My grandfather, William Harkness Sutherland, kept a small red leather diary from January 1st, 1920, to December 31, 1924. During those five years, he regularly jotted down notes. Not his deepest thoughts or a record of history, just about his family and his life.
The Diary begins, “Thursday, January 1st 1920, “Very cold went to Monks for dinner and tea.” Minnie his wife and the children were still in Toronto for a Christmas visit to her mother and sister. When Grandfather was home alone, he was often invited out to eat as no mention is made of him preparing his own meals.
The first page of the diary
William was married with three children, lived in Westmount, Quebec, attended church regularly, worked as a civil engineer, owned a car, played golf and often visited friends for the afternoon and tea.
Donald, Bessie and Dorothy Sutherland about 1920
My father, Donald Sutherland, was two to seven years old during those years. It is interesting to see how often he and his two older sisters, Bessie and Dorothy, were sick. They had all the childhood diseases, chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, as well as colds, flu and bilious complaints that lasted many days. They also had their tonsils and adenoids removed, but they had doctors who came to their house!
According to one entry, Minnie, my grandmother, was diagnosed with tonsilitis and Donald’s sore neck became mumps as he continued to have a swollen gland. “Tuesday, March 30, 1920, Drs. Craig and Shaw saw Donald this morning and Craig says the gland must be opened. Dr. Shaw brought Dr Bourne in the afternoon and they gave Donald an anesthetic and opened it, removing quite a considerable quantity of pus.” Amy, Minnie’s sister, came down from Toronto as most of the family was sick.
A few days later, Amy also became ill, so William called in Dr. Smythe. The doctor also checked Donald’s neck, which was again inflamed. “April 4, 1920, brought Dr Smythe home with us (from church) to dress Don’s neck. It was not necessary to probe it for when the bandage came off, it discharged freely. Dr, S. pressed it firmly and Donald kicked up a great fuss.” Imagine, four doctors visited the house within a week!
The children were better during the summer. Although one time, Donald cut his foot at the cottage while swimming, but luckily, there was a doctor just across the lake. Dr. Swaine came over, sewed it up and gave Donald a dollar.
Swimming in Brome Lake
The family often went for drives all around the city. William enjoyed having a car and would pick up friends and drive them all over Montreal, as not many people had cars or could drive.
Driving on Mount Royal, Montreal
A few incidents outside the family were written about, such as when Victoria Hall burned down on March 8, 1924. Some of the family were at their new home on Arlington Ave, which was being renovated, when “About 4:15 heard fire wagons went out and saw Victoria Hall burn. Watched until 6:30 and then went home for tea.” There was mention of another fire, the burning of the Sacre Coeur Hospital, March 15, 1923. “ Fire destroyed the Hospital on Decarie Boul. All patients were taken safely out, but the building was totally destroyed. Minnie went out to see it and then called at Donnelleys.”
It was a busy time in his life. The family moved from Grosvenor to Arlington Avenue. Then they built a cottage in Dunany, near Lachute, fifty miles north of Montreal. Two hours and twenty minutes was a quick trip, although many took three to four hours to the cottage, which can now be reached in just over an hour.
Bessie, Dorothy and Donald
Grandfather enjoyed playing golf. There are many entries about his games played at different golf courses, including who he played with and how he practiced indoors in warehouses during the winter. The Dunany Country Club was his favourite, where he was one of the founding members.
What would a diary be without talking about the weather. “October 31, 1920. Oct was an exceptional month, warm, an average of 7 degrees above normal.March 31, 1923. “Coldest March on record by about 10 degrees on average, still mid winter weather.” The last entry ,”December 1924 “Weather has been very cold for three weeks. At Davidson’s for tea on the 31st.”
The last page
The diary concludes at the year’s end but since there were still many empty pages, I wonder why he stopped writing. Most likely, life got in his way. I am glad he wrote if even for a short time. By reading his diary, I learned a lot about a grandfather I never knew.
Notes:
The Diary is in the hands of the author. All the pictures are in the possession of the author.
Kataryna, Serf. Taras Shevchenko. (Taras Shevchenko Museum) World History .ORG Creative Commons Yes, the street in Lasalle is named after this celebrated Ukrainian painter/poet!
Exploring your genealogy is something of a luxury. You need the knowledge to do it, the time to do it, sometimes the money to do it. And you need the ancestors to do it, that is to say ancestors who came from relatively stable, peaceful places; countries where good records were kept.
People in North America and Western Europe sometimes have this luxury, the rest of the world, well, not so much.
My ‘official’ family tree is half French Canadian and half North of England, so easy to put together. My biological tree is half French Canadian and, let’s say, something not Western European, something very, very complicated and sometimes hopelessly obscure.
On Ancestry, the record makes clear that most of my mother’s people hail from the Lachenaie seigneury, north of Montreal. That’s a very small area. There are hundreds of cousin trees to prove this.
My unknown bio-father’s side is from all around the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean. That’s the crux of it, anyway.
My Ancestry Ancestral regions. Not an exact science by any stretch but getting better. The Green is “French”, my Mom. 46% She has a touch British and Norway. My bio-father, a colourful mix of Germanic Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and Southern Italy and Eastern Mediterranean, with touches of Balkan, Greece and Albania, Eastern Europe, Persia, Romani, Mongolia, China. Some Crimean Tatars online who have done their DNA have similar mixes without German.
We’re talking an enormous area that for centuries was home to myriad populations, myriad cultures that for economic and/or political reasons moved around a lot.
On Ancestry, my mother’s side has 28,000 matches, none of them that close, but that doesn’t matter because I know who my mother is.
My bio-father’s side has but 1,800 matches, only one match at 60 centimorgans, likely a third cousin, and the rest at 20 centimorgans and below. 1
Still, using Ancestry’s various tools to analyze my paternal side’s origins, my best guess is that my bio father was half Protestant Black Sea German (maternal side) and half Pontic Greek (paternal side.)2
YourDNAPortal’s 1000 year old ethnicity estimate is bang on for my French Canadian side and it gives me 11-20 percent Crimean Tatar from the bio-father’s side!
Incredibly, it has taken me a full seven years to figure this out. I must have the equivalent of a Master’s degree in Black Sea Studies. 🙂
I won’t make fun of you if you don’t know what a “Black Sea German” is, although some of the descendants of these people now live in the Dakotas in the United States and in Western Canada.3
They were people from Baden-Wurrtemburg and Alsace (many winemakers) who took their horse drawn wagon trains to Southern Russia (sometimes by way of Galicia, that is the Poland/Ukraine border or Swabia, the Hungary/Romania border) in the late 18th century at the invitation of Catherine the Great who offered them free land, no taxes, and no conscription in order to re-populate areas formerly held by Turks. Catherine didn’t want those nasty Turks coming back. Later, Alexander I opened up Bessarabia (today’s Moldova) to Germans, offering similar incentives.
