This picture has nothing to do with the article, but it was on the same newspaper page and I thought it looked good.
Surveys Now Being Made of City to Determine Best Types of Social Meeting – Places to Take Place of Old “Poor Men’s Clubs” – To Use Old Barrooms?
Br Gregory Clark, December 27, 1919.
Toronto has had a happy old year, in which has come peace, and the marching back of tens of thousands of her sons, the overturning of the rickety political wagon and the final and irrevocable ousting of booze.
A fairly happy and industrious old year!
In the Happy New Year, which, out of old custom, is being predicted with Dickensian fervor these few days by one and all, such matters as prices, wages, the building of a new political bus, the embalming and final burial of the remains of Old Bill Booze, stand out as demanding some of the happy industry such as dispensed in 1919.
But one of the most interesting undertakings of the coming year is the discovery of a substitute for the bar, something to take the place of the saloon in the social arrangement, the provision of the “poor man’s club.”
And it speaks well for the powers that be that already the united churches of Canada, the Y.M.C.A., the Salvation Army, and other agencies vitally interested in the needs of man are all seriously bent to the task of finding a substitute for the bar.
When even the liquor interests reluctantly admitted that the bar-room was doomed as a social institution, everyone recognized that something had been taken away from a certain great class of our citizenship. There was some justice in the claim that the saloon was the “poor man’s club.” With its passing, the man who could not afford to belong to institutions for human intercourse such as clubs and societies, had to fall back on the pool rooms, bowling alleys, barber shops, and public meetings.
Home life has been stimulated. The married man who used to frequent his “club” down at the corner and commune with his fellows over a scuttle of beer, has found new pleasures in the company of his family.
Hundreds Hunt Companionship
But all men are not married. Hence the success of hundreds of piffling public meetings in the past year. Hence the hordes of young men aimlessly wandering about down town after business hours, seeking entertainment and accepting whatever chanceth.
Since the passing of the bar, movies, poolrooms, bowling alleys have met the social needs of men. The well-to-do still have their tea rooms, cosy and congenial, where they can sit and relax. But tea rooms are no places for the working man, with their atmosphere of gush and giggle, oolong and macaroons.
Can Toronto successfully operate coffee houses to take the place of the bar rooms?
Quiet, leisurely places where coffee, tea, sandwiches, etc., are sold at a modest price, where plain men can sit of an evening as long as they like, as our fathers did of old in the coffee houses of Britain, and as our American brethren are attempting to do across the border now.
The Interchurch Forward Movement is studying that question.
Rev. Peter Bryce is now making a social survey of Toronto, one object of which is the investigation of the social needs of every district of the city, and the discovery of what form the social and recreational centres should take.
The Y.M.C.A., which is now operating the Red Triangle Club1 at Queen and Victoria streets for returned soldiers, proposes to maintain the premises as a down-town social organization when, in due course, the military work comes to an end.
The Salvation Army has been operating its Soldiers’ Hostel in the old Krausman Hotel2 at King and Church streets for four years. Its military nature has been undergoing a gradual change, weaving itself back into the civic fabric. And Commissioner Richards of the Salvation Army is studying its development closely, with the idea of discovering the most complete form of social agency for the present day.
The time may not be far distant when many of the old saloons of Toronto may flourish again, not as fountains of evil, where homes were poisoned and lives withered, but as coffee houses where men can gather for the simple and ancient pleasure of being together.
Roosevelt Coffee Houses
In the United States this problem is receiving different treatments from different organizations.
The latest development is that undertaken by the three sons of Theodore Roosevelt. They are leading a movement for the re-establishment of the coffee house as it was before the advent of the saloon. For, three hundred years ago, saloons were unknown in Britain or the United States. There were taverns. But men gathered in coffee houses for relaxation and recreation, not in the gin mills. Coffee houses date back to the thirteenth century. Saloons were a modern development, the product of the Georgian era, the drunken era.
The first in the Roosevelt boys’ chain of coffee houses is on West Forty-fourth street, New York. It is a quiet, humble shop, formerly a barroom. It is filled with tables. Coffee, tea, milk, cheese sandwiches are sold. It is a sort of leisurely soda parlor. But there is none of the hustle and rush of a restaurant about it. It is designed for fellowship.
And it is not run for profit, but to be self-supporting only.
The survey of Toronto now being made by Rev. Peter Bryce is not a complete accounting of the entire area of the city, but covers a number of typical and representative districts.
The intimacy of the study of these districts, which is being made by professional sociologists can be judged by these headings, which direct the workers to the information required:
Total population of district, nationalities and numbers of each, principal occupation, special industrial groups in area, what changes in area in ten years; what educational institutions, what attendance; what churches in area, attendance, with charts and maps; what missions, Sunday schools, settlements, with attendance; what playgrounds, movies, theatres, poolrooms, bowling alleys; what places of evil influence. And the student of each district is to enquire into what policy or change of policy is required.
As to the Salvation Army, Commissioner Richards says:
“The Army that has taken over the lepers of Java, the Inebriates Island of New Zealand; which patrols the shores of Norway and Denmark for wrecked sailors, and has raised the Lord’s banner in every part of the world, will not fail to give Toronto just what it needs for the social welfare of its people.”
Editor’s Notes: The Toronto Star was editorially in favour of Prohibition, so Greg had to write the way he did about the evils of alcohol, though I don’t think he believed it personally.
