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HeritageQuebec

NewsVOL 5, NO. 5 SEPT-OCT 2009

MANY M I L E S TON E S AND TOO MANY ANN I V E R S A R I E S$5

Dorchester House

The Re-enactorsHistory’s role players plot rebellions replay

Half-century home of a Montreal family

More from the Quebec Family History SocietyThe Heritage Centre

QUEBEC HERITAGE NEWS

2

EDITORROD MACLEODPRODUCTIO�DAN PINESE

PUBLISHERTHE QUEBEC ANGLOPHONE

HERITAGE NETWORK400-257 QUEEN STREET

SHERBROOKE (LENNOXVILLE)QUEBECJ1M 1K7PHO�E

1-877-964-0409(819) 564-9595

FAX(819) 564-6872CORRESPO�DE�[email protected]

WEBSITEWWW.QAHN.ORG

PRESIDE�TKEVIN O’DONNELLEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

DWANE WILKINHERITAGE PORTAL COORDI�ATOR

MATTHEW FARFANOFFICE MA�AGERKATHY TEASDALE

Quebec Heritage Magazine is produced sixtimes yearly by the Quebec Anglophone

Heritage "etwork (QAH") with the supportof The Department of Canadian Heritageand Quebec’s Ministere de la Culture et

des Communications. QAH" is anon-profit and non-partisan umbrellaorganization whose mission is to helpadvance knowledge of the history andculture of English-speaking society inQuebec. Canada Post Publication Mail

Agreement "umber 405610004.ISS" 17707-2670

CONTENTS

Cover: “Lawn at the back of Dorchester House, Dorchester Street, Montreal”Anonymous, 1907. McCord Museum of Canadian History: MP-1987.2.2(Note the spires of St Paul’s church, which is visible on the plan on p.17.)

3Rod MacLeod

5

Robert DonnellyRoseline Joyal

8"ick Fonda

11Sue Pilson McGuireJohn Pratt

14Anne Joseph

18Robert Dunn19Tyler Wood21Michael Martin

22Kevin Erskine-HenryRod MacLeod

25Rod MacLeod

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HeritageQuebec

News

AWord from the EditorDid you forget our anniversary?

TimelinesLifetime achievers: the 2010 Marion Phelps award

Vital signsMarking 40 years of the Official Languages Act

ReviewOf Fishy Beaver and Jos Montferrand

Heritage FootballBishop’s Gaiters celebrate then and now

The Gaiters’ StoryBefore there was LCC...

Dorchester HouseHome of a Montreal family for over half a centuryTwo of the Josephs’ neighbours on Belmont Street

The Quebec Family History SocietyPart II: the Heritage CentreOf Redcoats and Patriotes

History’s role players plot rebellions replayGatineau prison holds secrets

New insight into internment

MilestonesWallace Lambert, father of French ImmersionMuriel Duckworth and the Outremont School

Question

HindsightMy Revolutionary Road to Bouillabaisse

Events Listings

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2009

3Belmont House (photo courtesy of the Montreal Chest In-stitute Library)

A WORD FROM THE EDITOR

Did you forget our anniversary?by Rod MacLeod

It was a staple of sit-coms when Iwas growing up. Ralph Kramdendid it all the time (well, once a year,anyway) and then had to go to great

lengths to make it up to his wife or eventry lamely to convince her that he hadn’tactually forgotten. Fred Flintstone, Kram-den’s 2D Saturday morning alter ego, wasalso a perpetual anniversary forgetter – al-though on one, er, memorable occasion hewas actually on the ball and had a big sur-prise lined up, gleefully feigning igno-rance despite his wife’s broadest hintsabout the upcoming event. “Aw,honey, of course I haven’t forgottenwhat Tuesday is. It’s Trash Day!”Something goes wrong, of course,and Fred finds it even harder to con-vince her that he hasn’t forgottenwhen in fact he hasn’t than when hehas – if you follow me. Boy, have Ibeen there.

Not with anniversaries, however.A bizarre passion for dates and mile-stones has always made me con-scious of significant days, includingthe candies & flowers variety.(Though my spouse and I have neverdone anything so conventional as toexchange candies or flowers; in fact, wealways refer to the day of our nuptials as“Trash Day” – in cheerful tribute.)

One of the challenges of a heritagemagazine is to keep up to date with an-niversaries, especially significant onesthat deserve special mention. It ain’teasy: One hundred years of flight in Cana-da. One hundred years of the MontrealCanadiens. One hundred years of LowerCanada College and Miss Edgar’s & MissCramp’s. Seventy years since the stockmarket crashed (that other time, I mean).Sixty years since the start of the SecondWorld War. Forty years since the passingof the Official Languages Act. How doesone keep up?

The great granddaddy of recent sig-nificant anniversaries was, of course, theBattle of the Plains of Abraham. You haveto admire it: two hundred and fifty, andjust as fresh as the day it was fought. Be-

lieve me, the QAHN board of directorsthought long and hard about whether toacknowledge this milestone or not (and ifso, how) and in the end decided to go theFlintstone route. (“Aw, honey, of course Ihaven’t forgotten what September 13thwas!”) There is much agreement that thelegacy of the battle is considerably moreinteresting than the fight itself. Above all,we should acknowledge and commemo-rate the creation of the Plains of AbrahamPark a century ago (thanks to both theQuebec Literary and Historical Society

and the St Jean Baptiste Society) alongwith the Battlefields Commission and theHistoric Sites and Monuments Board. Itis to them that we owe our current appre-ciation for heritage, even if it took them afew years to get beyond simply puttingmarkers on battle sites.

Recently, I found myself involved ina project to commemorate another sort ofbattle, namely the one against tuberculo-sis.The Montreal Chest Institute celebratedits centenary on October 21st, 100 yearssince the day that King Edward VIIpressed a button in London and sent anelectric current shooting across the At-lantic Ocean to light up the new hospitalin Montreal.

This high-tech stunt symbolized thestate-of-the-art ambitions of the medicalprofession with regard to the 12,000 peo-ple who were dying every year from TB

in Montreal alone, and to the third ormore of the children (depending on vari-ous studies around the world) who wereinfected. It was hoped that the new insti-tute would not only treat patients more ef-fectively than before, but lead the world inresearch so that the disease could be erad-icated. Over the next hundred years theRoyal Edward Institute, as it was named,after the guy who pushed that button, didfulfill expectations.

The term “high tech” does not springto mind today when contemplating the in-

stitute’s original facilities. BelmontHouse was donated for this purposeby Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bur-land, a trained scientist and promoterof medical reform whose father’sdeath in 1907 left him a fortune hewas ready to spend on improving thehealth of Montrealers.

The house lay on Belmont Park(no relation to the Cartierville funfair of later fame) which was howone segment of Belmont Street wasknown at the time, as it had been laidout over the grounds of a villa thathad once belonged to an old farm onthe mountainside. Belmont House

was a good-sized structure that could ac-commodate the necessary tuberculosis fa-cilities. (For more on Belmont House’sneighbours and a plan of the area, seeAnne Joseph’s article in this issue.) DrRobert Philip, an Edinburgh doctor andpioneer in tuberculosis research, re-designed the building as a hospital andteaching centre. Thanks to the King, theplace had plenty of electricity.

In 1909, the Royal Edward Institutewas convenient to the centre of the city,yet on high enough ground for it to profitfrom the cleaner air. By the 1920s, how-ever, Belmont Street was in a rapidly de-veloping part of downtown and in dangerof expropriation for the new railway. (It isnow an alley behind Central Station.) In1930, the Institute found new quarters onquieter St Urbain Street, just south of Hô-tel Dieu Hospital. Ten years later itmerged with the sanatorium in Ste

Agathe, with which it had collaboratedsince the beginning. In 1971 its name waschanged to the Montreal Chest Hospital,and by 1994, after being absorbed byMcGill, it became known as the MontrealChest Institute. Like the rest of theMcGill University Health Centre, it isslated to be relocated to the Glen Yardssuperhospital site in – well, let’s say soon.

Appropriately, the organizers of thecentenary commemoration decided thatthe October 21, 2009 celebrations shouldbe held as close as possible to the GlenYards site, namely the Air Canada build-ing on Maisonneuve Boulevard nearthe border with Westmount. They al-so decided to produce a short videorelating the institute’s history, and be-gan to look around for period cos-tumes and actors both of which couldcome very cheap. Connections beingwhat they often are, MCI Foundationpresident Susan Curry found herselftalking to Dael Foster of the Montre-al West Operatic Society, which wasitself celebrating its 70th birthday.Dael not only offered costumes andactors at no cost but a delegation ofsingers to perform at the centenaryparty. Curry and her colleagues wereapparently delighted, even though thecostumes were Edwardian only by astretch of the imagination and the actorswere strictly amateur. MWOS’s AndrewMacdougall, a retired engineer, played theking, while Dael, an accountant, and Joan-na Wrona, a charity organizer, were theBurland sisters, decked out in best bib andtucker.

And that left someone to be Dr Philipfrom Edinburgh...

I’d heard about this project someweeks before and then nothing; I’d as-sumed it had been dropped. But at 10amon the Thanksgiving weekend Saturday,the phone rang and Laura Cohen from theMUHC technical crew was asking me if Icould be at the Royal Victoria Hospital inan hour to begin filming. Only halfawake, for reasons I need not go into, Iagreed, after begging an extension to11:30. I made it on time and was escortedup through the maze of the Royal Vic tothe dark upper reaches of the Ross Pavil-ion, where Laura and her colleague DavidBitton were all set up in a dingy room thatdid sort of suggest 1909.

They’d added some old medicalbooks, surgical instruments and steel re-ceptacles for authenticity, which looked

fairly convincing, although I was less im-pressed that they gave me a standard labcoat and stethoscope plus green rubbergloves from Home Depot which raisedthe spectre of anachronism somewhat.

They also hadn’t asked me to wear atie, which clashed with my vision of howa respectable doctor from the early twenti-eth century would have dressed. Thataside, I was very impressed by their tech-nological savvy and professionalism,walking me through the script and makinghelpful suggestions as to tone of voice andpace of delivery.

What I had to do was walk abouteight feet alongside a counter talking withgravitas about the deplorable cost of TB,then stare into the camera and speak en-thusiastically about the new institute. Al-though there was a teleprompter riggedwith the camera, without my glasses Icouldn’t read it and so had to memorizethe speech, which certainly cost us a fewextra takes. In another segment, I had todeclaim my line about eradicating tuber-culosis while staring through a glass slideat some unidentified blob; between megetting the lines right and David filmingme from countless angles (includingthrough the glass slide) I must havegrowled “tuberculosis” two dozen times.Or rather “tew-bair-que-loh-sis” in the ac-cent of my forefathers, the ability to soundpassably like an Edinburgher being part ofmy so-called qualifications. Then, in an-other dingy room I had to say it was arainy afternoon in Montreal while gazingglumly out a window. The difficulty was,it was a gorgeous day, and the sunstreamed in, its force diminished only oc-casionally by passing clouds which wewaited for breathlessly before springinginto action for 15 seconds, praying for no

flubs.The irony, of course, was that we had

all spent this past summer doing the oppo-site: staring at dark clouds and willingthem to pass so the sun could providesome warmth. All in all, cinema takestime, and it was 3pm before they releasedme.

On October 21st, the MWOS gangassembled at the Air Canada building inour pseudo-Edwardian finery and provid-ed a colourful visual backdrop to anhour’s cocktail conversation – I mean, wewere singing our hearts out, but I don’t

think it carried all that well. Thenthey showed the film. Once I’d un-clenched my fingers and teeth I couldadmit it wasn’t half bad – althoughthe Burland sisters looked as if theywere standing c.1860 and Dr Philiplooked like he’d walked in fromabout 1952. The whole thing was ap-propriately black & white, andthrough the magic of FX the rainy af-ternoon in Montreal turned out to bejust that: quite a downpour in fact.

