TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been
placed at the end of the book.
The spacing between initial letters of railway names has been removed,
for example any instances of C. P. R. have been changed to C.P.R. for
consistency.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
Trains of Recollection
[Illustration: D. B. HANNA]
Trains of Recollection
Drawn from
Fifty Years of Railway Service
in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes
BY
D. B. HANNA
First President of the Canadian National Railways
TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF
CANADA LTD., AT ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE
MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1924.
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED.
PRINTED IN CANADA
_To the multitude of Fellow-Workers who, during twenty-six years,
loyally served the Canadian Northern and Canadian National Railways,
this book is appreciatively inscribed._
THE CHAPTERS
Page
Introduction ix
I. Suggesting a typically Presbyterian
background of Scottish migration
to Canada 1
II. Sketching early years of service at
country and city stations near the
Clyde 17
III. Recalling Van Horne and the Canadian
Pacific challenge to the
Grand Trunk 35
IV. Reviewing vanishing practices, including
ticket scalping and fast
freight lines 48
V. Portraying scantily the lives of a
poor prairie line and a beloved
prairie town 61
VI. Remembering when farming in the
West was misunderstood, and land
could not be sold 80
VII. Telling how Manitoba struggled
through an era of expansion and
the war of Fort Whyte 97
VIII. Recording the first encounter of Mackenzie
and Mann, with mules for a
stake 115
IX. Beginning the story of the Canadian
Northern as a pioneer line with a
staff of thirteen 132
X. Describing meetings of a traffic manager
with Sioux Indians and sudden
millionaires 148
XI. Indicating several considerations
which made Toronto the centre of
a Transcontinental system 168
XII. Offering explanations why luxurious
ease does not distinguish living on
a private car 190
XIII. Recounting midwinter episodes of
location and operation in empty
country 207
XIV. Reciting events, the Great War being
chief, which destroyed the Canadian
Northern 227
XV. Speaking some truth about the difficulty
of operating a railway for
the nation 250
XVI. Narrating several occurrences which
made huge Canadian National deficits
inevitable 269
XVII. Shedding sidelights on unities of
Canadian railway management
during the War 296
Appendix A 315
Appendix B 332
THE PORTRAITS
D. B. Hanna Frontispiece
Facing Page
Sir Donald Mann 68
Sir William Mackenzie 68
Sir William Van Horne 164
E. W. Beatty 164
A. J. Mitchell 244
R. M. Horne-Payne 244
INTRODUCTION
This book is published because readers have said they obtained from
the chapters that were written for The Toronto Star Weekly sufficient
knowledge about railway conditions in Canada, during forty years, to
cause them to ask for the material in permanent form.
The third era of Canadian railway expansion, beginning with the
unnoticed construction of a hundred and twenty-five miles of line in
Manitoba, and issuing in the largest national system in the world,
will sometime have its due place in the historical literature of the
period. Though this was always apparent, it never seemed that one’s
contact with the changes of a quarter of a century would ever reach
the public except through the inarticulate narrative that is interned
in annual reports and arid statistics.
What appears here is due to the ability of my old friend and
colleague to take scanty and seemingly disconnected material,
and fashion it into a story such as one scarcely supposed to be
discoverable.
This book could only have been written by an author with an inside
experience of railway administration; and an intimate knowledge of
Western Canada. Mr. Hawkes was for several years the Superintendent
of Publicity for the Canadian Northern Railway System. From the
railway point of view, therefore, he was familiar with most phases
of what I had to tell. His knowledge of the West is extensive and
peculiar. He was going through the mill of homestead farming in the
North West Territories before I ever saw Manitoba. His intimacy with
pioneer conditions, is repeatedly reflected here, in a manner which
it is a pleasure to acknowledge.
This much of explanation was necessary, to make it clear that an old
railwayman is merely offering, through the only available channel,
what little material a hardworking life affords for, perhaps, a
friendlier appreciation of the railways’ part in developing Canada
than is easily obtainable from official publications.
“Trains of Recollection” may be my story; but it is my friend’s book.
D. B. HANNA.
Toronto, May, 1924.
Trains of Recollection
CHAPTER I.
_Suggesting a typically Presbyterian background of Scottish migration
to Canada._
It seemed that one’s ability to identify a joke was being tested
when one was asked to set down something of what one had seen of the
development of Canada during forty years of railway experience. The
work I have been doing since coming to Canada in 1882 is the same
kind of service that has been well rendered by thousands of men.