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.
Mr. Bodkin, who works in our office, carries a handbag.
He has carried it for years, and with his handbag, umbrella and his rubbers on, he is so serious and dignified a personage, none of us has ever ventured to jolly him about the bag.
As far as we know, he never carries anything in it. It just seems to be a habit of long standing, and he would as soon go out with no collar and tie on and come to business without his faithful old handbag.
Now it so happens that he parks his car three blocks away from the office, half a block from one of the new liquor stores.1
And that handbag has taken on a new and horrible significance.
The first day liquor was on sale, Mr. Bodkin came down Church street and saw the line-up. And being an old newspaperman, the instinct to stop, look and ask naturally halted him.
He is a shy sort of man, however, who depends on his powers of observation rather than his tongue, and he stood about for all of five minutes before he spoke to one of his neighbors in the crowd, to ask what the line-up was for and where everybody was going, because everybody was carrying a bag of some description.
“Booze,” replied the neighbor. “This is the opening day.”
You can imagine Mr. Bodkin’s horror. He has been a prohibitionist since birth, a tremendous worker for the dries, the author of many a strong article and influential pamphlet on the liquor traffic.
And here he had been standing, bag in hand, in the liquor store line-up for five long minutes while curious crowds of onlookers stared.
He got out of there so fast, he was limp when he reached the office.
We helped him out of his coat, and he flung the old handbag to the floor.
“If it hadn’t been for that!” he cried, with a mortified air.
We gathered around him.
And he told us of the tragedy.
“Five long minutes I stood there!” he wailed. “Goodness knows who saw me. Hundreds and hundreds passed by and paused to look. Amongst them must have, been scores of acquaintances, and probably the telephones wires are at this moment being burned up with the scandal that Bodkin, the great prohibition worker, was amongst the first to line up for his liquor!”
We soothed him.
“Boys,” said Bodkin, “do me a favor. Help me out of this mess, will you? Pass the word around amongst your friends that I was standing there in all innocence, as a newspaper man. That’s good fellows!”
“But,” said Jimmie, “that handbag. It will be hard to explain away that handbag.”
“Oh, dear!” sighed Mr. Bodkin.
For two days, he came to work without the handbag, but he was like a lost soul. He wandered around like a man who has forgotten his pipe. The rest of us could do no work, with him wandering around. He would sit and stare moodily at the place beside his desk where he used to park the handbag.
“I don’t enjoy the walk anymore.” he confided to me. “I have carried that bag for twenty years, and I think it has become part of me. Little did I dream the liquor business would ever strike me in a vulnerable spot. Its ramifications are so insidious, reaching into a man’s most sacred life. Curse the liquor traffic, I say!”
Jimmie had the inspiration.
“Look here,” said he to Bodkin, “just have the words ‘MSS Only’2 inscribed in gold letters on the bag, good and big.”
So Bodkin has his bag again and all is well. He has the words “MSS Only” in letters two inches freshly gilded on the faithful old bag. And he comes down Yonge instead of Church street now.
“It’s a much finer way to come anyway,” he says.
There must be hundreds and hundreds of people who have been made self-conscious since the liquor stores opened, lawyers, doctors, salesmen, who have to carry bags in the daily vocation.
But they can all follow Mr. Bodkin’s lead. Doctors can quite excusably work in a little free advertising for themselves by inscribing their name and title on their bags in large characters. Lawyers can put “Legal Documents Only.” Travelers can have the name of their firm or commodity emblazoned.
Or, to put another interpretation on the idea, although this is hardly fair to Bodkin, now that he has employed the idea in self-defence, could not those who do line up at the liquor stores camouflage their bag’s contents by all sorts of disarming inscriptions such as “MSS Only.” “Dr. Smith. horse doctor,” “Use Squkm Gramophone Needles,” “Hokem and Pokem, Barristers, Etc.”
The clever concealment of the true function of a handbag that is solely employed for the purpose of carrying two crocks from the liquor store will now be one of those things that will tax the ingenuity of a necessarily ingenious section of the public.
Editor’s Notes:
The Liquor Control Act overturned prohibition as legislated in the Ontario Temperance Act and established the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), through which the province managed liquor distribution with government-run stores taking effect on June 1 1927. ↩︎
An old man in the next chair glared out from behind his paper.
When it was Illegal to Import Spirits from Montreal There was an “Underground Railway” in Operation, Which Succeeded Many Times in Beating the Police, But Which Also Enriched the City Treasury by $500.000 – A Few of the Funniest Stories that are Told.
By Gregory Clark, January 10, 1920.
Now that liquor can be imported legally into Ontario1, some of the tales pertaining to the illegal importation of booze may safely be told.
Sober citizens have snapped their fingers, during the past four years, and said:
“Pah! There is more drinking nowadays than ever before! Liquor is coming into this town by the carload. The police don’t even pretend to stop it. Why, I know four places right now that I can phone to, and have a bottle of whiskey delivered here in five minutes.”
We all know this sober citizen. Needless to say, if he had really known of four such miraculous places, he wouldn’t have been wearing such an old hat. He could have sold his information and made a fortune.
No, the majority of such romancers were either highly imaginative extopers2, who, in the dire dessication of modern times, permitted themselves a free fancy; or merely wise guys of that old type which knows of so many wicked and thrilling places, but which seems content to remain in the haunts of ordinary and gullible men.
