All posts by Dorothy Nixon

I am a Montreal based writer with a new book about the British Invasion of Suffragettes to Canada in 1912/13 Furies Cross the Mersey on Amazon Kindle.
England, Genealogy

Parallel Lives

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In April, 2008 I received an unsolicited email from a Mrs. Joan Hague of Montreal with just one word in the subject line: Changi.

She had seen an article I had written about my grandmother  in the Facts and Arguments1section of the Globe and Mail. She wanted to tell me about her father, Thomas Kitching, who had been interned at Changi Internment Camp in Singapore during WWII, just like my grandmother Dorothy Nixon.

I visited the gracious Mrs. Hague (recently deceased at the ripe old age of 99) only to discover something extraordinary: Mrs. H. and my own father, Dorothy’s first son, Peter, had led parallel lives!

My father, Peter, was born on October 24, 1922 in Kuala Lumpur, to a Selangor planter, Robert Nixon of North Yorkshire and his wife, Dorothy Forster of  Teesdale, County Durham. Mrs. H. was born in Batu Gajah, Malaya in early November, 1922, to Thomas Kitching, the Surveyor of Singapore and his wife Nora.

As was the custom for British Colonials in the era, Mrs. H. was sent away at age six to go to school in England. She attended Harrogate Ladies’ College in North Yorkshire. My father was sent away at age five to go to a school in Maryport, Cumberland and then he went on to St. Bees prep school on the coast of Cumberland.

Senior Rugby St Bees School, Cumberland. My father at top, fourth from right. Courtesy St. Bees School Website.

Mrs. Hague told me she spent her holidays with a loving grandmother in Lancashire. My father and his even younger sister, Denise, were shuttled on vacations between random relatives who resented having to care for them.

Mrs. Hague’s mother, Nora, a nurse by profession, filled the void in her life with sports, golf mostly. She also scored cricket for Singapore. My grandmother, Dorothy, became the librarian at the Kuala Lumpur Book Club and she was Selangor’s official cricket scorer.

My grandmother, scoring cricket at Royal Selanor Club in K.L in 1952. Courtesy of a March of Time Newsreel. She was the ‘grand dame’ of Malayan cricket apparently. She told a reporter that she got into cricket because her husband, my grandfather, was one of the finest players in Malaya in the 1920’s and 30’s.

In 1939, when the phony war broke out in England, my father was about to go to Oxford. Mrs. H.  was in her last year at her ladies’ college. The Harrogate students were evacuated to another town. Mrs. H’s parents, in England for a time, brought her back to Singapore because they thought she would be safer. After two years at Oxford’s St Edmund Hall (where he was awarded ‘colours’ for rugby) my father signed up with the RAF and went to train in Saskatchewan, Canada.

The Japanese invaded Malaya on Boxing Day, 1942.The Japanese planes bombed “the green” at the center of KL, the site of many government buildings. My grandmother’s library building, adjacent the legendary Royal Selangor Club, was hit. During the bombing my grandmother hid under a desk. Later, she helped dig  four dead bodies from out of the rubble.

On that ominous day, Mrs. H and her mom were safely in “fortress” Singapore. They joined up as VADs, tending to the severely burned survivors of two navy ships that had been blown up by the Japanese in Singapore Harbour.  Mrs. H. had a vivid memory of unfolding the hospital cots that were all covered in a sticky goo to prevent rusting.

Kuala Lumpur soon fell. My grandmother was commanded to take a noisy, unlit night train to Singapore. Upon arriving, she immediately joined the ‘resistance’ at the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation.2

Giles Playfair, a reporter, wrote Singapore Goes off the Air in 1943, so it was likely a bit of wartime propaganda. He oft mentions my grandmother and seems to like her, but he disparages Colonial Wives as lazy and living above their station.

To everyone’s surprise and to Winston Churchill’s embarrassment Singapore soon fell as well. Mrs. H. escaped to Batavia and made it back to England but tragically Nora, her mother, took another boat, the Kuala, with 500 others including 250 women and children, and was lost at sea when her ship was bombed by the enemy.

Mrs. H. trained as a physiotherapist at St Thomas Hospital, London and volunteered at the Canadian Camp.

Mrs. H’s father, Thomas Kitching, was interned at Changi Internment Camp, as were my grandmother and grandfather, Dorothy and Robert Nixon. (Upon the fall of Singapore, Dorothy had stubbornly refused to escape to Batavia, staying instead to support wounded soldiers. A good thing, perhaps.)

Thomas Kitching’s diary was published posthumously. Mrs. H. lent me a copy.

Kitching died of throat cancer in the men’s section of Changi prison in 1944 but he kept a diary of his time there that was later published. For a six month period my grandmother was Commandant of the Women’s Camp and according to her own unpublished memoirs she liked sneaking into the men’s camp, which was strictly against the rules, to gather information. The men had secret radio sets, you see, and she was an amateur radio enthusiast.

Malaya Straits Times 1936. The only woman among men. From what I have learned, that’s how “Granny,” educated at a co-eductional quaker school, liked it. This is why she just had to sneak into the men’s camp, a very dangerous act, I think. it certainly got her into trouble! Here she is described as Mrs. Dorothy Nixon. In those days and well into the 1960’s in newspapers in North America women were referred to as Mrs. John Smith.” They had no first names.

On October 10, 1944 many of these men and a few women were accused of spying in the infamous Double Tenth incident and taken by the Japanese Gestapo to a room in the basement of the local YMCA to be harshly interrogated, some men horribly tortured. My grandmother stayed in that stifling, bug-infested room with the crazed, half-starved men for a month, enduring a kick in the ribs on occasion, and then she was put in solitary confinement for another five months.

She survived her ordeal, but barely.

My father, meanwhile,  was posted to the Ferry Command based in Dorval, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal. A member of both the RAF and RCAF, he flew planes around the world, mostly mosquitos he told me.

A range of Mosquitos were manufactured to do everything from reconnaissance to bombing. Some were made in Downsview, Ontario. Ferrying planes from Canada to Europe was dangerous and many planes didn’t make it, but, hey, it was war.

In Montreal he met my mother, a French Canadian stenographer at RKO Radio Pictures probably at a party at the Mount Royal Hotel. They married after the war in 1949  once my father  had finished his war-shortened math degree at Oxford.

My father’s Sir George Williams grad pic, 1952, that I recently found online. Sir George Williams University night school was designed for returning soldiers, many of whom already had families.

In Montreal, my father added on a night time Commerce Degree from Sir George Williams University and a CA from McGill while working full time and raising a family.

Mrs. H. met her future husband, Mr H., the son of a prominent Westmount banker, during the war in London at a party for Canadian soldiers. The invitees brought with them a big juicy turkey apparently. The couple married in Morecambe Parish Church and moved to Montreal on the war bride scheme.

It is too bad I never got the chance to introduce Mrs. H. to my father as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s in the St. Anne de Bellevue Veteran’s Hospital in 2005. They certainly would have had a great deal to talk about!

Indeed, they may have already met. They both sent their sons to Lower Canada College on Royal Avenue in NDG in the 1960’s.

1. My Crochety Grandmother Deciphered.

2. Chronicled in a 1945 book Singapore Goes off the Air by Giles Playfair. The author wrote fondly of my grandmother, although he held the common belief (from back then) that Colonial women were indolent parvenues, ‘who would be sweeping out a four bedroom cottage back home’ were they not in Malaya attending fancy liquor-oiled soirees and waited on at home by a slew of servants.

3. Joan Hague obituary, chronicling her ‘interesting’ life with portrait young and old. I wrote this piece years ago and posted it on my personal blog after passing it by Joan Hague but also added two tidbits from her online obituary: Her marriage details and her work details.LINK HERE

England, Genealogy

Hard Life, Beautiful View

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The path my 2 times great grandmother Anne Nesfield took to work and marry in 1860 era. People in Sleights tended to stay put until the opening of the railroad in 1840.

My father, Peter, born Kuala Lumpur, Malaya in 1922 of hardscrabble North of England stock, always signed his name Peter N.F. Nixon Esq., something I found a wee bit pretentious. He was just a chartered accountant, after all. The F stood for Forster, the N for Nesfield.

I knew Forster was his mother’s surname. I didn’t know until very recently upon doing his genealogy that Nesfield was his father’s paternal grandmother’s name.

Ann Nesfield, my 2x GG was born in 1838A in Sleights near the lovely coastal town of Whitby at the North East corner of the North Yorkshire Moors to Stephen Nesfield of that place and Mary Jeferson of nearby Sneaton.

Stephen was a labourer. He and Mary were both illiterate as they signed their 1830 marriage certificate with an X.

