Tag: 1925 Page 1 of 4
By Gregory Clark, October 3, 1925.
War Cries, Battles and Other Disturbances at University of Toronto Now Regulated By Students’ Council – Ruffianism Abolished by Democratic Rule – Varsity Made Safe for Male Shingle and Marcelle
A terrible thing happened up on the campus of the University of Toronto the other day.
A student yelled “Yah!”
Right out loud.
It was a most disgusting exhibition. He was rough-looking sort of person. Large, bony, with big thick shoulders and thick legs.
The campus was crowded with students at the time, passing to and fro respectably, to their lectures. They were models of deportment. Most of them had the latest Oxford bags1 on, and nearly a hundred per cent. of them were wearing their hair long and slick2, in the very best manner. Contrasted with them stood this thick person of whom he are about to speak.
We will call him Buck.
Buck walked, perfectly composed, half-way across the campus. He was wearing a nondescript sort of blue suit the trousers of which clearly showed the shape of his legs. His cap disclosed the fact that his hair was cut short and bristly. On his face was a look of puzzlement.
Then Buck suddenly stopped in his track. Glared about him at the throng.
Then he reared up on his toes, threw his arms high in the air, and in a hoarse, deep, brutal voice yelled:
“Yah!”
Of course, after the students had picked themselves up off the ground, there was a momentary outbreak of protest and just indignation. But five members of the Students’ Administrative five members of the Students’ Administrative Council who were amongst those affected by this terrible breach of the peace were first to collect their senses and remind the throng of students of the amenities.
“Steady, fellow students!” cried out one of these officers. “Stand fast! Remember the constitution!”
And all the students quieted their voices and brushed off their Oxford bags in silence.
The officials of the Students’ Administrative Council gathered in a body near Buck, where he stood all alone amidst the throng, and then they approached him.
“Do you realize,” said the spokesman, standing forth a safe distance from Buck, they fearing for his sanity. “Do you realize that you are guilty of a grave offense against the laws, not to mention the honor and dignity of this great university of which we assume you are an undergraduate?”
Buck opened his large mouth, full of big, strong teeth, but then closed it without emitting another of those fearful yells.
“Presuming you to be a freshman and unacquainted with the regulations and interior administration of this great university, we ask you, will you come, without the use of force, to be instructed in the laws of this institution?”
“What if I don’t?” answered Buck in a loud voice.
“Then,” said the spokesman in a gentle and sweet voice of warning, “we will be obliged to call a policeman.”
Wild Buck Swiftly Tamed
So they led Buck, at a safe distance, all the throng following wonder and dismay, to the University College, where on the walls appeared this notice:
“Students who take part in disturbances or offensive contests unauthorized by the Students Council will be liable to a heavy fine not exceeding $50.003 each.
“R. Falconer, President.”
Buck read the above, removed his cap and reverently scratched his hard, bristly head.
Several dozens of the students were crowding around the councillors, crying out that their Oxford bags had been damaged by falling down when this frightful yell stunned them. “Compensation,” they kept crying. “Recompense for damages!” And one poor fellow showed how the yell had caused him to lose the $12 marcelle wave4 in his hair that he had got only last week.
But the councillors spoke to the mob of angry students and pleaded for Buck that he did not know the law. That was really, no excuse, of course. But still, there you are. Even in a self-governing country, there are those who escape the law.
Nothing like this has been heard of for several years. It is sincerely hoped that no further Bucks will appear amongst the student body of this great institution of learning. Buck has not been seen since the episode, and it is generally thought that he has left the university for some other, where his extraordinary qualities will not get him into trouble.
The incident demonstrates the most interesting fact about the University of Toronto. It is the most civilized university in the world. All the excesses that used to be linked with college students have been abolished. That roughness and intolerance that once upon a time shamed the fair name of learning has been dissipated. How? By the winning of self-government by the students.
While Sir Robert Falconer signs the warnings that are plenteously distributed all over the university buildings, the students themselves solemnly elect the Students’ Administrative Council, a body representing all colleges in the distinguished galaxy of colleges, and this council disciplines the students.