When screen Andrew pushed theelectric button in “London” we allbroke into a chorus of Happy Birth-day, which won us more applausethan the earlier numbers.Later, we also received a nice letter

from Susan Curry thanking us profuselyand praising our talents. (Hey, you needdiplomacy to manage a foundation.) Ithink they will be more than happy tohave us back for the 200th anniversary ofthe Chest Institute.

For my part, however, I think I’llgive candy and flowers a try.

SourcesAnnemarie Adams, Kevin Schwartz-

man, and David Theodore, “Collapse andExpand: Architecture and TuberculosisTherapy in Montreal, 1909, 1933, 1954.”Society for the History of Technology,2008.

Peter Keating, “Jeffrey Hale Bur-land,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography,Vol.XIV.

“Sir Robert W Philip (1857-1939),Pioneer of Tuberculosis Control. Ameri-can Journal of Public Health, 1959.

http://www.muhcfoundation.com/chest_institute

The Montreal West Operatic Society in not-so-Edwardiancostume (photo: Brent McGowan)4


TIMELINES

Lifetime achieversCall for 2010 volunteer heritage award nominees goes out

The Quebec Anglophone Her-itage Network (QAHN) isseeking nominations for its2010 Marion Phelps Award,

recognizing outstanding volunteer con-tributions towards the protection andpreservation of Quebec’s anglophoneheritage.

Past recipients have included volun-teer archivists, a businessman, a story-teller and several dedicated chroniclersof local history. Is there a worthy candi-date in your organization? Someone whohas consistently worked towards the pro-motion and preservation of Quebec’sheritage?

Nomination forms and additionalinformation about the award can bedownloaded from the QAHN website atwww.qahn.org. Just select the MarionPhelps Award webpage from the menu.Forms can also be requested directlyfrom the QAHN office.

Nominations must concisely de-scribe the scope and significance of thenominee’s work in the heritage field, us-ing specific examples. And all submis-sions must be received by the QAHN of-

fice no later than by March 30, 2010.The annual award is named for

Marion Phelps who was recognized in2001 for the five decades she spent as avolunteer archivist with the Brome-Mis-sisquoi Historical Society in Knowlton,in the Eastern Townships. In subsequentyears the award was given to Joan Bis-son Dow, co-founder of the BritishGaspesian Heritage Village in NewRichmond; the late historian KennethAnnett; authors Norma Geggie of Wake-field and Byron Clark of the MagdalenIslands; the Irish-Quebec scholar Mari-anna O’Gallagaher; Harry Isbrucker ofthe Stanstead Historical Society; Hudsonraconteur Rod Hodgson; and RichmondCounty Historical Society archivist Es-ther Healy.

For more information or to order nomi-nation forms, please contact Kathy Teas-dale at (819) 564-9595 or, toll-free inQuebec, (877) 964-0409.

The 2010 Marion Phelps Award will beawarded during QAH"’s annual generalmeeting in June 2010.

Marion Phelps (photo courtesy of townshipsher-itage.com) 5


From a brief presented by Robert Don-nelly, leader of the Quebec CommunityGroups "etwork (QCG") before theParliamentary standing committee onOfficial Languages, March 23, 2009.The committee is studying the Roadmapfor Canada’s Linguistic Duality, the fed-eral government’s five-year action planoutlining $1.1 billion in program spend-ing intended to support francophonecommunities in nine provinces and threeterritories where French has official mi-nority status, and in Quebec where Eng-lish speakers account for around 11 percent of the population.

Over the past 40 years, Englishinstitutions have weakenedand access to services in ourown language has dimin-

ished. Education provisions of the Char-ter of the French Language have had asignificant impact on the province’sEnglish-language public education sys-tem, causing a decline in enrolment thatthreatens the future of many schools, es-pecially in rural and isolated regions.And in spite of legislative guarantees,access to English-language health andsocial services depends largely on thetype of service and access varies widelyfrom region to region.

English-speaking Quebecers, espe-cially our unilingual elderly and our lessfortunate, require access to services intheir own language. Our community alsoneeds access to job skills that will allowEnglish Quebecers to integrate into thejob market and allow the community toretain its youth and young families andkeep its communities alive and vital.

The departure of highly educatedbilingual anglophones is a loss of humancapital for both the English-speakingcommunity of Quebec and for Quebecsociety as a whole. It also points to aglaring need for a policy for French-lan-guage training that recognizes theFrench language as an essential job skill.A successful human resources develop-ment strategy in cooperation and withsupport from key provincial and federalpartners is of paramount importance tothe survival of our community. That in-cludes not only access to jobs in the fed-eral and provincial public services wherethe diversity of Canada and Quebecmust be reflected, but in all sectors.

The QCGN is working hard to helpdevelop and implement policies thatsupport and nurture the community’splace in Quebec and Canadian society.Among our greatest challenges has beengetting recognition of Quebec’s English-

speaking community as a minority bothin Quebec and in Canada. That’s whywe are pleased that the Commissioner ofOfficial Languages Graham Fraser un-derlined our “national” standing becausewe consider the standing of the English-speaking community of Quebec hasbeen ignored by many federal depart-ments.

In his last Annual Report, the Officeof the Commissioner of Official Lan-guages noted that Quebec’s anglophonecommunity is one of the two official lan-guage minorities, and stressed that fed-eral institutions and key stakeholders in-terested in official languages should ac-knowledge our community’s contribu-tions to national policy-making in Cana-da.

By the same token, the English-speaking community requires the sup-port of our brothers and sisters in thefrancophone majority if we are to suc-cessfully influence the policies requiredto develop vital and viable English-speaking minority communities whichwill continue to contribute to Quebec so-ciety.

English-speaking Quebec faces theparticular challenge of being a minoritywithin a minority which, let’s face it, isnot always recognized as such by keydecision-makers and opinion-leaders.After years of working though our chal-lenges and issues in Quebec, we believethere are signs that the English-speakingcommunity of Quebec is finally accept-ing its minority status.

English-speaking Quebecers have arole in helping the majority communityfeel secure enough to assume the role ofsupporting its minority community. It’s aquestion of respect for each other andrecognition of our intersecting contribu-tions to society. And to achieve mutualrespect, we have to ensure that bothcommunities understand that support foreach other does not diminish the spaceor place the other occupies in Quebec.It’s not a zero-sum game!


6 Commissioner for Official Languages Graham Fraser and QCGNPresident Robert Donnelly (photo: Jake Wright)

Vital SignsMarking 40 years of the official languages actbyRobert Donnelly


7

On September 11th and 12th, 2009, theQCGN held its Members’ Convention andAnnual General Meeting in conjunctionwith the festivities surrounding the 40th an-

niversary of the Official Languages Act, which coin-cided with the launch of the 15th anniversary year ofthe Network.

The two-day convention was attended by some200 members, community partners and governmentstakeholders. On hand for the opening ceremony werethe Commissioner of Official Languages Graham Fras-er; the Honourable Maria Chaput, Chair of the SenateStanding Committee on Official Languages; RichardNadeau, MP for Gatineau and member of the Parlia-mentary Standing Committee on Official Languages;Marcel Proulx, MP for Hull-Aylmer; CharlotteL’Écuyer, MP for Pontiac and representing NormanMacMillan, Minister responsible forthe Outaouais region and MP for Pap-ineau; and Noel Burke, Dean of Con-cordia’s School of Extended Learning.

A Premiere! Of course the crown-ing event of the weekend was theQCGN’s Community CelebrationEvening and the ceremony to hand outthe first-ever Sheila and Victor Gold-bloom Distinguished Community Serv-ice Awards. The evening, emceed byCBC Radio’s Bernard St-Laurent, in-cluded kudos for Dr and Mrs Gold-bloom as well as this year’s laureatesof the award: Language activist CasperBloom (award handed out by Mr.Nicholas Kasirer), Eastern Townships

health-care advocate Marjorie Goodfellow(award presented by James Carter), and JackJedwab, researcher and Executive Director ofthe Association of Canadian Studies (awardpresented by Herbert Marx).

Thanks go to our Blue Ribbon Panel ofjudges, which included this year John Parisella,BCP Communications President and Quebec'snewly appointed delegate-general to New YorkCity; former McGill Chancellor Gretta Cham-bers; Senator David Angus; and former editorof The Gazette, Norman Webster. We wereglad that Mr Parisella and Mr Webster wereable to acknowledge the winners with us thatnight.

Throughout the convention and awardsbanquet, the contributions of English-speaking

Quebec to Quebec and Canadian society were celebrat-ed by a number of special guests, including provincialJustice Minister Kathleen Weil, who was there to rep-resent Premier Jean Charest and the government ofQuebec; Glengarry-Prescott-Russell MP PierreLemieux, who was on hand to represent Prime Minis-ter Stephen Harper and Official Languages MinisterJames Moore; former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion,who spoke on behalf of Michael Ignatieff and the Lib-eral Party; former Commissionner of Official Lan-guages Maxwell Yalden (1977-1984); and Vice-Chairof the House of Commons Standing Committee on Of-ficial Languages, Yvon Godin.

Roseline Joyal is Communications Officer for the Que-bec Community Groups "etwork

Above: Herbert Marx, Robert Donnelly and JackJedwab. Below: Sheila and Victor Goldbloom

Marking 40 years of theOfficial Languages ActThe Quebec Community Groups Network holds a major convention andlaunches new awardbyRoseline Joyal


8Image courtesy of Baraka Books

Of Fishy Beaver and JosMontferrandA People’s History of Quebecby Jacques Lacoursière and Robin PhilpotBaraka Books, 2009Reviewed byNick Fonda

REVIEW

APeople’s History of Quebec by Jacques La-coursière and Robin Philpot is a new bookfrom a new, Quebec-based, English lan-guage publishing house, Baraka Books.

(Baraka is a word which exists in several languages—none of them indigenous but including Hebrew andArabic—and which has several meanings. It refers toa blessing in Hebrew and to spiritual wisdom in Ara-bic; in French slang it means luck.) At a trim 208pages (including a tidy timeline of Quebec history anda useful index) and in a soft cover, it’s the kind of bookthat’s easy to carry on a trip and easy to bring to bed.It’s also a good read which offers lots of room for re-flection.

At the book’s official launch at Paragraph Booksat the end of September, Jacques Lacoursière referredto the book as an adaptation rather than a translation ofhis recently published Une histoire du Québec racontéepar Jacques Lacoursière. Perhaps little known to Eng-lish readers, Jacques Lacoursière is arguably as closeas any historian has ever come to being a householdname in Quebec. The author of numerous titles (in-cluding the five-volume Histoire Populaire du Québec)Lacoursière has also used radio and television to tellthe story of Quebec.

“A People’s History is an adaptation,” explainsRobin Philpot. “There were additions made to Unehistoire du Québec to make it more accessible to theEnglish reader.” Robin Philpot, besides co-authoringthe book, is also the publisher and driving force behindBaraka Books. The author of titles on both the Rawan-dan genocide and the Oka crisis, Philpot is unusual inthat, like Samuel Beckett, he most often writes in hisadopted language of French, and is consequently betterknown among Francophone bibliophiles than Anglo-phone readers. All three of the titles he has publishedso far under the Baraka banner are translations or adap-tations that bridge our linguistic divide.

As its title suggests, A People’s History offersmore than the familiar names and exploits of Cartierand Champlain, of Duplessis and Parizeau; it provides

us with an occasional glimpse behind the scenes, witha hint of what life might have been like for Monsieur etMadame Tout le Monde. For the armchair historian,the book is salted with little surprises.