The August 30, 1861B marriage record for Thomas Richardson and Ann Nesfield has them wed in Husthwaite, 40 miles to the south west but still on the Moors. Thomas was from nearby Rievaulx, a small town of 229 people (10 farms and 26 cottages, one school house and no pub) famous then as now for its monastery ruins.

According to the 1861 UK Census, Ann had been working in Husthwaite as a cook at an estate/farm, Highthorne, belonging to one Nathaniel Thomas Lumley Hodgson, Esquire (sic) gentleman horse-breeder who had been a crony of Charles Darwin’s at Cambridge! 3Thomas according to the same Census is living in Rievaulx with an older sister.

Ann and Thomas Richardson go on to have ten children over twenty years with my father’s grandmother Mary-Ellen, 2nd born in 1862, destined to marry one Robert Nixon, a quarryman from the adjacent market town of Helmsley.1

Now, I imagine Ann Nesfield’s existence in rural England post-Industrial Revolution wasn’t that easy despite her initial skilled position as a cook for a small family at a North York Moors estate. And who can know about her 1861 marriage to Thomas Richardson. Tailors and drapers, especially in small towns, were still solidly working class.

It is also possible Ann married right then out of necessity. It was announced in the 24th of August 1861 Yorkshire Gazette (just one week before Ann’s marriage) that Lumley-Hodgson Esq. was selling off some fine animals and leaving his farm for the winter ‘due to the health of his daughters.’

Abbot’s Well cottage on Google Earth with ruins behind. The oldest standing non-monastery building in Rievaulx, designated by the National Trust as Medieval, a period that ended in 1450.
The view from the garden. Roger Smith. Geograph Project Creative Commons

In the beginning, Thomas and Ann Richardson lived at the Richardson family abode, Abbot’s Well, a cozy-looking medieval cottage in Rievaulx, a town that started out as the inner court of one of the richest Cistercian Monasteries in England founded in 1132. The Monastery was destroyed by Henry VIII in 1532 at the very beginning of the infamous dissolution. New homes were then built with stone from the monastery, homes that were used to house various workers from the nearby Duncombe Park Estate of Lord Feversham.

The view from the little garden of Ann’s heritage house, by all accounts, was simply stupendous.

I discovered a 1830’s travelogue online that already describes the town of Rievaulx as ‘quaint’ and ‘picturesque’ and ‘historic,’ claiming the view from the ridge of the vale and ruins “offers a combination of beauties that must be seen to be enjoyed and once seen can never be forgotten.”2

A century later, in the 1930’s, a nephew of the 1st Lord Feversham of Duncombe Park in Helmsley was living at Abbot’s Well House (built 1906 and 30 meters away from the cottage) and Lady Beckett, the widow of the 2nd Lord Feversham, was offering tours of the cottage in benefit of local nurses “with the small garden providing an excellent prospect overlooking the monastery ruins.” Her tours continued well into the 1950’s.

And in May, 1984, the London Times remarked upon a recent sale of the modern Abbot’s Well House. “That a view is worth something is proved by the recent million pound plus sale of the modern Abbot’s Well with a two acre garden that has a view of the 12th century abbey and the Rye Valley beyond.”

I have to wonder, in the 1860’s, did Ann’s heart sing out every time she went out to hang the laundry with my great-grandmother, Mary-Ellen, at her feet? Or did she lament the leaky roof, drafty windows or the lack of bedrooms for her growing family? Was living beside these majestic monastery ruins a comfort to her or merely a haunting reminder of how things can fall apart?

As it happens, the Richardsons did move out of Abbot’s Well sometimes after 1881 and before 1891, but they did stay in town. The 1891 UK Census has the family living at New Cottage in Rievaulx, with Thomas still a tailor and draper but also, now, a grocer. The 1901 CensusC has Ann a widow with four grown children still at home, one son working as a general labourer but three girls in their twenties performing “home duties.” Ann is now the tailor/grocer in the family. In 1911, one year before her death at 74, Ann is still at New Cottage, working as a grocer and living with her youngest daughter who is 30 and married.

Recent Photo: Rievaulx Abbey and Rye Valley beyond from Rievaulx Terrace. Colin Grice. Geograph Project. Creative Commons.
Duncombe Hunting Party. 1728. John Wooten. Yale Collection of British Art. Creative Commons . My ancestors would be the labourers in the background or the scruffy attendants:)

My father’s working-class ancestors lived in picturesque towns all along the route from Whitby to Helmsley; pretty places with colourful names like Goathland, Kirbymoorside and Ugglebarnby. Whitby, where Ann Nesfield lived her early years, is also a North of England beauty spot from what I see on YouTube with surrounding coastal villages as lovely as anything in Italy’s Cinque Terre.

So, although little of consequence about Ann Nesfield’s life can be gleaned from the genealogical record, one thing about the woman cannot be denied. She spent her entire existence surrounded by the breath-taking beauty of the North Yorkshire Moors. That, I think, has to have taken the edge off her own hard-scrabble existence.

Notes:

Thank you to the Ryedale Family History Group for all their kind and expert help and especially to Valerie Slater for helping me sort out the many Ann Nesfields in the Whitby area born circa 1838.

(Apparently, there’s a lot of mix up over these Anns in online family trees. I have to redo part of my tree, now! And it doesn’t help birth dates on the UK Census are only guesstimates 🙂

A walk around Rievaulx Terrace National Trust: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=youtube+a+walk+around+rievaulx+terrace&mid=7CB260977EE2F240F3D27CB260977EE2F240F3D2&FORM=VIRE

  1. Robert Nixon Sr, my great grandfather, 1863-1937, who married Nesfield’s daughter, Mary Ellen Richardson, was a delver in the quarry in 1911 according to the UK Census, but he had other occupations. I know because I found his short obit from 1937 from the Yorkshire Post on the British Newspaper Archive database:

“Mr. Nixon was for man years foreman timber leader with messrs William Frank and Sons and with Mr Bentham King. Later worked for the Duncombe Park Estate, and during the war was put in charge of the felling of timber at Waterloo. He was a Sunday school superintendent and a local preacher in the Methodist circuit for over half a century.”

The 1921 census says Robert is working as head quarryman at Duncombe for the Trustees of the Earl of Feversham who was under age. The former Earl had died in 1915 in the war.*I wonder if the Nixons had an IN with the Earl? A Nixon and a Richardson were pallbearers at the Dowager Feversham’s 1889 funeral.

2. Ross, Stephanie. The Picturesque, an eighteenth century debate. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 1967

Esquire: Modern British. Polite term as appendix to a surname of someone without any other title implying genteel birth. Earlier, for English gentry rank below a Knight.

3. Both Darwin and Lumley Hodgson were ‘admitted pensioners under Mr. Shaw 1827. at Christ’s College a Divinity School.” Apparently, nature studies and divinity studies were considered compatible back then, as in ‘all God’s creatures.” Both graduated in 1832, although Darwin completed his exams in 1831. The Darwin Archives of Cambridge contains a January 1831 letter where a friend is asking Darwin if Lumley Hodgson has passed. “I don’t see his name anywhere, I am almost afraid to ask.”

Nesfield Rugby genes. My father’s nephew 1973, Rugby for Cambridge and England. My father, co-captain, 1939 Rugby for St Bees School Cumberland. My grandfather, 1912 Rugby for Duncombe Park where he was a footman. Through DNA I discovered other Ann Nesfield descendants played rugby for Scotland.

CITATIONS

A: Ann Nesfield Baptism 1838 Family Search
2. Ann’s marriage to Thomas Richardson 1861 Family Search
C: 1901 Census. Ann at Home running the family business with her girls.
Filles de Roi, Genealogy, Quebec

My French Connection -or why my grandfather had a lot of GAUL

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My very Gallic Grandpapa, Jules Crepeau (1879-1938) proud descendant of the Redones of Eastern Brittany in the Iron Age, among other Gallic Tribes.

Judging from her family tree, my late mother, Marie Marthe Crepeau was a bona fide French Canadian de souche.1

Her father, Jules Crepeau, son of an entrepreneur painter from Laval and her mother, Maria Roy of Montreal, daughter of a master-butcher, have trees that go right back to the boat in France – and yes, mostly to Normandy, Poitou and Ile de France. Classic!2

And yet, according to Ancestry’s (beta) chromosome browser, my mother was not 100 percent “French.”

I’ve provided my own spit to the platform and apparently chromosomes 3 and 12 on her side are English (but that does include the North of France) and chromosomes 17 and 18 are Norwegian (Norsemen -Northmen-Normandy, perhaps?) And a swath of chromosome 2 is indigenous American, making me less than one percent indigenous.