How could there be anything of public interest in a career that has
had only an average share of incident and romance, and more than an
average of exacting toil?
But it has been said that the commonplace is the greatest romance of
all; and that it often requires the lapse of years for an apparently
ordinary event to acquire its true perspective in the things which
impart the liveliest interest to life. After all, one was very
closely associated with the growth of a great railway system from a
feeble and unpromising beginning; and one saw the most extraordinary
change from private enterprise to Government ownership that has
taken place in the history of transportation. Nine millions of
Canadian people are financially interested in the effects of that
transformation, and it may help some of them to appreciate the
significance of their unexpected proprietorship if one tries to throw
a little light upon the evolution of Canada, as it has been affected
by four decades of rapidly changing transportation conditions--forty
years in which every sensation of success and disappointment has been
known to the most fascinating country in the world.
One must find the romance of the commonplace in harking back--it
cannot be done by looking forward. There is no joy in the
anticipation of a certainty. No surer way of discounting pleasures
has ever been invented than to describe them in advance. Everybody
knows the bore who ruins any good story he proffers by his assurance
that it is very funny indeed. Turnings in our personal roads which
have no special interest when they are taken, years afterwards
disclose themselves as the most fateful passages in our lives.
Sometimes when we have wanted to turn aside from a beaten path,
and have been foiled, we have not known how much was bound up with
keeping awhile longer the even tenor of what was then a commonplace
way indeed.
Perhaps I am alone in viewing, without regret, a turn which was
missed in my teens, and which would have taken me to Asia, far
indeed from the rigours of Manitoba winters, and from politicians
who would assist railway management on lines that have grown hoary
with age, and disgraceful in their inefficiency. While working at
Stobcross station in Glasgow I answered an advertisement for a clerk
on a plantation in Ceylon. No reply to the application reached me,
though I anxiously watched for it. Years afterwards, just before
coming to Canada, it was told me that an answer to the application
did arrive from the Glasgow firm who had the business in hand. The
family knew of the matter, and one of them intercepted a letter which
was addressed to me, and asked me to come to Glasgow, as it was
thought I might be the most suitable applicant for the situation. The
letter was concealed, I believe, with the connivance of my excellent
mother; otherwise, I might now be curing tea for Sir Thomas Lipton.
About that time, by the way, the first of the Lipton shops was opened
in Glasgow, and the astounding sight was witnessed of a provision
retailer advertising his bacon by weekly cartoons of Irish pigs on
the hoardings--for bacon, and not tea, was the early Lipton specialty.
One often envies the Canadian-born--even one’s own children--their
fortune in being natives of this land. But occasionally one meets
Canadians whose envies are of the reverse order. They say that it
must be fine to have spent a youth amidst the historical treasures of
the Old Lands; and fine also to have had the experience of finding
in Canada an entirely New Land--to have chosen it for oneself, and
to have had so much direct control over one’s own destiny; and the
destinies of one’s offspring, to remote generations. Immigration is a
romance of the commonplace, perhaps; though there isn’t much glamour
in the outlook of a poor wight who has left all his kindred, is
facing an unknown country, and is finding the ocean a bottomless woe,
on which nothing stays where it is put.
“What made you come to Canada?” is a frequent question, to which the
answer usually is, “To better my condition.” It is my own story,
though oddly enough, I came to Montreal to work for the Grand Trunk
at a smaller salary than I was getting in Glasgow as a clerk on the
Caledonian. Was that Scottish-like--was it wise or otherwise? If
an answer be desired, it can perhaps be found in a sketch of the
Scotland I came from--the Scotland of an average industrious family
that owed everything to labour and nothing to fortune--the sort
of family that has been supplying Canada with people ever since
immigration hither ceased to be a purely French process.
One speaks about one’s early years primarily because it affords an
opportunity to say a word for upbuilders of Canada who never saw
Canada, but who gave to Canada what she has most needed and still
needs--people, sound of body and of mind, and grounded in a faith
that may be stern, but has at least been steadfast, and has given its
followers the vitalities of character and success.
A friend has a habit of saying that his mother is one of the greatest
Canadians, though she has never lived for a single month ten miles
from her birthplace in the south of England. On the day this is
written he tells me she is keeping her ninety-eighth birthday, and
that, to date, she has given sixty-five children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren to Canada. For fifty-five years she has been
writing letters to, and getting letters from, Canada. Her stake
in the country has been infinitely more precious than that of the
millionaire who dies without seed.