For example, how many of us knew that on Carti-er’s third trip to Canada in 1541, he was “…second incommand to Jean-François de La Roque, sieur deRoberval, and they [brought] hundreds of settlers withthem, many of whom came straight from prison?”(p.11) In the half dozen pages accorded to him, the seacaptain from St. Malo cuts a less heroic figure thanhe’s normally accustomed to, and not just because hewas fooled by fool’s gold. And how things change!Teenage pregnancy has a very specific connotation to-day, one which is diametrically opposite to that of sev-enteenth-century Quebec when hospitals had the powerto fine fathers “…who failed to marry their male chil-dren by the age of 20 and their female children by theage of 16.” Nor did parents prolific in the procreationof progeny go unrewarded. Louis XIV of France pro-claimed in 1669 that those “who have up to 10 livingchildren born in wedlock, among whom none was apriest, a nun or in a religious order will be paid…apension of 300 pounds a year each, and those whohave 12 children will receive 400 pounds.” (p.23)

It’s easy to imagine that the most quoted storyfrom A People’s History will be that of the classifica-tion of the beaver. The new settlers, who came in thehundreds and then the thousands from France, were allCatholic, as the new colony was closed to both Protes-tants and Jews. Religion bound them to abstain fromeating meat for 140 days of the year. Beavers weretrapped for their fur, but they carried a good deal of ed-ible flesh, weighing up to 50 pounds and over.The question arose: is the beaver an animal and there-fore forbidden on days of abstinence, or is it a fish, inwhich case it can be eaten on any day of the religiouscalendar?The question was weighty enough that Laval, the firstBishop of Quebec, referred it back to the theologiansof the Sorbonne and the doctors of Hotel Dieu in Paris.


9Above: JosMontferrand’s battle on the Bytown bridge (From B Sulte,Histoire de JosMontferrand, l’athlete canadien, 1899) Below: Algo-nquin couple, 18thC (image courtesy of City of Montreal Archives)

“The experts earnestly discussed the issue at lengthand consulted other illustrious scientists and camedown with the conclusion that the beaver was a fishbecause of its tail. The decision brought joy to thecolony.” (p.37)

If many names in A People’s History are familiar,some are much less so, like that of Joseph “Jos” Mont-ferrand, “…who made a name for himself working theOttawa River Valley and who became an early incarna-tion of Maurice Richard.” (p.87) Unfortunately,squeezing 400 years into 200 pages inevitably leavescasualties on the editing room floor. A People’s Histo-ry says nothing more about Montferrand although he’sas heroic as marvellous a folk hero as you can hope tomeet. He was a logger during the era of the Englishlumber barons, when felled trees supplanted furs asCanada’s major export. He was larger than life: at aboxing exhibition in Montreal’s Champ de Mars, the6’4” sixteen-year old knocked out the just-crownedboxing champion of Canada. In 1829, on a bridgespanning the Ottawa River between Hull and Bytown,he is supposed to have defeated a crowd of 150 bully-ing Irishmen.

Quite recently the Prime Minister of Canada de-clared Quebec to be a distinct society, but who knewthat there was something different about Quebec fromthe very beginning? We read: “Champlain and hismentor François Gravé, sieur du Pont, had a dream ofharmony with the peoples he met whom he treated asequals, never doubting their humanity as others did.”(pg 14) Champlain actively promoted intermarriagewith the First Nations (although a cynic might pointout that it took six and a half decades after the found-

ing of Quebec for the small colony to achieve genderequality). His dream was of “a new world as a placewhere people of different cultures could live togetherin amity and concord.” (p.14)

This sentiment was shared by Louis XIV ofFrance who wanted the colony to “try to civilize the


10 Image courtesy of Baraka Books

Algonquins, the Hurons and the other Savages whohave embraced Christianity to prepare them to come tolive as a community with the French and to live withthem and according to their customs.” (p.24) As oftenhappens, there was a considerable gap between the the-ory and the practice. What the French court imaginedwas one thing; what was actually happening was an-other. A nun stationed in the colony wrote: “It is easierto make a Savage out of a Frenchman than to do theopposite.” (p.24)

Among the big three of the European colonizers,the French were different. Nineteenth-century Ameri-can historian Francis Parkman wrote: “Spanish civi-lization crushed the Indian; English civilizationscorned and neglected him; French civilization em-braced and cherished him.” (p.25) Another American,philosopher Henry David Thoreau, visited Quebec in1850 and noted: “The French, to their credit be it said,to a certain extent respected the Indians as a separateand independent people, and spoke of them and con-trasted themselves with them as the English have neverdone.” (p.25)

It’s a century and a half since Thoreau wrote.We no longer use the word Indian, let alone Savage.The term First Nations might assuage our guilt, but theillegal cigarette trade, the Oka crisis and the residentialschool revelations leave little doubt the descendants ofthe original inhabitants are today at the very bottom ofour social hierarchy.

The restrictions against Protestants and Jews ofseventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quebec did notsurvive the Plains of Abraham. Despite prejudicesagainst the latter group, it was in Quebec, in 1832, forthe first time in the British Empire, that “persons pro-fessing the Jewish religion [became] entitled to all therights and privileges of the other subjects.” (p.97) Per-haps even more surprising is the story of Ezekiel Hart,a Jew who in 1807 was elected to the Legislative As-sembly. His constituents in Three Rivers re-electedhim a year later despite the fact that in 1807 he had re-fused to take the Christian oath of office and was de-nied the right to sit in the chamber of deputies.

A People’s History does a good job of exposingthe roots of some of the attitudes that prevail today.Practicing Catholics declined precipitously in numberfollowing the Quiet Revolution, but anti-clerical senti-ments might well be traced back to the time of the con-quest when the clergy reasoned that since all authoritystems from God, revolting against a duly establishedauthority was equivalent to revolting against God.Hence, whatever their parishioners may have felt, theclergy stood for the government and during the Patrioteuprising in 1837, the Church sided with the Britishmilitary. The Church’s most potent weapon was thethreat of withholding sacraments and refusing the fall-en a Christian burial in consecrated ground.

Similarly, the tensions between French and Eng-lish (compounded by the Catholic-Protestant division)have a lot to do with the arrival of Loyalists after theWar of American Independence. Most of the Loyalists

were given lands to settle in Upper Canada, away fromthe French settlements in Lower Canada. This separa-tion was probably wise because the Loyalists were re-sentful of the French who, in the century and a half pri-or to the War of Independence, during various Euro-pean conflicts, had launched attacks upon them. AsLoyalists they were coming to Canada to live under theBritish flag. They were leaving often very well estab-lished homes in order to be English rather than Ameri-can and certainly not French.

This eighteenth-century animosity, which is stillnot entirely dissipated, bubbled to the surface on theeve of World War I when the Orange Order argued that“the use of French in public schools in Ontario repre-sented a serous threat to the integrity of the province asan English-speaking community.” (p.137) A few yearslater, in the Quebec Legislative Assembly, a motionwas tabled that read: “That this House is of the opinionthat the Province of Quebec would be disposed to ac-cept the breakdown of the federal pact of 1867, if, inthe other provinces, it is believe that this province is anobstacle to the union, progress and development ofCanada.” (p.143)

A People’s History begins and ends on precisedates: Cartier’s landing on July 24, 1534 and the Ref-erendum of October 30, 1995. Between those twodates, the authors’ account is lively and informative,brisk and articulate. For some it will no doubt be anappetizer, possibly for Lacoursière’s full five-volumeset. Of course we’re all curious about what comesnext, but history has to be sifted through the sieve oftime, or, as Jacques Lacoursière and Robin Philpotwrite, “the history of the referendum and the periodthat followed is still being written.” (p.192)

On the same evening that it launched A People’sHistory of Quebec, Baraka Books also launched twoother promising titles: America’s Gift: What the WorldOwes to America and its First Inhabitants by KathëRoth and Denis Vaugeois, and William Barr’s transla-tion of Joseph Elzear Bernier, 1852-1934: Championof Canadian Sovereignty by Marjolaine Saint-Pierre.Baraka Books will be specializing in creative and po-litical non-fiction, history and historical fiction and fic-tion. If future titles meet the standard set by this firstvolume, we can look for-ward to some good read-ing.

New English-lan-guage publishers in Que-bec are rare. That alonewould be enough to makeme wish baraka—in allits many meanings—toBaraka Books.

"ick Fonda is the currentpresident of the Rich-mond County HistoricalSociety.


1111Above: Guard Laurie Hart (left), running back John Pratt, and centre BradMitchell with his back to the camera (photo: Perry Beaton) Below: Playersfrom the three winningest Gaiters teams on the field at half time, with thenewest Gaiters in the background (photo: Perry Beaton)

Bishop’s Gaiters Celebrate Then and NowHERITAGE FOOTBALL

by Sue Pilson McGuire

The m a g n e t i c p u l lof the Eastern Townshipscould nowhere be more evi-dent than on the weekend of

October 23, 2009, when about 50Bishop’s University alumni plustheir families and friends gathered tocelebrate the Gaiters football teamsof 1953-54, 1954-55 and 1955-56.The teams were undefeated in theirleague for the three years except forone game—an unequalled record.

Photos of the three teams wereunveiled on the university’s RBCWall of Distinction, located in the J.H. Price Sports Centre, during a cer-emony presided over by Tony Ad-dona, director of athletics. Guest ofhonour was the beloved coach for allthree teams, Gordon “Beef” Ross,now 86 years old and living in Sher-brooke.

A dinner for the teams was heldon Saturday night by the university,and presiding was Eddie Pomykala, along-time member of the university’sathletic department. Grace before

dinner was said by the Rev. CanonDave Lethbridge from Combermere,Ontario, who was associated with allthree winning teams as player or

manager—or both, and whose throw-ing arm and football hand were leg-endary. In a preface to the grace, helamented the closure some years agoof the divinity faculty, saying thatbeing in the centre of a small univer-sity, its venue had contributed signif-icantly to preparing clergy for com-munity life.

Many of the football Gaiters ofthose years, and their wives, hailedfrom the Eastern Townships, and re-turning was a nostalgia trip, not onlyfor university days, but for some towhere their families and forebearslived. Among the 1950s alumni at-tending who have roots in the Town-ships were Cairine Gilmour, whoselate husband William Warren Lynch,from Sherbrooke, was a Gaiters starin the backfield; Sam Poaps, whohailed from Stanstead; JohnMatthews, whose father was Bishopof Quebec, based in Lennoxville;team manager Ray Ball who wasfrom Granby; Brad Mitchell fromMassawippi; Ralph Burt, Bob Burtand Sylvia Burt Smith from


12Above: Beef Ross (age 86) and Hugh MacDonald at the Wall of

Distinction (photo: Perry Beaton) Below: Gaiters from the 1950s atthe Wall of Distinction (photo: Perry Beaton)

Lennoxville; Alison Perry Edwardswho grew up in Drummondville;Nancy Shepard Douglas from Sutton;and Jim Fullerton, who has discov-ered one of his ancestors founded thevillage of Knowlton.

John Pratt, star running back onthe teams and now a resident of Hat-ley, served as liaison with the uni-versity; he was the genial and hard-working “face” of the event. He wasassisted through numerous emails byHugh MacDonald, one of the teamcaptains and now a North Bay resi-dent. Among the far-away teammembers who attended were AndyWW Davis (Powell River, BC), GlynEdwards (Edmonton), Dick Fletcher(Halifax), John Matthews and JimFullerton (Toronto), and Laurie Hart(Markham). Closer to home were To-by Rochester (Montreal &Georgeville), Dave Moore (SteCatherine de Hatley), and IanWarnock (Brome).

The attendance of members ofthe winningest teams in Bishops’football history evidently spurred thecurrent home team to victory on Sat-urday afternoon, October 24. De-clared earlier in the day to be the“underdogs” by Pat Hickey in TheGazette, the 2009 Gaiters were pittedagainst the Université de Montréal’sLes Carabins. Bishop’s dominatedthe first half, with the score 21-0.The Carabins came on strong in the

second half, but the wily tactics of(Bishop’s alumnus and) Gaiterscoach Leroy Blugh in the fourthquarter resulted in his team’s victory21-16.

