A Great Game (2 page)

It's grand to be an Englishman in 1910

King Edward's on the throne

It's the age of men
¹

—“T
HE
L
IFE
I L
EAD
,”
FROM
Mary Poppins

It was the dawn of a new century. The sun, it was said, never set on the British Empire, and Toronto was a burgeoning bit of the Empire's vast Canadian dominion. Toronto liked to be called the “Queen City,” which was certainly preferable to the pejorative “Hogtown.” The moniker reflected perfectly the self-image and aspiration of its—exclusively WASP and male—civic leaders. As the song from the Disney musical
Mary Poppins
would so perfectly put it, it was considered a “grand” time to be alive if you were part of the English realm.

There was great optimism in the air. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier perhaps best expressed it in 1904, in an address to the Canadian Club in Ottawa: “I think that we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century.”
²
Such was the growing confidence across the land.

What links the Toronto of the early 1900s to that of the early 2000s is the experience of change and growth. Though a primitive time by today's standards, technological progress had been sufficiently bold and rapid that it was unmistakable. Further, such advancement—and the positive social development it would make possible—was keenly anticipated.

Throughout the world, but especially in Canada, the most meaningful developments had occurred in transportation. The steam-engine locomotive had replaced the horse and cart (or winter sleigh) for intercity travel, reducing travel times exponentially. The age of the horse had not been displaced locally, but wealthy citizens could purchase the new motor vehicles, while the many rode bicycles or travelled by electric streetcar for a five-cent piece of silver.

The railways had their communications parallel in the telegraph, by which news could be rapidly transmitted throughout the world's urban network. A growing array of daily newspapers could then disseminate it within hours rather than days, and to a much wider array of citizens. Toronto had six daily papers: the
Globe
,
Mail and Empire
and
World
in the morning, and the
News
,
Star
and
Telegram
in the evening.
³
Citizens of reasonable means now also had their own telegraph parallel, the telephone.

They were good times to be raising a family in the Ontario capital. It was said a woman could be outfitted for twenty-five dollars, a man could get three squares (“breakfast, dinner, tea”) for fifteen cents and a family could buy a home for $1,200. However, with a full-time labourer earning twenty-five cents per hour at best—ten hours a day, six days a week—life for many was not easy. Trade union troubles were growing. Nonetheless, compared to the past, the times were prosperous and generally becoming more so.
⁴

The growing wealth was sparked by the rapid expansion of industry and manufacturing. It was accompanied by the noticeable spread of urbanization and the rising values of city land, along with an increase in the time for and the type of leisure activities. These ranged from high culture to, as one newspaper advertisement read, “Stage always filled with lovely women.”
⁵
However, all activity—except church services—shut down on Sundays.

Recreational activities and sports entertainment were experiencing explosive growth. In 1908 alone, the city's strict authorities charged 1,200 boys and girls for playing their games on public streets. When not playing, the lads and lasses would follow the exploits of their hockey heroes in the winter and their lacrosse, baseball and football counterparts in the summer. Without television or even radio, newspapers gave detailed sports coverage at every level of competition. Big games would often be reprinted literally play by play.

It was the age of heavyweight champ Jack Johnson and his Canadian adversary, Tommy Burns. Ty Cobb ruled baseball. In track and field, no one was bigger than the country's own Tom Longboat. Few were the days between scuttlebutt—good or bad—about the Onondaga long-distance runner from the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ontario.

Sports took minds off the many challenges and problems those in the growing city faced. Despite the prevailing Protestant moral ethos, alcohol use and abuse were rampant. Major occasions would be marked by energetic celebrations into the night, followed by brawling till the early morning. At the same time, there was an obsessive concern about personal health. Every newspaper of the time was overloaded with potential remedies for infirmities of all varieties.
⁶

While basic services were improving, unreliable water quality, infestations of rats and the pollution caused by the widespread use of coal were commonplace. This was especially true for the poor. Toronto was not known for its poverty, but slums, squalor and desperate privation were certainly to be found if one looked. Divorce was exceedingly rare, but spousal abandonment was not.

Nothing like the government payments and social services of our age existed. Active benevolent work was undertaken by extended families, neighbourhood interests and, especially, religious institutions. These were particularly important in Toronto's central “foreign district”—the poor areas that already contained 7,000 Italians and 22,000 “Hebrews” according to the census of 1911.
⁷

Crime was also regularly reported, although one does not get the sense it was top of mind. This changed with the spread of the automobile. In the years leading up to the Great War that began in 1914, the escalating numbers of pedestrian injuries involving cars became a major
issue. It was yet another sign of the changing times. Only a few years earlier, Edouard Cyrille “Newsy” Lalonde, the famous Cornwall athlete (and future Toronto Professional), had been robbed by bandits while driving his horse and buggy on an Ontario country road.

