_Offering explanations why luxurious ease does not distinguish
living on a private car._
This is the apologia of the private car, as to which there is
probably more misapprehension in the public mind than about any other
aid to railway business. The notion is abroad that there is as much
relation between the private car and hard work as there was between
the melodies and the briefs of a certain eminent lawyer, addicted
to drops in aitches, of whom a competitor is said to have remarked:
“’Ere ’e comes, the ’oly ’umbug, ’ummin’ an ’ym; ’ow I ’ate ’im”.
There are private cars and private cars. Most of them should not be
called by that name. Very few which are properly so designated belong
to railwaymen.
One chilly evening, just after sundown, a Saskatchewan farmer was
crossing, with his yoke of oxen, a siding where stood a car, well
lighted and blinds undrawn. He saw a short-bearded, middle-aged man
sitting, with three other prosperous looking persons, at the table,
which was well-appointed with spotless linen, and the sort of ware
without which a meal is nowhere. He watched a white-coated man enter;
and he halted his cattle to see this man hand around a dish, and
stand respectfully while the other people took from it what they
required.
Fascinated, the farmer stayed there till the meal was concluded,
cigars were burning, and the blinds were drawn. He was abroad later
than he had expected, and had not reckoned on so chilly an evening.
He shivered as he commanded Buck and Bright to proceed; and he talked
to himself--as he has told the story since.
The lazy luxury of these railway magnates! Lolling over the country
in private cars, waited on hand and foot, out of the money which poor
devils like himself, shaking with cold, and working their bodies to
skin and bone, paid to the railway for dividends and luxuries like
the cars that made these men feel like kings and act like tyrants.
The farmer would soon show these oppressors where they got off at.
They’d begin by getting off the private car--and so on and so forth,
in human nature’s human way.
One story is good till another is told. The rolling-in-luxury side of
this episode of a siding on a chilly October night is this:
The man at the table head was the railway president. Two of his
guests were representing financial houses. The fourth man was his
secretary. The car had been dropped at the siding because, next
morning, teams would be there to drive the party forty miles north
to inspect the country through which it was intended to build a
branch line; and in which it had been reported that there were many
farmers to whom getting out their grain was a burdensome operation,
depriving them of the chance to prosper by their season’s work.
The financial men were from London, and could facilitate or hinder
the flow of millions of dollars to Canada for the development of
agriculture. They were touring the country to see what sort of
conditions their clients were being invited to back. They wanted to
visit a typical piece of country without railway facilities; and to
get an idea of the courage and capacity of pioneers who would start
farms in the wilderness ahead of means of economically getting their
produce to market.
The president was on his annual inspection trip--just as necessary
to efficient discharge of his duty as a farmer’s Sunday walk around
his fields is to his knowledge of his crops. He did not want to
drive for whole days across new country. His trusted engineers and
locators were in the habit of doing that; and time was valuable.
But it was good policy to go personally with the men who were
extremely influential in the money market that was as important to
the Saskatchewan farmer as the wheat market is. All day he had been
with his guests, telling them about the country, and observing the
condition of the track and stations through which the train passed;
and receiving messages off the telegraph wire.
Long after the farmer had gone to bed, and his oxen had exchanged
cud-chewing for slumber, the railway president, having said
“Good-night” to his guests, was dictating replies to the messages he
had received during the day, and working as hard as if he had been
in his office fifteen hundred miles away.
It is true that the car looked like self-indulgent wealth to the
farmer sitting in the wagon outside; to whom it seemed the height of
luxury to be waited upon by a man in a white coat. But it was all
in a hard day’s work to the man who was getting the money to build
railways into the prairie country, without which the owner of a yoke
of cattle would be forlorn indeed. The president, who came from the
farm, would regard it as the height of luxury to have nothing more
to worry about than to sit on a binder for a few hours, and see the
nodding heads of wheat fall on to the carrier, to be delivered in
rows of sheaves to the stooker.
Any business man who has worked his heart out to establish something
out of nothing, and has overcome difficulties that had a knack of
springing up out of nowhere, and spoiling the best-laid calculations,
knows that most capital has to be wrung out of trouble.