Most theatre-goers have seen “Bunty Pulls the Strings”, Moffatt’s
verra Scotch play. The piece is developed around Bunty, the managing
daughter of a typically Presbyterian house. It is really a depiction
of life near Glasgow--some people think, of an extinct species of
existence. Its religious aspects are incomprehensible to a generation
that knows not its Shorter Catechism, as they are serious to the
participants, and homelike to many people in Canada scarcely past
middle life.
One of the characters speaks of going to Thornliebank. The father of
the playwright was William Moffatt, well known as an elocutionist
in Scotland fifty years ago, who used to give readings from the
“Reciter” of his own compilation. He was a frequent visitor to
Thornliebank. For nearly twenty-four years I never lived anywhere
else.
“Bunty” is a transcript from southern Scottish life, as I knew it,
within an hour’s walk of Glasgow. The church scenes, including the
presence of the collie among the worshippers and the deposits of
copper on the collection plate outside the door, before the spiritual
food has been dispensed, are as true to fact as a Canadian winter is
true to Jack Frost.
The Thornliebank folk as I knew them, and as I was one of them, are
reproduced in “Bunty” with a fidelity that shows how dramatic the
commonplace can be. Thornliebank was and is a village almost entirely
of one industry. The Crum Print Works employed several hundred
people. The Crums were among the first manufacturers to recognize
that they owed to their employes more than the smallest wages that
they would consent to work for. The influence of Robert Owen, the
socialistic employer of New Lanark, had spread to our locality. The
Crums furnished certain institutional services for the village. They
were circumscribed enough, in comparison with what has been done by
the Cadburys at Bournville and the Levers at Port Sunlight, but were
considerable advances on the average standard of industrial amenities
in the mid-nineteenth century. They were the heralds and examples
which, in due time, produced the Bournvilles and Port Sunlights, the
Garden Cities and the town planners.
Roundabout, Thornliebank was known as the model village, because
of the Crums’ commonsense philanthropies. There was a commodious
village club, the facilities of which, and especially the library,
were greater than the membership fees. Sport was not the feature of
country life that it has since become everywhere--perhaps because
that was still the era when Shanks’s pony was the steed on which
people put their odds. It was also the era of mutual improvement
expressed in musical and literary endeavour. In the Literary Society
my sphere was humble enough, though I recall the labour with which I
set forth the fruit of researches on such subjects as the history of
railways.
The Thornliebank Choral Union was nothing extraordinary, of course,
except perhaps that its daring members constituted me their
treasurer, and managed to renew their courage when the annual meeting
recurred. But Thornliebank’s chief musical fame was derived from its
brass band, into the glories of which I was never initiated. It had
(speaking from memory) twenty-four pieces; and was in much demand for
excursions and celebrations over a pretty wide territory. The pay for
a long day’s activity wouldn’t be more than twenty-five or thirty
dollars--think of that, ye who inhibit musicians from playing with a
Pageant Chorus, because of a union punctilio.
A long day’s activity? Many a Saturday morning have I been wakened at
five o’clock by the band playing itself through the village on the
way to Glasgow, there, at seven, to lead its employing multitude to a
boat for a journey down the Clyde. The band walked the five miles to
Glasgow, and played most of the way. Practice in daylight maybe saved
the cost of candle-light.
Some little time before I left Scotland there came to Thornliebank
a designer for the Crum Mills, who had a very fine tenor voice. He
was a little unlike some of our native singers, such as John Semple,
whose bass was one of the most sonorous I have ever heard; who gave
to his solo work a genius of interpretation I have never known
excelled, but who couldn’t read a note, and relied entirely on his
unfailing, memorial ear.
Our tenor was a technician, with a passion for the science of melody,
and a determination to excel in the professional world--which he has
since done in two continents. He is George Neil, conductor of the
Toronto Scottish Chorus, one of the sweetest lyric tenors you could
wish to hear, and a relentless worker in the cause of perpetuating
Scottish songs.
Discussing, the other evening, the musical associations of the region
we both knew so well, George and I agreed that the Pageant Chorus,
which has opened a new chapter in the great story of the Canadian
National Exhibition, is a measurable, modernized, Canadianized
expansion of the Tannahill concerts on Gleniffer Braes, to which,
with myriads more, Thornliebank used to flock on a summer Saturday
afternoon, to hear anywhere up to a thousand voices, drawn from city
and country choirs, commemorate a Scottish poet who thus received
a tribute unequalled, I think, by anything that has annually been
dedicated to his master Burns.