Nevertheless, that there have been underground routes for liquor, everyone knows. The whiffs of half-forgotten odors that we occasionally got on street cars were not all from doctor’s prescriptions. The hilarious gentleman on the night-car hadn’t been sitting at a sick-bed. And we all know of somebody who has a friend who safely wangled one lone bottle of rye in his suitcase from Montreal.
Taxicab drivers have been accused of being Toronto’s liveliest source of illicit liquor. All you had to do, the wise guy said, was to phone a taxi stand and the bottle was yours.
We asked one of Toronto’s senior police officials about the underground of liquor traffic.
“Did it exist?” we asked.
“It did,” said he.
“Why wasn’t it stopped like the underground drug traffic?”
“Because,” said the official, “in the drug traffic, there are a few crooks engaged in a sly business. They are hard to find, but once found, are easily squashed.
“But when crooks, bootleggers, lawyers, financiers, professors, bankers, clubmen, business men, aldermen, and even a few church officials all engaged whole-heartedly in the jovial game of booze-smuggling, the police, numerically inferior, were up against a big job. Some liquor was bound to leak in. To say that the police have done nothing is hardly exact. Their activities in Toronto alone, in the past three years, have cost the cosmopolitan booze runners over half a million dollars.”
The first and most popular method of smuggling liquor into Ontario was by freight.
The liquor, cunningly disguised as anything from a bale of hay to a human corpse, was addressed to the consignee who ordered it. Any article of merchandise big enough to contain a quart of whiskey was utilized as camouflage by the imaginative smugglers. The police and Inland Revenue Officers kept as close tab on these methods as was possible. But to probe every item of freight entering Ontario would have necessitated the remobilization of the C. E. F3.
One of the cutest ideas was a dozen cases of Scotch shipped as human body. The whiskey was in a beautiful black coffin inside the shipping box, just to allay suspicion. A case where the body was absent but the spirit present.
The second most profitable system, according to record, was by means of motor cars or lorries. To motor to Montreal or neighboring ports, load up at the alleged hoards, and drive home, was said to have been as easy as rolling off a log. But it had its comedies of error, too.
A Toronto military man decided to replenish his cellar. He drove in his touring car to Montreal, loaded up with $300 worth of assorted delicacies and started home. Outside Belleville, his car skidded into a ditch.
Presidently along came a flivver.
“Quit hoggin’ the hull highway!” yelled its two occupants at the Toronto man. And they got out of their flivver to investigate the Toronto man’s predicament.
While giving him the benefit of their advice, they casually noted the square contents of the ditched car, said contents being vainly covered with rugs.
“Excuse me,” said one of the strangers, “but I’m the county constable. Pardon me if I seem to examine your cargo.”
Luck? Merely luck. The Toronto man was soaked $500 and costs at the nearest court of competent jurisdiction, and the assorted delicacies were confiscated.
The third method of importation was by hand. The police have uncovered many schemes for concealing liquor about the body in hollow metal body shields. But the ordinary suitcase, handbag and trunk were the principal means used.
A Toronto traveling-man, finding himself in Montreal with an empty sample trunk, decided to load it up with liquor. He did so. He had it carefully deposited at the station, and hung around till he saw it safe on board. Then he took a seat in the coach nearest the baggage car, and at every stop between Montreal and Toronto, he hung out the window to make sure that his precious trunk was not put off.
Arriving at the Union Station, he trolled unconcernedly into the baggage room to claim his trunk. Picture his horror when he found his trunk set to one side in the “excess baggage” corner.
He figured he was found out, and that the police had set it aside, awaiting to pinch him as soon as he claimed it.
He was sick with disappointment. But he remembered he had a good friend high up in the railway company. Rushing to his office, he telephoned this friend, confessing all.
“And they’ve set my trunk aside,” he said. “You get it out, and I give you a good share of the contents”
“Sure,” said his friend. “Don’t worry. I’ll do what I can.”
And sure enough that afternoon, the precious sample trunk was delivered up to its owner’s home.
Feverishly, he opened it. It was empty!
Not a smell of liquor in it. Who had done this wicked thing: someone on the train, in the station, or was it his friend?
But the joke was on the traveling man. He could not kick4.
That was more than half the humor of the smuggling game. Whatever happened, one couldn’t raise a kick. Being contraband, liquor could be stolen with impunity.
Two friends were on the train coming from Montreal. Each had a bottle of whiskey in his grip5. They were in the smoking car.
“Look here,” whispered one to the other, “why should both of us run the risk of being caught. You put my bottle in with yours and then if you’re caught, I’ll split the fine with you. You’ll find my satchel back behind my seat.
“Shoot,” whispered the other. “That’s the talk. I’ll do it.”
But into the parlor car he went, drew his friend’s handbag from under the seat and quietly and stealthily withdrew the bottle of liquor from it.
An old man opposite suddenly looked out from behind his paper and beheld this action, glared at him but said nothing.
“Caught, sure,” said the traveler who felt the gaze of his fellow-passenger piercing his very vitals. “That fellow’s a detective and I’ll be pinched as soon as I arrive in Toronto.”
But nothing happened.
On arriving at their hotel, the two travelers opened their grips.
“Hello!” said the one, “I thought you put my bottle of whiskey in your grip!”
“So I did,” replied the other, producing two bottles from his bag.
In silent astonishment, the other produced a bottle from his.
“Great Scotch!” cried the first, “I must have opened that detective’s bag by mistake!”