It shows the power of self-government to quell savage tribes. As you can see from the notice signed by Sir Robert, disturbances and offensive contests may still be held, but “with the authorization of the Students’ Council only.” You may apply to the council to hold an offensive contest. You may or may not get it, as the grave deliberations of the council may decree. In the old days of benevolent despotism, when the president ruled the roost, there were all kinds of terrible excesses. The world was certainly not safe for the cake-eater as it is to-day on ‘Varsity5 grounds. The students’ council has made the male shingle and the marcelle wave perfectly safe.
Old Relic of Barbarous Days
The last, dying gesture of old college rascaldom occurred four years ago, when a few returned soldiers, who had not had time to complete their university courses owing to an out break of ruffianism in which they felt impelled to take part, returned to their alma mamma to finish their education.
A relic of past barbarous days is an old ramshackle one-story wooden building hidden in behind New Trinity and south of the athletic stadium. This is called the old temporary gym. It is used for storage purposes and for holding. such “disturbances and offensive contests” as the students’ council may agree to on application and after due deliberation.
The sophomores of one of the faculties – we will spare their blushes by refraining from naming the faculty – got permission, just for old times’ sake, to hold an initiation of freshmen in this old building. Permission, sad to relate, was granted.
The freshmen of that year were invited to attend and be initiated.
Now these freshmen, amongst whom were a lot of rough, demobilized soldiers, had no idea of the great reform which had been effected in ‘Varsity. They thought an initiation was an initiation.
So the sophomores locked and barred themselves in the old Rough House, as the ramshackle building is called, and invited the freshmen to come in.
The freshmen attempted a frontal attack. Then some old soldier devised a gas attack. They made up some ammonia solution, climbed to the roof of the building and poured it through the holes in the roof.
They nearly killed the sophomores. A tragedy was narrowly averted. But the freshmen, so dim is the primitive mind, deemed it a victory. They gained entry into the Rough House, and all the sophomores went home to bed.
This incident, of course, is never referred to in polite academic circles. It is blamed on the war.
Three years ago the dental sophs took the freshmen and removed all their boots and threw them out an upper story window into College street.
The students’ council at once took action on this dastardly outbreak of hoodlumism, and fined every soph. the sum of $2.
Two years ago the medical faculty held a little celebration and then formed up and went on an entirely unauthorized parade down Yonge street. They raided the Italian fruit stores along the way and threw vegetables all about.
The students’ council at once called an emergency session and called the whole faculty before them. After a long and grave study of the crime, they fined the medical students who went in the parade three hundred dollars, collectively.
How do they collect the fines, you ask?
The students’ council does not permit a student to write his exams until he has paid the fine. It is quite simple.
When you consider the precedent set by the past, it is a wonderful thing the students have done in discipline by self-government. When you count up the suits of clothing destroyed even within the past fifteen years, it would fill the old Rough House.
Historic Cases of Ruffianism
Here are certain historic cases.
The Model School Fence for example. Around the Model School on Gerrard street ran a drunken wooden fence that was unpainted, awry, staggered. For years the public and press cried out against it. Then one Hallowe’en, the students went down and held a bonfire. That was all.
The late Dr. Beattle Nesbitt was connected with an outrage that is remembered, even unto this day. A cow weighing fourteen hundred pounds, was somehow carried up the narrow stairway of the Old Grey Tower, and there left to moo and wail a greeting to the president the next morning. How they got it up was a mystery. For it took a gang of twenty workmen with block and tackle to get it down. It is the only time in the history of the place that a cow has ever been in the Old Grey Tower.
The picket fence around the athletic grounds, where the stadium now is, was burned year after year on Hallowe’en. It was one’ of the normal expenses of higher education, the renewing of that fence.
Theatre night used to be a night when everybody in Toronto used to try and get tickets to the show. The students’ atrocities in the theatre on these occasions used to be the talk of the town. Extraordinary sorts of confetti rained down from the gods. Strange musics afflicted the air.