Tannahill was the son of a Paisley handloom weaver. He was put to
the shuttle as a boy, but studied the poetry of Burns, Fergusson
and Ramsay till he developed an intense ambition to emulate them.
He fused his muse with the music of his loom, and tuned his metres
with his shuttle. At thirty-three he took the advice of those who
noted the local popularity of his poetry and published a volume of
175 songs and lyrics that enabled him to bank twenty pounds. But at
thirty-six, when Constable refused to publish a corrected edition,
his heart broke and he was found drowned.
One of his best pieces is “The Braes of Gleniffer”; and it was in
a natural amphitheatre, on the braes of Gleniffer, visible from
Thornliebank, that the yearly commemorative concert was held. The
braes were five miles from home; but nothing was thought of walking
the distance. The Tannahill concerts were known all over the south of
Scotland; and for several decades it was a distinction to be a singer
in them.
My father was a foreman in the Crum mills, and did his bit
in religious and social service. He was a highly Calvinistic
Presbyterian, of a sect which has no perpetuation in Canada. My
mother, a Blair of Barrhead, was also of his kirk--the kirk of
Original Seceders it was formally called, after a certain process of
union had been consummated.
There was no church of the Original Seceders at Thornliebank, so we
worshipped at Pollokshaws, the town that lay between Thornliebank
and Glasgow, and is now incorporated with the great city. My father
was the precentor for the Original Seceders, who would as soon think
of having a box of whistles to lead the praise in God’s house as
they would of praying to the accompaniment of fife and drum. Old
associates of his son in Portage la Prairie might not have been
astonished at the accountant of the Manitoba and North Western
Railway venturing on the perilous seas of choir-leading at the
Presbyterian church, had they seen Precentor Hanna at the Original
Seceders in Pollokshaws, standing up when the psalm was called,
striking his tuning fork, bending his ear to it, sounding the note in
harmony, and then leading off with “Duke Street” or “Martyrdom”.
The Original Seceders are a survival and a combination of several
schisms in the Presbyterian church in Scotland. The rigid qualities
of the Covenanters caused some of them to resist all innovations,
and to keep themselves separate from such as yielded to new-fangled
fashions in worship and belief. The settlement of William and Mary,
as sovereigns of Scotland as well as of the rest of the British
Isles, imposed an oath on ministers which some refused to take, so
that there was a secession of Burghers, as they were called. These,
in their turn, had a split of their own, resulting in churches of
Anti-Burghers. In opposition to the advancing tide of more liberal
ideas and less severe practices, the Auld Lichts also set up a new
identity among the folds of Christ’s Presbyterian flock.
To any of these divisions of the church militant may be ascribed the
overworked story of the good soul who, lamenting the decay of faith,
as indicated by the true kirk of the truly faithful having dwindled
to the minister and herself, said: “And I’m no’ so sure of the
meenister.”
At all events, the Anti-Burghers, the Auld Lichts and the Covenanters
gathered themselves together in the Original Seceders, of whom there
were not more than a baker’s dozen of churches in all Scotland. Our
family belonged to the church at Pollokshaws, where we walked every
Sunday, rain, snow or shine, and where father led the psalmody. We
were never taught, in so many words, that it was impossible to praise
God in any other metres or melodies, than the versions of the psalms
that belong to the period of the Westminster Confession, and the
tunes which were venerably associated with various of them. The idea
of a predestinated psalmody which was of the essence of our Sabbath
meat and drink was as much a part of our religious make-up as the day
of judgment itself. Hymns were taboo. Somehow, they didn’t fit in
with the true doctrine of the survival of the fittest; not even such
dournesses as
“Great God! what do I see and hear?
The end of things created,
The judge of all men doth appear
On clouds of glory seated.”
At Pollokshaws certain tunes were so associated with certain psalms
that when my father attempted the innovation of singing “I waited
for the Lord my God” to some other tune than “Balerma”[1] there was
almost a godly riot, and his religious experience was critically
sounded for the graver symptoms of heresy. The sentiment engendered
by my father’s endeavour to vary a tune has had no parallel in my
experience, I think, except in the astonishment with which some
politicians in the maritime provinces regarded the amazing doctrine
that the job of a section man should not be dependent upon his vote
at the last general election.