It was a difficult life (if you survived the journey) but many of these disciplined, hard-working farmers prospered – until they didn’t. Many ‘extra’ sons or cast-outs were constantly on the move looking for a benevolent, fertile piece of land to call home. Young unmarried women sometimes moved away for work.
Some Black Sea Germans, Protestant and Catholic, moved on from Southern Russia/ Bessarabia to settle in the Crimea on land once held by Tatars.4 In later years, Bessarabian German settlers spread out southward to Dobrucha in today’s Romania at the invitation of the Turks who were still in charge there. Ironically, this is where the displaced Crimean Tatars were now living.
The North American descendants of these Black Sea Germans have done a remarkable job chronicling their ancestors’ migrations and daily lives on various websites and databases. This information includes village censuses.
The most intriguing documents, I think, are the anecdotal “village histories” written down by a leading citizen and/or self-styled local historian. Apparently, there was lots of praying as these people were pious; also lots of drunken brawling, as most every town had a tavern; and lots of hardship, too, death from disease and famine, earthquakes and plagues of all kinds. Meeting your end at the bottom of a well was quite common. Hmm.
Initially, there were a handful of ‘orderly’ villages, 25 to 100 and that number grew to around two to three thousand. Although overwhelmingly populated with Germans in extended family clusters, many Besserabian villages also harboured a few Turks, Bulgarians, Romanians and Jews.
Ancestry’s Beresen and Leibmental enclaves of Black Sea Germans, covering Ukraine mostly.(Some ventured to Caucasus because they felt Mount Ararat to be the site of the Second Coming of Christ.)
Black Sea German citizens were so mobile they often named the last village in which they lived as their ‘homeland.’
Since the borders in Austria-Hungary changed so often, even an officially listed nationality like Polish or Austrian means little.
Nationality back then was very fluid.
That’s why delving into the ‘Germanic’ side of my unknown bio-father’s genealogy, although illuminating in one sense, usually sends me down a dizzying rabbit hole.5
Empire of Trebizond, Wikipedia Creative Commons. “A remote and isolated splinter of the Byzantine Empire.”10 This map goes a long way towards explaining my wonky heritage.
The Pontic Greek side is even more obscure. Pontic Greeks are people who believe they are descendants of the original Greek settlers on the Black Sea in the Classical period. 6
They practised Eastern Orthodox Christianity brought in from Byzantium at a later date, lived in vibrant port cities like Samsun and Trabzon in North Eastern Anatolia, and spoke either a form of Greek or sometimes even Turkish. They mixed up their genes with Armenians. Some dressed like Tatars. Many converted to Islam.
Post WWI, these Christian Greeks were forced by the Turks to leave the Pontus, as it is called, in a series of expulsions and death marches, mostly pushed to the Anatolian interior or towards the Caucasus. (This coincided with the Armenian genocide.)
In 1923, Greeks in Turkiye (mostly Pontic) were exchanged for Muslims in Greece. These Greeks primarily went to Thessaloniki in Northern Greece.7
I know I am derived from Pontic Greeks because I have over fifty matches on Ancestry with that particular “journey.”8 Some of these matches live in Turkiye and have Turkish names and when I contact them they seem very upset to discover they are even a small part Greek. Others are merely perplexed.
Many of my Pontic cousin matches have the tell-tale suffix IDIS at the end of their surnames and identify as Greek. They live in the United States and their immediate ancestors hail from Thessaloniki or southern Russia. 6
A handful have Russian surnames.13
Southern Russia! I have a theory. My male Pontic Greek ancestor from Samsun in Northern Anatolia (where I almost certainly have antecedents) took a boat across roiling Black Sea waters to the Crimea, maybe by way of Sochi, where I have a tree match, and met up with my female Black Sea German ancestor. The mountains of southern Crimea had a climate good for growing grapes. I have many sure-fire ancestors in the village of Huffnungstal, near Odessa. Some of these Hoffs, Bollingers, Lutz’s, and Berreths went on to Crimea.
This is more than a stab in the dark. Call it an ‘educated guess.’
The essential point is this: Because of the complex history of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea area, my bio father back in 195412 Montreal may have identified as a Ukrainian (most likely) or a German or a Greek or maybe even a Turk or a Tatar. Or perhaps a Pole or a Hungarian, or even a Romanian Jew14. Or just a Canadian. His ancestors might have been Steppe nomads, serfs or slaves, farmers, vintners, blacksmiths, soldiers,sailors, shopkeepers, shipping magnates, Romani gypsies, noblemen – or all of the above.
Yes, researching genealogy is challenging for most people but next to impossible for people in my situation, with roots around the Black Sea, even if you know who your parents are.
In Soviet society, post WWII, elders kept family history and stories AWAY from their descendants rather than passing the stories on, according to an academic paper I read.9
This was for their protection.
“The less people knew about their family history the better.”
The Pontic Greek diaspora in Europe and North America now struggles to keep its cultural identity. Persons who went to Thessonaliki or other parts of Greece in the 1923 exchange were often slighted by natives and not considered ‘true’ Greeks, so they didn’t showcase their past.
The other surviving descendants of the citizens of the once dazzling Empire of Trebizond now live in Ukraine (Mariupol) and Kazakstan and Turkiye and many likely don’t know (or want to know) their ethnic heritage.
It’s no wonder I can’t figure out who my bio-father is – and probably never will. His relatives, if they exist at all, reside in places where they don’t do DNA – and sometimes for good reason. But, thanks to modern science and copious online sources, I do know an awful lot about his very mixed-up ethnic heritage.
THE END SON Кінець Das Ende Τέλος Koniec Sfârşit
Footnotes
1. I only get one or two new matches on that side a week, or maybe a month. Most are Americans or Brits with some Romani. (I’m 1 or 2 percent Romani) or distant descendants of Black Sea Germans (Eberhard from North Carolina!) and an occasional Pontic Greek.
2. I only know this because I have a twin who did his Y DNA and the one match had a Turkish name. J2A.. My 3rd cousin match, a Turkish woman, is a stand-alone match, with no mutual matches. Her ethnicity profile mirrors my bio-father’s, though, suggesting to me Crimean Tatar roots. See Note 4. Bob Dylan, apparently has a similar ancestry.
3. I am almost certainly related to the Hemmerlings of Gimli, Manitoba. Are you?
Most Black Sea Germans were repatriated to Germany or Poland during WWII. As the borders changed during the war some had to go back to Russia. A few of these Germans lobbying to return to Germany had ‘mixed marriages,’ according to records kept by the Germans. The mates were mostly Russian, but quite often Moldavian (sometimes referred to as Gagauz, a kind of Christian Turk native to Romania) and but rarely Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian or Greek.
