake, Sing!”

Editor’s Notes:

  1. Mrs. Hamilton was the first-ever female city councillor elected in Ontario. ↩︎

Angels on the High Seas

EVERY PASSENGER SHIP that sets out from Canada or Great Britain has stewardesses aboard, taking their chances along with the crew and passengers of being torpedoed, bombed or mined. War has increased their work as well as their danger for into their capable care have come hundreds of babies and young schoolchildren en route from Britain to America.

By Gregory Clark, January 18, 1941.

The Sea Might of Britain – instantly there springs to mind the thought of great gray ships, of captains and tars, of the navy trailing its smoke across the tumbling seas of all the earth.

But in our vision of the sea might of Britain we never remember the women who go down to the sea in ships: So this is to be some little account of the women, most of them in their 30’s up, who at this hour, all over the world, through every danger zone where men go, through submarine-infested zones, facing the same dread perils that the bravest of our navy seamen face, are serving the empire by carrying their share of the great sea tradition.

They are the stewardesses. Every passenger ship that sails the seas these days – and there are a great many of them and nearly all British – has its quota of stewardesses aboard. A good standard 20,000 tonner will carry 25 stewardesses even in these times. To the witless passenger, these women are maidservants in white. To the seasick, they are nurses. To the sea-frightened, they are companions and confidantes. To the discerning, they are a class of women unique in the world of women, and rank, in actual training and character, somewhere near the universally respected sisterhood of nurses. In peacetime, they are looked upon by the world at large as some kind of upper-class servant. But in wartime, when you see them as I have seen them on Canada-bound ships carrying hundreds of children, the rating of a stewardess rises somewhere in the direction of Florence Nightingale herself. Before this war is over, and when stories can be told, there will unquestionably be added to the sea saga of Britain the names of many women.

So far, no outstanding story of a seawoman’s heroism has been reported out of the war. But since every passenger ship that has been torpedoed or lost has had aboard its staff of stewardesses, it requires little imagination to picture the part they have played. Because naturally, the women now serving in the greatly reduced passenger traffic of the seas are the pick of their profession.

In my two crossings of the Atlantic in this war so far, the majority of the stewardesses I encountered were women of Lancashire and the West of England. They were also the wives, daughters, sisters, and in many cases, the widows of seafaring men. In all shipping companies, it is normal practice that when a man in their service dies, especially at sea, the widow is given preferment when she applies for a job as stewardess. A great many of the stewardesses you see on a ship are mothers of families.

In the Submarine Zone

On one crossing of the war Atlantic last winter, I talked with a stewardess of nearly 60 years of age whose entire family. was at sea. She came of a sea-going Liverpool family that had been in ships longer than the family records went. Her husband was lost at sea when she was a young woman of 27 with four children. She at once got a job as stewardess and supported the home while her mother raised the children. At the time I talked with this valiant woman who was trying to suppress her true age for fear of having to retire from the sea, she had two sons in the navy, one son a steward at sea and her only daughter a stewardess, also now at sea, whose husband was in the navy.

And talking to this magnificent, capable and kindly woman made me ashamed of the fears I felt as we plowed through the submarine zone. In two crossings of the Atlantic and no fewer than eight crossings of the English Channel during this war, I must confess that the greatest fear I have felt was on these ships – two days out from Britain either coming or going; and of course every minute of the time spent on the channel. The blitzkrieg in France in May never roused in me a single minute of the tension that grips every nerve for hours and days aboard a ship. German bombers, without any interception by British or French fighters, came and lobbed their terror all about. But the unseen terror that lurks in the sea has me ever on edge. Yet every day, every hour, there are ships plodding those seas around Britain. And in those ships, women, on duty.

In wartime, there is, according to three great steamship companies I have talked to, not the slightest difficulty getting stewardesses for whatever distance the voyage may be, or through whatever war zone.

“In Liverpool and Glasgow,” stated one company executive who outfits the ships, “and in almost every seaport in Britain, there are hundreds and possibly thousands of experienced stewardesses not merely with their names down on the steamship company lists, but calling every few days to try and get themselves aboard. There is no difference between the men and the women of the British navy and merchant marine. Did it ever strike you as funny that we should have no difficulty manning every ship that Britain can build? Then it should not strike you as odd that we should have trouble fending off these women trying to get jobs at sea.”

“A woman’s nervous system,” I submitted, is not as ruggedly wired as a man’s.”

“Rubbish,” said the company man who had one time been a chief steward on ships. “There are no nerves at sea.”

And that is probably right. On one of my crossings, I came on a ship that carried 1,200 passengers and crew, 400 of whom were children. Most of them unaccompanied children or, if accompanied, part of far too large a party for the sole exhausted individual woman or man who had undertaken the task. Little children, most of them, at the most helpless and help-demanding age.

At It Early and Late

Those of us who had travelled the sea knew the capacity of our ship’s boats. We knew, the first hour aboard before we left the pier, just what was fated if we should come to any grief. This crowded ship was no place for any man who was anxious about his own future.

One aisle of six cabins on that ship will forever remain in a picture in my memory. The stewardess who served it and the next adjoining aisle of six cabins was a tall, handsome woman of about 40, with auburn hair. She had bright, humorous, observing eyes. Her whole bearing was that of a spirited woman.

In this row of six cabins were – a young, terribly frightened, thin little woman with two babies, one about two years old, the other an infant of two months. Next cabin, two aged ladies who hardly left their cabin for eight days. Next, a very tidy, masterful, tweedy woman, accustomed to bossing people about, with two very tidy, tweedy, haughty little sons of about eight and ten.

Opposite side, a young woman, possibly a school teacher or governess, a gaunt, startled, doe-eyed little woman of 35 who occupied two cabins with seven children she was shepherding across to Canada. The seven were the most lawless youngsters imaginable, ranging in age from four to about nine. The last of the six cabins was occupied by two government men, technical men, in visiting whom I got my daily picture of that corridor full of riot and grief.

I wish I could tell you what sort of people occupied the adjoining corridor of six cabins that this one stewardess had to attend. It was doubtless much the same.

Let us call the stewardess Baxter. On a little sign in your cabin is given the names of your steward and stewardess. The smart thing, of course, among us upper classes who travel the sea, is to call both the stewardess and the steward by their last name, without prefix. But some of us are green and stay green all our lives, and we always call our stewardess Miss Baxter, much to her amusement. If you just call her Baxter, she can see through you and knows you’re a snob. And if you call her Miss Baxter, you’re a snob also. But since she’s a snob too, and since we’re all snobs, what’s the difference?

So it was a great pleasure to observe Miss Baxter, whose name was probably Mrs., and doubtless had sons in the navy, proving for eight days that at sea there are no nerves.

In the first cabin, when the tiny infant wasn’t squalling in that curious steam whistle tone of a new baby, the two-year-old was bellowing, and the poor, terrified little mother was popping in and out of the cabin every two minutes, carrying things, changing things, heating things, cooling things. Then she took seasick and stayed seasick six days. Miss Baxter took charge.

The two elderly ladies were seasick before they boarded ship. Ever little while you would catch a glimpse of a haggard elderly lady peering from behind the green cabin curtain, weakly crying, “Stewardess, stewardess,” and there were times when everybody, including both the elderly ladies, wished they were dead.

The tweedy woman, the competent, the accustomed, knew how to wring the most out of a stewardess. And she was also, as is characteristic of the feline tribe, anxious to teach her two haughty little boys how to wring the most out of stewardesses. One must become accustomed young, mustn’t one? That woman’s cool, level but excruciatingly penetrating voice cutting through the riot of that aisle will linger in my memory forever. Probably I will grow a prejudice as big as a piano against all women with that kind of voice.

But the spirited Miss Baxter never lost a twig of her red hair. Even her alive, darting eyes never showed sparks. “Yes, me lady,” she would say. And only she and the two government technicians and I shared the joke of that. A deep, smooth “Yes, me lady.” And me lady purred like a cat. And her two little boys thought up some more rude questions to ask Miss Baxter.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, right through the week and the day we were at sea, Miss Baxter never rested. Up at five in the morning and to bed whenever at last she could leave the situation to the elderly, stubborn and plodding night stewardess who was supposed to tend the wants of five or six aisles of cabins. I would be very surprised if Miss Baxter got to bed before midnight any night. But I know she was up at 5. Making tea for the two old ladies. Sweeping, arranging, swabbing, preparing, with the help of the steward on duty for the same series of cabins, for another day of riot.

The woman with the seven children, the governess, was of course completely helpless in two or three days at most. But Miss Baxter seemed to be doing as much for her as for any of the others.

I think she got £1 from the tweedy lady. The government men told me the transaction was very publicly and regally done. What the young woman with the two babies, what the governess or the two elderly women forked over, might have been 10 shillings or what have they? But if Miss Baxter got $1,000 for the trip from the company and gifts of precious gold from her passengers she would have been ill paid.

In Time of Emergency

In case of emergency, the duty of a stewardess is to go at once to the cabins to which she is appointed and see that her passengers are warned and assisted. When the seven blasts of the ship’s whistle – or the thud of explosion causes that anguished instant of silence on a ship, you will see the stewardesses, in their white uniforms and caps, suddenly and very swiftly appearing from every direction.

No running, no uplifted hands in feminine flutter. They set down the tray or whatever they are carrying. They pause to consider which of their charges should come first, in the ever-shifting conditions of the hours of the day at sea.

First they must see that every cabin is warned. If the lights have gone out, they must have their torches. If anybody acts silly they must quiet them.

“And the best trick of all,” admitted one stewardess, “is to ask the panicky one to help you.”

What a feminine trick! When every cabin has been visited and no one left asleep, or helpless with either illness, fear or actual injury, the next thing is to help them get properly clothed and carrying their life-belts.

“Many women,” said another stewardess, “instinctively will not obey the order to wear their heaviest clothes. They always, instinctively, grab for their newest or most fancied clothes. I’ve seen a woman head for the boat deck in her nightgown, clutching the evening gown she had worn that evening to dinner.”