The outward form of much of the Presbyterianism of Scotland in
the sixties and seventies was hard, bare, unlovely to the modern
eye. It grates upon our present sense of spiritual contentment.
But it developed a fibre in the people who revelled in theological
exactitude, for which we, their descendants, are seldom sufficiently
grateful. It will be true of multitudes of other Canadians besides
myself, who were brought up in the moral rigours of a most positive
Puritanism, that their retrospect combines a little resentment
against the overclouding of their youth by unnecessary prohibitions,
with much thanksgiving for the immovable foundations on which
character was built. We are none too worthy citizens of the state,
as things are. Heaven alone knows what we might have been if we
had not been told, with stern, but kindly repetition, “This is the
way, walk ye in it.” Our grudge to our Presbyterian upbringing is
infinitesimal. Our debt is infinite.
Sometimes one hears what sounds like ungrateful criticism of the
thoroughness with which a theology that was sometimes confounded
with religion was drilled into the children of the nineteenth
century. A better attitude, surely, even for those who would not hold
their children’s noses closely to the Calvinistic grindstone, is to
appreciate the excellences which were so relentlessly pressed upon
us. It may be well that, for us, the old days have gone for ever. But
for family discipline, and the homage that was paid to the unseen,
could anything be better than the attendance at church of the whole
family every Sunday, at Pollokshaws, for services that lasted from
eleven till a quarter to four, with an hour’s intermission for lunch;
then Sunday school at five o’clock?
After a quiet evening there was the second family worship of
the day, beginning at ten o’clock, when whoever happened to be
in the house was not allowed to depart without sharing in the
exercises--expounding of the Word and a somewhat lengthy prayer by
father, and psalmody by all present. Religious duty was imperious
duty--in private as well as in public. Except the precentor, in
church we sat to sing, and we stood while the preacher prayed. The
long prayer of an ordained Original Seceder would often continue for
half an hour.
It is not of an Original Seceder, but of another branch of the
Presbyterian church, that the story is told of a young probationer
who was being heard with a view to an overture, and who, having been
told that his prospective congregation very much liked very long
supplications, thought to help himself out, when he was gravelled
for matter, by saying to Deity: “And now, Lord, we will tell thee a
little anecdote.”
Last summer I had the pleasure of taking a Toronto friend, Mr. A. J.
Mitchell, a manager of Old St. Andrew’s, to the Original Seceders’
Church at Pollokshaws. We deemed it inadvisable to bring the taxi to
the church door. As far as possible, we conformed ourselves to the
prevailing spirit of the congregation and the service. To each of us
the associations of the worship were different, indeed.
The interior, with its uncushioned pews, the precentor’s box and the
pulpit, was what it had been fifty years ago. When the precentor
pitched high the opening note of psalm or paraphrase, I was thinking
of my father, long since gone. While the preacher was discoursing
with all the old certainty, on the wrath to come, to me it was a
voice remote, but oh, so near. Outside one met warm-hearted people
who knew one’s name, and the family’s connection with the church,
but were personal strangers. One could only establish contact with
the living by recalling the dead. There is a sadness about returning
to an old home after decades of absence that in some ways is more
poignant than the feeling with which a youth leaves the roof that has
sheltered him all his days, for a land across the sea.
But for a pillar of a Toronto Presbyterian church to find himself for
the first time in the rarefied atmosphere of the Original Seceders;
to join in praise that is entirely vocal; to see the solemn devotion
that pervades a service singularly void of what to him hitherto
has been appealing in worship, is something new; and, if one is not
mistaken, something awful.
My friend comes of a family where the rigid practices of a fading
Puritanism were rigidly honoured--no such desecrations, for instance,
as cleaning shoes, or reading newspapers on the Sabbath day. He
adorns a church where the music is fine, and the congregational
singing notably hearty, where, indeed, the organist, Mr. Tattersall,
is the son of a Thornliebank girl. He is of those who invited a
Congregationalist to Presbyterian Old St. Andrew’s. He has delighted
in the magnificence of the cathedral and the grandeur of the ritual
at St. Giles’. He would not choose the severe and unornamented
concentration of the old Seceders before the catholicity that he sees
in the pending union. But--and this is what one would fain impress
upon the kindly mind--my friend came from Pollokshaws with a deepened
reverence for the wealth of character with which the old Puritanism
has endowed the world. A sorry day, indeed, will it be, whereon we
forget from whom and whence we came, even when we are most conscious
of the liberalizing changes which time and fortune have wrought.