He had. And the other chap, not knowing who the others might be, the was powerless to raise an objection. He happened to be staying at the same hotel, but when the friends hunted him up and returned the bottle he failed to see the joke.
“Whole carloads of whiskey have disappeared in transit,” say the police “If a foxy railway employe discovers a car of whiskey labelled sewing machines, and can sidetrack that car, he is fairly safe in assuming that the owners of the car, fearing they are discovered, will not raise a run holler.”
As the ravens fed Elijah, so did a jocular fate bring a grateful gift to a little village outside Toronto.
This little village is one of those way-stations which closes up at night, even the locals passing it swiftly by. The station agent goes home about nine o’clock in the evening.
One night, not long ago, a freight car was quietly sided at this station, The agent had gone home. All was silent.
About midnight, one of the village worthies, on his way home, passed the station.
Now this man had sort of a sixth sense. He could smell liquor through a cement vault,
He felt his spine tingling and his hair rising as he passed the station.
“Spirits!” he said, softly.
Just to see if his senses had betrayed him, he came over and investigated the lone box car.
Sure enough, it was packed full of cases of whiskey.
Here was a problem.
“This liquor,” argued the villager with himself, “is contraband. Some wicked man is trying to smuggle this liquor into the country. Is he going to get away with it? Well, not with all of it!”
And the villager hastened to the home of another villager. A working party was secretly assembled, and several buggies, democrats and Bain wagons6 came in the night to the lone freight car.
A working party was secretly assembled, and several buggies, democrats and Bain wagons came in the night to the lone freight car.
In the morning, the station agent, on arriving, found a freight car the siding, broken open, and about a quarter full of cases of whiskey. He Immediately notified railway headquarters and that afternoon a number of officials and police appeared on the scene.
The police scoured the village for the looted liquor. Suspect after suspect was visited. At several places, where they were cheerfully shown over the premises, they were given a quiet snort by the jovial owners. In fact, the police were of the opinion that nowhere had they encountered a village the cellars of which were go well stocked. And such fine, amiable people, too! But a hoard of looted liquor was nowhere to be found.
The police finally gave up the search, deciding that in all probability, some professional gang of booze runners from the city had arranged to have the car side-tracked at the village, and had motored out and taken most of their haul, leaving some because of daylight.
And the village concurs in this theory.
Editor’s Notes:
Even though Prohibition was in effect in Ontario, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had ruled in 1896 that provinces do not have the authority to prohibit the importation of alcohol. Quebec allowed alcohol at the time. This loophole was closed in the 1921 referendum. ↩︎
I’m not sure if this is a typo, I cannot find the definition of this word. ↩︎
This comic references Prohibition where someone is trying to smuggle a liquor filled pumpkin across the Detroit river between Canada and the United States. Though Ontario had Prohibition at the time, it did not ban the manufacture of alcohol so there was still smuggling from Canada to the USA.
Prohibition had been in place in Ontario since 1916, but it had huge pockets of unpopularity resulting in numerous referendums. In 1923, the conservative government of Howard Ferguson was elected. A referendum in 1924 on repeal was basically 50/50. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, in early 1925 it was announced the repeal of restriction on the sale of beer, allowing the sale of a beer with a maximum alcohol content of 4.4% which was nicknamed “Fergie’s Foam” or “temperance beer”. Full repeal came in 1927.
These illustrations went with a story by C. R. Greenaway on the rum-runners on the Detroit river during Prohibition. The photos taken were considered very risky, as it was not unexpected to be shot at by the gangsters who would not want evidence.
A bright young man from Montreal landed in Halifax with $5,000 cash in his pocket.
He put up at the best hotel. He banked his money at the corner bank.
And then he walked promptly down to the waterfront.
Along the miles of docks he strolled, in and out of tiny, shabby lanes, in the shadow of tall ships, and little, fat, iron ships, and tidy old sailing ships. He talked with sailors and longshoremen, ship’s officers and the masters of schooners. He spent an hour or more in each of the dim little cafes that are to be found in Water street, talking to all who would spare the time to drink a cup of coffee or a snort of contraband Negrita rum at his invitation.
The second day in Halifax he spent in the company of the hotel clerk, of the manager of the bank where his money lay, and of a merchant from whom he purchased some collars.
The third day, four gentlemen lunched with him at his hotel. These four were strangers to him and he to them. They had come to lunch in answer to his telephoned invitation “to talk important business.”
“I have five thousand dollars,” the young man from Montreal was saying “It is all I have. It represents a bungalow which was my home, and the cash surrender value of my insurance policies.
“But I will contribute also my personal services. I have here personal references that will vouch for my honesty. You can wire Montreal for confirmation of these letters.
“The chartering of a two-masted schooner will cost us $1,500 for one trip, six weeks. The wages of captain, mate and crew, with bonuses, all set us back, roughly, another $1,000.
“Whiskey can be bought to-day at St. Pierre $23.50 a case, and sold off New York at $34.50. The profit is $11 a case.
“If each of you gentlemen will kick in ten thousand dollars, we can buy nearly two thousand cases at St. Pierre; and on the second leg the voyage, three thousand cases at Nassau.
“You can figure the profits…”
Two days later, from one of the docks off Water street, a trim schooner put to sea.
Aboard her was her master, who had just banked $1,500 to his credit before sailing. Aboard her also was the bright young man from Montreal. And in a locker in her cabin was the sum of $42,000 in cash.