The stewardess has been allotted the same lifeboat as the passengers she is assigned to. After getting them all on their way to the boat deck and their muster stations, she is supposed to follow along and see that they don’t try to dart back for something forgotten. She is supposed to check them over, when she, too, reaches her station, and if any are missing to do what she can to locate them.

They are the last women into the boats.

And when in the boats their duty as stewardess does not finish; it just begins. For they must lend aid, help, comfort and care to the women in the lifeboat and set an example of calmness and courage.

THANKS TO the ship’s stewardess, this little war guest arrives happy and smiling in Canada. Her parents in Britain could not have given her better care on the voyage than did the stewardess in whose care she was placed.

So on the ship I refer to, with the 400 children aboard, you can figure with what sort of courage the 25 stewardesses left their own homes and kissed their own children good-by for just another crossing…

On one of the Canadian passenger liners is the stewardess, Mrs. Riley. I do not know where in England she lives, or any detail of her family. She was at sea when I garnered this story, and the steamship officials did not know her domestic particulars.

But from Mrs. R. Code, of 512 Rideau Rd., Calgary, Alberta, there came to the offices of the steamship company at Montreal a letter addressed as follows:

“To the stewardess who looked after the Tredennick children when crossing on the Duchess of…

“Dear Stewardess:

“Do you remember Joy, Mary and Christopher Tredennick? They have mentioned you many times, and we realize what good care you took of them on board the ship. They got off at Winnipeg, where I met them. They stayed with me for 10 days and then I brought them to Calgary, where my daughter lives and where they are to make their home.

“When Joy reached Winnipeg she was so upset because she had forgotten her purse, but I told her it might be in Calgary, and that is where we found it. Thank you so much for seeing about it. The crossings with all those little people running about must be very trying. I marvel at how you manage at all.

“The children look much better; they are getting so brown and their appetites have quite returned. It will soon be time for the little girls to go to school. They have settled in very well and are very happy in their new home. My daughter never had any children, but she and her husband are very fond of them.

“We all wanted you to know how much we appreciated your care of the children; they send their thanks too.

“Joy wondered whether you knew anything about the bottom part of one of Christopher’s pyjama suits. It is a gray flannelette. I mention this only in case you may be wondering to whom they belong. You must have found it very difficult keeping track of their belongings, and we think you managed it very well. “I remain,

“Very sincerely.

“(Sgd.) G. C. Code

“Mrs. R. Code.”

The steamship company looked up the passenger list and found what cabin the Tredennick children had occupied. Then they checked the duty list and found it was Mrs. Riley. And they sent the letter off to Mrs. Riley, somewhere at sea or in England or Canada-bound; and also kept a copy for me and you.

Then they looked up the parcel of “lost articles” which is always sent ashore to the offices when a ship docks. And sure enough, among the lost articles, was a small pair of gray flannelette pyjama pants.

And they had been all neatly washed and pressed with an iron by Mrs. Riley before she sent them ashore.

So the pyjama pants were sent on to Calgary by the steamship company, and there is Christopher, all safe and sound in Canada, even to the bottom of his pyjamas.

And there is Mrs. Riley, complete with as nice a letter as ever came to an anonymous person. I don’t know, but that letter to Mrs. Riley and what happened in and around it somehow carries a better story of what a stewardess is and does than all my story.

When the ship docks, there is a good day or two days’ work for the stewardesses in attending to the ship’s laundry and cleaning everything up in preparation for the arrival of the passengers for the return trip. But the stewardesses come ashore and usually visit friends. You might be surprised how many Liverpool or Glasgow homes there are in New York or Montreal. Doubtless many a stewardess and many a steward has set up house in a foreign land when he tired of the sea. But they have all got friends to visit and stay with in the few days “off” between voyages. Certain hotels – not the big fashionable ones, but those pleasant, home-like hotels you find in all seaports are favorite hangouts for the stewardesses who have no friends to visit.

One odd thing about stewardesses is this, that they have to present very good credentials and must pass a strict examination before being admitted to the service of the company. With this remarkable result!

“I have never, in 40 years’ experience,” said the official of a steamship company, “known of a stewardess who got a job and made only two or three trips. When they join, they remain for a long period of years.”

Which may explain in some measure the fact that all over the perilous war seas today are British women following the sea and upholding the ancient tradition of our race’s maritime genius.

Thundering Through – and your heart in your mouth!

November 28, 1925

Looking From the Engineer’s Cab Every Level Crossing is a Hair-Raising Hazard – The Engineer Cannot Slow Up His Train Every Mile or So – All He Can Do is to Watch, Watch, and Hope Those Motorists Ahead Will Have Sense Enough to Play Safe – Nervous Strain Terrible

By Gregory Clark, November 28, 1925.

Fifty-eight miles, fifty-nine, SIXTY miles an hour!

The gigantic engine leaps and sways like a racing automobile multiplied a thousandfold.

It feels as if it were hurling itself. The din is soundless, an ear-blocking din. Heat whirls in the grey steel-filled cab. Past narrow windows, the world streams dizzily past.

His gauntleted left arm resting shakenly on the huge throttle, his squinted eyes glued to the narrow ribbon of steel-shod way ahead, the engineer drives International Limited thundering through.

Sixty miles, SIXTY-ONE miles an hour!

Through narrowed eyes, he strains his sight ahead on that swift-rushing path ahead of him, swift-rushing towards him, like a river, a rapids, a furious torrent of road.

For he is coming to a level crossing that is a provincial highway. Soon he will see it. He reaches up, never moving his eyes from the path, and hauls heavily on a cord. Faintly in the din he hears his fierce whistle blow, long, long, short-short.

Then he sees far ahead the highway. Little black objects are scuttering across. Motors.

His giant Six Thousand leaps on. Oh, how the flickering dimly-seen, roadbed is swept up! The little black objects ahead seem to swell larger, larger. The engineer again reaches up, hauls the cord and the fierce whistle hoots.

Of course the highway crossing is protected. There are bells and wig-wags1 on it. It is broad daylight. It is a still afternoon, and his wild whistle can be heard miles. Yet…

The crossing is clear. The International is two swift train-lengths away from it. A low-hung touring car, grey, speeding, appears back on the highway racing for the crossing. Two hundred yards back!

The engineer crouches. The gauntleted arm clamps against the huge throttle. A wild thrill of horror seizes him, enfolds him. He snatches the whistle cord and hauls hard.

SIXTY-ONE!

He watches with half-closed eyes the point he will pass like a thunderbolt in three-two-ONE second.

The speeding motor car comes to a sudden stop twenty feet from the crossing. The man at the steering wheel is looking up with a grin and waves to the engineer. It was a little joke he was having… His passengers, women, are huddled terrified in the back seat.

The engineer, clammy from head to foot, wipes his gauntlet over his forehead and turns his eyes again on the wheeling road before him, his road. For a mile and a quarter ahead is another level crossing.

He is alone. This leaping, thrusting three-hundred-ton monster of black steel and white fire is his to make go and his to stop. Behind him, attached to him, in his care, are ten eighty-foot cars carrying three hundred and fifty men, women and little children. They are sitting unconcernedly, watching the country flying by, reading, playing, chatting as in a drawing room.

Speed Demanded by Public

The engineer is alone and all this is in his keeping. His mate, the fireman, sits across the cab, watching out the other window, his hand on the levers that control the automatic coal feed to the ravenous engine. But the two lone men in, the front of this mile-a-minute train are separated by an impenetrable, invisible wall of tumult.

You and I, in a hundred and fifty miles of motor travel, will cross perhaps four, five level crossings. We come to them as each of us sees fit, some of us cheerfully and recklessly, some of us cautiously. Four or five of them in a day’s long travel.

This engineer, traveling at tremendous speed, a speed demanded by the public as a whole, you and me included, a modern, twentieth century rate of speed, with neither the power nor the right to stop at crossings, this engineer has to cross not four or five but one hundred and forty level crossings in a hundred and forty miles of headlong, hurtling race.

One crossing to a mile is the average in the older settled portions of the province. Many of them are highways, protected by bells, automatic wig-wag signals or gates. But most of them are just open crossings with only the white cross sign. To you and me they are incidental risks of the day’s run. To the engineer in the cab of your train they are the ever-recurring, permanent, hair-raising hazards and terrors of a life of service.

Duncan Campbell of Mimico is one of the engineers who drive the International Limited, that great train run by the National Railways across Quebec and Ontario into the United States. As you know, engineers do not run a train the whole of its great run. They take it over in “divisions.” At every hundred and forty miles or thereabouts is a “division point” on the line, where a new crew come aboard, to drive the mighty creature its next hundred and forty mile run. Engineer Duncan Campbell’s share in the run of the International Limited is from Toronto to Sarnia and then, after a rest, from Sarnia to Toronto again. This division is one hundred and seventy-four miles through the most thickly-populated district of Ontario and of Canada, and his steel path is crossed by no fewer than one hundred and seventy-nine roads. More than one to every mile of his run. And in that run he hits sixty miles an hour -when he may.

“Each and every one of those crossings,” says Engineer Campbell, “is in itself a danger and a terror. Many of them are just little Country dirt roads. But in this day and age, with the motor car risen to such a place as it has in our lives, there is no road that has not its menace. Of course, an engineer, after many years back and forward on his division, every day of his life, comes to know each stick and stone of it, as a man knows his path home.

“Our orders are to keep our eye on the road all the time. Care as we must for our engines, we must keep our eye on the track ahead. We know every crossing as we come to it, we learn to sound our whistle without really seeing the whistle-post. Some crossings we learn to distrust more than others. All crossings, despite the fact that we pass them several times a week, fill us with secret fear.

“For you must understand, we run on a schedule of time and of speed. The public demand it. But I can stop my train with the emergency brakes, in about twice its length.

“If my train is ten cars, my train is about eight hundred feet long. Therefore, I can stop in 1,600 feet.

One Bad Fright Every Trip

The emergencies that arise at level crossings arise at far less than 1,600 feet; they arise at five hundred feet, four hundred feet. It is the man who suddenly decides he can make it after all, the man who has slowed up and then puts on speed to cross over, the man who is one hundred or two hundred feet from the crossing, who breaks the hearts of engineers.