The farmer too, knows this; for sitting on a binder isn’t all golden
grain; and chores have their own worries. But he is apt to associate
difficulties only with manual labour. Never having travelled in a car
that is also an office he doesn’t apprehend what working on wheels
really is.
The point is that, to a man harassed by a multitude of cares, as a
railway executive is, there is no such thing as luxury. He cannot
even envy the sensation of my countryman who was encountered at a
funeral.
Into a carriage starting for the cemetery there stepped a man who was
unknown to the mourner already there. As the journey proceeded the
mourner questioned his companion. Was he a relative of the corpse?
No. An old friend then? No, in fact he didn’t know the corpse. Then
he would be a friend of some friends? No, indeed, he was a stranger
entirely; but he hadn’t been very well, and the doctor had ordered
carriage exercise for his liver.
The general superintendent of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal
Company was incessantly up and down the road for three or four years
before he had a car that was called his own. He travelled with the
other passengers when passengers were present, and in the conductor’s
caboose when the train was all freight. A freight conductor has
a private car--business couldn’t be carried on without it. He is
compelled to ride somewhere. In cold weather he is entitled to as
much warmth as a passenger. On long runs he must have something to
eat. Nobody begrudges him his caboose. Uninformed resentment is
reserved for the magnate, so-called!
When we had extended from Dauphin through Swan River, and were
operating the Muskeg Limited between Winnipeg and the cordwood swamps
of Marchand I did have a car of my own. It was very much of a used
car, for it had housed Mr. Mann during construction of the Calgary
and Edmonton. While a contractor is on his job he is compelled to be
a good deal of a gipsy. The real difference between his private car
and a gipsy caravan is that the gipsy can move anywhere he likes, and
the contractor is compelled to stay with the tracks.
Mr. Mann’s car had a romantic name--the Sea Falls. It had stood
up nobly under every kind of treatment--and bumping over skeleton
track is treatment enough to annoy even a constructor’s equipage.
When we gave it such a renovation as pride and revenue permitted, we
also extinguished its name for a number--19 was the all-sufficient
description of the old Sea Falls, and Number Nineteen came to be
regarded femininely.
I don’t think she ever learned to dance the hornpipe, but she
certainly danced. The ideal car for construction purposes must not
be heavily built. Yesterday a friend was talking about ideal fishing
country in the northern recesses of Frontenac county, to which many
wealthy Americans come every year. “You can only get into it with a
Ford,” he said.
The old Sea Falls, invariably called a she, was the first and chief
Henry of the Canadian Northern. Up to a venerable age she was never
off the track. She rolled and leaped and ricocheted, when Billy
Walker or Joe Beef let his engine get gay over a stretch of gravel
ballast. Sometimes, I think, she skipped along like a flat stone
thrown almost horizontally at the lake; but, whatever happened to any
neighbouring equipment, Number Nineteen sustained the reputation of
the Sea Falls, and remained true to steel.
The superintendent, by the way, must also be a thoroughgoing gipsy
if he is any good as a superintendent. He has an office, of course,
at his chief divisional point, where he can be seen when people have
to come to him. But his real office is the table off which he eats
his meals. His stenographer is his constant travelling companion.
The public seldom sees his car, for it is carried at the tails of
freights, as a rule, and is left at all sorts of minor-looking
places, where work has to be done.
But what about the cars of which the public sometimes sees and
hears? They are of three sorts--the railway cars, the statesmen’s
cars, and the absolutely private cars whose owners pay for haulage
on as commercial a basis as the passenger who buys his ticket at the
counter.
Broadly, the trip which the Saskatchewan farmer saw, in part, can be
taken as typical of what may be called the presidential inspection of
properties and prospects, during the expansion phase of a railway.
The chief executive of an established road that covers a continent
is compelled to travel a great deal; and to know that his journeying
days are his hardest, however inured he may be to resting on restless
wheels.