Sue Pilson McGuire was Senior La-dy, Class of ’58. She lives part-timein Knowlton.

�ew scholarships

The 1954-56 Championship TeamAwards will help annually with re-cruitment and retention of one ormore outstanding student-athletesfor the Bishop’s football teams.Funds were contributed entirely bymembers of the three 1950s Gaitersteams, under the stewardship ofGlyn Edwards.

The Rider Family Award will as-sist annually a deserving student-athlete playing football or basket-ball (men or women). It was devel-oped by Tim Rider and family tohonour their father John, who was a3-year member of the winningestGaiters —as well as the long asso-ciation of the Rider family withBishop’s: Hamilton Rider (whogrew up in Fitch Bay where hisfamily had lived since the 1800s)and his wife Peggy Fuller Riderwere both athletes and Bishop’sgraduates in the late 1920s. Theirchildren Fred, John and Lillian areall Bishop’s graduates, as is John’swife Sandra Currie. (Lillian is pres-ident of the Lennoxville-Ascot His-torical Society.)


13Above left: Gaiters’ Badge and Coat of Arms (image courtesy ofBishops University. Above right: Church of St John the Evangelist,Montreal (photo: Rod MacLeod) Below: Jane Fletcher, Class of2029, with granddad Dick Fletcher (photo: Perry Beaton)

The "Gaiters" Story

In 1947 a competitionwas sponsored by theCommittee on Athleticsand The Campus news-

paper to find a nickname forthe University's Footballteam that would fire up theenthusiasm of the fans. Thecontest was won by GeorgeB. McClintock, '49, who

originally suggested "Gators" after the alligator whichis a "tough and formidable foe when aroused, capableof swift and decisive action in an emergency." Howev-er, by using a play onwords, the namespelled "Gaiters"seemed more appro-priate for an AnglicanCollege. Gaiters werean article of ecclesias-tical clothing whichcovered part of thewearer's shoes andlower legs. Thesewere worn by Bishops Deans and Archdeacons as partof the clerical dress when not robed.

The official University Badge was presented bythe Governor General together with the Coat of Armsin 1993. In the tradition of the heraldic pun, the 'gatoris wearing his "gaiters".

Before there was LCC…

Edmund Wood, an ambitious 28-year-old An-glican deacon arrived in Montreal in late1858 eager to work among the city’s poor,and was allowed to use the mortuary chapel

in the middle of the old Protestant Burial Ground,north of Lagauchetière Street. His preaching thereproved so successful in drawing crowds that in 1860 asite was found just to the east of the cemetery on St-Urbain Street for a new church, to be known as St Johnthe Evangelist. The following year, Wood, now an An-glican priest, opened a school in his home where hetaught both boys and girls from the neighbourhood.After several moves, “St John’s School” found a per-manent home adjacent to the new, larger St John theEvangelist Church, built 1878 on the corner of St-Ur-bain and Ontario streets. By this time it had become aschool for boys, and although the fees were oftenwaived for charitable reasons, it began to advertise it-self as a school for the “sons of gentlemen,” many ofwhom came from out of town and boarded.The photograph shows the present day church hall,which contains many of the features (notably the win-dows and the columns) found in the 1880s schoolroom. By the early twentieth century the school hadoutgrown its available space and in 1909 it moved tomore extensive quarters in the developing westerncommunity of Notre-Dame-de-Grace. In this locationit took on a more secular character and was renamedLower Canada College – which a century later remainsone of the city’s most prestigious private schools.

Sources:

Parish of St John the Evangelist, Centenary Bookof the Parish of St John the Evangelist, Montreal,1861-1961. (Montreal: 1961.)

Frank Dawson Adams, A History of Christ ChurchCathedral, Montreal. (Montreal: Burton’s, 1941.)


14

Home of a Montreal Family for Over Half a CenturyDORCHESTER HOUSE

by Anne Joseph

Dorchester House was built inthe late 1850s to the personalspecifications of a Montrealbusinessman, Jacob Henry

Joseph, for use as his family home. By1860, Jacob and his family were in resi-dence. Jacob himself died there in 1907,after which his elder son continued tolive there with his family until 1913, atwhich time the house was torn down toaccommodate development of the rail-way into downtown Montreal.

Jacob Henry Joseph: his back-ground and early life

Jacob’s father, Henry, arrived inQuebec in 1790 as an adventurousteenager. He and his two older brothers,Judah and Abraham, crossed the Atlanticfrom England at the behest of theirmother’s brother, Aaron Hart, who hadarrived in 1760 and fully recognized thepotential for bright young men to makeinteresting and successful lives for them-selves in the rapidly developing territo-ry. Aaron Hart rightly concluded that hisnephews would do well.

Henry Joseph married RachelSolomons in 1803, by which time he hadestablished his business and residentialcentre in Berthier on the north shore ofthe St. Lawrence River about half waybetween Montreal and Three Rivers.Henry’s brother Judah was already mar-ried to Catherine Lazare, and his brotherAbraham had married Hannah Lipman.All four of them signed Henry andRachel’s wedding certificate as witness-es.

Jacob was born in Berthier on 14September 1814, the eighth child ofHenry and Rachel. As the years went byfive more children joined the family.

While it is true that the paternalgrandparents of the Berthier Joseph chil-dren were in England, and there is norecord of them ever meeting, this in noway meant that they were lacking local

relatives. Their maternal grandparents,Levy and Rebekah (Franks) Solomons,were Montrealers, as was Rebekah’sown father, Abraham Franks. Grand-mother Rebekah Solomons was stillalive for the births of the first six of hergrandchildren through Henry andRachel. There were also a lot ofSolomons and Franks relatives withinreasonable distance of Berthier, mainlyin Montreal, and there is ample evidenceof Rachel (Solomons) Joseph keeping inclose touch with those of her ten siblingswho lived to maturity.

Being both financially secure andwell placed socially, the Joseph familylived in style in a very nice house inBerthier. Jacob was about 11 when hisfather embarked on further expansion ofhis property ownership in the mid 1820sin Montreal. Henry started to hand overmore responsibility for the business inBerthier to his eldest son, Samuel, andspent more time himself in a home hehad bought in Montreal on Près-de-Ville, Lagauchetière Street. With the ex-ception of eldest son, Samuel, the entirefamily was primarily resident in Montre-al by 1830.

An earth-shattering summer:the family grows up in a hurry

In June 1832, both Henry Josephand his eldest son, Samuel, died in thecholera epidemic. This, on top of theearliest deaths of three other older broth-ers – and a sister - of Jacob, meant thatthis fifth son of his now dead father be-came the eldest surviving son. Just sev-enteen years old, Jacob declared thatfrom then on, he wished to be known asJacob Henry Joseph. To his family,though, he remained Jacob.

The Joseph siblings grew up in ahurry. Each of the surviving brothers –Jacob, Abraham, Jesse and Gershom –became a powerhouse in his chosenbusiness, professional, philanthropic and

personal life. In the fullness of time, Ja-cob gained prominence as a business-man, soldier and back-room politician,as well as being one of the largest landowners in Quebec.

In April 1848, Jacob Henry Josephmarried Sara Gratz Moses in Philadel-phia, Pennsylvania. The mother figure inSara’s life was her maternal aunt, Rebec-ca Gratz, who had raised her after thedeath of her mother when Sara was onlyfive years old. In the years before hismarriage, Jacob had been living at No.8Près-de-Ville with his mother and sib-lings. However, when he returned toMontreal with his bride, the newly-wedsneeded a home of their own, and whilethey waited for No.7 Près-de-Ville to bemade ready for them, they lived in pri-vate apartments in a Montreal Hotel.They moved in to No.7 around the timetheir first child was born early in 1849.As more children arrived and Jacob’sbusiness enterprises continued to flour-ish, they knew it was time to considermore suitable housing.

The move to Dorchester House

Jacob had bought a large tract ofland encompassing most of the districtbounded on the north by Cathcart, on theeast by St Monique, on the south by La-gauchetière, and on the west by Mans-field, with Dorchester intersecting eastto west, for a reported £4,800. Thinkingof that in today’s terms is truly mind-boggling. St Monique Street has disap-peared, and been replaced – roughly –by University Street. Jacob then selec-tively sold about half of this land to var-ious people for the Bath Hotel, the This-tle Curling Club and for residential pur-poses. Then, on a huge chunk of thelarge plot south of Dorchester, Jacob hadDorchester House built for them. (1) (2)(3)

In 1860, or possibly a few monthsearlier in 1859, the family moved intotheir new home, which was set in beauti-


15

fully landscaped gardens. By now Jacoband Sara had two sons, four daughtersand a suitably large household to carefor them all. And now there was plentyof room for the animals, both cats anddogs. The irregularly shaped housestood, for the most part, three storieshigh over a basement, with a wing twostories high jutting out westward. Setback from Dorchester Street, the frontgarden was bordered by a grilled ironfence set in stone, with two impressivestone pillars on either side of the frontgates.

The elegant grounds must havebeen a joy for the family, and their loveof animals is further emphasized by theirpet cemetery sheltered amidst shrubsand small bushes.

Kathleen Moore, daughter of HenryBennett and Matilda (Joseph) Moore,was Jacob and Sara’s granddaughter.Kathleen was just 29 days old when hermother died in 1886, and her father, al-though he remained an integral part ofher life, felt it would be better for her tobe raised in her grandparents’ home.And so it happened that DorchesterHouse became Kathleen’s home for thefirst 27 years of her life. In her ownwords, she described some fine trees andtwo flower beds close to the house thatcould be seen from Dorchester Streetthrough the railings.

But most of the garden, more than

three-quarters of it, was secluded behindthe house. Scattered throughout weremany majestic trees, as well as fruittrees, including apple, pear and plum.But that was not all. There was a vinery,a vegetable garden with every knownand many then unknown vegetables, apaddock for a cow, a tennis court andplenty of flowers to pick and to giveaway. And one of Kathleen’s aunts, Car-rie Serra, remembered riding on thewagons when the hay was cut in theirfields. There were croquet parties in theearly years, and then tennis, all of whichmade this garden a most enjoyable placein which to spend summer.

Kathleen remembered thatSara called her husband Harry,and that he was generally knownin public as JH Joseph. Nonethe-less, his original name of Jacobalso remained in use throughouthis life.

Interior photographs ofDorchester House show the kindof cluttered furnishings that weretypical of the era. There aresome obviously magnificentpieces of furniture, a lot of themfrom the Gratz family and someprobably from the Moses family.After the family moved out,much of the furniture went withthem, including Rebecca Gratz’swardrobe from Philadelphia

which was used by Kathleen Moore inher sewing room, and then sent back toPhiladelphia by Kathleen in 1973. Inwhat they called the little parlour, familyportraits filled the wall space. Some areunfamiliar, but included among them arewell-known portraits of Solomon Mosesand Rachel Gratz Moses, Rebecca Gratz,Miriam Simon Gratz, Joseph Gratz andothers.

Kathleen Moore remained alertthroughout her life, speaking often ofDorchester House and her many rela-tives right up to the time of her death in1976.

Dorchester House: the end ofan era, the end of a home

It is possible to look upon the tim-ing of Jacob Henry Joseph’s death atDorchester House on 28 February 1907,after the death of his wife in that samehome three years earlier on 26 February1904, as something bordering on lucky.Lucky only insofar as it was soon afterhis death that the gigantic real estatedeal that culminated in the destruction ofhis beloved home took place.