“Engineers are trained to be experts in judging the interrelation of distance and speed. That is our business, our skill. As I sit at my window watching the crossing ahead and suddenly see a man start up to try and beat me to the crossing I know better than he that I am going to be at that crossing before he possibly can be.

“You would be surprised to know how many motorists strike trains in the second and even the third coach back in these attempts to beat us. If we had tried to stop, we might have just succeeded in slowing enough so that our pilot would have struck and destroyed them instead of them striking us. You have only to recall the sudden way a train appears to rush into the station platform to know how deceiving a train’s speed is. Yet coming into the station the train is actually slowing up, not speeding up.

“There is no trip that we do not have at least one fright. We do not know that the car running to the crossing really going to slow up. We do not know the intentions of the driver. We do not even know if he has seen us. It happens all in a few seconds. To us it sometimes seems an eternity. Yet we never become accustomed to it. Sometimes the cars will skip across so close in front of us that I am in doubt whether we have hit them or not. But no: they got across and waved jokingly to my mate at the other window,

“We are helpless. Once we have set the engine in motion and at a speed demanded by official schedule, we cannot stop save in emergency. If we slowed up for every crossing, not only would it make travel impossible, with a slow-up every mile, but would only make the motoring public confident instead of otherwise with regard to crossings.”

A C.P.R. engineer who cannot be quoted by name has the same experiences to tell.

“It is a regular thing in our trade for engineers to wear out under the strain and have to be laid off or transferred to lighter runs,” he said. “One bad accident puts a nerve strain on engineers throughout the country that is sometimes very hard to bear.

“A few days ago I sat at my cab window and counted eleven cars that crossed on a certain eastern Ontario highway after I was within one train length of the crossing, a matter of seconds, for I was hitting nearly fifty miles an hour. What if one of them had got rattled? What if two of them had met and locked? I could not stop in time. I pulled the whistle cord and held my breath. This was only a few days after a big smash near Toronto when half a dozen were killed.

“That night I dreamed some pretty tough dreams, I can tell you.”

What is to blame for the accidents? If the people of Canada paid out millions in taxes for gates at all crossings, as they are in England, would it help?

“The vast majority of our accidents and our scares,” says Engineer Alexander Bond, who for thirty years has driven on the Toronto-Sarnia run and now is one of the crack drivers of the International, “occur not at night but in the daytime. Our great electric headlight seems to be sufficient warning at night. In the daytime nothing but caution will do. For it is the opinion of engineers generally that seventy-five per cent. of the people hit are fully aware of the approach of the train and are struck as the result of misjudgment or carelessness or recklessness in the face of danger. Perhaps not even twenty-five per cent. were struck not knowing the train was upon them.

Foolish “Jokes” of Motorists

“I recall one day an open car coming at a fair speed towards the crossing. I had blown my whistle, but because it appeared to be a carload of girls I blew it again, for safety. Instead of slowing, the car put on speed. It was already too late for me to brake. We were hitting our top speed. All this happens, you must remember, in a flashing second or two. I was sick with the shock of it. I could scarcely look for fear. But as we rushed past my frozen gaze beheld two or three young girls laughing below me and waving, having pulled their car up suddenly, as they had intended from the start, not fifteen feet from the train.

“We get the shock, whether we hit or not.”

It is safe to say there is not an engineer of really long standing who has not hit something on a level crossing. He has excellent reason to fear them.

One engineer told of his worst accident. A car came to a stop at the crossing, the engineer watching, relieved of heart. The train bored on. Suddenly, to the horror of the engineer, he saw the car jerk into motion and start to cross after all, in low gear, apparently. Whether it was misjudgment of speed or whether the driver, flustered, had put his engine into gear; at any rate, the engineer and his mate felt the little bump which means that the 300-ton engine has struck the one-ton car. When they got stopped they found, on the pilot, a little boy of about five years dead. The father and mother were in fields to right and left.

“There was only one man who could possibly, under heaven, have averted that accident,” said the engineer, a pathetic look on his face, in remembrance of that horror. “And it was not I.”

Thundering through, the great engine cannot dodge. Either it must travel at its modern speed or railways must give up. And no matter whether the speed is sixty or twenty, the relative danger is still there.

What is the answer? In Ontario alone, in 1924, 63 persons were killed and 132 non-fatally injured in level crossing collisions. Ontario alone. The figures for the present year, to date, are 43 killed and 132 injured, in Ontario alone.2 The National Railways supplies the Safety League with statistics as to all cars that crash through gates after they have been lowered. This year the number has been 70. So gates, in a sense, are an actual menace, since a car that crashes gates stalls on the tracks, naturally.

Several of the United States have adopted the “stop law” at all level crossings. That is, motor cars and other vehicles must come to an absolute stop at level crossings at all times, whether there is a train coming or not. This necessitates the car changing gear and crossing in low or second. It permits warning signals to be seen or heard.

What inconvenience, what injustice would the stop law do the motoring public? In a hundred miles of travel a man would have to stop at level crossings an average of half a dozen times. In the course of a day a motorist does stop and change gears half a dozen times merely from the ordinary hazards and chances of the road, either a hole in the pavement, a detour obstruction, a traffic jam. Would the stop-law be so great an inconvenience?

Over a hundred dead in the past two years seem to testify in Ontario alone that the stop- law is due.

Thundering through they must thunder through, those great trains. A whole transportation system depends on the exactness of arrivals and departures.

On what depends the speed and the care of a motorist on the highway?

Just lives, human lives.


Editor’s Notes:

  1. Wigwags is a nickname for a type of railroad grade crossing signal once common in North America, referring to its pendulum-like motion that signaled a train’s approach. They seem to have been use from the 1920s to the late 1940s where they began to be phased out in favour of flashing lights. ↩︎
  2. Current information on deaths and injuries can be found on the Operation Lifesaver website, which also has good information on railway safety. ↩︎

Is This a Cow?

November 26, 1932

By Gregory Clark, November 26, 1932.

We have got some inside information, a scoop in fact, to the effect that the Ontario government and the Hon. Mr. Challies in particular are sick and tired of the shooting question and have decided to do with the sportsmen what they have done with the motorist.

They are going to make him pass an examination.

A shooting license, like a driving license, will have to be earned as well as bought.

The way things are now Ontario is a fairly law-abiding community for ten and a half months of the year. Then all of a sudden, in October, about forty thousand men get a touch of frost on their pumpkins, or something, and they snatch up their weapons and go skirmishing in all directions.

They have a few days after partridges and pheasants, during which chickens, ducks, pet dogs, cows, horses and hired men are shot in large numbers.

During the deer season, when high-power rifles loaded with dum-dum bullets are fired off all over the summer resort regions by some thirty thousand hunters, other hunters, horses, cows and porcupines are amongst the trophies. Roofs are punctured, boats are sunk, countless bottles are burst to splinters, tin cans scuppered and out-houses perforated.

Our information is to the effect that the government is going to put an end to all this. It is going to educate the sportsmen.

Night school classes are to be organized all over the province, unless our information is wrong, and every man who hopes to take out a shooting license next season will have to win a certificate from school before he can be issued a permit to shoot.

The schools are to be run on the well-known kindergarten system, with pictures being the secret of the method.

“This Is A Cow” will be inscribed on a large lithograph of a cow. Sheep, horses, chickens of all plain and fancy breeds will have to be memorized. A suggestion has already been offered the government that a well-known German song, sung by ‘Varsity students for half a century, might be employed. “Ist Das Nicht Ein Schnitzelbonk?” is the name of the song. The teacher, using a pointer, sings:

“Is this not a mooley cow?”

And the sportsmen’s class, all in happy unison, sing back:

“Yes, that is a mooley cow.”

Chorus:

“Oh, you lovely,

Oh, you pretty,

Oh, you darling mooley cow!”

And so on, through the quadrupeds, fowls and other creatures that Ontario city and town hunters are not yet thoroughly familiar with.

War in Niagara Peninsula

This system has a great deal of merit in it. As it is now, pheasant shooting down in the Niagara peninsula is sadly in need of rousing music and song to make it real warfare. The platoons and battalions of pheasant shooters, as they march across the fields and vineyards, could sing these college songs, rousingly, as they advance to the attack. It would give a fine martial tone to the pheasant shooting which is all it lacks now. The captains of the shooting parties could watch out for domestic and agricultural animals, and whenever one is spied they could shout out:

“Is that not a Plymouth Rock?1

“Yaw, dot iss a Plymouth Rock.”

Altogether:

“Oh, you lovely,

Oh, you fatty,

Oh, you sweety Plymouth Rock!”

And another innocent life would be spared.

On taking the full course of sportsmen’s night school the attentive pupil will be awarded a diploma, which indicates to an anxious rural population that the graduate is entitled to affix the initial. B.S. after his name, meaning Bachelor of Sport. He knows the main broad principles in distinguishing between a tame duck and a cock pheasant and between a Holstein cow and a deer. It would not take in Lou Marsh’s wambeazle2. That is a post-graduate course. Pupils will be trained to hold their fire whenever a wambeazle or other unspecified animal leaps out in front of them.

When Canada raised its army of 500,000 men it was supposed that this being a new and pioneer country the art of shooting would come readily to Canadians. But the fact

was that just as much time had to be spent patiently dinging the simple laws of marksmanship and care of arms into Canadians as into Cockneys from Bow Bells.

It took weeks to train any company of men to handle their rifles safely. Then it took weeks more to get them to hold their rifles in such a way as to hit the target if they could aim. Then they were taught aiming.

And when everything was finished about ten in a hundred could get into the bull.

However, despite this knowledge of the facts in regard to shooting, Canadian law allows anybody who has the price to buy any kind of gun or rifle he likes and to go gunning for any kind of game he can afford, from artificially planted and reared pheasants in the most densely populated agricultural district in Canada to wallowing after moose north of the Transcontinental.