4. Ancestry doesn’t acknowledge Tatars or Crimean ‘journeys’ but on many other platforms the algorithms give me Crimean Mountain Tatar, at least way back. These people were a mix of Northern Italian (Genoa) Southern Italy and Greece, (Sicily), Allans (Persia) and Goths (Germany) with Nogai, as in Steppe Tatars who in turn have Central Asian and Mongolian. (I have all of these things 🙂 I have only one distant match with a tree totally from Crimea and, yes, the surnames are Tatar.
5. I have a cluster of family trees with people from a town called Hoffnungstal in Bessarabia (Odessa area). I also have a cluster in Galicia (Poland-Ukraine border)in a town called Bruckenthal. There was a trade route between these two areas and smack in the middle was a town called Botosani, Northern Romania, where I also have a tree match- a Jewish match with people who moved to Montreal. Yikes! (Any ideas? Contact me, please!)Added a week later: The immigration path of the Black Sea Germans in my trees seems to go from Baden area to Poland down to Galicia north of Lviv, around Moldova to that bit of Ukraine west of Odessa where Hoffnungstal and Kloestitz (my villages) are. The researcher says there were many long stops along the way. Works perfectly. Bruckenthal Rava Ruska is north of L’viv.
6. The Euripides play Iphigenia in Taurus speaks to this. Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, is saved from death by the goddess Artemis and hidden in the land of the Taurians (Crimea). The Greeks have a long history in Russia. Rich shipping families from the Aegean ran the grain trade there in the 1800s. Many of these rich Greeks assimilated into Russian society. At the founding of Odessa, that became a bustling multicultural economic center, there were already many Greek families, who often were the wealthiest citizens there. At one point the Mayor of Odessa was a Greek.(Odessa Recollected; The Port and the People. Patricia Herlihy. 2018 Boston)
7. According to one online source, the Asia Minor and Pontus Hellenic Research Centre at Chicago, Illinois: In the city of Samsun, where I very likely have some ancestors, 72 Greek community leaders were arrested and sentenced to death in 1921. Other Greek men were killed, imprisoned or conscripted into the army and the women and children sent into exile or deeper into Turkiye where they were forced to change their Greek surnames to Turkish ones.
8. Ancestry gives me no journey on the paternal side, but there is a function that allows me to see the journeys of my paternal matches. These include: all parts of Germany; Black Sea Germans/ Leibenthal Beresen Enclaves; Pontic Greek; Eastern European Roma; North Eastern Hungary/Slovak Border. (That’s on edge of Ukraine near L’viv.) I appear to be connected to Szekelers, a sect of Hungarians who moved to Northern Romania, Bukovina.
9. A. Pahl and Thompson. 1994. Family history was dangerous even for families who left for North America.
10. https://www.grhs.org/pages/Villages A concise list of Black Sea German villages. Many descendants of Black Sea Germans and of French Canadians mixed it up in the Dakotas or Western Canada later on, so I have hundreds of distant ‘unassigned’ matches with both these heritages.
12. In 1954 Crimea was returned by the Russian Soviet Socialistic Republic to the Ukraine SSR. The Russians felt that the Crimea fit more naturally with them.
13. In Family Tree’s public Pontian Greek Y database, the vast majority of subscriber surnames are Russian. This appears to show the extent these people were absorbed into Russian society.
14. MDLP algorithm, that is supposed to be best for people of my bio-father’s ancestry, is unequivocal. I am Romanian. And sometimes a Romanian Jew or Gagauz (that’s the Turkish bit). Lots of Romanian Jews immigrated to Montreal. That would mean perhaps that my closest community is not Black Sea German but Danube Swabian, Wurrtemburg Germans who lived for generations in Romania, Serbia, until expelled after WWII.
This video says genetic studies prove Pontic Greeks are descendants of Ancient Greeks. Indeed, their mountain monasteries preserved elements of Ancient Greek culture long after Byzantium died out. Also, family history information was ‘encoded’ in their dress, the fabrics and patterns of their clothings, every day and ceremonial. Now, that ‘s interesting. Because of their cohesive social system and the make up of their terrain, Pontic Greeks in North Central and Northeast Anatolia largely resisted Turkish invasions.This book, from the University of Toronto Press, 2014 by Paul Robert Magocsi, is available on Archive.org. It contains pics of a Taurian Burial Ground 300 BC; Greek Amphitheatre; a cave village/Jewish Karaite; early 4th Century Christian Basilica; 14th Century Armenian Church; a Genoese Castle, and many mosques, attesting to the rich, complex history of the Crimea, a place still very much in the news for the usual reasons. This was the home of the sedentary TAT Tatars (as opposed to Steppe Tatars) as well as the Northern Pontic Greeks – as distinguished from the Pontic Greeks on the southern coast of the Black Sea in Northern Anatolia.
When I say that my grandfather, Thomas McHugh, worked as a cipher, Bletchley Park, MI5, Russian spies immediately come to mind. He was neither a Russian spy nor did he work as a cipher during the war. His employer was the Bank of Montreal, and it was his first job when he came to Canada in 1912.
The decision to immigrate to Canada was not easy for Thomas. He was in his mid-30s and already had seven children, between the ages of one and fifteen. For over 40 years, the jute manufacturers of Dundee, Scotland, had been providing employment for his parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, wife, and for him. However, by the early 1900s, he was facing a precarious future for his children.
By that time, Dundee had suffered a serious decline in the textile industry and more significantly, the jute industry. Jute was imported from India; however, the mill owners realized that it would lower production costs to open mills in India to prepare the jute and import the finished product to Scotland. Once mills were established in India, the jute production in the mills in Dundee decreased substantially.1
So when Thomas arrived in Canada, a little ahead of his wife and his children, he was eager and prepared to do any job that he could. The Bank of Montreal had its headquarters in Montreal, Quebec. At the beginning of the 20th century, the bank had significant dealings with Great Britain and there were correspondence and banking instructions back and forth between Canada and Great Britain daily. These instructions were mainly sent by telegraph overnight. Some of these instructions were confidential, and it was preferred that they remain so. Overnight instructions reduced the number of people who would have access to them. And the time difference between Montreal and the United Kingdom meant that the banks in London and Edinburgh were open for business while Montreal was still asleep.
Thomas with Pal in Verdun
Even in those days, the banks were concerned about security, privacy and confidentiality. The banking instructions and transactions that were transmitted by telegraph were encrypted. It was the job of the cipher clerk to decipher them so that the bank staff could then ensure that the instructions were carried out as required.