The smart little schooner, of a hundred and fifty tons, fled nor’east before a fair wind out Halifax, and in three days anchored in the harbor of the island of St. Pierre, one of the two in the St. Pierre-Miquelon group, off the south coast of Newfoundland, which belongs to France.
There is no prohibition in France nor in her colonial possessions.
The warehouses on the wharves of St. Pierre are crammed with hundreds of thousands of cases of whiskey, rum, wines and liquors of every sort.
Big ocean steamers bring heavy cargoes of liquor to St. Pierre from Scotland and France.
But as fast as they bring it, small steamers and schooners take it away.
The young Montrealer was rowed ashore in the dinghy. He was directed to a building abutting on the docks of St. Pierre. There to a man at a counter he made known his request for a cargo of two thousand cases of whiskey, rum and wine, to total $42,000.
With another official, be arranged for a berth one of the docks. With the French customs officers he arranged for clearance of his cargo of booze to the port of Nassau, in the Bahamas.
And that night, his cargo of two thousand cases was loaded aboard the little schooner.
In four more days the schooner entered Halifax harbor. To excise officers who promptly demanded her clearance papers and manifest, it was shown that the schooner was merely putting in to Halifax for water and to drop a member the ship’s company.
The young Montreal man was put ashore, and after a few hours in harbor, the schooner went to sea again without him.
And he took train for New York, having made complete arrangements with the master of the schooner to meet him at certain point in the Ambrose Channel off New York seven days later.
In New York it did not take the young Montrealer seven days to find a purchaser for the two thousand cases. He dined two nights at a fashionable café, made the acquaintance of the head waiter in that time, and then asked him who in New York would like to pick up two thousand cases.
He was promptly introduced to his man.
Five days later, at dusk, a small steel tug, aboard which was the young man from Montreal and the fat gentleman who was buying the cargo, drew up alongside the schooner, which, true to its master’s word, was lying just where he said it would be lying in the Ambrose Channel.
The two thousand cases were transferred from the schooner to the tug.
And $66,000 cash was paid over to the Montrealer, who stowed it in the cabin locker, and instructed the skipper to set sail for Nassau at dawn.
Nassau is seven hundred miles below New York, off the Florida Coast. But the little schooner made the voyage, in spite of bad weather, in five days.
At Nassau, the Montrealer went ashore, and within an hour had purchased three thousand cases of Scotch whiskey. The schooner drew up alongside a large tramp steamer just in from Glasgow, and the cases were shifted from the big ship to the little two-master. On the schooner’s deck, the young man paid over $65,000 cash to the agent of the owners of the whiskey.
And cleared Nassau for St. Pierre.
But the schooner didn’t go to St. Pierre. It hauled into the Ambrose Channel about eight days later, after a rough passage.
By a passing launch, the young man sent a message ashore. And that night, aboard the same steel tug, came the same fat man, and took over the three thousand cases at $35 a case – a lump sum of $105,000 cash, paid over in $1,000 bills, in the cabin of the little fishing schooner.
The next morning, the schooner set sail for Halifax, where it arrived three days later and set ashore the young man and his wad of money. But because it was cleared from Nassau to St. Pierre, the schooner could not stop, and went on to St. Pierre, where it loaded with ballast, and cleared St. Pierre in ballast for Halifax.
The young man went to his hotel and called up his four partners.
They assembled at once to hear the news.
And $105,000 was split five ways pro rata, according to the investment of each.
The last reports on this bright young man is that he and his backers have dispensed with slow schooners and have chartered a steamship of the type known as a trawler, and are making the run between St. Pierre and Nassau, with intermediate store each way of the Jersey coast.
Instead of three thousand case lots, they are carrying thirty and forty thousand case lots.
They double their money each round trip.
There will be no shortage of motor cars in their families.
They are reputed millionaires.
By the greatest of good fortune for the rum runners, there are two ports of the Atlantic coast which do not demand clearance papers.
The laws of the sea are hard and fast laws. You can’t poke your nose into every port of the world and drop anchor. There are certain little formalities to be seen to. Officers come aboard and demand your clearance papers, from your last port of call. You have to show that the cargo mentioned in those papers is intact. You have to show that you have come direct from that port. They don’t allow loitering about the high seas.
But St. Pierre and Nassau in the Bahamas, beautifully positioned, one at the north end and one at the south end of the Atlantic coast, are not strict in the matter of clearance.
If you happen to drop anchor in Nassau, cleared from St. Pierre with a cargo of whiskey, why, nobody is going to pester you with questions if that cargo of whiskey has mysteriously disappeared between the port of clearance and the port of destination.
How ideal for the rumrunners!
A veritable flood of liquor is pouring into America from Europe through these two ports.
Many Canadian ships, from little fishing schooners to yachts, are employed in the trade.
And unbelievable fortunes are being made. The only difficulty is that, like all good things, too many get wise to it, and gum it up. Too many ships are peddling their goods off the coast nowadays. With the coming of spring, their number will be increased a hundredfold, it is expected.
The result is, that instead of whiskey selling at $60 a case off New York, with a profit of nearly $40 for the rumrunner, it has dropped to a little over $30.
Too many crooks spoil the broth. There is likely to be a glut of whiskey off New York and Boston this summer. The schooners that pick it up for $20 to $25 a case at Nassau will have to sell it a little over cost. Profits will be cut. A lot of good men will be ruined and go back to fishing and those other industries of the coast.