The modern pump gun in the hands of an expert will fire five shots so fast that five ducks, travelling at the rate of seventy miles an hour, will be blasted down out of the air by powerfully driven loads of scattered shot reaching out sixty to seventy yards. The modern rifle, such as the .270 Winchester, is far more powerful than any army rifle, shoots an explosive bullet so fast that in travelling two hundred yards it rises only two inches above the line of sight. Twenty-five thousand deer hunters this season tried to scatter themselves far enough apart to escape any danger from these modern whizz-bangs. And they didn’t altogether succeed.

To Bring Gunners Under Control

So far the government has touched everything to control hunting but the hunter. It has banned dogs. It limits the number and kind of game that can be shot and the days on which shooting may be done. But it hasn’t said anything about who can shoot. You are tested to be a car driver. You are bonded to be a bank clerk. Educated to be a doctor. Examined to be an engineer. To take up an aeroplane and endanger only yourself you must go through a fearful rigmarole with two governments. But to take out a stick of dynamite in the shape of a modern gun or rifle all you need is the price. It took months to make soldiers even moderate marksmen.

But an army of deer hunters, most of whom never have their rifles out of their cases except on the one or two-week hunting trip, with soft muscles, jumpy nerves, buck fever, goose flesh and wet feet, are entrusted with the responsibility of slaying Ontario’s game neatly and humanely, as licensed experts with the gun. It can’t be done.

The whole thing is very complicated and grows no less complicated with every year’s increase in the number of shooters.

The situation respecting the shooting of pheasants and partridge in the agricultural districts of the province appears to be reaching an impasse.

One solution offered eight years ago and never recognized is this: that the government. oblige all bird shooters not only to have a government license but a permit signed by the owner of the land on which they are shooting. The license itself could be large enough to have on its reverse side a form of permit, with several spaces for signatures. If shooting on wild or crown land no permission would be required. But in the Niagara peninsula, before invading any private property – and there is no public property on which to shoot there – the gunners would have to obtain the signature of the owner. It would be trouble, of course. Plenty of land-owners, when faced with the request, would refuse. To-day hundreds of farmers and fruit growers would prefer to have no shouters banging about their lands, but are afraid to interfere for fear of being considered poor sports. Hundreds of others have posted their land who would be perfectly willing to permit shooters to kill a few pheasants if those shooters came in straightforward fashion and showed themselves and asked for permission – or paid for it!

Why should not the farmer be paid for the nuisance and the damage done to his land by the shooters or to his fruit crops by the pheasants? A farmer who charges for the privilege of fishing for trout in his brook is not a poor sport. He is simply taking steps to keep the mob off his place and also to make a little rightful money. It is true the pheasants were planted by the government. But it is doubtful if the farmer, on whose land the pheasant subsists, was consulted by the government. If the farmer likes pheasants on his land, the government certainly has no privilege to admit shooters on to private land. If the farmer does not like the pheasants on his land he should be privileged to do as he likes about it.

But of all the rational means of bringing several thousand gunners under control the simplest seems to be the hundred per cent. posting of all land in the pheasant country and then the demand, by the government, not by the land-owners, that everyone who shoots on other than his own land, obtain a signed permit of the land-owner.

Twenty-five men in cars, working from telephones at strategic points, could put this law into effect in such fashion in one season that the present ruthless, reckless, rowdy and unsportsmanlike system – perfect for the local sportsmen who have the inside dope, just a panic for the outsiders – would be cured in one year.


Editor’s Notes:

  1. A Plymouth Rock is a type of chicken. ↩︎
  2. Lou Marsh was the sports editor for the Toronto Star at the time. The must of been some lore related to the “wambeazle” at the time that I’m not understanding. ↩︎

Neighbors

October 21, 1922

By Gregory Clark, October 21, 1922.

If it is neighbors you want, go north.

If you are sick of the soft, fickle hand of city brotherhood, head for some place beyond North Bay.

If you are seeking the Land of the Golden Rule, you will find it, chances are, in a blackened and forsaken and dismal country lying between Cobalt and Englehart…

An old man comes limping up the hill to the relief car at Charlton. He must be all of seventy. His overcoat is six sizes too large for him. A boy’s cap perches on top of his old grey head. His broken shoes are sodden with slush. He seeks each spot he sets his foot. He winces with each step.

As he approaches the little group huddled about the door of the lone express car, a woman sitting on a box rises to give the old man her place.

“Sit down, woman,” says the old man. “A fine day, everybody?”

It isn’t. But they all agree it is.

He rests against the car. Presently his turn comes to stand before the opulent open door.

“Now, dad, what?” says the constable dishing out supplies.

“Somethin’ warm for an old woman and an old man,” says the old fellow.

“Well, you’ve got a coat,” begins the constable.

“Oh, ’tain’t for me,” says the old man. “It’s for an old couple, neighbors of mine. They are too old to come, so I come for them. They…”

“Were you burned out?” queries the constable.

“Me and them and the whole concession,” says the old man. “We are all starting over again in W—‘s barn. Now, the old woman, she needs a cloak…”

“How far have you come?”

“Oh, three, four mile.”

Out come priceless things from the express car – coats, sweaters, stockings, heavy wool underclothes.

The old man’s arms heap up. A boy steps over and says —

“I’ll help you carry them, mister.”

“You go help your own father,” says the old man, sternly.

And down the hill he goes limping, under a large bundle tied in a sheet.

A neighbor.

A big, mustached man is standing at a crossroads, his back to the driving rain.

Every party that comes trudging up the road has women and children in it. The big fellow halts them all.

“Where are you heading?”

“Englehart,” they answer.

“It’ll be dark in an hour. Never make it to-night. My place is half a mile up the side road here. Something to eat and room for the woman and kids in the house if you’ll share the barn with me.”

“Thanks, mister.”

The heavy-hearted little parties turn off the lonely road up the muddy side road.

And the neighbor stands with his big back to the spinning rain, watching up the desolate highroad.

A middle-aged man sits in the shelter of a bit of ruined brick wall. In his arms is cuddled a baby in a piece of soiled white blanket.

“A pretty baby,” I say to him. “Is it your only child?”

He blushes with the violence of the northerner.

“This ain’t mine,” he says. “Mine is all growed up. This one belongs to a young woman that took sick and they took her out to New Liskeard in a buggy. I’m carrying her baby in.”

“Why, it’s miles!” I exclaim.

“Well, I’ve come miles. But I’ll meet a car pretty soon, I figure. Anyway, it don’t matter – he’s nice and warm.”

Amid the ruins of what once was a house, a barn and a cow stable, a broad young man is toiling with an axe and some long nails and blackened remnants of timber.

Both his hands are swathed in dirty bandages. Above the bandages his wrists show scarlet and raw. He handles his axe gingerly, clumsily.

He proudly surveys the pitiful little lean-to he has made out of brittle charred boards.

“What’s this you’re making?” I ask.

“Well,” says he, resting gratefully. “It’s a sort of a cow shed. If my hands weren’t burned I could cut some logs out of that bit of swale over yonder that escaped the burn. But this’ll do fine, for a while.”

“Was this your homestead?”

“No, it belonged to a fellow I worked for, summer before last. He got all messed up saving his own kids and his neighbors, so I says to him I’ll fix up a shelter for his cows.”

If you don’t believe these legends, go and see for yourself.


Editor’s Note: Greg was sent to cover the Great Haileybury Fire that ravaged the Timiskaming District from October 4 to 5, 1922. It has been called one of the ten worst natural disasters in Canadian history.

Premier Ferguson the Home Work Prohibitionist Was the Fighting Terror of His Schoolmasters

October 4, 1924

By Gregory Clark, October 4, 1924.

Pranks, Politics and Scraps Made Up Boyhood of Ontario’s First Son – Whenever He Can He Goes Home to His Folks at Morrisburg – Aims at Restoring Responsibility in Province’s Schools – Forswore Big Salary and Life of Ease Because He Is a Fighter

G. Howard Ferguson1 sat in the wood shed.

His father and mother sat in earnest talk in the office of the big stone house.

“He is going from bad to worse,” said Mrs., Ferguson. “You are away at the sessions of parliament a great deal, and you don’t know what is going on.”

“Hmph!” said Dr. Ferguson. “Don’t I!”

“This time,” continued Mrs. Ferguson, “the principal of the high school says he does not see he is going to take Howard back. It was serious offense against the discipline of the school. He put gunpowder into the stove, which blew off the lid and a kettle for distilling moisture into the class room air…”

Dr. Ferguson, M.P., stood up.

“There is one thing we mustn’t forget. It takes brains to think up mischief. It takes spirit to carry it through. I prefer a young rascal to a mollycoddle. If we can only control him until the serious affairs of life begin to interest him, I am certain Howard will be a success, for he is filled with vigor and ardor. Why, he may some day be premier!”

And with a chuckle the doctor walked out wards the wood shed. For his sly reference to Howard and the premiership would settle Mrs. Ferguson. She was born of a political family, and here she was the wife of a politician, and doing her best to raise a family of politicians.

G. Howard Ferguson continued to sit in the wood shed, his chin sunk in his hands, gloomily pondering the mysteries of existence, until his grave parent entered, and read him a stern and final ultimatum with respect to his future conduct.

All this was forty years ago. It would have by now been forgotten if a little girl, devoted worshiper of the wicked Howard, had not lain cuddled in her crib in the next room, listening intently to the ominous conversation of her parents.

What Does Kemptville Say?

I went down to Kemptville, near Ottawa, to try and obtain a “line” on the premier of Ontario. In The Star library, where files are put on all public men, there is a fat file labeled Furguson. But in those papers and photographs there is not one picture of the premier except in the political aspect, and not one printed line but is political.

Since his announcement of the temperance plebiscite the whole province is sharply curious as to the human aspect of the Hon. G. Howard Ferguson. Politics reveals most men. Politics has clothed the premier in a voluminous garment. What is he like, with the toga off? What’s his sport, his hobby, his life?

Kemptville holds the answer, entire.

Because Kemptville knows so much about Premier Ferguson, the rest of Ontario knows little.

By a boiling process, I could reduce my adventures down to a few paragraphs in estimate of the man.