To be a cipher clerk, one had to be reliable, meticulous and honest, and maintain the confidentiality of the bank’s business above all else. To decipher the information, the clerk used a cipher handbook and worked overnight, making it a difficult job for a man with a family.
So while my grandfather, the cipher, did not work in espionage, I still think that his first job in Canada was rather interesting.2
The black-leather-lined plasticized bilingual identity card wacked my arm as it fell from the shelf. Until then, I had never really noticed the card among the many items my grandmother left me.
Luckily, its heavy construction protected the words on the card, which remain as legible as they were when my grandfather received it on January 4, 1936.
The Canadian federal “Department of Marine” issued the card to give my grandfather credibility as a radio inspector. It says:
“The bearer G. Arial is hereby authorized to issue and inspect private radio receiving licences in Edmonton East. He is further authorized to require the production of private radio receiving licences for inspection.”
Turns out that this little artifact hints at a short-lived controversy in Canadian history. The card expired on March 31, 1937, but it would be defunct before then.
The Department of Marine seems like an odd overseer of radio licences until you realize that early broadcasting began in the 1890s when Morse Code was used to enable ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communication. The idea of a public broadcaster begin in May, 1907, when the Marconi station in Camperdown, Nova Scotia began broadcasting regular time signals to the public.
The “wireless telegraphy” industry continued to develop with private individuals investing in ham radios with no regulation. By June 1913, the federal government decided to regulate the industry to protect military communication.
When World War I began in August 1914, private licenses were banned altogether. Only the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of Canada, Ltd. kept operating during the war years, in part because it became a research arm of the military.i
After the war, the private industry blossomed, particularly in Western Canada. Many of the new broadcasters came from multiple religious communities, a situation the federal government tried to prevent by setting up a public broadcasting system through the Radio Broadcasting Act of 1932.
That act led to the establishment of a licensing commission called the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission under the leadership of Hector Charlesworth. Charlesworth’s group censored many religious groups and political groups, but none more than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Norman James Fennema described the controversy in his 2003 dissertation, Remote Control.
…in Canada we find a situation in which the original impetus for regulating radio broadcasting began with the specific aim of putting a rein on religious broadcasting. Originally directed at the radio activities of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, this expanded in the early 1930’s into a policy against the licensing of religious broadcasters, a policy initially justified on the basis of the scarcity of the broadcasting spectrum, but that survived the expansion of the system.ii
By 1935, Clarence Decateur Howe became both the Minister of Railways and Canals and the Minister of Marine,iii the ministry under which my grandfather’s job was created.
Howe favoured private broadcasting, and encouraged new private entities to flourish.
Prime Minister Mackenzie King preferred a public broadcast system however. In February, 1936, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) came into being, and my grandfather’s job ended.
Altonen, Karhu, Kuivinen Family reunion 1919 At the dawn of the twentieth century many of my ancestors from Finland immigrated to the United States. They settled in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie. In the above photo seated are my Karhu great-grand parents surrounded by their offspring. Directly behind my great-grandfather(in the black Jacket – seated) is my Dad, Kaarlo.
Over the past decade a number of stories about my father’s adult life as a Professional Mining Engineer were presented on this blog. However, from his neatly organized photograph album we get a glimpse of his youth.
Kaarlo Victor Lindell was the oldest son of Johan Hjalmar Lindell, a blacksmith and Ida Susanna Karhu. He was born November 14th, 1905. The family lived on Bridge Street above grandfather’s shop. Dad was second of eight children, four girls and four boys
This is one of the earliest photos of Kaarlo pictured here with his four sisters. He was about 9 years old at the time. His brothers were born years later.
Dad would have been about 11 in this photo with his sister Leona.
Kaarlo attended Elementary School in Ashtabula Harbor.
The description says it all!
Grade 5 Class Picture and the signatures of Kaarlo’s classmates
Ashtabula Harbor High School
The Mariner – The yearbook for Ashtabula Harbor High School 1923.
Dad was on the Advertising Committee and was also involved in many of the school activitiesas can be seen in the following photographs.
As a youngster during his teenage years Kaarlo had “many irons in the fire”. He built a crystal radio to the delight of his family. To earn money for college he read meters and ran the movie projector in the local theatre. During the summer months he sailed the Great Lakes as an assistant cook on ore boats.
From his humble beginnings as the son of a blacksmith throughout his life he became a driving force in the mining industry and travelled the world.
Recently, for a minor medical reason, I was referred to Hôpital Sacré Coeur de Montréal, located in the Ahuntsic/Cartierville neighbourhood, North of Montréal. Instead of using the major highway, we decided to travel via Gouin Boulevard. Motoring along a pleasant country road, filled with all manner of houses, trees, flowers and bushes, it was a very enjoyable route.
The reason I wanted to write about this hospital I had never seen before was because when we arrived and I saw the majestic gateway that led up to the main entrance, I thought at first the building may have once been a cathedral.
Although the photo below was taken C. 1940, it looks exactly the same today.
Publisher: Novelty Manufacturing and Art Co. Ltd., Montreal
It intrigued me so much that I wanted to learn about the history of this striking building. As we approached the parking lot, I could see the huge cross on the top of the building. The original stonework, which was masterly, really stood out to me.
Picture Alexis Hamel
The original stonework would reflect the architectural styles popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, potentially incorporating elements of the Victorian or Beaux-Arts styles common for public buildings of that era.
Picture Marian Bulford
Excited to begin researching, I found a lot of interesting information. For instance, did you know that the institution was originally founded on June 1, 1898, the day of the Feast of the Sacred Heart, by a small group of women located in a building in downtown Montréal? (1)
They named it the Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal, and the women cared for a dozen ill individuals, deemed the ‘incurables’. An unfortunate name, but cancer and patients with serious diseases were incurable then. By 1902, support care was provided by the Sisters of Providence.
In 1900, the hospital moved to a larger building on Décarie Boulevard in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG). and was known as the Hôpital des Incurables.
Hôpital des Incurables.
This building was destroyed by fire in March 1923, and in 1926, a new building was built on Gouin Boulevard in Cartierville, where it still stands today. With the new building, the administration reverted to using the original name, Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal.
Initially, it specialised in the treatment of tuberculosis. This was soon followed by the development of orthopaedic surgery (Dr. Édouard Samson, 1931) and thoracic surgery (Dr. Norman Bethune, 1933). In 1973, the Hospital became a tertiary care trauma centre for Western Quebec, together with the Institut Albert-Prévost, to provide psychiatric care and was affiliated with the University of Montreal as a research and teaching centre.(2)
In 2022, an expansion by Provencher_Roy and Yelle Maillé was completed, adding 16,252 square meters, which complements this heritage structure. (4)
Although a visit to a hospital is sometimes an anxious experience, the building and staff at Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal were most helpful and attentive. Young volunteers are situated on each floor, ready to give directions to various parts of this now vast hospital.