All told, the problems of the era were notably lower in profile than the bold new ventures, emerging corporate empires and ambitious civic projects that were taking shape. The business district was growing rapidly, moving up Yonge Street beyond its traditional northern limit at College. Two-thirds of the roads of “Muddy York” were now paved, and electric lighting was soon to appear above them. The affluent had already established summer homes in Muskoka.

More than anything, Toronto was growing. From 1901 to 1911, Canada expanded from five million–plus inhabitants to just over seven million. The city, absorbing its growing suburbs, climbed from some 200,000 souls to around 375,000. By way of comparison, Toronto's closest provincial rivals, Ottawa and Hamilton, would barely cross the 80,000 mark by the end of the decade. There was already no doubt as to where the power lay in the new country's largest province.

A “new” country it was. The Confederation that brought together the
colonies of Canada West (Ontario), Canada East (Quebec), Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1867 had since added Manitoba, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and the immense lands that would later make up the Prairie provinces and northern territories. The Dominion now stretched
a mari usque ad mare
, from coast to coast (to coast), and was the world's second-largest country, next only to sprawling Russia. And yet, still commonly heard was the terminology of pre-Confederation days: the “West” meaning Ontario, the “East” being Quebec. The Atlantic realms and the provinces and territories of the vast Northwest—increasingly stocked by people neither British nor French—seemed still somewhat beyond the everyday “national” consciousness of central Canadians.

Canada then had only two cities of national significance, Montreal and Toronto. Of these, Montreal was clearly both the larger and more dominant in numbers and influence. It had grown earlier and its economy was more diverse. Although Toronto was beginning to make gains, it still trailed the Quebec metropolis by a good hundred thousand.

Montreal was not, however, merely bigger and more powerful than Toronto. It was a decidedly different place. Whereas Toronto was dominated by its “British” character, Montreal was defined by its cultural diversity. “Us, them and the Irish” was the city's reality, a reality marked not so much by hostility as by “much indifference and ignorance.”
⁸

Montreal had its class distinctions, but these were much less ethnically based than modern mythology suggests. It is true that the business elite was largely Anglophone, living in brownstone mansions on Dorchester Boulevard and Sherbrooke Street. However, there was also a new class emerging between the rich on the Mountain and the poverty-stricken closer to the river, a middle stratum “composed of both French Canadians and Anglo-Canadians.”
⁹

The other difference in Montreal was its palpably more flexible character. Whether this was a consequence of the accommodations of cultural difference is hard to say, but Quebec's urban centre seemed a less rigid place than its Ontario counterpart. Ironically, this made it more in line with the contemporary mores of the Mother Country. There, the fashionable, adventurous and sometimes scandalous Edward VII, who had ascended to the throne in January 1901 upon the death of Queen Victoria, was defining a new age.

In Toronto, however, to be British still meant to stand for the stern and solid moralism of Edward's late mother. She had ruled for nearly sixty-four years, from 1837 on, and her rigid personality and values had wielded as much influence in the world as had her army and navy. Toronto did not call itself the Queen City for nothing. Victorian morals continued to reign supreme and had begun to morph into a phenomenon called the “social purity” movement.

This movement believed that a systematic, “scientific” approach to moral education could expunge social problems and vices. Ontario was a beachhead for the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which had started up in Ohio in the 1850s. Drinking men were advised by doctors
to switch their drink of choice, as there would be “fewer criminals with pure milk.” Many Ontario schools had their young men assemble each day to say, “Jesus Christ and Canada expect me to be an A.1 boy.” So pronounced was the trend in English Canada that youngsters were regularly warned to avoid “the leprosy of vice.”
¹⁰
This puritanical culture was to have a profound influence in the area of sport.

The cultural differences between the two cities served only to underscore Toronto's restlessness with its second-place status. Reading the journals and debates of the period, one is soon struck by the city's sense of its inevitable and rightful rise to power in the new Dominion. The idea that Montreal had a birthright to Canadian leadership—so obvious to that city's older establishment—was not accepted in the Queen City. A British Canada, Toronto believed, needed the unequivocal British leadership that only it could provide.