But we won’t boil. Come on with me.

I landed into Kemptville before seven o’clock of a bright and frosty morning. A gentleman in whiskers, representing a large implement firm, was the only other passenger besides myself to be deposited at Allen’s Hotel.

A boy of fourteen was sweeping the sidewalk in front of a neighboring store.

“Where does the premier live?” I asked him.

“Just up the street there. But he ain’t here now. He’s in Toronto.”

“I just came up to get some information about him.”

“Oh? Well, you came to the right place.”

“What sort of a man is he?” I asked.

The boy studied me curiously.

“Say, he’s the best… Say, do you know, he gives orders to the schools to issue out ice cream tickets to us, every fair time, and this year I got three. Howard’s the best man in the world. He never walked past me in his life. You ask anybody.”

A sound within the store set the boy vigorously sweeping again. So I went into the hotel. Mr. Allen greeted me. I told him my business.

“Anybody,” said Mr. Allen, “can tell you something about Howard. But you must be sure to see Mrs. Dr. Storey – that’s his sister – and you must pay a visit to the ‘board of trade.'”

He smiled and showed me through the window a little grey shop across the road from the hotel.

Sitting There for 25 Years

“That’s Bill Hyland’s shoe repairing shop. But it is better known hereabouts as the ‘board of trade.’ That’s where the boys sit. You will find some of them there at any hour of the day. When Howard is home, he sits in there, too. They know Howard. He’s been sitting in there for twenty-five years.”

Already I began to have an inkling of the situation – and an inkling of the Hon. G. Howard Ferguson. So, to see how far this thing was going to go, I resolved to ask everybody about the premier. I got Alf. Little to drive me around in his ancient Ford. Alf. is older than the premier, but went to school with him.

“What kind of a man is he? What was he like when he was a kid?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” said Alf. “He was only so high. But he could lick you to a standstill. Next minute, he would lick anybody that touched you. As far as I can remember, he didn’t do anything but fight. But he was the most popular kid in the town. He’s never changed. Still fighting, all the time, still licking bullies, still befriending everybody, still the most popular kid in town.”

When the sun came up and shone fair down into the main street of Kemptville, there began to be signs of life. Merchants opened up their doors and let down the awnings. Boys swept off the pavement. And then appeared a few elderly gentlemen who marched leisurely, from different directions, halting for brief chats with all who were out, but converging definitely upon Bill Hyland’s cobbler shop.

So I went in, too. Bill Hyland is one of those lean, gentle, genial men who beam behind spectacles. His shop is the typical cobbler’s shop, littered with old boots and leather, the walls covered with cards and papers, the air reeking with the pungent, friendly smell of leather. Grouped about the little den, on chairs without backs, sat three members of the board of trade.

“The premier comes in here, when he’s in, town?” I asked.

“When he’s home,” corrected Bill Hyland. “He sits right there, on that box by the window, with his legs crossed, smoking and leaning his head back.”

“What does he talk about?”

“Whatever there is to talk about. He’s been sitting there for years. I don’t know how many. He’s one of the bunch. The only difference his being premier has made is to keep him away from home.”

“He’s closed his law office,” I said.

“Yes, but not his home. His farm is still going strong. He comes home whenever he can, and sets to work on his farm and comes in here to talk with the boys, the same as ever.”

“I guess he is pretty popular in Kemptville.”

“Why shouldn’t he be? He’s lived here all his life. We’ve known him since he was a kid. He’s a friend to everybody. And he has made good. And he still lives in Kemptville.”

He is a Small-Town Man

In this quiet town, Howard Ferguson was born and raised. Back to it he came, after seven years’ exposure to the charms of the big city during his university and law courses. From it he came to Toronto as member of the legislature and cabinet minister and premier. But back to it he still comes whenever the increasing responsibilities of Toronto permit.

And here we have the reason he is not known, as other public men come to be known, to the big city. Because he is a small-town man. Unlike Whitney and Hearst2, he has not transferred his interests and his home to Toronto when big politics called. It is a character hunt we are on, and hero we have the first clue: when he can, he goes home to his folks.

The board of trade was a little bit stand-offish with me, for there is dynamite in politics, and who knew but that I might be an enemy within the lines?

“They tell me Howard was a live wire, as a young fellow,” I suggested to the meeting, by way of setting loose the anecdotes. The boys exchanged smiling glances.

“You see Mrs. Dr. Storey,” said Bill Hyland, tapping at his last. “She will have it right.”

So at last I came to the big stone house where, the premier’s sister lives. She was the same little girl who lay curled in her crib listening to the fateful words of her parents the night G. Howard Ferguson sat alone in the wood shed.

“The premier’s success in politics,” I said to her, “comes, as such things come, from character and not from chance. Are we right in regarding him as a fighter, a man of high spirit and energy, to whom politics is second nature, whose hobby is politics, whose fun is politics, whose life is politics?”

Raised in Political Atmosphere

“It would have been a great wonder,” replied Mrs. Storey, “if Howard had not gone into politics and made a success of politics. For he was born and raised in an atmosphere thick with politics.

“When he was three years old, his father, Dr. Ferguson, entered the Federal house for the first time, and remained a member of parliament for twenty-five years. So, for the formative years of his life, Howard lived in the thick of it, when politics was a greater game than it is to-day.

“This house had three spare bedrooms, always kept in readiness for the political guest. There were guests to dinner nearly every night, and politics was the talk at table.

“Howard’s mother was even more interested in politics than his father, for it may fairly be said that she did a great deal to organize and plan the doctor’s campaigns, and she had much to do with the success of his career.

“So you may see Howard should be pretty well grounded in the current history of politics. What a boy listens to at the table, every day of his life, is likely to influence him.

“Then, the practical side of politics, the manual labor of the game, has been familiar to him from childhood. By the time he was ten years of age, he was out driving through the country distributing campaign literature, posting up notices, and accompanying his father on canvassing trips, learning the art of political discussion and of soliciting a vote. These things were not chores to him. They were manly stuff, and he took the most ardent interest in the whole game. I recall him coming home to dinner with the latest political gossip he had picked up sitting around the stores with the men of the town. And I remember his goings and comings on winter nights near election time, when he was driving through the country in a cutter, going messages for his father, delivering literature or arranging the practical details of meetings.

“Of course, character was being formed during these adventures, but the practical lessons in politics which he learned in boyhood seem to have been invaluable to him, and to have had some influence in directing his steps.”

Was Forever into Mischief

I turned Mrs. Storey’s memory towards his character as a boy. Was he a fighter?

She laughed.

“I regret to say, he was forever into mischief. He was so eager a disposition, so full of energy and vitality. I imagine he could not be content with the ordinary outlets offered to boys. It must be confessed that he was frequently suspended and expelled from school, because of his mischief. Fred Napp, of roller boat fame3, wore two gold teeth in front, as the result of a shinny argument with Howard. I remember him coming home with black eyes, and other wounds, which only endeared him to me the more.

“He used to go with other boys back to the gipsy camp and play cards with the gipsies. When he was attending high school, one of his favorite games was to attend auction sales in the town and when any well-known town, skinflint began to bid for something. Howard would bid too, running bids up to much more than the other had hoped to pay, and when Howard felt he had gone as far as was safe, he would drop out.

“Only one time, if I remember, did he get caught. He bid against a certain character in town for a lot of old railroad lamps, an old gun and a broken carpet sweeper. And the other dropped out, leaving Howard the winner of the contest at $8.35. This was one of the two times that Howard got a switching from his father. For father had to pay the money for the junk.

“It was after the escapade of the powder in the stove at school that his father sent Howard down to the shanties for a week to work at hauling out railway ties.

“He was not a success at school, because of his mischief. He had his ups and his downs. But his father was not alarmed, for he said that if this energy, and invention could be turned to the serious affairs of life in due time, the boy would be a success. And that has proved true.”

The Fights in Harding’s Mill

Not Mrs. Storey, but Jim Hagen and a couple of the other old schoolmates of the premier told of the fights in Harding’s flour mill. Old man Harding would put up coppers for the boys to fight for. On the big bare mill floor the boys would gather after school and, paired off, would fight till “nuff” was called, the winner taking the one cent stakes.

Howard was the top boy in his class in this fighting. Jim Hagen remembers him fighting ten fights in succession, and taking boys a good deal bigger than himself in order to compete in the copper stakes.

“He became a mighty skilful scrapper,” said Jim Hagen, “but mind you, it was only for sport.”

Howard got into trouble once, though. The system of initiation into the high school war known as “blocking.” It is nowadays known as the “royal bumps.” The novices are taken by head and feet and bumped against a brick wall.

Howard was one of the four lads who undertook to give the bumps to a big lad named Brown. It was a rule that each new boy had to step up himself and take the bumps, for if he backed down, heaven help him. Brown had to be seized by force to take his initiation. And in giving him the bumps, he was injured. The father had the case up before the magistrate. and Howard was fined $8.

“He announced, at that time,” said one of the chums who also was fined, “that he was going to enter the profession of law. And he did.”

G. Howard Ferguson sat in a little bedroom in the house at 191 McCaul street, Toronto. On the floor lay his carpet bag, unopened.

Here he was, in the midst of the great city the world before him. The principal of the school had finally and irrevocably decided that he could no longer countenance Howard’s mischief and infraction of the discipline of the school.

And here was Howard, not a matriculant, sent up to Toronto by his father, to try to matriculate in the university at the Toronto examinations.

He was lonely and alone. He had reported at the Y. M. C. A. and at the registrar’s office. Not a soul had spoken to him. He had registered. And there on the floor of this strange room, so far from merry Kemptville, lay his carpet bag unopened.

Would He Head for the West?

Would he stick it? Or would he grab his bag and disappear – go out west where all the youth and adventure of that day were heading?

At that moment, there came a rap on the door, and a big fellow by the name of Jack Ferguson walked in.

He was a third year student at the university.

“I happened to notice your name on the roll,” said the stranger, “and my name being Ferguson, I thought we Fergusons should stand together.”