Lately, I’ve subscribed to an interesting infotainment3 website that really dives into a person’s ethnicity from all angles and over a slew of time periods: Ancient, Bronze , Iron and Modern Ages. Sure, I get Eure, Finistere and Vendee (Normandy, Brittany and Poitou) in spades, but I get just about every other area of France, too – as well as some Spanish, French Corsican and French Basque.4

My mom’s French Canadian family tree supports some of this. From the ten percent sample I traced back to France I get natives of Limousine, Aquitaine, the Mid-Pyrenees, Picardy, Bourgogne, Haute-Marne, Bayonne, Les Rhones Alpes, as well as the Canadian North (Innu).5

And let’s not forget my ancestor the legendary pioneer river pilot Abraham Martin dit L’Ecossais (he of the Plains of Abraham fame) who may have been from Scotland. My mom has him at least twice in her tree.

A while back, I figured out that my Mom’s paternal Crepeau line (father’s father’s father, etc.) can be traced back to Vendee but it is likely of Sephardic Jewish ethnicity and hails originally from Spain. 6

Lachenaye Seigneury 1676 (Claude Martel -historian)
View from Hubou farm (or close). These pioneer farms on the North Shore of Montreal were a narrow stretch of river away from the Eastern tip of Laval Island, and just a bit more north of the Eastern tip (Pointe aux Trembles) of Montreal Island.

In New France, my grandpapa Crepeau’s maternal tree can be traced to the original families at the Lachenaye (Terrebonne) Seigneury (est.1673) north east of Montreal, four founding farmer families in particular: Ethier (Poitou-Charentes), Forget (Normandy), Hubou (Ile de France) and Limoges (Rhones Alpes). My mother’s DNA is largely a mish-mash of these families’ genes, for they inter-bred down through the centuries. Basil Crepeau my mom’s 4 x GG was a slightly later arrival at Lachenaye who moved in beside the Hubous.

Jules and family before my mom was born circa 1920. Maria Roy (Gagnon) his wife was also connected to the Lachenaye tribe through Ethier.

Now DNA distributes down the generations in very complicated and irregular ways especially where endogamy or founder effect is concerned8 and judging from my many French Canadian ‘cousins’ on Ancestry, my mom may have gotten a disproportionate amount of her genetic material from the Hubou founder family at Lachenaye Seigneury. A great majority of my DNA cousins on that platform are connected to me through her 2nd great grandfather, Michel Hubou dit Tourville.9

As it happens, Michel’s pioneer ancestor was one Mathieu Hubou dit Deslongchamps, a master-armourer from Normandy who was married to one Suzanne Betfer who was…wait for it… a gal from Gloucester, UK.

Now, ain’t that fun! A bona fide English Fille de Roi!!

THE END

1. de souche a controversial label that means from the roots.

2. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.20.500680v1.full.pdf On the genes, genealogy and geographies of Quebec. According to: French Canadians come from 8500 founder families in 17th and 18th century, with only 250 of these founder families, the majority from Perche, leaving behind the majority of genetic disorders that passed down through the ages. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41464974

(Hereditary disorders in the population of Quebec II Contribution of Perche)

The very first pioneers, the 2,700 super founder families, 1608-1680, were 95 percent French. The later 17th and 18th century founder families were 80-85 percent French but the non-French includes Acadians.) The first 2,700 founder families contributed to 2/3rds of the modern gene pool of French Canadians, but geography and natural boundaries kept families within even smaller gene pools. Indigenous DNA contributed one percent of French Canadian DNA. Regions can have super-founder families that contributed even more to the modern gene pool.

3. Your DNA Portal

4.These ethnicity estimates are based on complex science but the various results have to be taken with a grain of salt. Even if the original science is spot on, these results depend on what sample of your DNA is taken and how far back the algorithm is examining. I liken it to making a complicated stew from various ingredients, letting it simmer for a long time and then trying to deconstruct what it was made from. Maybe you put parsnips, carrots and parsley in the recipe, but these ingredients are already related genetically so it’s not easy to pull apart. Still, taken as a whole the results I get are telling: My mother’s ancestors were mostly from Gaul, especially the tribes Redones and Veneti in Brittany. Hardly a surprise as that’s what my Mom had always been told, that her people were from Brittany. I also get Gaul Santones who lived in Charentes. So spot on!

5. Nos Origines and Drouin

6.My mother is no outlier French Canadian in this respect, at least according to a recent paper that maintains that the Huguenot and Acadian populations are largely made-up of Sephardic Jews escaping the Inquisition. Investigating the Sephardic Jewish ancestry of colonial French Canadians through genetic and historical evidence. Hirschman.

https://nameyourroots.com/home/names/Crespo (Spanish roots likely Sephardic) The name means Curly Haired One. My mom knew that. She did have very curly hair as did her father so that trait passed down through the ages.

The Crepeaus (Crespeaus, Crespo’s) are not the only possible Spanish line my mother has in her tree. For instance, her mother’s maternal Gagnon line goes back to one Lily Rodrigue in Normandy, a surname some say is Spanish derived. Another line goes to a Domingo in Bayonne, near the Spanish border. That name is Spanish/Italian and found in Southern France. I also have Navarre or Navarro.

7. Roy is the second most common surname in Quebec. http://leroy-quebec.weebly.com/the-surname-leroy.html . Gagnon is the third most common name and my direct pioneering ancestor hails from Perche in the North of France where he was a leading citizen, apparently.

8. Supposedly, all things being equal, we have only a 47 percent chance of inheriting DNA from an 8th GG, and inherited DNA from 8th GG’s amounts to a fraction of 1 percent but a high degree of endogamy or ‘founder effect’ clearly changes that, judging from the info in the studies in the links I have posted here.

9. On Ancestry, 60 percent of my closer DNA cousins are connected to me through Michel Hubou Tourville and his wife, but it should be noted that a full 400 family trees on Ancestry contain his name. It appears that his descendants moved to the US and did their family trees! Also, these ‘cousins’ tend to have my other Lachenaye names like Ethier and Forget and Limoges in their trees, so impossible to parse.

“This article explains the very thing I’m talking about: https://www.legacytree.com/blog/dealing-endogamy-part-exploring-amounts-shared-dna?fbclid=IwAR1veE4wNTc9gLGtx33Z8qphXmRdtTH2fREANxrenVDgx2NRqs1SznCAV0 “In one of our research cases, we found that an individual descended 12 different times from the same ancestral couple who lived in the late 1600s in French Canada. Although they were quite distant ancestors in every case (within the range of 9th-11th great grandparents), he had inherited a disproportionate amount of DNA from them due to their heavy representation within his family tree.”

Endogamy or consanguity? I’ve discovered that my grandfather Jules Crepeau likely had some double first cousins: his mother Vitaline Forget Despaties married Joseph Crepeau and Vitaline’s brother Adolphe Forget Despatie married Joseph’s sister, Alphonsine. I wonder if this happened further up the line. Wouldn’t that have messed with the DNA estimates! If such cousins marry it is closer to consanguinity than endogamy.

https://www.historyfiles.co.uk/KingListsEurope/BarbarianRedones.htm

The Celtic Tribes in France were described by the Romans as the GAULS.

Genealogy

The Jungle Librarian

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“Obviously a club does not change from a dump of second hand books to a pan-Malaysia institution without care and attention.” Malaya, 1966. British Malaysia Association. Tribute to Dorothy Nixon, former secretary of the Kuala Lumpur Book

Dorothy Forster Nixon 1895-1971

One morning not long ago, I received an email from a young woman in Malaysia. She wanted to know about my grandmother, also Dorothy Nixon, who had been ‘secretary’ of the Kuala Lumpur Book Club back in the day. The woman was a librarian-in-training and she told me that “Granny” was a great inspiration to her.

I wasn’t at all surprised because about ten years earlier I had received a similar email from the former Director of the Malaysian National Library. This illustrious person was researching my grandmother’s life as a retirement project.

It seems that my County Durham born grandmother, Dorothy Forster, who moved to Malaya in 1921 to marry Yorkshireman Robert Nixon1, a rubber planter, is something of a legend in modern Malaysia, at least among librarians.

In 2003, sheer serendipity led me to start my own research into my colonial grandmother. I was a prolific freelance writer back then and it was my habit to enter my name “Dorothy Nixon” into Internet search engines to check out where my essays and articles may have landed.

On this occasion, I stumbled upon a mention of another Dorothy Nixon, my father’s mother. It was on Amazon.co.uk in a review of a book by historian Margaret Shennan about Colonial Malaya “Out in the Midday Sun”. In the book Shennan mentions my grandmother but only once and only in connection with an ugly incident at Changi internment camp during WWII. She gets her name wrong, too: Dorothy Dixon. The reviewer, a Mr. Smith, corrected this typo and described my grandmother as ‘the endlessly helpful secretary of the Kuala Lumpur Book Club.”