There were probably rumbles in thegrapevine before the news got out, par-ticularly among those well-placed in thebusiness and social communities. Andremembering that both of Jacob’s sonswere well-entrenched in the real estatebusiness community, they must havecaught a sense of what was to follow. By1911, the Canadian Northern Railwaywas planning to bring its tracks into thevery heart of the city. The idea was to

Above: Section of Charles Goad’s 1880 Atlas of Montreal. Below:Dorchester House hole in the ground (image courtesy of Anne Joseph)


16 Dorchester House (image courtesy of Anne Joseph).

bring railway tracks into Montreal fromthe north, through a tunnel under MountRoyal, emerging into a terminal at theheart of the downtown district. The planwas feasible from an engineering view-point, but acquisition of the necessaryproperties was another matter. Explosionof news of the venture would lead to acomparable explosion of costs. Propertyprices would skyrocket.

The acquisition of land north ofMount Royal was completed before thedevelopers turned their attention to thematter of buying property in the heart ofthe city. Initially the plan was to buy theblock just north of Ste Catherine Street,but news leaked out with the inevitableresult that speculators drove propertyprices sky high.

This glitch led the planners at theCanadian Northern Railway to turn theirattention towards another site extendingsouthward from Cathcart Street down toLagauchetière Street between Mansfieldand St Monique Streets. A number of re-al estate agents had been handed the taskof buying up the requisite property,without being told either who their clientreally was or why the acquisition wasdesired.

The first big deal was the Josephproperty, Dorchester House, by then thehome of Jacob’s elder son, Henry. Hesold the property to the Mackenzie andMann syndicate. There are two reportsof the selling price, one at $2.60 persquare foot, and another at a total of$300,000. Melding these two reports,and assuming they are both accurate,would put the size of the plot – maybe -

at 115,385 square feet.The uncertainty sur-rounding this estimate isthat the reports do notspecify how the value ofthe house entered thepicture. Remember, thehouse itself was sched-uled for demolition. (3)(4)

A handwritten noteheaded “True copy - SaleDorchester St. Property”reads:

“Price $300,000.00on account of which$50,000.00 has beenpaid. The balance of$25,000.00 (hole in pa-per) to be paid as fol-

lows. $25,000.00 July 8th 1912,$25,000.00 March 8th 1913. Balance$200,000.00 within five years, with the

right of payments at any time the wholebalance of price or any portion, not lessthan in sums of $25,000.00, as given thevendor at least 30 days previous noticein writing with interest on the said bal-ance at 5 ½ pc per annum – payable halfyearly.”

The family moved out of Dorch-ester House in 1913. It is worth thinkingabout whether Henry Joseph would havebeen, on some level, content to sell. Thebustle of the city around DorchesterHouse in 1911 was vastly different fromthe relatively serene atmosphere of halfa century earlier, and moving to an ele-gant house further up the mountain mayhave held quite an appeal. But thesecomments are speculative.

A postscript to this story is that thegrandiose plans of the Canadian North-ern sank into insolvency. In time therailroad company disappeared intoCanadian National Railways. The site


17Above: John Easton Mills (image: Ville de Montreal archives, VM6, S10,DO26.5). Below: McGill Normal School on Belmont Street (image: BNQ, Mas-sicotte collection)

known locally as “the big hole” re-mained throughout the Depression,crossed by the Dorchester Streetbridge. Decades passed before a revi-sion of the initial project took shape.Work on the Central Station complexbegan in 1943, and in time the QueenElizabeth Hotel was added in 1958,and the central building of Place VilleMarie was first occupied in 1961. (4)(5)

Anne Joseph was born in England in1935, arrived in Montreal in February1959, settled here and married WilliamK. Joseph, a 7th generation Quebecer,in 1974. Her 30-year working life al-ways seemed to include research andwriting. Retirement years have been

filled with a variety of volunteer proj-ects, and for the last dozen or so yearsmost of her spare time has been fo-cused on researching and writingabout the earliest Canadian Jewishfamilies who arrived in Quebec in the18th and 19th centuries.

Sources:

1. Borthwick, Rev. J. Douglas,LL.D., History and BiographicalGazetteer of Montreal to the Year1892. Montreal: John Lovell & Son,1892.

2. Goad, Chas. E., Atlas of theCity of Montreal from Special Surveyand Official Plans showing all build-ings and names of owners. Montreal,1881.

3. Montreal Star, 11 November1911.

4. Collard, Edgar Andrew. Mon-treal Yesterdays. Toronto: Longman’sCanada, 1962.

5. Montreal Star. 8 October1977.

Plus general, ongoing sources:Joseph, Anne. Data binders of pa-

pers of family interest culled fromfamily members, libraries andarchives.

Joseph, Anne. Heritage of a Patri-arch. 1995. Quebec: Editions duSeptentrion.

Two of the Josephs’ neighbours onBelmont Street

Belair Villa was the home of JohnEaston Mills, his wife Hannah Ly-man, and their many children – atleast, until things began to go

wrong. At the beginning of May, 1841, sonsGeorge (5 years old), Edwin (nearly 3), andAlbert (10 months) contracted scarlet feverand died within a week. Five years laterMills, a banker, was elected Mayor of Mon-treal on a reformist ticket, and within monthshis populist sympathies were put to the testas ships began to arrive crowded with immi-grants suffering from typhus. Mills set uprelief camps in Point St-Charles, protectedthe sufferers from hysterical mobs, and – anaction that must surely have been influencedby the recent loss of three children to disease– rolled up his sleeves and nursed the sick.Before the end of the year, the “martyr may-or” was dead of “ship fever.” Hannah’s twoelder daughters married and moved away,but she continued to live in Belair Villa untilthe late 1860s when the estate was subdivid-ed and both Ada and Alice found husbands –both gentlemen being Redpaths. Hannahwent to live her last years with Alice in Eng-land. Ada, who married John James Red-path, was murdered in a bizarre doubleshooting, never properly explained, in 1901.Belair Villa was acquired by potash inspec-tor Edwin Atwater, and was eventuallybought by lawyer HO Andrews who donatedit to the Anglican Diocese as the AndrewsHome for destitute immigrants.

The Normal School just east of BelairVilla had been built in 1846 as the HighSchool of Montreal, but within a few yearsthe school was taken over by McGill Col-lege and was relocated further up the hill (toa building some may remember as the origi-nal home of the Fraser Institute Library).When McGill established Normal School in1856, the abandoned school on BelmontStreet was an obvious place to install it. Forhalf a century, the McGill Normal Schooloperated out of the Belmont Street buildinguntil the new Macdonald College campusprovided more feasible facilities for thetraining of teachers. Montreal’s Protestantschool board leased the building in 1907 andopened Belmont School, which served theinner city non-Catholic population until itwas closed in 1932.


18

Our Heritage Centre iswhere researchershave at their disposalvirtually all the tools

necessary for finding answers towho your ancestors were, wherethey lived and worked, wherethey came from and when they ar-rived in Canada .

Our Heritage Centre is locat-ed at 173 Cartier Avenue, Pointe Claire, Quebec.

Library ResourcesOur library contains over 8000 titles. The titles are

searchable on our library catalogue computer. Subjectsinclude Personal Family Histories, Quebec History,Military History, English, Scottish and Irish Resources.We also have a large collection of United Empire Loy-alist books, several special library collections and alarge collection of maps, cemetery headstone transcrip-tions and periodicals published by other genealogy so-cieties in the US, England, Scotland and Ireland.We have collections dealing with Native Quebecersand Huguenots.

Special CollectionsOver the years QFHS has been the beneficiary or

several very interesting collections. Of note is theDavid McDougal collection of ships, shipbuilding andpeople of the Atlantic Provinces, particularly theGaspé, involved in the ship building industry, or shiptransportation in the 19th century.

The Norma Lee collection has everything youwant to know about the history of Quebec City concen-trating on people and building. There is interesting in-formation about the people and architecture of Quebechospitals, public buildings and private homes, and in-cludes building plans, permits, and notary records. Beprepared to spend a lot of time looking through a hugeamount of very interesting information in the two spe-cial collections.

MapsWe have a very good collection of maps of early

Quebec up to modern day as well as maps of the Unit-ed States, England, Ireland and Scotland, identifyingparishes.

Microfilm and Microfiche ResourcesMicrofilms of a large number of registers for Que-

bec non-Catholic churches and synagogues, someMontreal Irish Catholic parishes and the 1851 Canadi-an census are available to view. Scanning and printingof records is possible. Similarly, microfiche of earlyIGI records, British BMD records, Quebec Loisellerecords and many others are available.

Computer ResourcesThe internet is now one of the most powerful tools

used by genealogists. QFHS subscribes to many web-sites and we have access to several billion records. Re-sources in Ireland, Scotland, England, and the UnitedStates are accessible. We have four computers with ac-cess to Ancestry.

We also have many CD collections including Irishwills index, Canadian built ships, English burial index,Newfoundland records, British 1851 and 1881 census,and LDS IGI records. Interestingly, the CD version ofIGI has millions of records not available on the LDSwebsite.

Come and see us or visit our website. Guests arealways welcome

Robert Dunn is an active member of the Quebec Fami-ly History Society, manages the QFHS bookstore, haswritten or co-authored several church repertoires andis part of the team working to make all QFHS databas-es available on the QFHS website.

Quebec Family History Society173 Cartier AvenuePointe Claire, Quebecwww.qfhs.ca514-695-1502email: [email protected]

Quebec’s Anglophone Genealogy Society, Part Two:Heritage CentreQUEBEC FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETY

by Robert Dunn

The Heritage Centre (photo: Derek Hopkins)


19The first “re-enactment” of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham: BenjaminWest, “Death of General Wolfe,” 1770 (National Gallery of Canada)

History’s role players plot rebellions replayOF REDCAOTS AND PATRIOTES

by Tyler Wood

At first glance they appear tobe like any other large groupin the trendy brewpub, enjoy-ing each other’s company

one evening in Old Montreal. Exceptthey’re taking notes, and they seem lessinterested in the beer and grub than withthe balmoral one of them has startedpassing around. Then another memberwhips out a 19th century drill manualand then the pieces come together. Theseseemingly normal people are part of thatstrange breed: thehistorical re-enactor.

It is a toughtime to be a re-enac-tor in Québec. LastJanuary, threats ofviolence derailedplans to commemo-rate the 250th an-niversary of the Bat-tle of the Plains ofAbraham in QuebecCity, the centrepieceof which was a re-creation of the battleitself. For re-enac-tors, some of whomhad spent years or-ganising the event,this negative reac-tion was baffling.

In recent years,scores of newbooks, museum exhibits and evenmovies have all cropped up, taking ad-vantage of a renewed interest in the250th anniversary of the Seven Years’War. Some re-enactment groups notethat curious history buffs are joiningtheir ranks in unprecedented numbers. Inthe United States, other commemorativebattles of the Seven Years’ War havebeen held to the enjoyment of fascinatedcrowds. These enthusiasts often seemtoo serious about history and warfare towant to make light of it, too politicallyheterogeneous to want to convey anypartisan interpretation of it. If they haveone common goal, it is to make history

come alive, to share a visceral apprecia-tion of what life was like for our ances-tors.

Yet, in Quebec, re-enacting is virtu-ally unknown, and is often grouped inwith LARPing (Live-Action Role-Play-ing). In L’age des ténèbres, Denys Ar-cand’s 2007 film, the protagonist findsescape in a world of fantasy, where onecan pretend to be a troll or a knight.Even when a film grasps the fundamen-tal difference between the two pastimes

– a serious regard for historical authen-ticity – re-enactors come across as dan-gerously delusional about what centurythey live in: Demain dès l’aube, a 2009French film, portrays re-enactors as se-cretive about their double lives, ready tofight real duels over matters of honour.In the media, re-enactment’s role in pub-lic education is completely disregarded.