His secretary loads several boxes with correspondence, much of it
relating to matters to be taken up at points to be visited, and much
concerning all kinds of business accumulated at the head office.
Where inspection of physical property is an objective--which is
always the case, for, wherever you go, you are on the property for
whose maintenance you are held responsible by shareholders and
public--the President while the train is moving will be found sitting
at the observation end of his car, with his secretary by his side,
watching everything as it comes into an instantly dissolving view.
On a siding he sees a couple of cars belonging to an American
road, for which rental is being paid for every day that they are
on his system. They may be in this unlikely place for very good
reason--and again there may be some neglect of duty in their present
location. Note is made of it, for the attention of the superintendent
concerned. At the fourth telegraph post, after mileage six hundred
and fifty-three, there is a stack of ties, with weeds growing about
them in a profusion which suggests that there has been unwise
distribution of costly, deteriorating material.
A station not stopped at gives evidence of slovenliness in the agent.
The next has flower beds in lovely bloom--the proof of a pride in his
post for which the agent will receive a word of appreciation from a
superior who does not forget that he is also a colleague.
Crossing one of the fast-diminishing number of wooden trestles it is
observed that the water barrels are not well filled. Further on a
tank is leaking water--and money.
During a stop at a division point the President hurries to the
roundhouse, to get his own idea of the efficiency with which the
power is being handled, and repairs made without undue delay.
After a day of this description you arrive at a city where the City
Council and the Board of Trade are waiting to press for a pledge of
improvements which, to them, are most important items in a civic
programme.
In the afternoon, perhaps, you passed through a station of a small
and juvenile town for which the local Board of Trade had urged the
desirability of another express truck, and a larger cattle pen, so
that passengers on the express trains might get a better idea of the
magnitude of the business done at that point.
Sometimes the difference between the small town and the big city is
only of degree. Local patriotism is a mighty fine asset in every
community. One finds no fault against the urgency with which local
problems are pressed upon a harassed railway executive, with the
remark, often heard, that what is asked is a very small matter for so
large a railway. Many a mickle makes a muckle; and there are limits
to what can be done with the revenues of a railway, every department
of which has an Oliver-Twist-like propensity for demanding more.
Take an instance of the problems that beset your railway president
as he flits about the country--the passenger accommodation at St.
John. The Intercolonial station is on low ground. It is one of the
structures which do not reflect the magnificent ambitions of members
of Parliament, whose chief end in public life is to get public money
spent in their ridings--well spent on the whole, of course, but
spent. Lately the train sheds that served the purpose of a metal
umbrella, had collapsed, and temporary shelters over the platforms
had to be put up.
Long ago, plans were prepared for a rearrangement of the station
accommodation, which would bring the passengers into a building on
a higher level, discharge baggage at a lower elevation, improve
the street railway facilities, and generally give to St. John what
everybody admits St. John needs, on a business-like basis.
The cost of over a million and a half dollars must be shared by the
National Railways, the civic government and the street railway. The
improvements were held up because the railway executive believed
the other parties to them should contribute more to the cost than
at first they were willing to undertake. “Let George do it” is not
an isolated view of expenditures in which what some people no doubt
would like to call the king’s railway is concerned, jointly with
other public and semi-public authorities.
Situations like that at St. John abound in varying magnitude.
They call for an armoury of qualities which any one man might be
forgiven for not possessing. They are just a part of the day’s
responsibilities which crowd into the private car.
They abide with the executive while he is showing guests the aspects
of Canada in which they are specially interested. Consider two
examples from Canadian Northern ante-public-ownership days. The first
excursion that looked like a joy ride to everybody except to the men
responsible for completing it, was the visit, in 1898, to Dauphin
and Winnipegosis of as many members of the Manitoba Legislature as
could go to see the railway that had been built under legislative
guarantee. Having none of our own, we had to hire sleeping and dining
cars from the Canadian Pacific. The trip occupied two long days with
a banquet in Dauphin on the night out.
The last considerable excursion attributable to public
responsibilities was the Parliamentary journey to the Pacific Coast
when the road to Vancouver was prepared for business, in 1915.