Along Gouin Boulevard, we passed the affiliated Institut Albert-Prévost, set in a pleasant park-like area, before reaching the Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal.
Entrance to the Institut Albert-Prévost
Before becoming a hospital, Albert-Prévost may have changed names from sanatorium to pavilion, but never its vocation: it has been treating mental health problems for over 100 years. This influence is due as much to the teaching it provides as to the care it gives.
Who was Albert Prévost?
Albert Prévost
He was a Quebec neurologist and forensic physician, born in 1881 and died in 1926. He was the first holder of the chair of neurology at the Université Laval in Montreal and the founder of the institute that bears his name. (5)
Ten years ago in July 2015, my sister and I shared a “Sister Pilgrimage” to Shediac, New Brunswick, the home of our maternal ancestors. Here is a part of the story I wrote upon our return:
“Early Sunday morning, dressed in our special t-shirts, we left in plenty of time for the morning church service at St Martin’s-in-the-Woods. The greeter welcomed us warmly, and we asked if there might be any Haningtons at church that day. She beckoned down the aisle to her husband who then introduced himself as Allen Hanington. Overjoyed, we threw our arms around our surprised distant cousin and snapped a commemorative photo. And so our journey began.
My 3x great grandfather, William Hanington William Hanington comes to Canada, was the first English settler in Shediac, New Brunswick, in 1785. He was an amazing fellow who emigrated from England at the age of twenty-six, built a whole community, set up lumber exports, built ships, married a PEI girl Shediac’s First English Woman Settlerand had a family of thirteen. Later in life, in 1823, he donated a piece of land and built St Martin’s-in-the-Woods Anglican Church, where he was buried in 1838.Later on that Sunday after the morning service at St Martin’s-in-the-Woods, we visited with Allen’s charming sister Lilian, the family historian who knew our exact location in the Hanington family tree!
… PS The August 2015 family newsletter, the Hanington Herald, just arrived by mail! Included in the comments from the President’s Desk (that would be our cousin Allen!), it says: “We just experienced a lovely visit from the Anglin sisters; Lucy (Montreal) and Margaret (Ottawa) who were visiting in the area and attended morning service at St Martin’s-in-the-Woods Anglican Church on Sunday, July 5th 2015. We had a very nice visit on Sunday afternoon. They are descendants of Daniel Hanington.” Roaring Dan
After the recent passing of Allen Hanington, I spoke with his sister Lilian—and it quickly became clear that her story deserved to be shared.
Lilian is my third cousin once removed on the Hanington side, and she’s made a lasting impact as our family historian. Her most significant legacy is the Hanington Book—a detailed 394-page family tree that she compiled and first published in 1983, then updated in 1988. Every Hanington was assigned a unique number to trace their lineage. Lilian herself is #2-4-6-10, meaning she is the 10th child of the 6th child of the 4th child of the 2nd child of our original Shediac settler, William Hanington. I now have a PDF copy of the Hanington book and happily share it with cousins near and far.
To keep the family connected, Lilian also created The Hanington Herald, an annual newsletter filled with updates on births, deaths, travels, and all things Hanington. She maintained it faithfully, offering four years of family news for the modest subscription price of just $12.
Lilian’s father, John Moore Hanington (1886–1967) ventured west from his birthplace in Shediac, N.B., in the early 1900s on a “grain excursion,” later joining the 145th Battalion in WWI, though he never served overseas. A skilled carpenter, he worked on the Scoudouc airport and maintained a thriving farm when he returned to Shediac. At one point, he had over 100 plum trees and picked more than 100 pints of raspberries in a single day. He also kept cattle, pigs, and hens for the family’s use.
His wife, Ada, came to Canada from Cheshunt, England at age 12. Together, they raised a large family—Lilian, their tenth child, was born in 1940.
Lilian attended Moncton High School, graduated from Teacher’s College in Fredericton, and taught school briefly before working at T. Eaton Co. Mail Order for 12 years. Like her father, she grew fruits and vegetables, ran a farm stand, and still maintains a huge garden. Her beautifully handwritten multi-page Christmas letters always include updates on her abundant harvest of that year.
I received my first Christmas letter after we met in 2015… and now I look forward to it every year:
Christmas 2015
Dear Lucy,
It was so good to meet you & your sister after hearing about you for so long from your Uncle Bob. My father always said that nothing is so important that you can’t stop & talk to someone. I always enjoy meeting relatives. There is now a note on the church bulletin board for any relatives visiting to contact me…
My garden did well in spite of the late planting. I had peas to freeze, beans to sell, bushels of potatoes, some large carrots, cucumbers & small tomatoes to give away. I also had lots of gooseberries, pears & grapes. Allen had black currants and crab apples so I made lots of jam, jelly, preserves & marmalade. Some of which I will give as Christmas gifts. I also make dozens of cookies, many of which I give as gifts also. Easier shopping that way…
I wish you a very Merry Christmas with peace, joy, love & happiness. All the best in 2016. It was so nice to meet you. Please keep in touch.
Love,
Lilian
It feels fitting that I met Lilian at St. Martin’s in the Wood Anglican Church—a place deeply rooted in our family history. Built by her 2x great-grandfather (my 3x great-grandfather), the church has been a cornerstone of her life. She married Robert Hamilton there in 1967 and served faithfully for over 20 years as a Sunday school teacher, sewer, knitter, and superintendent.
In 1985, Lilian helped organize the 200th Hanington Reunion, a celebration that brought together 400 relatives for a parade and lobster dinner—honouring a legacy built on faith, hard work, and community. I only wish I had been there to witness it!
Before we ended our phone call, she fondly recalled my grandparents’ summer cottage Iona Cottage down the lane from the church and how my grandfather, an Anglican priest The Priest, would occasionally step in to lead summer Sunday services.
A natural historian and gifted storyteller, Lilian clearly inherited not only her father’s green thumb but also an extraordinary memory.
The Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal is famous as the home of Montreal bagels and of novelist Mordecai Richler. Its iconic architecture features outside staircases attached to two- and three-storey rowhouses, next door to churches, synagogues, shops, cafés and renovated manufacturing buildings. But Mile End’s history goes back to one small tavern at a crossroads in the countryside more than 200 years ago.
The Mile End Tavern was located at today’s northwest corner of Saint Laurent Boulevard and Mount Royal Avenue,1 now the starting point of the Mile End neighbourhood. In turn, Mile End is on the Plateau, an elevated plain lying north of Sherbrooke Street and east of Mount Royal.
The first known reference to Mile End was dated April 21, 1808, when landowner John Clark placed a notice in the Gazette advertising Mile End Farm as providing “good pasture for horses and cows at the head of the Faubourg [suburb] Saint-Laurent.”