Off Halifax and certain other smaller ports of Nova Scotia which it would be cruel to mention, I visited some of the rumrunners.
Romance has come back to the sea, and especially to canvas. For half a century canvas has been on the wane. It has been reduced to fishing and to the carriage of certain foul-smelling commodities from little islands in the sea to the mainland. Sail had fallen to a pretty low ebb. The men who could sail a ship were few in number.
Then came the rum game, and the rattiest little old schooner came into its own. You could buy a pretty decent schooner for $6,000 or $7,000 before the rumrunning came in. Now they want twice that, if you can buy at all.
Many an old retired sailor, whose wisdom was all in canvas and the handling of a ship with sails, has been dug up out of his retirement to help man a rumrunner. It has been a great comeback. I talked with one old fellow of sixty-five who had gone ashore for good because he couldn’t compete with the boys on the steamers, and there was no more call for his cunning with canvas. He lived in simple poverty in a little village outside Halifax.
Now he is the mate of a three-masted tern schooner, making regular trips over the rum route, and he is getting not only mate’s pay but double pay as a bonus every trip. He has enough money to buy a pretty cottage to go home and die ashore. He has enough, in fact, as be pointed out himself, to get married on!
There is a sort of revival of the romance of the old privateering days in the game. The coast is filled with sailing ships as never in the last quarter century. All kinds of odd craft are making the winds work.
In the little cabin of one of the schooners I visited there were three shotguns hanging in racks upon the wall.
“What for?” I asked, “Shooting gulls?”
“Not them,” replied the skipper. “Those are for the preservation of law and order on the high seas. Those weapons are for the suppression of piracy. When we are lying in ‘rum row’ off the Jersey coast, every time a strange boat comes near, we man the bulwarks with those three guns, loaded with buckshot. There have been several cases of piracy – toughs from ashore coming aboard a helpless, honest ship and looting her cargo and her cash box.
“This trip I am exchanging those old double-barrelled guns for a set of modern pump guns that throw five charges of buckshot at a pretty good lick I’m told.”
One Halifax schooner master, by hard work all last year and the year before, had worked up a very decent business. He had amassed the overwhelming capital of $80,000. It is probable he never had a thousand dollars in the bank in the old days, though he toiled hard and dangerously at the fishing off the Banks. He risked his life and his ship in the most hazardous of callings for a very uncertain reward. Now he was rolling in wealth.
He made a trip down to Nassau and sunk the whole $80,000 in a cargo and brought it to the line-up of vessels off New York.
One of the “law-breakers” from shore came out – a big power boat – and he made his deal with a couple of foreigners.
They paid him in cash – $1,000 bills – the sum of $142,000.
And the skipper sailed tremulously for home. He took ballast at St. Pierre, and came to his home port in Nova Scotia. He was filled with dreams of founding a steamship business, of building a fine mansion, and living ashore for the rest of his life. As he sailed in the harbor he stood on deck picking a nice site for his future home.
When he plunked his fabulous fortune down In front of the teller in the bank, dazed with the thrill of it, he was the proudest sailor ever home from the sea.
The teller began to count the bills.
Then be stopped and fingered them.
A started look came into his face.
“What’s this?” he exclaimed. “Where’d you get this stuff?”
The $142,000 was all in counterfeit $1,000 bills.
The skipper was flat broke.
When two foreign gents arrived in Halifax some time later looking for a schooner to break into the game, some friends of the old skipper brought them to him.
Yes, he knew the ropes. He would willingly charter his ship and hire out as master of it.
“We’re from New York,” said the strangers. “The game is too crooked down there. It is all in the hands of one big gang. There is no profits for the little dealer. It all goes in graft. So we’ve come up here to break in from the outside.
Their plan was this: they would put supercargo of their own selection on board the schooner, and he would go with the ship to St. Pierre where a five-thousand-case cargo would be bought and delivered off New York to these men personally. A date was set. Another foreigner, of the gunman type, was introduced to the skipper, and he set sail.
The run to St. Pierre is only 400 miles from Halifax and can be made in three or four days’ fair sailing. But it was a bit rough. And the old skipper rolled that schooner through the trough all the way. The result was that the landlubber supercargo was a pretty dead specimen when they made St. Pierre.
He could hardly make the purchase, he was so upset. And when it came to getting aboard again for the long run to New York, he couldn’t be persuaded.
So the old skipper advised him to take steamer from St. Pierre to Halifax, and there the schooner would call and pick him up, so sparing him the worst part of the voyage.
The gunman, out of his element, with promises that his bosses would never find out, agreed.
But at Halifax he was as fearful of the next leg of the voyage for a storm was raging at sea and the skipper was determined to set sail.
So another arrangement was made, whereby the seasick supercargo could come aboard the schooner at New York a day before his bosses were to come aboard; and all would be well.
The skipper was such an honest old man!
He made the Ambrose Channel the evening the gunman was to meet him.
Presently, with the flashlamp signals arranged on, the unfaithful supercargo came alongside in a small launch, very sick and frightened.
“Beat It!” cried the skipper. “Your bosses came out last night and found us and took the cargo off. They are sure looking for your hide.”
Without a sound, the terrified gunman fled into the dark.