At the same time, the Seven Years’War takes on more significance here.Jacques Godbout’s 1996 faux-documen-tary Le sort de l’Amérique raises an in-teresting paradox: in Quebec, “the Con-quest” – what many consider to be thelinchpin in our collective history – isn’t

discussed openly because most peoplethink they already know what happened.Unconsciously, they are afraid that, intaking a serious look at our past, theymight find out they are wrong in theirbeliefs. When a commemoration threat-ens to disrupt the rhetorical cease-fire, topromote remembrance and debate, andperhaps to encourage a meeting ofminds, then the tension smouldering foryears can flare up, unleashing a stagger-ing diversity of passionate opinion.

Thus, during thePlains debates earlyin 2009, when a re-enactment was at-tached to what somein the media inter-preted as a federallyorganized “celebra-tion” of the Englishtriumphing of theFrench, people wereuneasy and distrust-ful of the plans, and,at best, confusedabout the partici-pants’ motivations.Some newspapercolumnists madehalf-informed as-sumptions about thehobby, comparingthem, in one case, todrag queens. The po-

litically radical promised to forcefullydisrupt the event. It was cancelled, la-belled a bad idea, and soon the wholenotion of re-enacting seemed equally asfoolish.

Back in Old Montreal, as themen and women chat aboutuniforms and battles, it be-comes clear that they aren’t

new to the hobby. They have all been ac-tive for years, most with experience inmore than one era. They all were sad-dened by the cancellation of the Plainsevent, and worry about the public per-ception of re-enactment in Quebec. But


20

while others hesitate to organise newevents here, the resolve of this group hasnot waned. In fact, if anything, they aremore committed to their hobby thanever, more convinced of the need forpublic education. Undeterred, they nowtalk of portraying an even more unset-tling chapter of our past: the Rebellionsof 1837-38.

If the Conquest is an uncomfortablesubject, then the rebellions are nearlytaboo. While Victoria Day is celebratedin Quebec as Journée nationale des pa-triotes since 2003, only the most radicalseem comfortable waving the green,white and red flag of that 19th centurypolitical party. There still is an uncom-fortable dissonance here over the mean-ing of it all. While museums and gov-ernments like to gloss over the exactevents of 1837-38, emphasising the im-portance of the Patriotes in fighting fordemocratic ideals like responsible gov-ernment, few delve into the dirty detailsof what essentially was a civil war. Un-like the Seven Years’ War, which had itsshare of cruelty and destruction, the ene-mies weren’t just an unwelcome imperi-al power; they lived next door, and wereoften blood relations. This was a conflictbetween social classes, motivated large-ly by political self-interest and providingan excuse to settle long-standinggrudges. It was a war of libel, of streetbrawls between gangs of Tories and Re-formers, of partisan bands intimidatingfamilies and burning down villages.While the Conquest can sometimes beviewed as an outcome of superpowersvying for empire, one cannot as easilydissociate what happened in St Denisand St Eustache from the individual ac-tions of our ancestors. It is, in a word,messy.

And yet this is part of the appeal forthis band of re-enactors, gathered at thepub; here is an important, neglected andmisunderstood chapter of our heritage,too often co-opted for political argu-ments, begging to be brought once moreto life, to encourage new understanding.Academics have done incredibly littleanalysing of the Rebellions (the most re-cent English books on the topic are morethan twenty years old), and many pri-mary sources have never seriously beenlooked at, but the challenge of research-ing in a vacuum is part of the fun. Try-ing to figure out what the Patriotes woreis already yielding new finds. One of the

men around the table reads a diary thatnotes their tuques were usually blue, notthe red one tends to see in later images.The excitement is palpable. And yet,there is a moment of caution: “We haveto be prepared for the public reaction.And we can’t spout gibberish,” one ofthe leaders states. There is agreement;more than a year will go by before anyactivities are organised for the public.This gives the party time to research, tobe sure of what, and whom, they areportraying. There are those at the meet-ing who will be donning the redcoat ofthe 24th Regiment, while others are pas-sionately committed to the Patriote side.The division loosely reflects the mem-bers’ modern political leanings, so evenamong friends, differences in their inter-pretations of events could create friction.One member suggests creating a pam-phlet, to be eventually distributed to thepublic, stating why they are re-enactingthe period. That way, before the grouptries to bring a sober, even-handed viewof the conflict to others, they will haveat least settled one potentially con-tentious issue among themselves. Themotion is approved. The meeting is ad-journed and the members head back totheir homes across the province.

These are only the beginnings of anew re-enactment group, and the partici-pants are still wary of creating a prema-ture stir, so they wish to remain anony-mous. Still, a sympathetic observer can-not help admire their ambition, willingto spend thousands of dollars and hoursto potentially get heckled by crowds.During the meeting, the man who sug-gested the pamphlet notes that many ofthe Patriote leaders, including WolfredNelson, had their headquarters only afew buildings away. “What would theythink of us here tonight, a bunch of theirdescendants, organising a group to re-enact their deeds?” Separated by 170-odd years, the circumstances surround-ing historic combatants and their con-temporary interpreters stand in sharpcontrast to each other. And yet, it seems,the re-enactors, too, are bound to strug-gle for what they believe in.

Tyler Wood is a recent graduate fromQueen's University's School of Urbanand Regional Planning. He is passionateabout heritage preservation and hasbeen a historical re-enactor for morethan ten years.

HometownHeritageStudentWritingContest

What’syour story?

The QuebecAnglophone HeritageNetwork is offering

Elementary students cashprizes for true stories from

local history.

Send your entries to:

Deadline forsubmissions isApril 30, 2010

For complete contestdetails, visit our

website,www.qahn.org

and click on News

First prize $150.Second prize $100Third prize $50

Quebec AnglophoneHeritage Network

400-257 QueenStreet,

Lennoxville, QuebecJ1M 1K7


21The door of the Montreal communist newspaper La Clarté, pad-locked under the Duplessis government’s infamous law. (Biblio-thèque Nationale du Québec, P48 S1, P1536)

New insight into internmentGATINEAU PRISON HOLDS SECRETS

by Michael Martin

The provincial prison in Gatineau on St-François Street in the Val-Tétreau neighbour-hood hides a story unknown to most, includ-ing historians in the region. The prison served

as an internment camp during World War II for Canadi-an communists and German POWs.

Constructed in 1938 by the first Duplessis govern-ment, the original Hull prison was a white elephantthat didn't meet provincial standards. In 1941, howev-er, the federal government asked Quebec if it could usethe prison. Since March 1938, the Liberal governmentof Mackenzie King had developed internal securitymeasures called “Regulations for the Defence of Cana-da” in anticipation of the brewing world conflict.There was, however, a pecu-liarity: these measures wereaimed at controlling Cana-da's communists. At the be-ginning of the war, Canadiancommunists opposed Cana-da's participation, arguingthat it was an imperialist warsimilar in nature to WorldWar I. This stance provided aconvenient cover for intern-ing leaders of the Canadianleft in Kananaskis, Alberta,near Banff, and in Petawawa,Ontario, in the Ottawa Valley. After the prisoners re-volted in Petawawa, they were transferred to the Hullprison on August 20, 1941, where 89 communists,sympathizers, and trade unionists were held for fifteenmonths.

In June of 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the SovietUnion, and Canadian communists began wholehearted-ly to support the war effort. The Hull prisoners werenot released, however, making Canada the only alliedcountry to pursue a policy of repressing communists –a policy in effect in the fascist countries against whomCanada was at war.

Why were these people interned? In spite of offi-cial explanations at the time for the internment, in ac-tuality communists were imprisoned because they pre-sented a real danger to the capitalist system and theCanadian ruling class. Nor was this a new policy; thepractice had started at the end of the 19th century dur-ing the period of the great European immigration toCanada, immigration encouraged as part of the Nation-al Policy of development espoused by Macdonald andlater confirmed by the Laurier Liberals. Among theJewish, Ukrainian, Finnish, German, Russian and other

immigrants from Europe were many radical anarcho-syndicalists who did not appreciate the oppressive con-ditions and racism in Canada. In 1914, in reaction totheir militancy, the Borden government adopted theWar Measures Act (the same one used by PierreTrudeau during the FLQ crisis in Quebec in 1970) toinstall social discipline among workers. The legislationbecame extremely useful to the government after theRussian Revolution of 1917.

A severe recession occurred early in the 1920s,during which a small communist party formed calledthe Workers' Party of Canada. It was eventually re-named the Communist Party of Canada and was atonce recognized by Moscow. During the depression of

the 1930s, the Party grew instrength, partly owing to thesevere social repression or-ganized by Canadian PrimeMinister R.B. Bennettt –who was the former ownerof the EB Eddy Company inHull. During the 1930s, thegovernment arrested about10,000 workers and deportedanother 30,000 to Europe ata time when the Party had, atmost, 5000 members in allof Canada. The Bennet re-

pression backfired as support for the Party increased,also owing to the growing threat of fascism in Canadaand elsewhere.

The Gatineau internees did win their freedom aftera broad national campaign which had the effect, onceagain, of increasing support for the communists, espe-cially in English-speaking Canada. The whole episodeprovoked considerable class division but also nationaldivision, as the French-Canadian ruling class in Que-bec insisted that the communists be repressed. Thistook place at the same time that about 180,000 youngFrench-Canadians from across Canada volunteered tofight the forces of fascism during WWII.

German POWs

Even as the Canadians were being freed fromHull prison, a new type of prisoner entered.Canada played the role of jailer for GreatBritain during WWII. The British did not

want to maintain all the Axis prisoners it held at homesince it would have presented security risks, and wouldhave demanded a considerable expenditure of man-power. In total, including Canada's own POWs,


22Wallace Lambert (photo courtesy of theCanadian Psychological Association)

Wallace Lambert was one of Canada's qui-et heroes. The former McGill UniversityPsychology professor died 23 August2009 at St Mary's Hospital in Montreal,

of compli-cations from pneumonia. He was 86.Walter Lambert was known

as the Father of second-lan-guage immersion instruction.

In 1965, Wallace Lamberthelped a group of parents dis-satisfied with their kids' Frenchinstruction at a South Shore ele-mentary school in St Lambertlaunch the first French immer-sion program in Canada. Overthirty years later, French im-mersion is the most popular ed-ucational program in Englishschools across Quebec.

Lambert's groundbreakingstudies on identity and language fuelled the wave of re-forms that took place during the Quiet Revolution inQuebec and, under Former Prime Minister PierreTrudeau, lead to the passing of the Official LanguagesAct and the institution of French immersion programsin every province and territory in Canada.

"He was really ahead of his time. These were real-ly landmark studies. People still cite them all the time,"said Fred Genesee, a McGill psychologist mentored byLambert in the 1970s. Lambert later consulted onMo¬hawk, Cree, Hebrew and Spanish immersion pro-

grams in Canada and the Unit-ed States, beginning a processthat would see the "Canadianmodel" of immersion school-ing exported to places likeJapan and Estonia.

The French immersionprogram that had its roots onMontreal’s South Shore at StLambert Elementary is nowtaught in schools across Cana-da and around the world. Asthe father of second-languageimmersion, Wallace Lambert’sgentle influence changed the

lives of countless young people and shaped the bilin-gual Canada we know today.

Merci and Thank You, Wallace Lambert!

Kevin Erskine-Henry is chair of the South Shore Com-munity Partners "etwork

MILESTONES

Wallace Lambert (1922-2009)Father of French Immersion passes away at 86byKevin Erskine-Henry

34,000 men were held captive in Canada, among themthe 300 assigned to the Gatineau prison – by thenknown as camp '32' or 'H'.

Many of the German POWs in Gatineau werethemselves leftists, communists or trade unionists.The Canadian army used a simple system to organizeand observe prisoners, who were interrogated and clas-sified according to their political views. “Black” pris-oners were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. “Grey” prison-ers were neutral, soldiers or sailors simply doing theirpatriotic duty. “White” prisoners supported the Alliedcause.

These prisoners renounced the support of the'protecting' power, Switzerland, which supervised theAllies’ treatment of Axis prisoners. (Portugal played asimilar role vis-à-vis Allied prisoners held by the Axispowers.)