Screenshot
Clark (1767-1827), an English-born butcher, acquired the land he would call Mile End Farm in several transactions, including purchase agreements and leases, between 1804 and 1810.2 Like most farms in Quebec, it was long and narrow. At its greatest extent in 1810, it measured 2.5 kilometers from south to north, and between 400 and 550 meters wide. Clark was almost certainly the one who chose the name Mile End. The centre of his property was about a mile north of the small city of Montreal, and the area might have reminded him of another Mile End, a mile east of London, England. The name caught on and has been in use ever since.
John Clark, a butcher from Durham, England, settled in Montreal around 1797. Portrait in a private collection.
When Montreal was founded in 1642, Mile End was probably uninhabited. The ground was too rocky for settlements or agriculture, and few Indigenous artefacts have been found there. The northeastern region of the Island of Montreal was covered by a vast cedar forest. The heart of Mile End was also forested, but there, both cedar and ash trees were the dominant species. This forest was still intact when the Sulpician priests mapped the area in 1702, but as the city’s population grew — it stood at around 1,200 residents in 1700 – more and more trees were cut to provide firewood.
By 1780, most trees had disappeared from the foot of the mountain, replaced by houses, farm buildings, hay fields and pastures. In the Mile End area, livestock pastures, vegetable crops, tanneries and quarries dominated the countryside, and orchards were planted in the mid-1800s.
In 1663, the Sulpician priests became the seigneurs, or feudal lords, of the entire island. In 1701, the Hôpital Général acquired an extensive piece of land from the Sulpicians in the future Mile End area, and the Grey Nuns took over the hospital and all its lands in 1747. In 1803, the nuns sold the piece of land that would become Mile End Farm to two masons, Jean-Baptiste Boutonne and Joseph Chevalier. They wanted to quarry its stone and sand for building materials.
The masons had to pay the Grey Nuns a rente constituée (annual interest), as well as yearly seigneurial dues to the Sulpicians. So when John Clark bought the property – the first part of his Mile End Farm — in 18044 and gave Boutonne and Chevalier the right to continue collecting building materials for seven years after the sale, they must have been relieved. Meanwhile, Clark found another use for the land, first advertising pasture for other peoples’ cows in 1808.
When the same ad for livestock pasturing at Mile End Farm appeared the following year, it was placed by Phineas Bagg (c.1751-1823) and his son Stanley Bagg (1788-1853), my four-times and three-times great-grandfathers. A farmer from western Massachusetts, Phineas had brought his family to Canada around 1795. Initially he worked as an innkeeper in LaPrairie, near Montreal, and then the family moved onto the island. In 1810, Phineas and Stanley signed a lease with John Clark.5 Paying an annual rent of 112 pounds, 10 shillings, they ran the Mile End Tavern and managed the farm for the next seven years before subletting to another innkeeper.
description below.
The lease described the property as having a two-storey house (which at some point must have been converted into the tavern), a barn, stable and outbuildings. The Baggs were required to sufficiently manure the pastures and arable land, to cultivate and to perform road maintenance and other required duties. They were permitted to cut wood for fencing and firewood, but they had to preserve the maple grove. They were also permitted to cut and remove stone.
No doubt the tavern brought them a good income since it was located at an important, if somewhat remote, intersection. Stanley must have attracted many additional customers after he built a racetrack nearby. In May 1811, he signed an agreement with the Jockey Club of Montreal, subletting a piece of land to the club and promising to build the track within five weeks. The club supervised the races. The track, partially on land leased from the Sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu, was about a mile in circumference and what is now Jeanne Mance Park, extending east to Saint-Laurent. It was most likely the first racetrack in Montreal.6
Another reference to Mile End appeared in the Gazette on August 4, 1815 when Stanley Bagg, Mile End Tavern, placed a notice offering a reward for information about a lost bay horse, about 10 years old, with a white face and some white about the feet.7
In 1819, Stanley married John Clark’s daughter, Mary Ann (John Clark was also my four-times great-grandfather). Their son, Stanley Clark Bagg (1820-1873), eventually inherited the Mile End Farm, as well as other properties Clark had owned nearby.
In the second half of the 19th century, Stanley Clark Bagg began subdividing and selling the properties he had inherited from his father and grandfather. He died in 1873 and the next generation of the family continued to sell building lots from the Stanley Clark Bagg Estate.
In 1891, they sold most of the Mile End Farm property to McCuaig and Mainwaring, a pair of promoters from Toronto who envisioned a high-end residential suburb they called Montreal Annex.8 The project got off to a slow start because basic services such as water, sewers and streetlights were nonexistent and a promised electric tramway did not materialize in time. A recession that started in 1893 put an end to their dreams. A few years later another group of investors, the Montreal Investment & Freehold Company, took over the property and the area developed as a mixture of duplexes, triplexes and commercial buildings.
Meanwhile, the Mile End Hotel continued to appear in city directories at the corner of Saint- Laurent and Mount Royal until 1900. The property was expropriated for road widening in 1902 and the building was demolished. A department store had replaced it by 1906.
Description ofMap: The areas with a greyish tinge are the areas that John Clark held by lease rather than owning them; none of them ever came back to Clark-Bagg possession after the leases ended. The yellow areas are cutouts belonging to and reserved by other people, excluded from the rectangles describing the property leased to P & S Bagg in 1810. Mile End Farm was bounded by the modern Saint-Laurent Blvd. in the east, while the future Park Avenue was just to the west and Pine Ave. would have been the southern boundary. RHSJ refers to the Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph de Montréal, a religious order dedicated to caring for the sick.
1. Mount Royal Avenue is the continuation of Côte Sainte-Catherine Road, which traverses the northeast slope of Mount Royal and continues east of Saint-Laurent Boulevard. Saint- Laurent, now a busy commercial street, was at one time the only road leading north from city to the Rivière des Prairies, on the north shore of Montreal Island. Built by the Sulpician priests in 1717, Saint Laurent was initially known as Le grand chemin du Roy – the Great King’s Highway. Over the years it has been known by many names, English and French, including Chemin Saint-Laurent, St. Lawrence Street and “the Main”. Since 1905, its official name has been Boulevard Saint-Laurent.
2. Yves Desjardins, Histoire du Mile End, Québec: Les Ēditions du Septentrion, 2017, p. 22.
3. Island of Montreal property owners were required to pay dues to the Sulpicians every year until the seigneurial system was gradually abolished there, starting in 1840. The system was abolished in the rest of Quebec in a gradual process starting in 1854.
4. Louis Chaboillez, n.p. no 6090, 30 May 1804. A reference to the purchase also appears inJ.A. Labadie, n.p. no 16733, 7 June 1875. This was the inventory of Stanley Clark Bagg’s Estate. It includes the name of the seller, the date of the sale and the notary who prepared the deed. This part of Mile End Farm is item #264.