But one night, the students poured flour down out of the gods. It was about this time Toronto began to feel that after all, there is nothing greater than property. The show chosen by the students for their theatre night was “The Middie Man” with E. S. Willard. When the riot and confusion was at its height, Mr. Willard rang down the curtain and came to the front.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “I have come a long way to make this my humble offering of the drama. When I learned that the students had chosen to attend my poor performance as their annual theatre night, I was greatly flattered. But it seems I have been guilty of misunderstanding. It appears that the students have come with the intention of presenting the entertainment, not I. I have rung down the curtain to allow these gentlemen to file out of the theatre, and as they pass the box office, each will receive his money back.”
Dead silence for a moment. Then a burst of tumultuous applause – from the gods. Mr. Willard had won. The students were perfectly quiet for the remainder of the show.
Theatre night now – if they still have theatre nights – they do not form up on the campus and march in a body. The students go individually, with their girls.
Students didn’t have girls in other days, They couldn’t be afforded.
There was at one time a chiropodist on College street whose sign was a huge human foot, gilded. A small select society was formed at the university which for the purpose of the moment called itself Order of the Boot. The large gilt foot disappeared never to be seen again of mortal eye. It decorated a room in a residence.
Signs are safe to-day. It was only 1910 that no student felt he was a student until sundry street car signs, “keep out,” “office of the president,’ and similar notices graced their studies. Recently, a stop and go signal, complete taken by students. The police sent word they wanted it back. They got it back.
Initiation Now Means Less
The Literary Society for long years annually elected its moral suasion committee from the largest and heftiest members of each party. At the Lit elections, these two moral suasion committees met to settle their differences by moral strength alone. Their fights were epics. Hoses usually played a large part. It was about the time that self government was imposed on the student body that the Literary Society voted to do away with the moral suasion committees as not being in keeping with the dignity of the society. Now they have got the dignity, at least.
Serenading the ladies residences, St. Margaret’s College and other girls schools within reach of the campus used to be the gallant way in which incognito gentlemen used to pay their respects to the girls. This had the advantage of being collegiate. To-day, the student in his wide pants and oiled hair takes his lady to a dance pavilion. Yelling Adeline under school windows however, was cheaper. A college education to-day is not so rough but more expensive than it used to be.
No Man’s Land is the more modern name for that bit of road that lies between the east door of the Engineering Building and the south door of the Medical Building. Across, this space of road, hundreds of fierce battles have been fought. For some reason, probably propinquity, engineers and doctors seem to hate each other. Between lectures, groups of Meds and Engineers would gather at their respective doors. Taunts would be hurled. Then insults. Depending on the weather and the barometric pressure, these rival groups would or would not go any further than taunts. When they did, woe betide the poor Arts men who might be in the neighborhood. Being known to neither side, both sides regarded them as enemies, in the fierce hand-to-hand that would follow. The writer had the distinction of having a thumb-full of shoe blacking smeared into his right eye by the eminent school battler. Bull Ritchie who weighed, dry, nigh unto three hundred pounds. And the writer started out merely as spectator, Arts.
When these battles started, all yearly differences and antipathies were wiped out. For example, it might be School Freshmen and Meds third year that were engaged. But no sooner did battle engage than the roars and groans of the battlers would be heard in lecture rooms and corridors within the separate strongholds. And out would rush school men of all years to the side of their detested Freshmen, and Meds Freshmen would with swelling pride come to the defense of their conceited Third Years men.
And the late Dean Galbraith himself would have to come out, armed with a hose, perhaps, to put an end to the little difference.
A Freshman used to be an object of intense physical repugnance to his elders. The only parallel is the feeling in a small boy’s soul when a new baby arrives in the house. No Freshman could be allowed to join the sacred circle without having a few mushings to indicate to him his physical deficiencies. For a university is a place of the intellect.
All this is gone. The parable of our good simple friend Buck and his indiscreet “Yah” illustrates what self government can do to a wild people.
If Buck yells “Yah” a second time, he is likely to be fined fifty dollars by a grave assembly of his peers.
Initiation, too, has fallen upon materialistic times. Initiation means initiation fees.
The dollar has tamed Varsity.