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union,tensions grew between “white” and “black” POWs.The former asked for the protection of Canadian au-thorities, and even agreed to work for the Allied cause.So, as the Canadian leftists were being freed, German“white” prisoners were transferred to Gatineau, whereonly 100 inmates could sleep. The rest were assigned

to farmers in the Outaouais and in Carleton County inOntario, south of Ottawa, and only report to the prisonfor medical or administrative purposes. This farmingout of prisoners was done over the objections of theRCMP, who were still fighting communists in spite ofthe change in the war.

Working conditions on the farms were often diffi-cult, as farmers extracted their pound of flesh from theprisoners. There were many racist incidents and in-juries among the German POWs, who were often citypeople not used to the hard work on a farm. Hardlysurprisingly, there were about 20 escapes from thesefarms. Normally, the POWs would report to the prisonor would be quickly captured; however, in five casesthe records are incomplete, and we can't say for certainthat the POWs were recaptured. Might they have es-caped to melt away into the country? Or are there sim-ply holes in the records? The answer is not clear.

Michael Martin is a freelance journalist and historianin Gatineau. His book about the Gatineau internment,The Red Patch, is available free-of-charge at his web-site: http://web.ncf.ca/fn871/.


23Muriel Duckworth (photo: Janet Munson)

Muriel Duckworth (1908-2009)and theOutremont School QuestionAn overlooked moment in the history of human rights in QuebecbyRodMacLeod

Muriel Duckworth, who died onAugust 22, 2009,at the age of one hundred, is well-knownnationally and internationally as a crusaderfor peace and women’s rights. Despite

having spent most of her career in Nova Scotia, shehailed from the Eastern Townships (Austin) and re-turned there at the end of her life. One of her most inter-esting accomplishments, which has unfortunately goneunder the radar of accounts of her life, is to have spear-headed a critique of the inherentinjustices of Quebec’s educationalsystem, which provided no placefor religious minorities. Duck-worth’s activism in the years im-mediately following World War IIhelped set the tone for the fledg-ling Quebec Federation of Homeand School Associations’ long-standing commitment to humanrights.

Duckworth (nee Muriel Ball)received a BA and a teachingdiploma at McGill University in1929, followed by a year at theUnion Theological Seminary inNew York City with her husbandJack Duckworth, who was train-ing to be a United Church minis-ter.The couple settled in Montrealand became involved in the Stu-dent Christian Movement, an or-ganization dedicated to the Social Gospel and the morehumanitarian and activist aspects of the Christian mes-sage; in the 1930s there was much overlap with thefledgling League for Social Reconstruction and the newleft-wing political party, the Co-operative Common-wealth Federation (whose successor, the NDP, wouldlater have Muriel Duckworth as a candidate). Althoughan overtly Protestant group, the SCM believed in cross-ing religious boundaries for the sake of philosophical in-quiry and improving social justice, and worked particu-larly with Jewish groups to overcome anti-semitism atMcGill and elsewhere.

The Duckworths raised three children in Notre-Dame-de-Grace and Muriel became active in the Homeand School association at Kensington School. Murieltook an interest in the formation of the provincial Que-

bec Federation of Home and School Associations in1944 and became active in its leadership. Because ofher background in education and religious issues shewas asked to chair a special QFHSA committee struckin May 1946 to inquire into the so-called OutremontSchool Question.

A controversy had arisen within the Montreal mu-nicipality of Outremont over the decision by its Protes-tant board of School Trustees to cease accepting Jewish

students from outside the munici-pality, or at the very least to segre-gate them into a separate school.As a result of an agreement signedbefore the war – Montreal’sProtestant board had signed a sim-ilar agreement – a large number ofJewish families from the upperpart of The Main sent their chil-dren to nearby Outremont’s threeProtestant elementary schools andthe secondary Strathcona Acade-my. Strapped for cash in the lastyears of the war, however, theOutremont trustees felt they couldno longer afford to accommodate“outsiders” – non-property ownerswho paid no school taxes. Trusteesalso expressed concern that the“Christian” character of Protestanteducation was suffering in themidst of so many students of a dif-ferent faith.

Their decision left Jewish parents outraged andtheir children distressed. One parent declared that thetrustees’ action was reprehensible in the light of “thepresent conflict” (the war). Another, a woman whosehusband was fighting overseas, asked the Board whatthey would suggest she say to her daughter when theteacher informed her she and the other Jewish childrenwould not be able to return the following September.The trustees believed they were acting in the best inter-ests of Outremont’s Protestant parents and pupils whoshared their “displeasure” at the great numbers of Jewsin their schools. However, a great number of parentsfelt no such concern and decided the appropriate courseof action was to form a Home and School association.The new Outremont association, composed of bothProtestant and Jewish parents, sought the help of the


24 Poster, 1978 (image: Quebec Federation of Home andSchool News)

QFHSA to resolve the issue.Muriel Duckworth and her committee, also made

up of both Jews and Protestants, set out to review the ed-ucation laws, examine the terms of the agreements be-tween the trustees and the Jewish community, assesspublic opinion, and consider the potential costs of theOutremont situation both to the community and to thepsychological well-being of its children. In this they re-ceived no help from the trustees, who argued that thematter was a local one and that the Federation had nobusiness interfering.

Duckworth presented the committee's findings tothe QFHSA directors in March 1947. While it did notoutright accuse the trustees of anti-semitism, the Reportargued that their actions were inconsistent with the post-war world and its climate of cooperation and breakingdown old prejudices. The Report was especially criticalof the religious segregation that was going on withinOutremont Protestant schools, a policy implementedwith the excuse that the Protestant children’s workwould otherwise be interrupted because of Jewish holi-days. Duckworth had interviewed teachers who felt thetrustees' argument was entirely unjus-tified, especially in a world that hadseen the kind of horror the war hadprovoked. At least 80% of Out-remont’s Protestant parents sharedthis view, and had no fear theirschools were losing their “Christian”character. Moreover, two leadingProtestant ministers assured Duck-worth that moral and religious educa-tion, including Bible study, could betaught to both Protestant and Jewishpupils by both Protestant and Jewishteachers in a way that was mutuallybeneficial. The QFHSA report calledfor the immediate admission of Jew-ish students into regular classrooms,but in the longer term sweeping re-forms were necessary to the schoolboard structure: trustees, they argued,should be elected by universal adultfranchise rather than by property holders of one faith,and that the concept of “Protestant” education should bebroadened to make it suitable to all denominations.Faced with this evidence and a rising tide of oppositionfrom within the wider Anglo-Protestant community –the Canadian Legion even stepped in to criticize theboard’s actions – the trustees finally acquiesced in thesummer of 1947 and agreed to sign a 5-year contractwith the Jewish community allowing its children intoOutremont schools.

The wide circulation of the Outremont School com-mittee’s Report caused much embarrassment to the Out-remont trustees and was a particular source of annoy-ance for the provincial government. On one rather sinis-ter occasion the Report’s impact came back to haunt thecommittee. In May 1947, Muriel Duckworth was nomi-nated as Executive Vice-President of the QFHSA, and

subsequently a newspaper article appeared alleging thatthe Report’s insistence on democracy and equality con-stituted a form of communist infiltration of the Homeand School movement. It seemed obvious to many thatthe Union Nationale government, which was not in theslightest degree interested in school reform, resented thecommittee’s somewhat radical stance and was taking akind of revenge by calling for police screening ofprospective candidates for executive office within theFederation. Although some argued that the call shouldbe heeded, the prevailing view was that the govern-ment’s tactics were reprehensible: “If we have to accepta screening as to our thoughts, our politics, our morals,our attitudes,” one member argued, “we are defeatingone of the main purposes of Home & School.”

Later in 1947 Muriel Duckworth moved to Halifaxwhere her husband had been appointed executive direc-tor of the city's YMCA. Muriel became an advisor tothe provincial Department of Education, a foundingmember of the local branch of the Canadian MentalHealth Association (an issue that had been of great con-cern to the QFHSA), and by 1954 President of the Nova

Scotia Federation of Home andSchool Associations. By the endof the decade she was one of thefounders of the Voice of Womenin Halifax and became a tirelesschampion of women's rights forthe rest of her long life. Equallycrucial was her commitment topeace, which sprang naturallyfrom her belief in religious toler-ance and the Student ChristianMovement's dedication to paci-fism. Many of these values wereshared by the QFHSA, which be-came an advocate for peace, toler-ance, and an end to ethnic divi-sions. An organization whoserank and file – and eventuallywhose management – was com-posed principally of women, theHome and School movement fol-

lowed in the remarkable footsteps of Muriel Duckworth.

Rod MacLeod is co-author of Meeting of the People:School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec,1801-1998 (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2004)

Sources:Marion Douglas Kerans, Muriel Duckworth: AVery

Active Pacifist (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1996):185.

QFHSAArchives: Minutes, Outremont ReportEMSBA, Minute Books of the Outremont School

TrusteesHarold Ross, The Jew in the Educational System of

the Province of Quebec. M.A. Thesis, McGill Universi-ty, 1947.


25

Hindsight

MYREVOLUTIONARYROAD TOBOUILLABAISSEby Rod MacLeod

Ifinally got around to renting theDVD of Revolutionary Road, thebelated cinematic take on RichardYates’ seminal 1961 novel high-

lighting post-war suburban conformity.I thought the film was brilliant on manylevels, though probably least so as asearing indictment of said suburbs, atheme that is by now pretty old hat.What struck me most was the film’spresentation of the tremendous yearningthat ordinary people have to becomesomething exciting, preferably in an in-spiring locale (in the case of Kate &Leo, it was Paris), before the rockingchair gets them. At the same time, itshows the deadening pull that rockingchair has on all of us.

It took me back to a moment in myown life when my family found itselfflirting with the kind of project the cou-ple in the film flirted with – with muchhappier results. And yes, this is one ofthose coming-of-age stories, but beforeyour eyes glaze over let me emphasizethat it contains political corruption, sex-ual harassment and French cuisine.Much of this I didn’t understand at thetime, but looking back from a third of acentury on I recognize a watershed.

The summer of 1976 was one ofdiscontent in a lot of places, but espe-cially in my world. I was ploughingthrough my adolescence, frustrated tohave missed the turning-on and drop-ping-out of the late 60s which had mademy older cousins and parents’ friends’children seem so cool and which hadbeen replaced by post-Watergate disillu-sionment, wide-collar shirts, and Abba.I tried to grow my hair long, but it justpoofed out. To make matters worse, Ifound I needed glasses and my first pairwere strictly Robert Bourassa. Likemost people’s parents, mine hadn’t aclue – indeed, they had less of a cluethan most because they were older thanaverage and operated from a Depres-sion-era conviction that saving a buckwas as much of a fashion statement asyou needed.

Grade Nine at Montreal West Highhad been a so-so year, and the prospectof two more long so-so years beforeanything new would happen was not ex-hilarating. I had spent a great deal oftime failing to get up the nerve to askout the older girl who played the tubawith me at the back of the band. Overthe months we had worked out a some-what zany banter, as two people will dowho are forced to sit side by side forlong periods with large pieces of plumb-ing in their laps, but it was platonic. Myefforts to put a double meaning into con-versations about valves and em-bouchures came to predictable naught.

The summer promised the Olympicsand my first real job – Day Camp coun-cillor, of course. One morning of “train-ing” and then the full charge of a dozeneight-year-olds who wanted to hurl ballswhen it was time for arts & crafts anddig in the ground when it was time to tryout the fun games that all children love,according to the library book I’d takenout on the subject. Nearly as disillusion-ing were the promises made by ourpoliticians regarding the profits to bemade from holding the Games. My fa-ther bought tickets to two events, whichproved disappointing. We missed theRowing on Ile Notre Dame after takingtoo long finding a place to park. TheAthletics event in the “Big O” seemedmore promising – in point of fact, I’dbeen vaguely looking forward to it, hav-ing developed something of a crush onDiane Jones, a leggy pentathlete whowas occasionally seen dancing with thePrime Minister – but our seats were sofar up the side of the stadium that it washard to tell if it was steeplechase or highjump unfolding before us.