The ever-ready cynic can say that these excursions are near, but
extravagant relatives of the electioneering campaign of which the
cheap cigar is a nauseating and corrupting feature. But, looking
back through the severe spectacles of the prohibition age, and not
forgetting that the prairie air, especially as it approaches the
Great Divide, is very prone to sharpen Eastern appetites, I think it
is well within the truth to declare that journeys like these have
been performed absolutely in the public interest.
The most solicitous railway in the world cannot give to a member of
Parliament the faculty of imparting to his constituents and to the
public generally the highly instructive information which has come to
him in his representative capacity. All it can do is to give him the
opportunity to acquire knowledge of the development of his country
which only travel under informing auspices can bestow. That we did,
at various times, and left the event to a providential future.
Prince Arthur of Connaught travelled over the Canadian Northern from
Edmonton, when on his way home from Japan, whither he had been on a
special mission for King Edward. To act as if a railway owed nothing
of courtesy to such a representative of majesty would flout the
amenities of civilization. The Prince of Wales travelled thousands of
miles over the Canadian National system. This journey couldn’t have
been prevented without injuring public sentiment, and couldn’t be
accomplished without making the most and the best of the private car.
There was the courtesy of finance in other personally conducted
travels such as those, say, of Mr. Andrew Jameson and Mr. Robert
Kindersley--to give two typical instances of civilities that had
practical respect to the future, from the farmers’ as well as from
the railway builders’ point of view.
Mr. Jameson was an ex-governor of the Bank of Ireland, and a leader
in Irish manufactures and finance. In 1907 he was revisiting this
continent with his wife and daughter Violet. The family travelled
with me from Winnipeg to Edmonton. Mr. Jameson had a qualification
for sizing up Western Canada which not many of our visitors brought
with them. As a young man he had been a rancher on the Texas
prairies. One of his reminiscences of that experience was a testimony
to the intensity of the youthful patriotism which flourishes beneath
the stars and stripes.
Jameson, driving several days over an unfamiliar trail, stayed one
night at a rancher’s house in which was a son of about eight years
of age. After supper, the boy, who should have been in bed, devoted
himself to observation of the stranger. While Jameson was smoking,
the youngster planted himself between his knees, and watched him
intently for some time. At last he broke silence.
“I can see you ain’t no American citizen,” he said.
“How do you know that? Are you sure?” Jameson asked.
“You bet I am. I can see you ain’t no American by the way you smoke.”
“That’s very interesting,” Jameson replied. “And how do you know I’m
not an American citizen by my smoking?”
“You don’t spit.”
As an indication of what happens sometimes in a private car, it can
be said that the little town of Vibank, between Brandon and Regina,
is a memorial of a very agreeable couple of days with the Jamesons.
It commemorates Violet Jameson, and the institution with which her
father was closely associated. Nobody would suspect an Irish origin
for Vibank; but it is as truly Hibernian as Pat Murphy himself.
Mr. Kindersley, since he first became concerned with the Canadian
Northern has been knighted, for distinguished services during the
war, and has succeeded Lord Strathcona as governor of the Hudson’s
Bay Company. He had charge of the issuing of war certificates--the
scheme by which scores of millions of pounds were raised by the
creation of certificates which, on payment of sixteen shillings and
sixpence, guaranteed the recipient a sovereign after five years.
As governor of “The Company,” Sir Robert toured Canada in 1920,
in celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
chartering of the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles the Second, who
gave to Prince Rupert and his fellow gentlemen adventurers the
territory draining into the Bay. It didn’t belong to Charles, but he
had the ways of kings in those days, and gave it, exacting in return
the tribute of two elk and two beaver, whenever he visited the domain.
Before the war Mr. Kindersley came several times to Canada as the
representative of Lazard Brothers, the great financial firm of
London, Paris and New York. That house under-wrote millions of
dollars’ worth of Canadian Northern securities; and, therefore, was
intimately concerned in the enterprise, as to investing in which
their clients would be largely guided by their example.