5. Jonathan A. Gray, n.p. no 2874, 17 Oct. 1810.
6. Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 107.
7. Justin Bur, “À la recherche du cheval perdu de Stanley Bagg, et des origines du Mile End.” A la recherche du savoir: nouveaux échanges sur les collections du Musée McCord; Collecting Knowledge: New Dialogues on McCord Museum Collections. Joanne Burgess, Cynthia Cooper, Celine Widmer, Natasha Zwarich. Montreal: Éditions MultiMondes, 2015, p. 143.
8. Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 271.
One of my favourite recipes in Mom’s recipe book is for chilli con carne. It has only a few ingredients: hamburger, kidney beans, onions, Heinz tomato soup, salt, pepper and chilli powder but only if desired. With fresh rolls and tomato slices, it was a meal we often had at the cottage, without the chilli powder. I was surprised to see that there was no Campbell’s tomato soup in the recipe.
Mom’s famous Chilli Con Carne!
Mom started this book when she got married in 1948. It contains recipes cut out of magazines and newspapers, her handwritten recipes and ones collected from friends and family. In her later years, she mostly cooked from memory but sometimes would open the book just to check.
The indes page
The book is now falling apart. It has been taped and covered with mactac but those adhesives don’t hold forever. The favourite recipes are worn, smudged with sticky fingerprints and ingredients. The newspaper clippings are starting to disintegrate.
A favourite Christmas treat
My mother’s recipe book used to travel back and forth from Montreal to our cottage in the Laurentians. When Mom moved into a senior residence, it remained in Dunany. I then took charge of it, not wanting to leave it to the mice over the winter.
I thought I would make a book or calendar of some of the recipes as they all have stories to tell. Funny how most of them are for sweets. Main dishes at home were mostly roasted meat and boiled potatoes, which didn’t require recipes.
As kids, we would ask Mom what was for supper but all we really wanted to know was what was for dessert. Would it be a cake, a pie, a pudding, a cobbler, squares, cookies and ice cream or my least favourite, canned fruit? We had to eat our dinner before we got dessert but we always had dessert.
Inside front cover and sweets
Mom’s planned menus were similar each week. She would make a list and only buy what was on the list. On Sundays, we had a roast at noon with potatoes, vegetables, gravy and then omelet, pancakes or bread broiled with cheese and bacon for supper. Monday was usually chicken, with one cut up for six people. Tuesdays meant leftover roast and on Wednesdays the menu varied with veal patties, liver, sausages or pork chops. We ate leftover roast again on Thursdays, sometimes being shepherd’s pie. On Fridays, we always ate fish even though we were not Catholic. This was our least favourite meal as it mostly consisted of frozen white fish, sometimes with a soup sauce. On Saturdays, we had hamburgers, usually without buns.
Our meals didn’t look like these pictures
Mrs McNally’s cookie recipe came from the mother of a university friend of mine. Eileen’s mother used to send cookies back with her daughter, much to the enjoyment of her roommates. It is a basic oatmeal cookie with raisins, nuts, chocolate chips, cinnamon and nutmeg. It became my mother’s go-to recipe and she added whatever was in her pantry. The cookies were often stored in a ceramic cookie jar in the kitchen. Dexterity was needed to quietly raise the top and sneak a cookie.
Mrs McNally’s Cookies
There are many pictures of decorated cakes. Mom took a class but only made a few very fancy cakes. Most were just plain iced layer cakes. She made some doll cakes with a Tammy or Debbie doll (we never had a Barbie doll) in the center of an angel food cake with fancy icing for her skirt. She also put money between the layers of cake, wrapped in wax paper. Pennies, nickels and dimes with one quarter. She would mark on the cake plate where to find the quarter and show the Birthday person.
Very fancy decorated cakes
Rhubarb upside-down cake replaced pineapple upside-down cake when my mother got the recipe from her sister. We always had this dessert in the spring and summer with rhubarb from the garden. Rhubarb and chives were the only edible things my mother grew.
Mom was an excellent pie maker. Her book does contain a booklet on how to make pie crust. She mastered this skill in no time. She would make all her fruit pies without looking at a recipe. I preferred blueberry and raspberry pies made from berries she picked around our cottage. Apple was my father’s favourite. One day, she anxiously watched as he cut into a pie and asked if it was ok. “When is your pie not alright? ” answered my father.
There would often be a little sugar pie made with the leftover pie crust sprinkled with sugar, cinnamon and little pats of butter. Pieces were eaten right out of the oven if you were lucky enough to be around.
There were definitely things we didn’t like, such as porridge every morning before school but we were well fed!
A World of Education, page from a pamphlet given out to school children in 1967 about Expo 67.
My mother, Mary-Marthe, would put herself out for people. At the check-out counter of the grocery store; on the bus; in the park my mother was not shy about helping out others. She sometimes forced spontaneous acts of kindness on complete strangers, often to my childish embarrassment.
This habit, I imagine, she picked up from her own mother, Maria, a pious French Canadian who married well in 1901 and was generous with food and home-remedies.
The story goes that in the 1920’s my mother’s Sherbrooke Street West grey stone had a mark on the gate that indicated to homeless men, or ‘tramps’ as they called them, that a hearty meal was in store for them should they knock at the back door.
I most vividly recall an incident that unfolded in the summer of 1967, the year of Expo 67, the World’s Fair, when I was a young adolescent and because of my prickly age extra prone to being embarrassed by my mother.
My family lived in Montreal and we all had ‘ passports’ so we could visit the nearby World’s Fair anytime we wanted.
The Canadian section of Expo 67. The Western Provinces Pavilion, a forest, smelled so wonderful compared to smoggy city air!
I was 12 years old and I sometimes took the number 65 bus to those blissfully bright Expo isles alone, likely skipping school, and the bus stop was right under my 6th grade classroom window! I wasn’t too afraid to be found out. Didn’t my teacher say we’d learn more at Expo than at school?
Over that six month period from May to October 1967 I travelled the short bus and metro route to Expo 50 times, sometimes alone, sometimes with my brothers or other relations and sometimes with friends and their families. I recall that one mom was so afraid of losing her many tweenage charges in the swelling sea of thrill seekers she looped a long rope around our waists to keep us contained. How embarrassing!
I wandered to the Expo site in all weather with a packed lunch since I had no extra money to spend.3 I liked the wide open Canadian and Ontario pavilions the best. I’d eat my sandwich on the Katimavik watching the rusty monster emerge from the lake adjacent. I experienced their exhilarating movies1 over and over again. The five Expo theme pavilions were a hit with me, too. 4I mostly avoided the popular national pavilions: the American, Russian, Czech and British pavilions with their long long line ups.