On the fringe of my vision, my par-ents had been going through crises oftheir own. My mother’s I was familiarwith, since she talked about it openly.The clinic where she worked was beingmismanaged by its director, to the pointwhere accusations of corruption andeven embezzlement were being flung.

My mother and a handful of co-workers(all women, a couple of whom I still seeon occasion though they are close toninety) were determined to bring thisguy down. Unfortunately, efforts toblow the whistle came to naught. Ac-cording to one of their contacts, the di-rector was a political appointee and hadfriends high up in the provincial Liberalparty – a claim that seemed to be borneout by the reluctance of any governmentperson they approached to listen tothem. Finally, my mother and one of hercolleagues arranged a meeting with TheEnemy: the Parti Québecois HouseLeader, Robert Burns. This meetingproved to be one of my mother’s greattriumphs in life – even simply that ithappened at all, that this man agreed tomeet with two unilingual Anglo ladies,listened to them, and promised to dowhat he could. As they parted, Burnsmade sure he had my mother’s namedown correctly: “MacLeod.” “It’s Scot-tish,” she coyly added to this souver-eigniste. “Just like yours!”

Some months later, after a famouschange of government, the clinic direc-tor was transferred to somewhere in theUnited States. My mother became a de-voted PQ supporter for at least a decade,although she remained unilingual andhated the idea of Quebec independence.She did not vote in the November 1976election at all, however – thanks to myfather’s actions that summer.

I only heard his story years later,and not from him. The most private ofpeople, my father tossed and turned atnight with worry without letting on tohis family that anything was wrong – al-though he did eventually tell my mother.Like her, he had a boss that was givinghim trouble, someone whose actionswere clearly immoral although not nec-essarily illegal. In this case, it was awoman, a career administrator in an agethat still did not look kindly on femaleexecutives. Unfortunately, she fit theworst stereotype. My father was not thesort to be intimidated by having a female


26 The Revolutionary Road Taken (photo: Rod MacLeod)

supervisor, but he was completely takenaback by one who got her way throughwhat we now call harassment, includingsexual overtures. My mother was themost secure of marriage partners, butcould offer him no solution to his un-comfortable situation other than flight.

My father’s exit strategy took theform of a scheme to improve his work-ing French – which was of course agrowing source of anxiety for manyWest-End Anglos. Hediscovered that theschool board where heworked offered ayear’s leave of absence– without pay but witha job guaranteed at theother end – to any em-ployee who would un-dertake to devote thetime to learningFrench, ideally awayfrom the usual sourcesof linguistic apostasy.My mother, in themidst of her own pro-fessional frustrations,really liked the idea.They calculated that ifthey could rent ourhouse for more thanwhat our new lodgingswould cost, there wasenough in the savingsaccount to keep us inclothes and food for the winter.The question remained: where?

Chicoutimi seemed the obvious choice,but my mother quickly ruled that out.Too cold. OK, then, how about Mar-tinique? Upper Volta? The South ofFrance?

I imagine the crazy idea settlingquietly over their late-night kitchen tableconversation. Before I was born – be-fore they were actually married, I laterrealized – my parents had spent severalsummers tootling around Europe in myfather’s VW Beetle, camping much ofthe time and on occasion staying at those$2 hotels Frommer used to brag about.On one memorable occasion they hadenjoyed a romantic dinner in Ville-franche-sur-Mer just east of Nice – al-though my father’s jaundiced view ofseafood might qualify the notion of en-joyment; he described Bouillabaisse asthe result of dredging a shovelful of themuck at the bottom of the sea and heat-

ing it up. But spend a year in Bouilla-baisse country? In a flash.

My parents did have friends withsabbatical experience, but still I marvelat their success in getting my father en-rolled at the University of Nice in aFrench-for-foreigners program and ahouse rented for nine months in the re-sort town of Juan-les-Pins. It cost usabout $350 per month, $150 less thanwhat the people who moved into our

home would pay us. From this locationmy father drove our leased Renault 5along the shore of the Mediterranean in-to Nice every day, about 20 minuteseach way. The house was also a conven-ient distance from the local Lycée towhich I’d been admitted shortly afterour arrival – a ten minute walk, but al-most all the other students arrived bymo-ped. They seemed quite a sophisti-cated bunch and took great interest inme, constantly asking if I lived abovethe Arctic Circle and whether I preferredhandball or “le footing.” Hadn’t it beenterribly exciting to have the Olympics inyour own city? Well, I supposed so – butit was also bankrupting, I pointed out totheir dismay.

For the first time since I’d been lit-tle my mother enjoyed simply keeping ahome: shopping at the local supermarché(her lack of French was no obstacle),cooking unusual food and taking dailywalks down to the beach where she

would converse in sign language withthe elderly nudists. An even morebizarre task she undertook was to collectbagfuls of the enormous pine cones thatfell in the nearby park which we wouldburn in our fireplace. Alas, the housewas not centrally heated, and althoughoutdoor temperatures rarely went below10° it was often not much more insideand my mother was probably colder formore of the time than she would have

been in Chicoutimi.“Ma femme était froidependant tout l’hiver,”my father famously re-marked in his Frenchconversation class –much to the teacher’s(and later my mother’s)amusement.

But the whole ex-perience blew ourminds. It was an ad-venture that broughtthe three of us closertogether, and although Ihad always felt tremen-dous affection for bothmy parents I knew nowthat they were thecoolest people around.I’m not sure how muchFrench my fatherpicked up in Nice, butthe next summer hewent back to work in a

new office far away from the schoolboard which brought him into closercontact with the students he enjoyedhelping. My mother took a job teachingSocial Work at Dawson College, a high-light of which was the proud day onestudent told her: “You’re head’s whereit’s at!”

I wish I could say that I was a muchmore sophisticated young gentleman af-ter my time among the French, but no:indeed, I probably made some of mylife’s greatest... let’s call them socialfaux pas...during the year following ourreturn, but at least I had the confidenceto make them. I had to take extra class-es to make up for the credits I hadn’t re-ceived the previous year, so there was notime for tuba or for the drama club I haddearly wanted to join. Never mind theroad not taken; it is the ones we take thatcount.

Oh, and I changed my glasses.

EVENTS LISTINGS

27


Eastern Townships

Société d’histoire de Sherbrooke275 Dufferin, SherbrookeInfo: 819-821-5406Email : [email protected] :www.shs.ville.sherbrooke.qc.ca

Permanent ExhibitionSherbrooke 1802-2002, Two centuriesof history

Uplands Cultural & Heritage Center9 Speid St.(Lennoxville)Info: 819-564-0409

Wednesday to Sunday, 1 a.m. to 4:30p.m.Fall opening hours

Saturdays and Sundays 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.Weekend Afternoon TeaReservations are preferred

Till December 19, Wednesday-Sundayfrom 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.Exhibition: Bonheur d’hiverArtists: Jean Charvin Dumas, DenisCourche, Josée Desjardins, Lucy Dohe-ny, Debbie Everett, Anne Johnston, Car-olyn Jones, Lucie Levasseur and Gil

Stanstead Historical Society/Colby-Cur-tis Museum535 Dufferin, StansteadInfo: 819-876-7322Email: [email protected]

Till December 19, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.ExhibitionShipping Families on Lake Memphrem-agog

Till December 19, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.Exhibition

Murray & Williams: Steam NavigationSteam navigation ventures byGeorgeville summer residents

Montreal

Quebec Family History SocietyInfo: 514-695-1502Website: www.qfhs.ca

December 12, 10:30 a.m.St. Andrew’s United Church, 75-15thAve., LachineLectures SeriesSpeaker: Heather McNabbTartan Weave: Patterns of Scottish Im-migration and Settlement in Quebec be-fore the 20th Century.

McCord MuseumInfo: 514-398-7100Email: [email protected]

Permanent ExhibitionSimply Montreal Glimpses of a UniqueCityOver 800 objects from McCord’s fa-mous collection

Westmount Historical AssociationWestmount Public Library, 4574 Sher-brooke St. WestInfo: 514-925-1404 or 514-932-6688Email: [email protected]

December 17, 2009, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.Lecture SeriesThe Robert Harvie Photographic AlbumHarvie’s family album photographsfrom the 1800’s that were reproducedand donated by Henrietta Harvie toWestmount Historical Association willbe the subject of this informative lectureexplaining how contact prints weremade from glass plate negatives.Speaker: Doreen Lindsay, WHA re-

searcher and photographer

Exporail, Canadian Railway Museum110, rue Saint-Pierre, Saint-ConstantGeneral Information: 450-632-2410

Till: January 10Railway ChristmasTea room, craft and storytelling for chil-dren, model train layout and rides onminiature train

Permanent Collection160 Unique railway vehicles on display

Outaouais

Gatineau Valley Historical Society80 ch Summer, CantleyInfo: 819-827-3164Email: [email protected]

December 14, 7:30 p.m.Christmas Traditions at La Grange de laGatineauMembers of the Gatineau Valley Histor-ical Society and Family and friends areinvited to an evening of carol singing,music in the historic ambience of TheGrange in Cantley all ages welcome.

Quebec City

Morrin Center44, Chaussée des Écossais QuebecInfo: 418-694-9147 or 0754Email: [email protected]: www.morrin.org

December 12, 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.Literary GroupsFree Kids ReadingsSpecially selected books, based on aninteresting theme, will be read out loudin English followed by a fun craft

Guided Tour of the Exhibition Les éditeurs québécois et l’effort de guerre, 1940-1948

Jacques Michon, the exhibition’s curator, leads a guided tour of the fascinating editorialadventure of Québec writers and publishers during World War II. Mr. Michon, a professorat Sherbrooke University, was director of the Groupe de recherche sur l’édition littéraireau Québec (GRELQ) from 1982 to 2006 and held the Canada Research Chair in Bookand Publishing History 2002 to 2008.The tour leaves from: room M.465, level M of the Grande BibliothèqueThursday, November 26, 7 to 8:30 pmLimited number of places: 20Reservations required. By phone, 514 873-1100, option 2, or in various BAnQ buildings:• Grande Bibliothèque: information and orientation desk (ground floor)• Montréal archives centre: reading room• Preservation centre (Centre de conservation): reading room

A New Highly Visual Exhibition Aboutthe Children of the Outaouais in the 20th Century

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), the Centre régional d’archives del’Outaouais and the City of Gatineau have joined forces to present the exhibition Imagesd’enfants. This exhibition offers visitors a glimpse of the children of the Outaouais. It willbring back memories for older people and, for the young, the childhood of their elders. Aselection of photographs, personal letters, toys, books and clothing left as testimony by thefamilies of the Outaouais will immediately transport visitors to memories of childhood.In the Vitrines du Centre d’archives, de généalogie et d’histoireGround floor of the Maison de la culture de GatineauOctober 5, 2009 to April 25, 2010Free admission

Exhibition Le braille, c’est normal!

To celebrate the bicentennial of Louis Braille’s birth, BAnQ is presenting a new exhibi-tion, Le braille c’est normal!, from November 10, 2009 to November 7, 2010, at the Es-pace Jeunes of the Grande Bibliothèque. The exhibition will give young people and adultsalike the opportunity to learn about Louis Braille, the man who invented the code madeup of raised dots that carries his name. His code would revolutionize the lives of millionsof blind people by giving them the chance to read and write.

To complement the exhibition, you are invited to attend Contes de l’aveugle, a family-friendly performance presented at the Auditorium of the Grande Bibliothèque on Sunday,November 22, from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm.

CULTURAL CALENDAR

heritage - qahn.org

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