Sir Robert Kindersley is one of those Englishmen whose eminent
affability of manner might be taken by some of our neighbours for
evidence of an extreme remoteness from business acumen. But a
shrewder business man never crossed the Atlantic.
The first division point between Saskatoon and Calgary is Kindersley,
in the midst of what used to be the greatest of all buffalo
ranges--the buffalo paths ploughed across by farmers are many of them
six inches deep, to this day. A magazine article about the beginning
of the town preserved, as was seldom done, (for writers with a
gift for vividly seeing the possibilities of an apparently common
proceeding are not always on the spot), the personalities, scenery,
atmosphere and other conditions that belong to the nativity of a
busy town. “The First of Kindersley” was illustrated, and its most
characteristic picture was a photograph of the town-lot auctioneer’s
small table and a suitcase, standing alone on the illimitable plain.
When the later regime of the Canadian National railways began, the
cars of the president and the vice-presidents who required such were
deprived of their names, and were known to the service by numbers
only. Their doors were not even painted “Official,” but announced to
the visitor that he was entering a “Business Car.”
A similar adaptation to useful uses applied to the several cars that
are used by Cabinet ministers. About the propriety of the Prime
Minister traveling in an exclusive car there are surely no two
opinions. Some departmental chiefs, too, are in the working class
when they are on journeying duty bound. There can be too much of a
good thing, of course, and, at times, judging by sundry signs and
wonders that have come forth, this possibility has been discerned
by the Cabinet as a whole, against the aspirations of a colleague
whose ideas of official frugality and personal convenience were not
endorsed.
Sir Sam Hughes was an old friend of Sir William Mackenzie, dating
back to the time when he defeated Mr. Mackenzie for the Conservative
nomination for Victoria county, in 1891. When he became Minister
of Militia in 1911, and began an extraordinary career of activity
and independence, he felt he needed a car in which the work of the
department could be done by a chief who intended to be as nearly
ubiquitous as was possible to a Cabinet Minister tied to Parliament
for several months in each year.
Colonel Hughes asked me to get him a private car, that was to be
serviceable rather than ornamental. I bought a Pullman--they were
then being taken off the road rather freely by the Pullman Company on
account of the steel car coming into favour--had it fitted up, and
turned over at a cost of about seven thousand dollars. The bill was
promptly paid, and the Roleen, named after the minister’s daughter,
was very freely used.
When the war came the Roleen had little rest. Valcartier Camp was on
our line out of Quebec, so that I was a good deal concerned with the
early movement of troops, and knew how incessantly on the job Sam
Hughes was. Most Friday nights he left Ottawa for Valcartier, and
returned Monday mornings. He regarded himself, as everybody knows,
as the real lynch pin of Canada’s share in the war. At all costs he
would have things done; and often enough they were done at a first
cost of traditional Cabinet responsibility. He honoured this as much
in the breach as in the observance; and was consequently not exactly
beloved of all his colleagues.
His creation of honorary colonels was an exercise that gave him
immense pleasure. He could not understand why some of the recipients
of his favor were not as delighted to receive as he was to bestow.
One, who returned to him the imposing commission signed by the
Governor-General--which, by the way contained a mistake in spelling,
such as probably appears on many of these treasured parchments--was
surprised, after Sir Sam’s death, to receive it from the Militia
Department.
Another member of the first Borden Cabinet regarded an exclusively
private car as a necessary aid to his departmental efficiency.
Soon after being installed he asked us to procure him one, giving
his assurance that it would be promptly paid for. This assurance
was requested because I knew of another Cabinet Minister who once
borrowed a car from the C.P.R. and never returned it, even when he
left the Government.
After awhile, and following repeated enquiries from the Minister,
reflecting the urgency of delivery, a converted Pullman was ready for
him, on receipt of word that the order-in-council authorizing payment
had been passed.
The car was kept at Chicago for a fortnight, and was then brought as
far as Sarnia and held for several weeks more. The order-in-council
was never passed; the car was re-named, and was used for several
years by the third vice-president of the Canadian Northern. Many will
remember the Toronto.