I had met Dorothy only once in 1967 at 12 years old when she came to visit us in Montreal. She was cranky and super-critical of all things Canadian – especially of my ‘shrill’ playmates skipping or biking out on our Snowdon area street – and we did not hit it off at all, so you can imagine how confused I was by this description of her.

So, I tracked down Mr. Smith, a former rubber planter. He told me all about the KL Book Club’s subscription arm where book-boxes were assembled and sent out to people holed up in the jungle in their far-away plantations, a service much appreciated during the 1950’s Communist Emergency.

He further described my grandmother as having a fine and nuanced understanding of literature. She always studied the members’ tastes, he said, in order to recommend books to them.

I eventually wrote a story about “Granny” that got published in the Globe and Mail. That’s how the Director knew to contact me. In return for my help this nice lady mailed me an article from the Malaysia Library Review 1952 co-written by my grandmother about history of the KLBC: “The Kuala Lumpur Book Club: A Pioneer.”

The article explains how the Book Club started out as an informal back-room book exchange for Brits and evolved over the decades into a full-fledged government funded community resource, housed in a two story air-conditioned art deco building near the famed Royal Selangor Club in Kuala Lumpur.

Between the wars there were four libraries in Malaya, including the KLBC and the Raffles Library in Singapore. Although these places were set up for Britishers, members were debating whether it was time to allow locals to join, if only government officials.

The newspaper record 2 reveals that my grandmother, who worked at the Book Club from 1937 to 1966, was instrumental in opening up the library to Asians, male and female, especially students. This is likely why she is so admired today in Malaysia.

In the 1930’s and 40’s, the KLBC had a reputation among some Colonials as a light-weight institution that provided low-brow literature to rubber planters’ wives, who were bored to death with servants to do everything and their school-age children away in England.3

Dorothy, who attended a co-educational Quaker school in England, did indeed have many Tamil and Chinese servants at her husband’s Selangor rubber estate, some of whom watched over my father until he was sent away to school in Cumberland at five years old.

She did, indeed, attend many drunken garden parties and polo matches in the 20’s and 30’s – but eventually during the Great Depression she found something more important to do. For a smidge under three decades she worked at the Book Club 7 days a week, 9 am to 7 pm. In the evening she strolled over to the Royal Selangor Club (in the company of her male friend, an eminent lawmaker) where she scored their cricket games!

Popular Australian author Di Morrissey includes a bit about my grandmother in her 2010 novel.

Today, if you google “Dorothy Nixon” and “Kuala Lumpur Book Club” many many MANY citations will come up from scholars and journalists thanking my grandmother for help researching their books.

These authors are especially grateful for access to her personal collection of Malaysiana. Apparently, my grandmother was an expert in all things Malayan, a real scholar herself who was always invited to Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman’s birthday bashes, and who at mid-20th century repeatedly made the Malaysia Who’s Who.

So, not lazy at all

Video about Malaya in 1952 with images of my Grandmother scoring cricket at the end.

END

1) Men working in Malayan plantations were encouraged (forced) by their Companies to go home to find a British wife even if they were happy with other arrangements. My grandfather, Robert, found Dorothy Forster, the daughter of an itinerant Primitive Methodist Preacher who had circulated through his hometown of Helmsley, North Yorkshire in 1912-1914. When she arrived in Malaya, late 1921, Dorothy discovered Robert had an Asian ‘mistress’ as they said back then. Upon his marriage, he did not give her up,apparently. (Re: my Aunt Denise.) She got pregnant with my father immediately.

2. The Malaysia Straits Times is online with a database and many articles citing my grandmother, some with photos, most of them in connection with the Cricket. This link to an article, written in 1966, is a tribute to her work as KL Book Club Librarian and in Montreal in 1967 when she visited us she wasted no time in showing it to my mother. She was obviously in search of respect from us. Indeed, judging from her ‘diary’ searching for respect seems to have been her life’s goal.

https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19660514-1.2.105.12

3) British Colonial wives were much looked down up in rubber country, described as undeserving parvenus, women who would be sweeping out a three bedroom cottage back home in Somerset were they not in Malaya lazing in their airy bungalows, waited on hand-and-foot by servants. Yet, these Colonial Wives were given little to do and forbidden to meddle in local affairs in fear they would cause scandal or upset the entrenched hierarchy of the British, Malays, Chinese Tamils. The British believed it was necessary to send their children away to England as soon as possible for schooling and to avoid their contracting a tropical illness. By the time my father’s younger brother was born, he got to go to a British school in Malaya set up in the hills, considered a healthier milieu.

A Beautiful (Terrible) Life
An earlier story on this blog about my grandmother and her internment and torture during WWI.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/my-crotchety-grandmother-deciphered/article955859/

Genealogy, Montreal

Peacocks and Cherubim: My Mysterious Aunt Cecile

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My Aunts Flo and Cecile, circa 1930, in what I assume are bathing suits maybe at Old Orchard Beach Maine where the family vacationed.

It was 1962 or so and my mom, twin brother and I had taken a bus from Old Orchard Beach to Ogunquit, Maine to visit my Aunt Cecile, who was on vacation at the same time as us.

As my brother and I crawled over the jagged and slippery shoreline in front of her hotel we openly wondered why anyone in their right mind would want to vacation in this spot. It was all rocks!

Well, much time has passed and my husband and I love to spend time at picturesque Perkin’s Cove on our short trips to Maine in the spring or fall.

On one such weekend visit, I recall the owners of our b-n-b telling us about pre-WWII Ogunquit: it had once been a bohemian artist’s colony with open air classes and nude models posing on the Marginal Way.

An artist’s colony! Now that explains it. My Aunt Cecile was an artist and a good one at that – but a bohemian, never! I remember her only as sober and serious – and seriously pious. Children were a foreign country to her and her main ambition with regards to me was to convert me to Roman Catholicism.

Marie-Catherine Cecile Crepeau was born in Montreal 1909 to Jules Crepeau and Maria Roy, my grandparents. She had an older brother and sister, Louis and Alice and in 1914 or so another girl her age, Florida, was plucked off the scruffy streets of south central Montreal and brought into the family fold. My mother would appear much later in 1921.

Cecile contracted scarlet fever as a child and suffered severe heart damage. According to her sisters, she was ‘babied’ for most of her childhood, not asked to do very much.

So, it seems she learned to paint.

This battered canvas of young Flo is the only one of Cecile’s that I own. It was painted in 1927 when both Cecile and Flo were 18. It is pretty accomplished for so young an artist, I think.

Indeed, in a few years later Cecile would be accepted into the Beaux-Arts in Montreal (perhaps using this portrait in a portfolio) and she would win the first prize for oil painting (considered very much a male domaine) in 1937.

I have the medal somewhere and I found this tidbit from a tabloid called “L’illustre” describing the 1937 Beaux-Art exhibition: “Although the Hall of Paintings has little that is very striking, Therese Boucher’s “Reclining Man’ is vigorously treated. Among the angels, Cecile Crepeau’s is most alluring, in large part because of the curious golden tonality of the ensemble. Her study of a face, placed to the right of the entrance, has life and sincerity, despite some weaknesses. Her blue vase beside a pewter bowl also merits a mention. The female nudes are unimpressive.”

The angel picture I remember well. It loomed over Cecile’s living room and, yes, it was very golden. Another tall tall wall hanging I remember was an oil painting of a statue of St John the Baptist holding his own very hairy head.

I don’t recall the still life mentioned in the newspaper article, but I wish she had put some pretty vases behind Aunt Flo in my painting. It seems unfinished somehow.

My aunt was ‘a perfectionist’ (who suffered migraines for it) said my mother, which might account for why she created so few completed canvases..

Again, according to my mother, a teacher at the Beaux-Arts told her she had the technique but to be a superior artist but she had to ‘live a little.” (I wonder if the teacher was hitting on her.)

In the 1940’s, Cecile is listed in Lovell’s Directory as “housekeeper’ at my widowed grandmother’s Oxford Avenue flat. My mother is working as a stenographer at RKO Motion Pictures just down the street and my Aunt Flo as a greeter at Henry Morgan’s department store downtown. They are providing the financial support. My grandfather, former Director of City Services, had died under mysterious circumstances in 1938.

My brother and aunts in Cecile’s garden on Beaconsfield Avenue. It was lined with statuesque poplars and showcased an ornate wrought iron and marble birdbath! 1956 or so.

In 1951 my grandmother passed away. My mother had already married and moved a short distance way. Flo, too, would soon marry, leaving Cecile to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

The story goes Cecile tried to became a nun but was turned down ‘due to her bad heart.’ Instead, she married a friend’s father, Amedee Buteau, a retired professor almost 30 years her senior. 1They would take a lower duplex apartment in NDG, filling it with my grandparents’ elegant furnishings. It was a marriage of convenience, no doubt, but it worked.