The older fellow took young Howard in tow, introduced him into the life of the university, got him into the football club, and Howard gave up all dreams of going west, and sailed into his matriculation with his usual vigor.

He settled down to seven years of college in Toronto, to his degree in law.

Character: a distinctly independent nature, with the ingenuity to devise mischief and the spirit to see it through, even to the extent of being, finally, sent up alone to face matriculation in the big strange city. He was no compromiser.

The comic coincidence of the thing is that the very day I was learning all these mischievous exploits of the boy the man was giving to the press of the province the details of the great educational reform which he, as minister of education, as well as prime minister, has devised.

When I got home from Kemptville, I got an appointment with the premier and told him I had been down to the old town and had dug up some great tales of his boyhood.

“Go ahead,” said he. “Our sins will find us out.”

“But,” said I, “isn’t it odd that these things should be told just at the moment you announce your educational reforms?”

“I have in mind,” said the premier, “some of the things that happened to me as a boy, when I make the changes I have suggested. Responsibility is the thing! It was want of responsibility that made me a mischief. So I advised responsibility of my own.

“Don’t imagine for a minute that my schoolmasters did not leave impressions on me that have lasted all my life. A man to whom I owe as much as to anybody in the world was a schoolmaster whom I met after I had left school, but who taught me this philosophy: Never worry and never lose your temper.

“But responsibility is a good philosophy, of which we have almost lost sight of in recent times, so religiously have we sought, with infinite organization and regulation, to take all responsibility off teachers and children and mankind as a whole. My desire, in the reforms I have outlined, is to restore responsibility to teachers and children. I want to bring back the old personal contact between teacher and pupil which you will find amongst the best memories of the older men. The legendary schoolmaster who left the imprint of his character on his pupils.

“I have cut the book of official regulations which bind and tie the teachers and pupils of this province from two and a half inches thick to one inch. I hope to do more. Set them free. A boy isn’t a pail in which to pour facts. He is a material to inspire with life, to galvanize into glorious life. If you hold him, he will wriggle — Thank heaven!

“Go ahead with your stories if you want to. They will be no different to the stories that could be told of every schoolboy in the country.”

Tied Knots in the Bell Rope

Aye. Howard, of the time you tied the knots in the bell rope so that the lame teacher couldn’t reach it (and went and visited and ministered unto him when he was ill,) and of upsetting the bell so that it wouldn’t ring (and only one boy bold enough to climb the roof and set it right,) of unscrewing all the seats and desks from the floor the day the inspector called, and the vast hullaballoo and confusion when the pupils came in and sat down with a crashing and smashing under the grave inspector’s outraged eye, (and you suspended, no questions asked, but just the teacher saying weakly: “Howard! Leave the room!”) and so on and so on.

When he came back from College, and set up his shingle as a barrister and solicitor, his well remembered talent for raising heck did not work against him, for he at once obtained a good practice in the law which involves the interests of a small town: suits, mortgages, property law. What energy he had to spare from the establishing of a law practise he put into the town council, being a town councillor, reeve and a member of the school board. (His mind turns to education.) Then in 1902 he went up before the Conservative convention for nomination to the provincial house, but failed to get in. In 1905 he again went before the convention and went in when the Whitney government came to power.

This, of course, brought him into his stride. When he was invited into the cabinet he wired his mother, who was already on her death bed, of the realization of her dreams, this gifted lady who had been into politics all her days, and it was a great triumph for her.

Stuck to Home Folks

But he never abandoned the home folks. When he came into Bill Hyland’s place, as a cabinet minister, he took the same seat as ever, and they still called him Howard.

When he went back as prime minister, it was the same.

Kemptville has a beautiful big agricultural college and experimental farm now (since Howard’s accession to the cabinet) and a fine armories, (of, recent date). Why not? The big house he lives in he has had twenty years, with the farm. He was a success before he was a political success.

His farm makes him money. It has an orchard of five hundred trees, and he fattens hogs and steers. and grows corn and vegetables. He could live off his farm. Last season, he got the best price in the township for his hogs.

In 1920, when the Hearst government went down to defeat. Hon. Howard Ferguson announced to his colleagues and friends that he was through with politics. It was generally known that a very big industrial corporation were after him, and had offered him a salary of some thirty thousand dollars to look after their foreign interests.

It was a beautiful prospect, to spend his richest years – he was now fifty – with money and travel all over the world, with his wife for he has no children. It was the sort of goal a man dreams of. An end to all the responsibilities and burdens for polities is a master that lets a man not many paces from the door. An end to struggle and care – just to travel and deal in big, accustomed matters, from Norway to Japan, Paris, London, the world!

Howard Ferguson, the small-town man, had never traveled. Here, in 1920, before the vigorous, active man was a dream vista, ahead, down the years.

He Simply Couldn’t Quit

He was through. He told his colleagues, his constituents, his friends. His colleagues pleaded. His party begged. Big Tories came down from Ottawa to argue with him, to beg him. But he was going.

Then came the timber enquiry.

“You can’t go now!” his colleagues cried. “It would look as though you were running away.”

“Let them talk. It won’t hurt me. I have nothing to hide.”

“But It will damage the party if you quit,” they argued. “Even if you feel no hurt, it will hurt the party. Fight, Howard, fight!”

As the twig is bent…

He had his plans made. His affairs were more than half put in shape. He had accepted the big corporation’s offer. His wife and he had planned trips, voyages. They had spent nights and nights planning, reveling, scheming.

And then character began to function.

The fights in Harding’s mill, for Old Man Harding’s coppers, the politics around the table, the Party, the trips in the winter night stacking up dodgers on country cross-roads, the meetings, the argument, Bill Hyland’s “board of trade,” the home folks, fight, fight.

So the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho love and sung. Also, the capitals of Europe, calling, calling, ease, wealth, independence, an end to fighting, fighting-Howard stayed.

He walked the floor all one night. His wife had said: “We will stay!”

The next morning he came out with his famous, “nail-their-hides-to-the-fence.”

And he is premier.

When he announced to a contentious province the holding of a temperance vote, the province asks, sharply curious: “What manner of man is he, himself, apart from politics? What is his life? What does he play?”

Well, there you are!


Editor’s Notes:

  1. Howard Ferguson was the 9th Premier of Ontario from 1923-1930. ↩︎
  2. James Whitney was the 6th Premier of Ontario from 1905-1914. William Howard Hearst was the 7th Premier of Ontario from 1914-1919. ↩︎
  3. The Knapp Roller Boat was a weird attempt to increase speed and reduce sea sickness. ↩︎

Quick-Lunch Justice

“Sixty-eight years old!” exclaims the lawyer. “It is admitted he tried to pick the pocket. But he is so old, your worship.”

By Gregory Clark, September 22, 1928.

“This court,” states Magistrate Robert J. Browne, “stands adjourned for one hour for lunch. It will continue if necessary until midnight.

“We will have no quick-lunch justice here!”

Quick-lunch justice!

Everything about the old Toronto police court calls for quick-lunch justice. Justice slid along the greasy counter. Justice slapped down on the plate. The dingy old court room shouts for it. The dark and dismal corridor outside the door where distressed mankind waits for all the world like a Hogarth1 drawing of the Old Bailey – all shout for quick-lunch justice. For mercy’s sake, make it speedy.

Here is a court room that was built in 1899. In 1899, a buggy was the fastest thing on Toronto’s streets. In 1899 there were less than 200,000 people in Toronto. Booze provided only one or two problems – drunks, desertions. Now booze has become a complex thing, bootleggers, motorists, dives. In 1899 it was an honor and privilege to appear before Colonel Denison2 in the beautiful spacious new court room..

But age withers.

The windows of the police court to-day have shrunk to slits that let in a gray light. The curtains are drab and faded. The woodwork seems stained by countless sinful vapors.

The roar of a great city forbids that windows be opened. The tumult of the gears which turn the wheels of justice in this old room make it sometimes impossible for the court to proceed. On one day recently, Magistrate Browne sat from ten o’clock in the morning until four-fifteen in the afternoon before the “morning” court was ended.

Five different police courts exist in Toronto, and except for a small committee-room next door to the main court room, the old police court has somehow to accommodate them all. The “drunk” court, now shrunken to a little formality of twenty minutes. Then the main criminal police court, which in the heyday of Colonel Denison, used to run from ten to twelve o’clock and which now runs on and on, sometimes into the late afternoon; the women’s court in the little crowded committee-room, the traffic court in the afternoon wherever it can be accommodated, and on certain days, the health court, which sandwiches itself wherever it can find a high desk and a fragment of silence.

In this one year, there will be one hundred and twenty-five thousand cases pass through these courts!

The Police Court Midway

What is guarding Toronto, then, from quick-lunch justice? From slap-stick justice?

The corridor is like a midway. Toughs and gentle women witnesses; babies in arms, thundering policemen, sick people, broken-hearted people, grim accusers, sly, shifty ones – the human midway, the corridor of the Toronto police court.

Toronto’s court has no witness rooms, no counsel’s rooms, no privacy whatsoever. The law of the land is that the court room shall be public. Whoever gets there first gets a seat in the court room, and the rest are herded into the corridor, to listen and strain amidst the shadowy din to their names called. Lawyers must consult their clients in this public highway. Witnesses, tragic or cold, gentle or rough, must all sit together and take away a nightmare with them when they go.

Common human sympathy urges everybody to hurry, to get the thing over and done with.

But Toronto’s five magistrates live in fear. They live in fear of being influenced by physical conditions around them. They do not know from one hour to the next which court room they will be in. Nothing is ordered or orderly. They live in a kind of pandemonium, but they will not err in the direction of speed.

“There will be no quick-lunch justice here,” says Magistrate Browne.

“Lewis Harris,” cries the clerk of the court.

“Lewis Harris,” echoes the constable of the dock.

At the back, the public is wedged in tight in the benches. In all the standing room, constables and detectives, witnesses and officials are packed in. The dock is filled with a row of midway spectacles, who look like the men who sing, in a Balieff ballet3, the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”4 One of them, Lewis Harris, rises and stands forth.