That same night, with his knowledge of the game, the old skipper found a buyer for the 5,000 cases in his hold among the small craft cruising out from shore. He got his money, $35 a case, $175,000, and he made dead certain that it was real money that time.
The following night, which was the first night agreed for the rendezvous, the two foreigners came aboard, vastly excited and delighted.
“What?” exclaimed the old skipper. “Here again!”
In moment pandemonium was loose on that schooner.
“Why,” said the skipper, “your supercargo went ashore to get you last night and came off about midnight with you, in a steel tug. Wasn’t it you? You don’t mean to say it wasn’t you?”
“Did they take the booze?” screamed the owners.
“You certainly did! Now don’t try pulling any tricks on me,” cried the old skipper.
And he bundled them off his ship.
They are probably still looking for that double crossing supercargo. And he is as faithfully avoiding them.
And the old skipper has his money back.
“Anyway,” he is reported to have said, “landlubbers haven’t any business in this sea-going trade.”
There are risks in the game. For one thing, no insurance can be got on either cargo or ship. Losses, when they occur, are heavy losses.
One man I talked to is a shipowner. Rumor has it that he is not missing the opportunity to invest circumspectly in the game.
He recently chartered a small two-hundred-ton steamer for one trip of about one month’s duration for $7,000. He further obtained from the man who chartered it (an American) a bond for $40,000, the value of the little vessel, to guarantee that it would break no laws or otherwise get into trouble.
That is a good rent, eh?
The Nova Scotia people generally, who have all the liquor they want despite their prohibition law, feel that Canada is missing a great opportunity to pay off the national debt in not going heartily into the rum-running game in large way.
But the rum-runners themselves complain that too many people are in the game already.
They are talking of the “good old days”. That’s a bad sign – for them.
By the good old days they mean a year ago, when a case off New York sold for $60.
And their hearts are further steeped in gloom with the news that the United States government is making an effort to have the British and French governments put the lid on St. Pierre and Nassau by requiring strict clearance papers in and out of all ports of call.
This will mean that rum-running will become a pure smuggling game, and cargoes from Europe will have to be transferred from big ships to little ships on the high seas.
And that’s a game only mariners can play.
And only the mariners are glad.
Editor’s Notes: There are a lot of prices listed here but $1 in 1923 equals about $15.80 in 2022. So, for example:
“And there on the bed, in a row, lay six gleaming amber bottles.”
By Gregory Clark, March 11, 1922. Illustration by E. G. Dinsmore.
This is the story of six bottles of whiskey.
Harry, the hero, was one of those upright, fearless young men who never have liquor in their possession but who find a manly pride in letting all their office acquaintances and not-too-Intimate friends assume that they had salted down a fifty year stock in 1920.
He was the kind of fellow who never took a drink except when among strangers. His friends knew he didn’t like it and that he was no gay dog. But Harry loved to toss off a drink whenever it created on strangers the impression of a man-about-town.
And on those rare occasions when he did take drink, Harry would hasten around a sort of circuit of people he wanted to impress before the smell wore off. When they, scenting the breath that Harry was careful not to conceal from them, jocularly said –
“Aha! Where do you get it?”
Harry would blush deprecatingly and say – “Oh, just a little business drink – you know.”
As if he had been dickering with those princes of finance who are popularly supposed to keep decanters on their desks.
Well, Harry got himself into a jam.
The reputation he had accumulated as a devil of a fellow with a cellar could not but work him ill.
A bunch of the executives of the sister company in the States came up on a visit to the big Canadian plant in Toronto. And Harry’s boss called him in and said:
“Now, Harry, these boys will want a little fun. But you know my house – strictly prohibition. So I was wondering if you could stage a little party up at that well-oiled bachelor apartment of yours, eh?”
And the boss winked jovially.
Now Harry should have sidestepped right there. He could have said his stock had run out; that he had been hitting it too hard; or some similar excuse that would have been quite sufficiently man-about-townish.
But to have the boss approach him thus intimately – the president! – and wink and chuckle.
It was too much for Harry.
“Certainly, sir! De-lighted! How many will there be?”
“Well,” said the boss. “There’s five of them from the other side, and a couple more of the boys from the office, and us; that’s eight. Tonight. Can you handle us?”
“Oh, sure!” said Harry. “Tickled to death, sir.”
“That’s the boy! Have dinner at the hotel with us, then, and we’ll all drive up to your flat after.”
“Right,” said Harry, man-about-town.
And he went to his own desk outside and sat down with a buzzing head to figure out how he’d get the means for the boss’s “party.”
After about ten minutes’ thought, he felt he should go out into the fresh air. He walked up one side of Yonge street and down the other, and finally decided to telephone all the people he had got a drink from the past month or two, and try them for a half-dozen bottles.
Dropping into a soda fountain, he sat down and commenced a list.
Two names he got at once. And then no more! Two! Surely there were more. He racked his brains, but all he could recall were numerous discussions of booze, but no material evidences of it.
In the pay ‘phone booth, Harry called up the two who had actually given him drinks in the near past. Both replied in the negative.
Harry then decided he would have to disclose himself to others as a man who had no cellar. It was a sore trial. He hated to abandon his pose. But he called up eight in a row, eight bright young men-about-town – and drew blanks with all.
Harry began to wonder if they were all bluffers like himself.
Then he remembered a pimply-faced lad in the shipping department who boasted a wide acquaintance with bootleggers. Hurrying to the office, Harry went back and sought this worthy out and said –
“Say, give me the address of a good bootlegger, on the q.t., will you?”