In the 1960’s, I just loved visiting Cecile’s home. Unlike our dingy and unadorned upper duplex apartment not far away, Cecile’s home was spic-n-span, every surface polished to a high sheen. There was no TV blaring Bonanza or Star Trek, just a giant grandfather clock solemnly marking each quarter hour with a click and a ping. The place felt like a museum with all the curio cabinets filled with so many intriguing things.

1955, My mom with her sisters.

And mixed in with the fin-de-siecle family treasures were her many multi-media artworks: sculptures, ceramics, watercolours. There were quite a few confusing (to me) religious subjects like bleeding hearts but also some adorable cherubim and many nature studies especially of flowers, birds and butterflies. Indeed, Cecile painted an immense peacock in full display on a wooden blind on the wall behind her bed. The tension between Eros and Thanatos in her beautiful Beaconsfield Avenue abode was quite evident to me, even as a child.

My mother had a very choppy relationship with her sister Cecile so even though we lived but a short bus ride away we didn’t visit her that often. – and I don’t recall her ever visiting us. Cecile’s hair went from red to grey between 1960’s visits I recall.

On at least one occasion I was sent on a sleepover. My aunt was awkward with me and I was determined not to like her, probably picking up on my mom’s vibes. It didn’t help that Cecile brought me to a scary Latin mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, pinning a silly handkerchief to the top of my head. Unfortunately, she did no art with me. Too messy I guess. Too bad as she was a wizard with pastels.

Cecile passed away in 1974 a year or two before her aged spouse. She was 65. My mother sobbed with grief at her passing. “You were always fighting with her,” I recall saying to my mom. “So why are you crying so much?” How naive of me.

All of the family heirlooms fell into the hands of ‘strangers’ upsetting my mother, but one lost canvas pained her in particular. “It was Cecile’s best painting,” she said, “of Alice putting a flower in Florida’s hair before a dance.”

Classic! I can hardly blame my mother for coveting that particular oil painting, one that involved all of her sisters: I wonder who owns it now.

  1. Mon Oncle Amedee was so comically vague in his dotage, seated in his armchair snoozing away with an upside down Le Devoir newspaper folded onto his lap, we children assumed he was expert in some airy-fairy field like ancient philosophy. But, no, quite the opposite. A short search on the Web reveals that in the 1920’s Amadee was a civil engineer, Dean of a Technical College and expert in technical education giving lectures, meeting with policy makers, even writing a book.
England, Quebec

The Ugly Vases

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“Here men and women were working side by side, the women subordinate to the men. All were preoccupied, wrapped up in their respective operations, and there was the sound of irregular whirring movements from every part of the big room. The air was laden with whitish dust, and clay was omnipresent—on the floor, the walls, the benches, the windows, on clothes, hands and faces. It was in this shop, where both hollow-ware pressers and flat pressers were busy as only craftsmen on piecework can be busy, that more than anywhere else clay was to be seen in the hand of the potter.” Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett.

Family heirlooms are loaded both with history and with sentiment. While an heirloom’s historical significance often grows over time, the sentimental side of it inevitably diminishes down the generations.

A once-cherished heirloom very often becomes something a baffled descendant holds up in the air while wondering “Is this teacup pretty enough to keep?” “Does this glass lamp match my decor?” Or more likely. “I wonder if this hideous silver ladle is worth something.”


In my house, I have many heirlooms from my husband’s side –and have disposed of even more – and only a few from my mother’s side. My mother’s much older sisters got all the delightful bourgeois bric-a-brac from the family, my mother ended up with only a few turn-of-the-last-century vases.

I gave my sister-in law this Austrian Amphora with a cascade of cherries. She has more baroque decorating tastes than I do.

This classic Schneider Verre Francaise I keep in an Art Deco place of honour – on the floor – so my kamikaze cat won’t knock it over.

And the two rather ugly portrait vases once belonging to my chere Grandmaman Crepeau, I keep up on a shelf in the spare bedroom

for one reason and one reason only: I was practically born under them.

December 1954. That’s me in father’s arms. We are at my Aunt’s home in NDG

Twenty years ago, I investigated the provenance of the ugly vases for my Mom. She had just inherited them from my Aunt. They had a certain Pre-Raphaelite feel, I told her. Maybe they were worth something.

It didn’t take too long to figure out. These vases were English “art nouveau’1 Rembrandt vases out of the Thomas Forester factory in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, a business supplying “useful and decorative” pottery to the masses.

1912 Thomas Forester Showroom, Glasgow. The company specialized in Phoenix ware, a bright blue kind of pottery.

Later, I brought the ugly vases to a woman who was holding a “road show” event locally and she seemed impressed that I knew of their provenance. She said my Rembrandt vases were worth 400 dollars. Well, OK. Today, I can see a nearly identical pair on auction in Yorkshire for a mere 30 British pounds.

These days, I display the vases beside a print-out of a painting of the Pompeii Cleopatra. (I am a classical history enthusiast which, let’s face it, is largely about pottery – or pottery shards.) There’s a similarity in style, I think, especially with the girl on the left. I’ve always called her the Egyptian girl.

The back of the vases. Poppies? The Road Show lady said all the ugly bleeding is a mark of multiple firings and a good thing.

The designer of the vases is likely one Thomas Deans 2. I wonder if Mr. Deans ever visited Pompeii. Still, I don’t find these vases very appealing. Too chiaroscuro3 for my tastes. Too rough around the edges. The auction sites agree 🙂

Now, wouldn’t you know, Mary, the Queen of England, expressed a fondness for Rembrandt vases in 1913, the very year my vases were thrown. I know because Their Majesties made a tour of the Potteries (five towns in Staffordshire) in April . The tour was recounted in detail in the May 1913 issue of The Pottery Gazette.

The pottery industry was so important in England in 1913 that it warranted a Royal tour.

The King and Queen were also there, I suspect, to help calm down the natives who were upset over muscly new workplace laws threatening their businesses.5

This Royal visit was a PR masterclass, skilfully curated in support of the English pottery industry: The Royal Couple was on a tight schedule but they always seemed to linger longer than permitted, “so interested they were in the orchid paintings of Mr. Dewsbury; such pleasure they took in the engravings of Mr. Wyze; how attentively they watched the Wedgewood throwers at their work.”

And at every turn, Her Majesty revealed a vast knowledge of all things moulded, pressed and thrown.

Their Majesties did not stop at the two Thomas Forester factories in Longton but they did visit another factory-of-the-masses in that town signifying that they were not pottery snobs and very much interested in the ‘utilitarian’ aspect of the products.

They also went upscale. It was at the Doulton Factory toward the end of their tour where Queen Mary expressed a keen interest in my vases, ah, well, similar ones. “The Rembrandtware was singled out by the Queen for special inspection.” I guess, she really liked those gloomy vases gilded with gold.

So, my ugly art nouveau vases do contain a bit of history, even if it can’t be proved that Thomas Dean the designer ever visited Pompeii; even if Queen Mary of Teck, King Charles’ great-grandmother, never set eyes on them. 4

The vases certainly contain loads of sentiment: that photo is the only one I have of me as a baby and I’m in my Dad’s arms. For all I know, I first learned to focus my eyes on one of those gilded West Midlands maidens as my father moved toward the couch for this first-ever family photo-op.

Reminder to self: Put a copy of this story in one of the vases for when my my kids are deciding whether to give it to the VON. Also. Reread Anna of the Five Towns.

Thomas Forester: A local self-made man with good business sense. He would have two factories on Longton, his home town.

1. Art Nouveau. I love Art Nouveau. But where are the Mucha-like flowers in the hair? Forester produced prettier vases with women adorned like that. Just not here. My vases are a mishmash (miss match) of Dutch Golden Age, Art Nouveau and Classical Antiquity, I think anyway.

2. My vases have no Forester stamp, just a squiggly line, but online at auction an identical vase was designated Deans.

3. Rembrandt style as in clear/dark. I remember the term from an art history lecture in college. Funny what sticks in your head. Doulton Rembrandt vases are worth a fair bit on the auction sites. They have traditional portraits of hoary old men.

4. Maybe she did, after all. To put a stamp on the Royal visit, the Potteries mounted a huge exhibit for the benefit of all citizens.

5. Children under fourteen were banned from the workplace. The glass industry said this would ruin them. Boys needed to start work at 10 or so in order to become apprentices at 14. Not to worry, the children would only work 44 hours a week! There were new laws regarding the unbearable heat in the buildings, too, and lead-poisoning (of women and children) was also a topical issue.

Canadian Province, Quebec City, Scotland

Romeo and Maid Marion: A Rom-com Romance

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August 18, 1918

30 York Avenue, Westmount

My dearest sweetheart,

I cannot express in writing how pleased I was to hear your voice over the telephone a little while ago and was very sorry when I learned that due to the circumstances, you were not able to come home.