Between him and Magistrate Browne on his high bench, are the lawyers, privileged characters, who rise and sit, bend and scuffle, talk and wave documents, come and go. Over all this scene there quivers a tumult of sound and movement.

But away up against the high panelled wall, alone and aloof, in black coat and wing collar, sits the young magistrate. He is handsome in the Greek way. His eyes are intense blue and very wide and quiet. He has a broad, strong mouth, which turns down in a faint sardonic smile when the rumpus of his court reaches one of the panics of physical congestion.

He is at rest. None of the excitement seems to reach him. His head is framed against the high panels, and you think the gray hair on his temples is blonde hair, so peaceful is his face.

“Lewis Harris!” cries the clerk of the court. In triumph, as if proud to produce anybody at all amidst all this whirligig.

No Off-Hand Judgment

Harris is an old man, bowed, white-haired, with spectacles down on his nose like a collector of coins.

We are all sympathy at once for Lewis Harris. What crime can be juggled up against so quaint and helpless an old man as this?

Maybe, we thought, he has no home and has come to the end of the long, long tether.

“Pickpocket,” says a voice, amidst the countless whispering, murmuring voices.

It seems that at the Exhibition, two visitors caught Lewis Harris with his hand entering one of their pockets. They held him and a detective arrived.

What an absurdity! Pickpockets are young and nimble and foreign. This man is old and gentle and far from nimble.

A lawyer is standing up, leaning forward and stretching up his arms in gesticulation to Magistrate Browne.

“Sixty-eight years old,” exclaims the lawyer. “It is admitted he tried to pick the pocket. But he is so old, your worship. Deport him. Send him back to the States where he came from. Fell for a momentary temptation.”

But another lawyer is on his feet, a rugby player of a lawyer. He is the crown prosecutor and he holds in his hand a very large sheet of foolscap.

“A record, your worship.” he says in a man’s voice that cuts through the fog, “dating back to 1894. Philadelphia, 1894; Boston, 1896; Chicago, 1899; San Francisco, 1904; Portland, Oregon, 1906; San Antonio, Texas, 1907; Detroit, 1913: Toledo, 1916; Omaha, 1918; Atlanta, Georgia, 1922…”

Why Lewis Harris is no poor old man! He is an adventurer, a world traveller! A man who has seen the world.

“All,” says the prosecutor with the man’s voice, “for picking pockets.”

“Sixty-eight years old!” pleads the lawyer. “He is not long for this world. Deport him, your worship. Send him back to where he belongs.”

The magistrate’s wide blue eyes are staring at the old bent figure below him.

No quick-lunch justice here.

“We can only feel sympathy,” says the magistrate, “for this old man at the end of his life. But the interests of the community must be served. We cannot deport him. That would only create the impression amongst American crooks that they can come up here with impunity, take their chance, and if caught, all their punishment would amount to would be to be sent back home at no expense to themselves. Nine months in the reformatory, and to be deported at the conclusion of his term.”

Thinking Down His Sympathy

The next case is a boy.

He is young and clean and slim. There is a delicate look about him. If we felt sympathy for a sinful old man, we feel even more sympathy for this straight youth of nineteen. He has the face of a poet, and this is no company for poets.

A poor woman hobbles in and sits beside the lawyers at the witness bench.

The boy, it seems, is charged with criminal negligence. He drove a truck and struck down this woman. All the evidence comes out, a doctor concluding with detailed technical description of the injuries. The woman with three little children got off a street car under the Queen St. subway and along out of the gloom came this truck and hurled her to the ground.

The boy walks nervously to the witness box and stands up close to Magistrate Browne. They talk face to face.

“Have you a driver’s license?” asks the magistrate.

“No, sir. I am studying music….”

“He won,” says the boy’s lawyer, “the governor-general’s prize for violin two years ago.”

“I am on my holidays,” continues the boy. “And I was helping my brother. I thought I would help him, so I drove this truck from the repair shop to our home.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen. I got along all right, but coming through the Queen St. subway, it was dim, and I was following the street car. I did not know street cars stopped in the subway. Suddenly. I found myself rushing beside the street car. It was all a whirl. I had struck the woman before I knew anything. It was all over…”

What kind of justice will we get here?

Surely a young man with only a little gray at his temples will feel a great sympathy for this boy and his violin, who suddenly in the dimness found himself rushing past the street car and all his life tumbling about his head.

Do students of the violin go to jail?

“There is nothing in your favor,” says the magistrate, slowly. Let the court beg for hurry. Let anxious fists hammer at the gates. “Nothing in your favor. You are young. You have no license to drive. You are not accustomed to driving. Yet you take a death-dealing machine through the streets of this city. And only the mercy of God prevented you from, killing a woman and two of her three children. This is a dangerous age.”

An almost silence has come on the court and the lawyer stands with jaw fallen. The magistrate is staring with calm eyes at the boy, thinking down his sympathy, thinking it down.

“You will go to the reformatory for one year.”

The student of the violin does not seem to understand. He has not been used to paying. Others pay. He plays.

Will he take his violin to the prison, I wonder?

World is More Complex

Thieves, embezzlers. forgers, thugs, sneaks, they get their time and their share.

Five different men charged with reckless driving, or being drunk in charge of cars, go down to jail.

All one man did was crash into the rear of a truck. He went to jail for ten days. He had had “half a glass of beer” earlier in the day.

“I wish,” says Magistrate Browne, “the press would give greater prominence to the sentences imposed on reckless and negligent drivers. There is no mercy here for men who drive motors negligently and recklessly or when under the influence of liquor in the slightest degree.”

The hours drag on.

Already the traffic court cases for the afternoon are gathering out in the corridor and the confusion and rumpus seems to be on the increase.

Order! Order! Order! The magistrate demands it, sardonically. He has an inspector in the court room whose sole duty is to preserve order and decorum in the court. There are ten or a dozen constables and officials to back him up.

And because the magistrate was once a soldier he gets order, even out of what is clearly inevitable.

But what can you expect of an old and sin-blown court room that dates back to 99. when the fastest thing in Toronto’s streets was a buggy and the only problem booze gave us was drunkenness, to be dealt with in the quick-lunch way, with humorous jests from the bench and comic items in the daily press?

We’ve come a long way. The world is stranger, more complex than in 99.

“Yet,” says Magistrate Browne, “we’ll have no quick-lunch justice here!”


Editor’s Notes: (There was a section of this story that I deleted as it was racist to immigrants).

  1. William Hogarth was an 18th century English artist. ↩︎
  2. George Taylor Denison was a Canadian lawyer, military officer and writer. ↩︎
  3. Nikita F. Balieff was a Russian Armenian born vaudevillian, stage performer, and director. He is best known as the creator and master of ceremonies of La Chauve-Souris theater group. ↩︎
  4. The “Song of the Volga Boatmen” is a well-known traditional Russian song. ↩︎

Great West Populated by Harvesters Who Go Broke

September 8, 1923

By Gregory Clark, September 8, 1923.

Roaring Bunch of Men Go From East Every Summer Seeking Adventure, Find None, and, Without Price of Return Ticket, Stay West and Make Good.

Harvesters going west are like troops going to war in more respects than one.

There is the same noise and abandon. The primitive colonist sleeper cars bear the same crowded and forbidding look. And both harvesters and soldiers are full to the brim with the expectation of high adventure.

And adventure doesn’t come.

Just as the soldier landed with a chilling flop into the drab and unfruitful and uneventful round of spit and polish and drill and the stupid eternity of the trenches, so the harvester, ready for big doings in the wide romantic west, finds a hay fork in his hand, or about twenty square miles of new-cut wheat to be stooked before dark, or a thousand bushels of grain to be heaved by brute force into the separator, amidst a smother of dust and chaff, before the boss calls it a day and lets the cook sound his whistle.

A harvesters’ excursion is spoken of in the east here as something picturesque and outward bound. So it is. Eight hundred men all in a roaring bunch constitute a picture.

But when a harvesters’ excursion hits the west and is smashed by the impact into countless little squads and sections and troops of four or ten or seventeen men, dumped all forlorn off the train at some little packing box way station in middle of a limitless prairie, the romance goes out of it.

Eighty per cent. of the men who leave the east on a harvesters’ excursion hope never to return. They have visions of the Big Chance which life so far has denied them.

And eighty per cent. of that eighty per cent. are broke when they leave the east.

And what are the rewards of a harvester?

In Manitoba, this year, the wage per day ran round $3.50. Out further west it ran to $4 and In seme places as high, as $4.501. The harvester paid strictly by the day. If it rains and there no cutting or stooking or threshing, there is no pay. If it blows up rain about noon there is half a day’s pay, and no more. Sundays, no pay. At four dollars a day, working at most twenty-four days in the one month’s work the harvester must put in before he can use the return stub of his cheap fare, he can earn $96.

He has had to pay $15 plus half a cent a mile beyond Winnipeg to come out west. It will cost him half a cent a mile to Winnipeg and twenty dollars from there heme. If he smokes cigarets and has any other expensive habits the likelihood is he will return to the hard and undemonstrative east as broke as he left it. In fact, many of them are so broke they can’t pay their fare home and have to stay west.

In Brandon I talked with one old chap in the livery business who said that that was how he came to settle in the west – came out harvesting and couldn’t pay his way home. And blamed if he didn’t think the west was largely populated with people in the same predicament.

Thousands of the harvesters don’t get regular jobs helping a farmer for a steady month or six weeks. Only a few lucky ones get taken on with “outfits” – which are threshing gangs that travel from farm to farm. Most of them get a few days’ work at stooking, and then get tired and move over a few miles to some I place they’ve heard about where there are better jobs going begging.

“The trouble with harvesters is this,” said a Manitoba wheat rancher, “the tough ones that can do the hard manual labor of harvesting are a restless crew, either finding fault with the grub or getting into fights or moving on for the sheer love of moving on. The quiet, conscientious fellows are usually those not accustomed to hard manual labor. They will stay on the job, but they can’t handle the work.”