“Say, by golly, this is too bad!” said the pimply-faced one, disgustedly. “But all my friends have been pinched. This is too bad. It’s just at the moment – perhaps some other time -“
Harry looked at his watch. Three p.m. He hastened out to the street again.
It was about 5 p.m. that it began to dawn on Harry that Toronto was perhaps, after all, a prohibition city. At noon that day, Toronto had been billowing in booze, if you could believe everybody. At 5 p.m. it was as dry as a pine cone!
So he ‘phoned the boss to say that a sudden emergency would prevent him from dining with the party, but that he would be up at his apartment ready to welcome them at eight o’clock.
“Right,” said the boss.
Then Harry hurried home to the fashionable three-roomed bachelor apartment in a select apartment house to telephone to doctors.
Doctors could only produce one bottle. But one was better than none.
First he called a doctor who was also a brother-in-law. Over his limit! Next a doctor who was a member of Harry’s canoe club. Sold out! Then three doctors in a row who had attended him at various stages from infancy up. All sold out.
He called up the canoe club. Perhaps some of the boys would be hanging around. There were three, two of whom had no end of liquor ordinarily, if you could judge by the conversation, but were just out, and didn’t know where their next crock was coming from, at the moment.
Six thirty!
Harry felt himself losing weight.
Now we must pause to introduce the villain.
Harry’s telephone was on the wall in his apartment hallway.
Six feet along the hall was the dumb-waiter.
The dumb-waiter door was open.
In the bachelor flat above a lonely gentleman was getting himself a lonely supper.
He opened his door to the dumb-waiter shaft to see if the grocer had sent the sardines. And then he overheard Harry in his pathetic quest of hooch.
The lonely gentleman listened with interest. He kept on listening, as he ate a quiet repast of sardines and a bottle of milk.
Harry’s telephone bell rang.
He leaped from the chair where he sat in anguish, and answered.
It was the pimply-faced lad in the shipping room.
“Say,” he said, “I can get you some of that goods you was asking about –“
“Can you?” Harry shouted. “Good!”
“How much did you want?”
“Oh, six bottles,” said Harry.
“All right. A fellow will bring them up to you to-night.”
“Look,” said Harry. “I must have them before eight o’clock. Before eight, sure!”
“All right,” said the pimply one.
Upstairs, the lonely gentleman withdrew his head out of the dark dumb-waiter, softly closed the door, and went over to his telephone.
At eight o’clock the boss, accompanied by the five gentlemen from over the border and two of the senior men of the local office, arrived gladly and well-fed at Harry’s apartment.
And Harry was modestly beaming.
He helped them dispose of their coats, accepted their amiable, brotherly jests – even the boss’s – and then drew aside the green curtain that hid the alcove which was his bachelor bedroom.
And there on the bed in a row lay six gleaming amber bottles.
The excitement and whooping had barely died down, and the first cork had scarcely opened the musical program of the evening, when there came a loud, peremptory knock on the door.
The bottle was instantly recorked and hid in the waste basket. The curtain of the alcove was re-drawn. And Harry opened the door.
Two large, stern men were standing without.
“Excuse me!” said the foremost, stepping solemnly into the hushed, crowded little room. His companion followed.
They sniffed the air.
“Excuse me,” said the leader again. In a sepulchral voice. And he walked past the eight frozen gentlemen, pulled aside the curtain of the alcove, and stood in a dramatic posture, gazing at the five bottles on the bed.
“Bill,” he said, “take those.”
“Gentlemen,” he said, turning mournfully to the company, “there is one more bottle. Produce it!”
“But,” cried the boss, who was first to regain his voice, “what do you mean? This is a private house! Can’t a man give his friends a drink?”
“Gentlemen,” said the stranger sadly, “this Is bootleg liquor.”
“Go on!” cried several together, the boss loudly, Harry tremulously.
“Gents,” continued the severe big stranger, “this liquor was delivered to this apartment not ten minutes ago.”
All turned to Harry for denial; and there he stood, his head down, the picture of guilt and dejection.
“Come, gents,” said the stranger. “The other bottle.”
And the boss himself fished it out of the waste basket.
As the big man stood at the door, he said to Harry:
“I won’t take you along. I have your name and address. I can get you if I need you.”
And he closed the door.
The party lasted about ten minutes longer. The boss’s nerves were shaken.
“What did you want to get bootleg stuff for?” he demanded angrily of Harry. “I thought you had a supply of your own. You can’t tell where this thing’ll end now –“
He and his seven friends departed in an air of strained joviality about 8.30 p.m., and left Harry all alone, to lie on his bachelor bed and cuss.
Later in the evening, through the fog of remorse and vain regrets, Harry found time to wonder what all the racket was about on the floor above.
But the lonely gentleman in the flat above was no longer lonely. He had six friends in with him. And six bottles of amber hue stood upon his bachelor table.
Two of his guests were big men.
One of these was saying, as he gripped a glass with one hand and dabbed a handkerchief to his tearful eyes —
“But the fun of it was, we never mentioned the word ‘police’ once; did we, Bill? We just walked in and glared around. And there they stood – nine of ’em – and took it for granted!
“‘An, gents.’, I says, ‘If you please, the sixth bottle!'”
Editor’s Note: A “gay dog” is slang for a man given to self-indulgence.