Dearest, I have never written you on this strain since I have known you and before I say what I have in mind, I beg of you to please try and understand it in the light that I mean it.

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

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

Really, it has seemed to me almost like years. I would a thousand times rather be left entirely alone than to be left again with the girls, as I cannot get them to  do anything which appears to me to be reasonable. I have come home on several occasions and the front and back doors were not locked. They will not close the windows and the house is almost like an oven. They forget to order food. The refrigerator is left open; the ice is melting as fast as you can put it in. Cawlice. Water is running all over the floor and things are lying about. I am sick and tired of the whole place.  

Take pity on me Darling before I go crazy and come home to me to look after and love me. *but under no circumstances take chances (with mother’s health).  Take it from me, God help the poor man that gets either one of them, if they don’t change. You can do more in five minutes than they can do together in a day.  You have forgotten more than they’ll ever know. God bless you Marion and may it be God’s will that he can spare you to me for many long happy years.

Lovingly,
Hughie

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

This rather amusing letter was sent under duress by my husband’s grandfather, Hugh Blair, to my husband’s grandmother, Marion Nicholson Blair in August 1918.

It seems Marion had taken her daughters, 12 month old Marion and three-year-old Margaret, from their home in Westmount, Quebec to visit her mother in Richmond, Quebec leaving her husband in the care of his sisters-in-law, Flora and Edith.

Hugh, clearly, is at his wit’s end. He is feeling neglected. Of course, his sisters-in-law have more important things to do. They have busy day jobs as teachers. WW1 is raging. Over and above their tiring day jobs, the women volunteer for the war effort. Many of their friends have lost brothers or sons at the Front. They can hardly feel sorry for Hugh.

My husband’s grandfather, Hugh Christian Blair, born in Three Rivers Quebec in 1882, was a man of many faces. He could be a big baby, no question, but he was also a suave charmer, a savvy businessman, a talented carpenter and metalworker, a fine fiddler, a hockey player and curler and, ugh, judging from an album I have filled with photos of dead foxes and such, an ardent hunter.

Hughie the joker with the stylish signature

He was the son of a prosperous Three River lumber baron and he worked in the family business.

In 1912-13, Hugh was courting his future wife, Marion Nicholson, daughter of Norman Nicholson, a very respectable but down-on-his-luck businessman from Richmond, Quebec.

Letters I have reveal that their one year courtship, from May 1912 to October 1913, has all the earmarks of a modern rom-com movie with its many ups and downs and breakups and make-ups and misunderstandings.

Let me summarize the plot for you:)

In May 1912, in his mid thirties and with good prospects, Hugh Christian Blair is introduced by his landlady to Marion Nicholson, a teacher at Royal Arthur School in Little Burgundy. Hugh is instantly smitten by this attractive firebrand, but first he must give his current girlfriend, Jean, a Momma’s girl, the brush-off. “Of course, you must know that we were never engaged and as for any understanding it must have been entirely on your part as I myself was only thinking of you as a very kind friend.” 1

He pursues Marion with all of his energy, taking her out of her stuffy rooming house to church as well as to more exciting places like the Orpheum Vaudeville Theatre and Dominion Thrill Park.

Marion is secretive about her life but sisters Flora and Edith keep their mother Margaret up to date about the budding romance, cheekily referring to Hugh in their letters as “Romeo” or “Hugh Dear.”

At the end of the school year Marion organizes a party at her rooming house. She strategically invites Hugh as well as another male friend. Neither of them shows up. She is furious. So the romance stalls. Marion returns to Richmond for the summer months.

In August, 1912, Flora and Marion visit a kind doctor cousin, Henry Watters, in Boston who takes them to Norumbega Park and a Bosox game. Henry isn’t the marrying kind, but another Boston relative, a Mrs. Coy, is keen on having Marion marry her son, Chester. Hugh somehow senses this. He writes Marion two long-winded letters while she is in Boston.

“I notice by the advertisements that there will be quite a few nice plays out this fall in Montreal. So if I am here – and of course you also – and care to take them in, I will enjoy taking you along. Of course, I would not like to neglect our Old Standby at the Orpheum. But I suppose there is no use planning too far ahead as many changes can take place between now and then.” It looks like he’s hedging his bets, doesn’t it?

It’s September. School begins anew. Marion is totally fed up with her rooming house with its suffocating curfews, so she finds a large flat to live in with her sister Flora and two other teachers in Mile End.

This is quite the revolutionary feminist act. Mr. Blair is a frequent visitor, so says Flora in her letters. (How scandalous!) However, Chester, “A great Yankee” also comes to visit.

Marion drawn by a fellow teacher

In November, Marion writes her Mom: “Hugh is helping with the double windows. Sometimes I like him, sometimes I hate him, but I wouldn’t know what to do without him.” Now, doesn’t that sound promising!

But something happens at Christmas (likely a dispute with the dad, Norman) that once again pours cold water on the romance.

In a telling January 3, 1913 letter to Marion, Hugh acknowledges receipt of her Christmas gift of cuff links and in turn says that the teddy bear he sent her was probably lost in the mail or stolen. Hmmm.

In February, 1913, Edith tells her Mom she went out with Hugh and Marion and he was all suave charm, “not the Hugh you had at Christmas.” Things are definitely looking up.

Sure enough in May 1913, Marion sends a letter to her mom with a drawing of her engagement ring.

A month later Hugh sends a very formal letter to Norman, her father, asking for Marion’s hand. Norman sends a letter to Marion saying “I can’t give my consent for I am dead broke.” 2. (Clearly giving consent is about money here.)

The men finally come to some arrangement but first Marion has to sign a miserly marriage contract that stipulates she gets nothing should the couple separate FOR ANY REASON. This is, likely, Hugh caving to his parents who do not approve of the marriage.

The couple weds in Richmond in October 1913. Hugh’s parents do not attend the wedding. Hugh leaves the family business to set off on his own.

Edith, Flora Hugh, Floss and Norman Nicholson, I suspect on the wedding day.

Wedding on the cheap.

But a Great War breaks out and Hugh soon reconciles with his parents and returns to the family business. (They need him: production is ramping up. Canadian lumber is key to the war effort apparently.) Hugh and Marion, with a newborn daughter, move from NDG to a cottage 4 on York avenue in Westmount near Hugh’s Aunt and Uncle.

Marion invites Flora to come live with them (with Hugh’s approval):

“It seems rather foolish to me to have you alone at Mrs. Ellis’s when there is room here. It is not that I need you especially for anything, but that I would like to have you with us.”

Marion tells how Hugh and his uncle work on their Victory Garden:

“Hugh and Willie are making a garden. What success they will have I do not know. One thing may be sure, the beds are straight and square. I would prefer to have more in them myself.”

Marion describes how much Hugh’s mother rails against Conscription:

“Everyone here, that is the Aunts and Grandma B are terribly worked up about conscription. All they say would fill a book and some of the sayings I do not find very deep. I would like to tell them that they are not the only ones who have sons who will be called, or they may think that theirs are more to them.”

Letter from the Front. Flo’s friend, Ross Tucker. He survived, his brother Percy did not. Percey was killed just before Armistace. A sister died of the Spanish Flu. “That family is not the same,” says Edith in a letter.

And in July, 1918, just a couple of months before another scourge, the Spanish Flu, hits Quebec, Marion takes her two young daughters on a prolonged visit to her parents’ in Richmond and Hugh, left behind to swelter in the kitchen, has a meltdown. He writes her a long, plaintive letter he hopes his wife will burn after reading. Alas, she doesn’t burn the letter. BIG mistake!

Denouement.

Post war life is good for the Blairs. They have two more children, a girl and a boy, and spend a great deal of money, according to Edith. Marion’s father dies in 1921. Marion continues to regularly visit Richmond, a place her children come to cherish.

However, in 1926, Hugh contracts a liver disorder and passes away a year later – but not before signing away Marion’s rights to his portion of the family business on his deathbed – “as a temporary measure to facilitate business.” Marion Nicholson Blair is left with nothing to live on so she goes back to work as a teacher, wheeling and dealing to find sponsors for her children’s McGill education.

A last minute letter reveals that Hugh attempts to to purchase a burial plot in Melbourne Cemetery beside the Nicholson family plot. That doesn’t happen. Hugh Christian Blair is buried with his family on Mount Royal in Montreal. The funeral notice in the Gazette reveals it is packed with Masons but fails to mention Marion and her family as mourners.

Afterward:

So, here we have the plot for a classic rom-com romance, but a movie with no happily-ever-after. Iron-willed Marion just rolls up her sleeves and goes back to work, despite great pressure put on her to remarry for the sake of her children. Indeed, she once told her children that being a lone parent wasn’t so bad: “At least I can make all the decisions for my family myself.”