Editor’s Notes:
- Oxford Bags were very baggy trousers popular with male students at the time. ↩︎
- Slicked back hair using pomade or other oils was also the style at the time. ↩︎
- $50 in 1925 would be $915 in 2025. ↩︎
- On the subject of hair, Marcel waves were more common on women, but some men had them too. ↩︎
- Varsity was a generic term used at the time for the University of Toronto. ↩︎
These illustrations accompanied a story by W.W. Winans about slang use in Toronto 100 years ago. I don’t have any information on the author. Some of the slang and their definitions in the images:
- Big Fish = Important person
- Bird = Person
- Thirty Seeds = Thirty dollars
- Kisser = mouth or face
- “Know your onions” = to be knowledgeable on a particular subject
- “Crying out loud” = expressing surprise or impatience
- Six-bits = 75 cents (also meaning “a lot”)
- Applesauce = nonsense
The “4.4” mentioned here refers to the the sale of a beer with a maximum alcohol content of 4.4% under the revised Prohibition laws which were still in affect at the time, which gained the nicknamed “Fergie’s Foam” after Premier George Howard Ferguson. In the subsequent 1926 election the Conservatives ran on a platform of repealing the Ontario Temperance Act, which they did.
By Gregory Clark, May 23, 1925.
The man who is going to be hardest hit by Premier Ferguson’s Beer Verbotens is the man who votes dry but feels wet.
There is at least one in every office. There are probably ten thousand of them in Toronto. They constitute the mysterious and elusive element in all booze balloting. The talk of them leads the wets to believe there is a strong wet sentiment abroad. Their actions, on voting day, discover to the drys that the situation is not as black as it looked.
They are on the fence to this extent: they do like a little drink now and then, but to escape that guiltiest feeling when facing their wives and mothers-in-law at home, over the supper table, they vote dry every time. When the results are published, and Premier Ferguson announces that a certain wetness will be the real result, notwithstanding, these men get a double kick out of the situation. They are proud to have done their duty; but they are secretly tickled that they will be able to have the odd snootful of beer. They look forward to a very easy summer, when the family is up north…
The wets look on them with loathing and contempt. They are men without the courage of their convictions. They are henpecks, apron-string men, weak-kneed and contemptible. The drys regard them with a peculiar lofty pity. They are dry except when opportunity presents itself. They will not buy a bottle but they will share a bottle. They are the kind of men who will get a prescription from their doctor in a friend’s name and let the friend go to the vendor’s.
Now they are up against it.
All the secretly cherished expectations of the past three months have been suddenly and flatly dissipated into thin air. There will be no nice cosy little bars to hide in for a couple of glasses on those evenings on which they have to stay downtown on business (long enough for the smell of the beer to go off their breaths before they go home). There are to be no old-fashioned bar parlors with curtains and alcoves where they can spend jolly afternoons when their wives are out of town.
No: drinking will either be in the privacy of their own home, from bottles or kegs delivered in a public way by a loud and conspicuous delivery wagon, or drinking will be very horribly in public, at tables, which must be clearly visible from the street through uncurtained windows.
It looks as though Premier Ferguson had made a deliberate attack on the liberties of one section of the community – the semi-prohibitionists who want to be wet only on the sly.
Drinking at home is, of course, out of the question for these men. And now drinking in public, except at very late hours when all respectable men (who might see them) ought to be home, and in bed, is out of the question, too.
The semi-prohibitionists are out of luck.
Premier Ferguson has been guilty of a gross piece of class legislation. Nobody now can have a drink but the wets!
Editor’s Notes: In 1925, the Prohibition question was still front and center. “Wets” were against prohibitions and “Drys” were in favour of it.
By Gregory Clark, April 18, 1925.
The Radio Joneses are going to move again.
(We all call them the Radio Joneses. You ought to see their roof. Last fall, so long as the good weather lasted, they had their loud squeaker out on the back balcony to give all and sundry the benefit of the entire static of the district. Mrs. Jones has even given up bridge. Nothing is more horrible than when a wife also becomes a radio bug.)
The Joneses have moved every May since 1919, when Jones, burying his uniform1 in his parent’s garden, married her and they moved into their first apartment in a great King street apartment house.