So this army of fifty thousand men dumped into the west every August spreads thin or thick over the map, restless, hard-worked, disillusioned, most of them making just barely enough money to pay their passage back to the east at the end of four to six weeks.

But like old soldiers, who will keep on going to wars no matter how sour the last one turned, there are old harvesters who keep on going west every autumn, moved by the expectation of adventure which is so elusive a jade in this workaday world.

The harvesters’ special from the east, with a three to four day weary jam of passengers, usually pulls into Winnipeg at night. I don’t know whether Winnipeg has arranged that or not. But at any rate the great majority of harvesters never see Winnipeg at all.

Their train pulls in in the dead of night.

As they break, gasping with relief, out of the train that has imprisoned them for four days, into the Winnipeg freight yards, they find themselves being lined up before a small wicketed office under arc lights, where representatives of the Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta government employment bureaus are waiting to inform them where harvesters are required.

The expeditionary nature of the excursion goes out of the harvesters’ special right there in Winnipeg.

“Have you any place in mind?” asks the agent.

“No,” replies the harvester.

“How about Lethbridge?” says the agent. “Twenty-five men wanted there at once by farmers not ten miles out.”

“Done.”

“Have you the fare?”

Then the harvester walks over to the ticket booths and gets his half cent a mile fare to Lethbridge.

“A train for Lethbridge leaves from here in two hours,” says the ticket man.

It is three o’clock in the morning. Winnipeg lies cold and asleep without. The harvester goes out to see Winnipeg, walks a deserted block, rambles back to the station to sit till his train is ready in the dawn. Gets aboard, pounds westward another few hundred miles in a colonist sleeper, and wakes up to be debarked in Lethbridge.

Farmers are waiting at the employment bureaus in the station. The harvester is hailed by the farmer.

“How much a day?”

“Four dollars, sleep in the house, home cooking.”

The great majority go to no such town as Lethbridge for the jumping off place. They find themselves unloaded, amid the cheerful hoots of fellow passengers, at a little packing case station, without a human habitation in sight for all the miles and miles of bronzed fields on every side. Half a dozen farmers are waiting, with motor cars and flat wagons, to snaffle such men as are getting off at that point.

Thefts of good men occur. When the train stops at one of these little jerkwater stations, and ten men debark for fifteen farmers waiting, the farmers will jump aboard the train, swiftly scan the cars, and make take-it-or-leave-it offers to the best looking men in the car. That is, men booked through to further points.

Or they will run along the open windows of the car, calling:

“Any good men in there want four dollars a day and six weeks steady work?”

“I want five old hands.”

“Two men wanted – have you had any experience? Hop out. Four a day.”

Many of the farmers won’t take pot luck in the men sent. They prefer to board the train and pick out the men they want on appearance, offering them half a dollar a day extra for a bribe. In this way they get the men they want.

In nearly all the farms, which run from a half section of 320 acres to a section of 640 acres, the harvesters are taken right into the home of the farmer and eat at the family board. On the big wheat ranches of one and two or more sections, the farmer has a bunk house built within the tree enclosure in which his homestead stands and which is used for accommodating harvesters only. He hires a cook for the season. The food is always plentiful and plain.

But it is with an “outfit” that the harvester comes nearest adventure.

An outfit consists of a tractor, a threshing separator and a caboose. The tractor drags the threshing machine and the caboose from farm to farm and runs the separator at threshing. From eight to fifteen men constitute the crew of an outfit.

As soon as the grain is in the shock, the outfit sets forth on the rounds which it has planned during the summer. From ranch to ranch it goes, snorting and steaming. The caboose is cut off in a shady spot – if possible – and the thresher is set up in the middle of a field. The farmer, with rented and borrowed teams, totes the shocks of grain to the roaring maw of the separator. No bringing in the sheaves to the barn in the West. They just thresh right in the field. When they have cleaned up one square mile, they move the outfit to another part of the prairie and thresh all the wheat within range. The threshed grain is either stored in little granary sheds or is carted into the barns.

Great heaps of straw and chaff, as big as city houses, are thus left dotting the stubble fields, like slag heaps around Hill 702.

Passing from Winnipeg. I saw three huge columns of smoke ascending in the air to the north.

“Forest fires, eh?” I remarked to the passenger beside me. He chuckled.

“Ain’t no forests in these parts, mister. Them’s straw stacks burning.”

“How would that happen?” I asked, from the east where straw is so much per so much.

“Well, a farmer jest throwed a match into it, I guess.”

They burn their mountains of straw in the West.

No greenhorn can get aboard one of these “outfits.” They are prize workers. The owner of the outfit gets so many cents a bushel for the threshing, and it is in his interests so get the job done in record time. He hires men with some pride in their shoulders. They work like demons. They work all hours, from dawn to dark. They take joy in beating the last day’s record, the record of former crews. They go to their caboose at the end of the day dead beat, hardly able to sit up and sing after their huge if unornamental meal.

But it is the nearest thing to adventure there is in harvesting.

The ordinary harvester bends his back at stooking, at teaming sheaves to the threshers, at bucketing grain into the granaries, at all the simple, ancient acts of agriculture which have changed little in ten thousand years. It is uneventful, healthy, heartbreaking work, the kind of work a man can easily pass up when the spirt moves him.

The railroad officials figure that 20 per cent. of the return ticket stubs they issue are not used each year. Twenty per cent. of fifty thousand men is ten thousand. That is draining the east and populating the west at a pretty good rate.

But the west is a large and roomy and hospitable place, for all its cold and its bleak wastes of prairie (how an Englishman from the green rolling hills of ‘ome must pine!) and somehow the thousands who stay either stranded or by choice in the west as the result of their harvest excursion, shake down.

That cheery, hail spirit of the adventurous trainload of irresponsibles somehow sticks to the westerner. If you whoop on the main street of an eastern city, a policeman will run you in or a space will be left about you in the traffic. Whoop at the main crossings in a western city and nobody pays the slightest attention, unless you look lonesome, and then a crowd will form around you in the traffic and take you home to supper.

In Winnipeg, I asked a man the time, and he took me home to dinner. In Brandon, I enquired the location of the railroad station, and my informant turned out to be a cousin. In Dauphin, I picked up a man’s hat the wind blew off and he introduced me to a member of parliament, a judge, the local chairman of the newly formed license commission, and the leading Presbyterian divine, right there and then on the street.

And by special interrogation, I found that each and every one of these cheery informants was originally a harvester who came west, went broke, settled and made good.


Editor’s Notes:

  1. $4 in 1923 would be $70 in 2024. ↩︎
  2. The Battle of Hill 70 was a World War One battle. ↩︎

The Mad, Merry Midway Makes Morons of Us All

September 2, 1922

By Gregory Clark, September 2, 1922.

On the Midway, everybody is a moron.

A moron, according to the psychologists, is “a high grade imbecile, with the mental age of a child of eleven years.”

Aside from the fact that this is a dirty crack at boys and girls of eleven, it is a pretty good description of the Midway.

Mind you, we are not asseverating (quaint Victorian word) that everyone who goes into the Midway is a moron. Our point is that as soon as he enters the Midway he becomes a moron – a high grade imbecile with a mental age of eleven.

Is it the bright paint, the gaudy canvas, the barking barkers, the primitive music that throws a spell over us and reduces us to morons? Or is it the psychic effect of a mob, whose massed personality overwhelms the individual personality, and reduces all for the moment to a common level of intelligence?

There is something decidedly spooky about the Midway.

Observe what happens to this large, thick, masterful looking man. He is the president and general manager of a flourishing manufacturing business. He is an officer of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association. His golf handicap is four. His poker handicap is nil. He has a hundred and thirty cases in his cellar and is practically a teetotaller. In a word, he is a successful man.

Yet, look at him.

He is the bear cat of a party of four – his wife, another thick gentleman and wife. No young ‘uns in the party.

His collar is wilted. He has just consumed. a hot dog in three bites, and is hollering “C’mon, c’mon!” to the others, and is pointing to the Ferris wheel.

His face is red. There is a dab of mustard on his coat. His shoes are dusty, his clothes awry. Little would you think that to-morrow morning, with a flirt of his pen, he can close a factory employing four hundred men, or raise the price of washing machines. He acts like a boy of eleven. He looks like a high grade imbecile. He is, temporarily, a moron.

Or this lady, here, with the attractive white hair and the eyes the color of polished mahogany. Would you think she was one of the eight intellectual women of Toronto? Would you suspect that she has raised a family of three already prominent lawyers and is the vice-president of nineteen women’s organizations?

Her specialty to-day is freaks. She has been into every side show from the glass blowers to the wild west show. But her passion is freaks. She has had her fortune told by means of a paper out of a glass tube, but she has been in to see the gen-oo-wine Siamese twins three times. She goes in no spirit of mockery, but with the idea of getting an eye-full in those hot brown eyes, as thrilled as any girl of eleven. As a matter of fact, she is eleven. She is a moron.

Here is a boy scout in mufti who has wheedled his dad to the shooting gallery. The boy has fired two full rounds – fifty cents. Then a peculiar expression overspreads dad’s face, as he picks up the rifle.

I’ll shoot a few,” he says.

Dong, clatter, pink, go the targets as dad unlimbers.

“Give me another dozen,” says dad.

And another, and another.

“Hey, dad, what about me?” cries the boy scout in mufti, forgetting for the moment the creed of the scout.

Dad looks at his son as if he had never seen him before. Then a look of puzzled recognition comes into his face. He pays for another dozen each.

“I’ll shoot the top row, you take the bottom,” says dad to his son. “Bet I can beat you.”

Boy against man? Not at all. They are evenly matched, Dad has become a moron. He is only eleven.

But enough of individual cases.

Look at the swarm. They are all morons – we are all morons. Our mouths are slightly open. Our eyes shine. We move about erratically, irresolutely, aimlessly. We are children of eleven. Morons.

But no! Alone, aloof, there in the crush go a few superior bodies, ill as ease, marking us with amazement, a mild contempt.

Poor creatures, they are fixed forever at the age of forty or fifty, or whatever their age is.

Of your charity, pity them that cannot become morons for a day!

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