The movie We are Young in the Cominco Pavilion another favourite haunt of mine in the summer of 67. The exhibits explored the five senses. See link below that includes info about The Eighth Day at the Christian Pavilion and all the other landmark films that prepared us well for the future of media.
But I did like escaping to the sculpture garden behind the American pavilion. It was uncrowded, cool and peaceful in that place and all the avant-garde works of art, both life-like and abstract, were exciting to behold.2
One installation at the Sculpture Garden. The Watchers.Lynn Chadwick, UK 1960. No wonder I felt safe.
My older brother, a cutting-edge type, liked the Cuban pavilion for the vibes so we went there together, feeling slightly rebellious. He dragged me into the Christian pavilion one day and we saw a film with a monk setting himself on fire that depressed me for a days. And together we saw Harvard’s famous all-male Hasty Pudding troupe at an outdoor bandstand in a play called a Hit and a Myth that was quite bawdy. Although a good fit for my brother, it was bit mature (sic) for my tastes. I recall the energetic finale, Acalpulco, with a group of ‘grown men’ dressed like Carmen Miranda dancing in a conga line. Their unanchored brassieres kept riding up to their necks.
The list of songs inside this programme reveals that Acapulco was the penultimate song in the play, not the last. Characters in the play included Xerox and Tenintius and there were also Vestal Virgins. The Montreal Gazette said the play was written by the sons of Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights and would be of interest to anyone willing to get into the panty raid spirt. (I checked on Wikipedia: one writer, Timothy Crouse, became a journalist for Rolling Stone. The other, John Weidman, wrote for Sesame Street.)
Yes, I went alone to those glittering Expo Isles in the St. Lawrence, despite the fact that in the spring a policeman had visited our sixth grade classroom to tell us about the dangers lurking there. He said a girl could be drugged in a bathroom and then sold into white slavery. I’m guessing I never mentioned this to my father and mother. I wasn’t too worried being used to walking the big city streets on my own and not understanding the term white slavery – something to do with snow, I imagined. However, I did keep a look out for any suspicious Boris Badenof types around the Russian Pavilion.
Yardley paintbox eye liner from the era. So obviously aimed at little girls like me. I still want one!
My father worked for Expo as a comptroller but I never visited the fair with him. He obviously was too busy. I did go with my mother, though, a few memorable times. On one occasion we saw Bobby Kennedy walk by surrounded by his team of FBI agents in dark glasses, and on another day we witnessed Haille Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia. He had a little dog following him. (I assume this wasn’t a coincidence. My mother wanted to see these famous figures.)
And on one very hot day my mom decided to visit the British pavilion. That place, more than any other, always had an especially long line up. This was the era of Swinging London, after all, and the pavilion included a MOD London exhibit with the Beatles (remember them?) and a Mini Minor Car. I was excited to go. I was a big fan of The Avengers with gorgeous Emma Peel karate-chopping Cold War baddies in her colourful Carnaby Street attire and of the Monkees TV show that featured Yardley commercials and “the London Look.”
The long line up at the British Pavilion. No shade. Wikipedia Commons.
My mom and I queued up realizing we probably had a very long time to wait. It was a hot day and in the line you couldn’t escape the sun. The person ahead of us was an ‘older’ woman with a young child – perhaps around 15 months old -who was not happy in the heat. The baby girl was kicking up a big fuss the whole time and would not be pacified, not in her stroller, not in her mother’s arms.
As was her way, my mother struck up a conversation with this woman.
She was British but this is where the similarity to Emma Peel or any other British ‘bird’ ended.
She was tall and thin, yes, but with wispy light brown hair and lots of stress lines around her eyes. Dowdy would be a good way to describe her attire. She was self-conscious about it, too. “I must look like the wreck of the Hesperus,” she said, combing back a rogue lock of hair with her hand.
This statement impressed me. Here was a smart British lady, just like my 6th grade teacher. And yes, in fact, this beleaguered mom was a teacher but in Toronto. She also had a 15 year old son who was off somewhere exploring the grounds – and she was divorced.
I started to feel sorry for her. She said she had driven to Montreal for just one day so her son could visit the Fair. Just one paltry day to see Expo, how sad! And all she wanted was to visit the pavilion of her homeland. Minutes, maybe hours ticked by and the long line inched forward. The little girl squirmed wildly in her mother’s arms, her shiny face getting redder and redder.
We were getting closer to the entrance and then my mother offered to do something very generous. She said WE would watch the baby for the woman in a shady area nearby so that she could visit the British pavilion in peace. (Our own visit would have to wait for another day.) And, what do you know, the woman took her up on the offer. I guess all that time in the line had made us seem safe and familiar to her.
The harried British mother passed through the turnstiles by herself and my mother and I and the baby found a big tree to sit under.
Detail of Mod Britain exhibit British Pathe video.
Then the lady returned and we said our goodbyes.
At Christmas she sent us a card with a long thank-you note written in impeccable teacher handwriting. (She had told us she didn’t have a phone. Too expensive.) I remember the note was on blue paper, maybe one of those aerograms popular in the day for overseas correspondence.
So, it seems, this overwhelmed mother did, indeed, appreciate my mother’s spontaneous act of kindness, as outrageous as it was – even for the 1960’s. I, myself, don’t recall being embarrassed at all.
3. ” Take a bag of ham sandwiches and a thermos of coffee to Expo- where there are 146 restaurants and snack bars, 46 food shops and 500 automatic vending machines to serve you,” says the opening line of the article “Easting Exotically and otherwise at Expo,” in the Star Weekly insert for February 11, 1967. The pic shows Indian, Japanese, Italian and Mexican chefs with their exotic fare: tacos, pizza, sushi and a meal with pilau and nan. (I think I ate all these things this past weekend.) A pic on the next page caption says :A snack bar in Expo terminology means glamorous dining, indeed. (So, no real cheap food at Expo.) Oddly, the advert in this article was for KLIK and Kam luncheon meat with a pic of little squares of this ‘meat’ on toothpicks on a pickle. How ironic.
4. Man the Explorer; Man the Producer; Man the Creator; Man the Provider. I recall Man and the Community had a revolving exhibit (Czech artist) with little wooden models of a man and a woman in bed and all their needs revolving around them on a belt. “The cause of all progress is laziness.” Reading a list of that place’s exhibits, it sounds amazing. I want to go back!
The Star Weekly insert wrote about the Man out of Control? exhibit in Man the Producer with it’s “maze of signs showing man besieged by the information explosion.” The article continues: “The question mark in the title is no accident. Will the devices of man swallow him up or will he remain in control?” Hmm. Why do I feel this question to be extremely timely?
Genealogy Ensemble 