Marion becomes a master-teacher and rises up to lead the Provincial Association of Protestant Teachers, or PAPT, during WW2 where she fights for teachers’ pensions.

In 1947, Marion dies of a heart attack before she can earn her pension.3 She receives a front page obituary in the Montreal Gazette, a major newspaper. “With the loss of Marion Blair the province, indeed, the whole Dominion has suffered a serious loss.”

In the 1960’s, the PAPT is one of the highest achieving public boards in North America and no doubt Marion Nicholson Blair had a role in making that happen.

1. This was the usual language used in such situations. I believe there must be a legal component to it. Indeed, the last line of the letter asks her ‘reply and tell me you have forgiven me.’

2. Many people believe this traditional gesture is romantic but it was practical, all about money. In Britain at least adults have been able to marry without consent for many centuries. However, without a dowry, most men couldn’t marry.

3. Marion’s heart condition first flares up in the year Hugh is dying. Edith suggests Hugh is very demanding and Marion, with four children, is run ragged meeting his needs. Edith also says Hugh’s eyes are yellow as yolk. A tube between the liver and stomach fell apart. It is a condition easily fixed nowadays.

4. 30 York Avenue is still there, a two story cottage. It’s on Google Maps.

Genealogy, Quebec

Laura Lacombe, Who Were You?

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Perhaps the only picture of my mother’s cousin, Laura Lacombe, fourth from left in a Crepeau family picture circa 1914.

Genealogy is a gift that keeps on giving. A few years ago, when the 1921 Canadian census came online, I anxiously consulted it to see a Crepeau listing for my mother (4 months old), my uncle Louis, my aunts Alice and Cecile (20 and 17) and my 15 year old Aunt Flo, listed as adopted under the name Florida St-Martin.

Bingo! That’s what I had been waiting to see for 10 years!

In the 1911 census, my Aunt Flo is listed with her birth family, the St-Martins but I wasn’t 100 percent sure the listing was hers. (I had only a vague recollection of her birth family’s name. The family name St-Martin had come to me in a light-bulb moment in the middle of the night!) So this 1921 listing confirmed my subconscious’ powers. I suddenly felt very smart.

Aunt Flo peeking out at my mother in around 1925.

But, I also noticed another name in the Crepeau household on the 1921 census, Laura Lacombe, niece, born 1892. I had never heard this name before, so I took another peek at the 1911 census. Laura Lacombe is listed there, too. I had missed it.

Now I was really confused. (I suddenly didn’t feel so smart.) I rationalized that I might have missed Laura ten years earlier when the 1911 census came online because the Crepeau family listing is at the bottom of one page and Laura’s name comes up on the top of the next. Or maybe I did notice Laura’s presence on the census and just assumed she was one of the many young girls brought in over the years to help my grandmother, Maria, keep house.

Whatever the reason, it did not take long before I figured out who this Laura Lacombe was. She was the daughter of my grandmother’s sister Melina Roy Lacombe who had died in the mid 1890’s leaving behind two young children, Raoul and Laura.

On the 1901 census Laura is living with her grandmother (my great-grandmother) Melina Gagnon Roy and my grandmother, Maria; also Maria’s brother Louis and sister Eugenie who is married to a James Deslaurier. Maria and Louis are mistakenly listed under Deslauriers. (For this reason, I had a lot of trouble finding Maria on the 1901 census at first. ) Melina Gagnon Roy is listed as chef or head of the household.

So, when Maria, my grandmother, got married later in 1901 to the ambitious Jules Crepeau, she took in the twelve-years-younger Laura. Or maybe Laura moved in with them in 1906, after the death of the grandmother.

Now, the real question begs: how come I never heard about Laura before? Was she for some reason a family secret?

Over the decades, I never heard my Aunt Flo or my own mother speak of this cousin – and they both liked to talk about the Crepeau family in the early days.

The answer might lie in another document I found: Laura’s death certificate. You see, she died only a few months after the 1921 Census man came around – and a few months more after my mother’s birth. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, signed her death certificate. No reason for the death is given, which makes it all very sketchy. (I’m not embarrassed to say, I looked for the name “Lacombe” among my many French Canadian DNA cousins on Ancestry. The name hardly appears at all. Phew!)

Still, I have to ask. Why the silence surrounding Laura’s life. A real mystery, it is.

Genealogy

The Bush Camp Bean Counter

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“Three years ago, Wabush was bush: a rough, scraggly, nearly lifeless wilderness. The hills in summer echoed only with the whir of the black fly. The only way for a man foolish enough to want to go there was to do so by seaplane. The bush, like so many of the parts of Canada that have yet to be opened, had to be broken and tamed, and the men who broke it — the last frontiersmen — are a breed apart.” Macleans Magazine

In November, 1963, Peter Gzowski, the young managing editor of Macleans, wrote an article for his magazine entitled “The New Soft Life on the Last Frontier.”

The journalist – now legendary – had worked ‘like a serf’ as a student on the Labrador railway that was needed before they could start work at the iron ore mines at the Quebec/Labrador border.

Apparently, he was amazed at the advances made in just a few years in the embryonic mining town of Wabush, 1248 kilometers from Montreal.

A rough, scraggly nearly lifeless wilderness is how Gzowski described Wabush back in 1960, and, yes, that is certainly how I remember it – if only from photographs we took on our little Brownie camera.

My brothers, Mark and Phil, and me in front of Little Wabush Lake, 1960, my ridiculous hairdo courtesy of my mother who was trying to make me look less of a tomboy.
A Y Jackson Wabush Lake. If my memory is correct he visited Wabush while we were there and told my mom he would have liked to have painted my twin brother (not me!)

My family moved to Wabush in the spring of 1960 when the only family quarters there were a log cabin owned by the American Foreman and, just up the hill, a few well-equipped house trailers for the families of other supervisors.

The other mostly young unmarried male workers lived in crude canvas tents. They included an athletic young prospector who would go on to share Canada’s only gold medal – in the four man bobsled – at the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics.

Our long, green trailer was state-of-the-art with its own washer-dryer, but it was still a trailer and during the short black-fly infested summers of 1960 and 61 all five of us packed into it. I think my parents slept in a Murphy bed that made room for the kitchenette table when not in use. My twin brother, Phil, and I slept in bunk beds.

I don’t remember feeling crowded but my father, Peter Nixon, certainly did. He spent most of his time at work or outside fly-fishing in summer and taking me and my twin brother for walks ‘across the lake’ in winter.

My father and me with his fly fishing catch which I always ate because no one else liked trout.

It helped that outside the summer months my older brother, Mark, attended prep school in England. He missed out on the Wabush winters where the annual snowfall is twice that of Montreal, the days one hour shorter, and the average daily temperature what a Montrealer would consider part of a mercifully short-term deep freeze.

I do remember visiting the Foreman’s log cabin as a friend of his daughter who was a few years older and a full head taller. (Well, I remember the memory of the memory of the memory.)

She confidently made a pie, plopping peaches out of a can onto a pre-prepared pastry impressing me no end. Apparently, we played together a lot because I am in a few of the family pictures she still has in a box at her home in the U.S.

I may remember the Foreman’s daughter, but she doesn’t remember me. She attended school in Sept Iles and had other older, more intriguing friends to play with.

There were 21 children living in Wabush in summer. The many boys contented themselves with mischief, such as chasing behind the D D T truck! I mostly pushed my beige doll carriage around the small trailer camp, sometimes talking to the lonely mothers there. One of these women made me a beautiful doll’s quilt, the highlight of my entire Wabush adventure!

Generally, I lived a rather feral life with no TV and no colourful picture books to keep me amused.

My most vivid memories are not of other children but of animals: a frightened snarling fox in a cage that men were poking with a stick; a dead baby bear shot while trying to get at someone’s larder; oh, and the owl that flew down and lit upon Mark’s shoulder.

A newsclipping from 1960: “Wabush presently has crude wooden buildings, tent bunkhouses and a few housetrailers and about 125 workmen. But it boasts a fine 4,600 foot airstrip, and a daily schedule air service to Sept Isles, plus a twice weekly shuttle service to Shefferville operated by Quebecair. The Foreman says it will take five years to build a town site, a grinding and concentrating plant and a loading facility.”

My mother Marthe’s catch. They were spawning, she said.

We arrived at Wabush in April or May of 1960, taking a very noisy and cold DC 3? plane, I remember, with our young dog, Spotty, the coonhound wailing in a cage at the back of the plane.