A first apartment is always an experiment. Nobody expects them to stay put. The Joneses had decided to move at the end of their first month.
“You’ve no idea,” said Mrs. Jones, then a slip of a bride, “of the racket and goings on in this place. All hours of the night. The queerest people. I don’t like Snooks” – (Radio Jones himself) – “to be in an atmosphere like this. On our floor, some business girls…”
So they moved to a very quiet eight-family apartment up in the Spadina district in May, 1920. And it looked as if they were going to stay. But shortly after Christmas, we had them to tea.
“Really,” said Mrs. Radio, then not quite so slippy, “the deadliest atmosphere in that place. I don’t know one person in the place. They glower at you, and swish by in the halls without so much as a good morning. And the other night we had Fred and his wife and Jean and her husband in for a little evening, and would you believe it, the man down below us telephoned up to say that it was one o’clock! No, sir! We’re going get out of that tomb.”
And they did. May, 1921, they moved to a duplex on the Hill. And there Radio Junior was born.
“A duplex is all right for a honeymoon,” said Mrs. Jones, along about February. “But with a baby in the house, you need a house.”
So May, 1922, found them moving to a small six-roomed house, not counting the cellar, in the St. Clair district.
And there Junior learned to walk and knock things about, and dig the yard up and break the furnace chains and almost break his little neck on the stairs. Mrs. Jones had lost every vestige of her slippiness by that time, and she found the stairs very trying and the laundry tubs too low, and it was fifteen minutes, her time, to the street cars and the shops on St. Clair.
“Really,” she panted, in March, 1923, “we must get something more central. If old Funny Face” – (formerly Snooks) – “can’t manage to get a car, then I want to be within five minutes. of somewhere, anyway, somehow.”
So they moved to a seven-roomed house in the west end within one block of the cars.
Junior was now able to be out on his own two fat little legs.
“A child is an awful responsibility,” said Mrs. Jones. “I had no idea. Two doors away is a family of six kids, and one of them has always got something, whooping cough, measles, pink eye. I live in terror. When Junior is on the verandah, I can’t keep those kids away. They love him, the dear wee fellow. But I am in terror. I just stand at the door and listen for whoops or croups or mumps and things. I’d like to get away to some district where there aren’t so many children. A street where there is just one other little child besides Junior, for him to play with, for I believe a child should have companions. But sometimes this place is just like a schoolyard.”
Thus, last year, they did move. They found a street of brides. A row of new houses in which, as yet, there is not even one baby. They bought Junior a pup.
And then they got the radio bug. Bridegrooms seem to go in for radio. Anyway, it was seeing the aerials on the houses all up and down the street and the vision, through roseate downstairs windows2 in the evenings, of happy couples bending over mysterious boxes that induced the Joneses to investigate. And in a month they were bugs.
“Half these fellows,” said Jones, indignantly, “have little four point four sets that ruin the air for hours every night.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Radio Jones, the other evening, “we are going out to a dear little bungalow near Islington, and, do you know, there is hardly an aerial to be seen from the upstairs window. And furthermore, it is just like the country, and the country, I think, is so good for children.”
And she blushed prettily.
You will note she said children.
We know the 1926 excuse already.
Editor’s Notes: Radio was still fairly new in 1925, so some people became obsessed with it.
This illustration accompanied a story by Fred Griffin about the homeless sleeping at the police station to stay warm. This was before the Great Depression when “hobos” were less common. The “better ‘ole” is in reference to Bruce Bairnsfather’s famous “Better ‘Ole” comic from World War 1.
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:
- 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. ↩︎
- Current information on deaths and injuries can be found on the Operation Lifesaver website, which also has good information on railway safety. ↩︎
This illustration went with an article by Fred Griffin on how juries are selected in Ontario. It notes that Ontario still does not allow women on juries while jurisdictions like Alberta and some U.S. states have allowed it since 1922 and 1920 respectfully, despite recent changes giving women the vote. The article also lists all of the conditions to become a juror such as being over 21, being a British subject, not infirm, and owning $600 of property in cities or $400 in towns or villages.