A brilliant 1990 history of Wabush using first-person testimony, written by Dana Hines and available at their Town Hall has a telling quote:

“Some of these early residents recall stepping off the plane or train and sinking up to their knees in mud. This was to be their first taste of what initially appears to be a very barren place indeed, for Wabush at that time was nothing but wilderness. “(Page 12)

So, I am not imagining things: my family arrived in the Labrador bush at the very beginning. My father’s job was to oversee the money being used to create this model family mining community, for two years on-site (1960-61) and for another four years (1961-1965) out of the Canadian offices of the Wabush Mines Company on Dominion Square in Montreal.

In late 1961, he moved my Mom, my twin brother and me back to the big city, into a relatively spacious upper duplex apartment in Snowdon. I started the first grade, an over-due November arrival who still couldn’t read. How embarrassing!

The change of work locale for my dad, from a crude wooden structure in the deep bush to a storied edifice at the ‘cross-roads of Canada,’ also must have been truly head-spinning.

Mark returned to live with us a year later, a British schoolboy in every respect. So pudgy, polite and bookish he was, I hardly recognized him.

The town of Wabush was designed by the same architects who created the Expo 67 islands. ( It is no surprise, then, that my father went on to work in 1965 as an auditor for the Fair Commission instead of taking a transfer to Cleveland, Ohio, the seat of the US head office of Wabush Mines.)

And those architects did a very good job designing the mining town judging from the many happy, nostalgic postings on the Memories of Wabush Facebook page.

There were 293 families in Wabush by 1967 and the many children living there had lots of things to do. By then the town had a school, a library, a recreation centre with television and movies and a bowling alley, as well as a swimming pool with sauna and sundeck – and even a small shopping mall.1.

(Of course, in Montreal I had Expo 67 with its endless wonders to keep me amused, so it was no contest.)

My older brother summed things up upon reading the town’s history: “We left before things got good.”

1. Hynes, Dana. Untitled History of Wabush. 1990. Available at the Wabush City Hall.

A call for an auditor for Wabush a few years after we left. My father still worked for the company at their head office at 1010 Ste Catherine Street, the Dominion Square Building.
Grandiose 16MM film promoting Wabush in 1960. Big money is being spent: I guess my dad had to keep track of it.

Click here for the Gzowski article: https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1963/11/2/the-new-soft-life-on-the-last-frotier Gzowski’s main point: The workers still had it very hard and the prices were scandalous!

Quebec, Scotland

From Daguerreotype to Digital in Four Generations

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Sarah Maclean Macleod : Daguerrotype or Tintype

The above picture is a digital reproduction of a tintype or daguerreotype portrait of Sarah Marion McLean, my husband’s great great grandmother, taken (most probably) around the time of her marriage in 1849 in Flodden, Quebec. I scanned the metal photograph to computer over 10 years ago.

The pic above is composite montage of Sarah’s 4 times great granddaughter, Nora, my granddaughter born 2018, stored on my cellphone. The collage consists of photos snapped from the moment of her birth until her 1st birthday. These pics are but a fraction of the pictures existing of Mademoiselle Nora, now 4 years old, on various cellphones belonging to family.

I have in my possession only two other photos of Nora’s 4x great granny, Sarah, one where she stands beside her seated husband (Isle of Lewisman John Mcleod ) looking very pregnant. Another cardboard studio photo of her is from her final year. At the back of the photograph someone wrote in her name and dates. Sarah Marion McLean McLeod 1825-1912. She may actually be dead in the photo.

Unfortunately, I have misplaced the metallic originals, so I can’t test whether they are daguerreotypes or tintypes. (Tintypes are slightly magnetic.) They must be in a box somewhere in the garage with the other ‘important’ family photos I am missing. I mean, it has to be, right? I would never have thrown out such precious mementos.

The Macleods emigrated to Quebec in 1838, before so many others in their clan were pushed out in the infamous ‘clearances.’ Sarah Maclean from Coll arrived in Quebec a little later, after her parents and two brothers died back home. She had a sister in the province. Sarah, who was born at the height of the Industrial Revolution, led a long life in southern Quebec before passing away just as the motor car was making life in the Eastern Townships much more exciting. Too bad. Apparently, she loved to travel about.

Sarah is oft mentioned in family letters I have on hand from the 1908-1913 period. The family is feuding over her care in old age. Apparently, she speaks only ‘the Gaelic.’

A few years ago, I digitally enhanced her portrait. There was a white ‘hole’ in her forehead. I scanned the dag/tintype into the computer (afraid that any residue from harsh chemicals on the photo might be harmful to me) and filled in the hole using Photoshop.

Later on I embellished the photo of this Scottish ancestor whose face has passed down through the generations.

So, in the almost 200 years between the births of Sarah and Nora, the photographic world has gone from solid metal daguerreotype to a multiverse of ephemeral digital media – with the act of taking photographs becoming progressively easier.

Photographers in the Victorian Age were well-heeled trailblazers and techno-enthusiasts in possession of a great deal of very expensive -and very cumbersome – equipment. Today taking pictures is, no, exaggeration, mere child’s play. Nora is already pretty adept with a cellphone. I imagine in a very few years she’ll be taking candid photos of me as I crawl out of bed and creating instant animations with my dishevelled image and posting them online. Well, she already is.

Nora is already taking candid photos of her grandmother.

Sarah Marion McLean McLeod saw great advances in photography within her very own lifetime.

Although I have only three photographs of Sarah, I have many more of her daughter, Margaret McLeod Nicholson, my husband’s great grandmother 1853-1942 , perhaps 15 in total, and even more, around 75, of her granddaughter Marion Nicholson Blair, my husband’s grandmother, 1887-1947.

Margaret Macleod Nicholson, Sarah’s daughter. 1912. “I have the new pictures. I do not think they make me very good-looking.” (Letter)
Advert for Kodak, aimed at women, without the technical jargon in camera ads aimed at men.
Photo of Margaret, her daughters Edith and Flo and a neighbour taking tea on the lawn circa 1912. Colourized by me. Taken by Marion as she is in another pic from the same day.

According to her 1906 diary, Marion Nicholson (my husband’s grandmother) who was a teacher liked ‘to fool around taking Kodaks’ during her summer vacations. The Nicholson likely purchased their camera at Sutherland’s drug store in their home town of Richmond.

This was clipped because of the final potato entry, I imagine.
1910 Ad from the Delineator Women’s Magazine.
The Nicholson family photo album with the ‘tea on the lawn’ in upper right corner with Marion on the ground in her white dress. The album is full of pics of unnamed people,too. Alas!
Marion, detail from pic above.
My fave photo from album: Sailing in Hudson, Quebec.
Trip to Potton Springs. I love this pic. It looks like a still from an old movie. Where’s Lillian Gish?
Collage of Sarah’s female descendants up until the 1970s. That’s the ‘death’ photo of Sarah top left.

And the family photographs just keep on coming throughout the 20th century. There was that first decade, the era of shirtwaists and silly-looking BIG hats; then the roaring twenties with Sarah’s descendants in home-made flapper dresses sporting crude bobs; then the 30s with the Nicholson women wearing tonnes of movie star makeup to emulate their favourite big screen thespians; then the 40’s with the women in suits with big shoulders or, yes, even military garb; the 50’s ladies in A-line floral sun dresses sporting wing-tipped sunglasses; the 60’s gals reclining in frilly one piece bathing suits at the cottage, all puffing on cigarettes.

Nora will likely have thousands and thousands of photos taken of her in her lifetime. Still, I wonder, will any of these photographs be accessible to HER four times great granddaughter? Or will they have vanished over the years into the Cloud? I have already lost many many valued pics and videos when my ‘ancient” Note 2 suddenly expired.

Should I, as the family genealogist, be printing out all of the best photos on glossy paper with a colour printer with permanent ink, putting them into a giant album – a real album – for these future generations? (Always making sure to put names and birth dates to the pictures.)

(This would be an extremely costly proposition considering the price of colour ink.)

Or, do I merely create an enormous virtual album and put it on a key and into the safety deposit box and hope against hope that it won’t be casually tossed out one day – and that the info on the key will remain accessible?

Maybe all that will be left of the bazillions of photos of Nora, my granddaughter, will be on novelty items like coffee cups and calendars given to me each Christmas.

Or perhaps her image will exist only on this blog post, ready to be extracted from the ether in 2300 by some self-styled cyber-archaeologist.

I’m no fortune teller but I can hazard a good guess…but, first, I have to find that box of precious old photos down in the garage.

Possibly my favorite pic from the Nicholson collection. Waiting for the bus in Richmond, circa 1908. Edith Nicholson standing at front with young cousin Stanley Hill in front of her. Flora seated at left. Could be a scene from the Music Man. What is that decoration on Edith’s hat?

Years ago I wrote an essay for the Globe and Mail on the same topic. It was very well received and often reprinted. Gone with the WIndows.