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Sketching early years of service at country and city stations near the Clyde.

The proportion of our immigrated people who visit their native lands is growing, despite the rise in steamer rates. There are multitudes to whom the Old Land still appears as it did when it was the only country they knew. For what it is worth, then, one who has several times trodden the old familiar ground, may say that you have to go back to the Old Land really to see it; and to appreciate what Canada has done for you.

I am sure that is unanimously so with all who have had the experience. The fields you think of as big; the village street you remember as wide; the kirk you recall as imposing—they are all there; but they have diminished in extent, or you have grown in stature. The people, noble as they are, abide where they always abode. Somehow, in the old segment of the world, they have not imbibed the air of the newer, more optimistic world that is on this side the sea. And distances have been transformed, and the way you look at distances.

Those who have always been accustomed to the magnificent distances of Canada frequently marvel at the small acquaintance many British people have with their native country. What may seem a phenomenal ignorance is oftener only a proof of an ancient fiscal limitation. In Thornliebank we knew about Loch Lomond, the Trossachs, and the glories of the more northern hills and glens. But to go to Loch Lomond, for instance, was a financial adventure, as well as a serious railway journey, to be followed by costly coaching along the shore. Ben Lomond, the three-thousand-feet mountain which stands like a sentinel over the twenty-two miles of islanded water, is forty miles from Glasgow—the distance of Hamilton from Toronto. Last summer we motored from Glasgow to the hotel at the foot of the mountain, and back again, in four hours. Besides the scenery so often mentioned but so seldom described, we saw the proofs of the disappearance of the former age, which, admirable as it is from the point of view of the popularization of what used to be the joy of a few, still seems rather flippantly to challenge the majesty of the prospect—I mean the abundance of travel by motor char-a-banc.

Gasoline has indeed done wonders for travel; but a big bus, rolling along at twenty miles an hour, with as many passengers as the first steamer that plied on the Clyde—the “Comet” in 1812—is not the picturesque sight that a tally-ho, with horses four, and an echoing horn used to be. Naturally, an old railroader is all for better transportation, and the multiplication of fares; but, the old ways had their good features, and, somehow, one has a lingering feeling that it were better for the older-fashioned picturesqueness, which the multitude could not see, to remain than that everything in life should be subdued to gas—and perhaps, in time, to jazz.

On the whole, the men who gave most of their time to the kirk also served the community most consistently in other spheres. Fifty and sixty years ago the larger duties of citizenship were not commonly open to men who worked for wages. My father was past fifty before the ten-pound householder had a Parliamentary vote. The teaching of men like Robert Owen, and the rise of trade unionism, synchronized with intellectual, social and economic advances among working people who didn’t cease to read when they left school. Mechanics’ Institutes abounded. Co-operative societies sprang up in almost every industrial community in the Lowlands of Scotland and the north of England. There was one in Thornliebank, of which William Hanna was the treasurer.

The organization of a local co-operative business was very simple—its methods also. A society was formed, goods bought for the co-operative store, and the members paid cash for them. At each buying they were given metal tokens representing the amount of their purchases—it was a coinage which obviated the necessity for the intricate labors of bookkeeping. At the end of three months the committee took stock of the store, compared the value of the goods with the standing at the last quarter day, counted the cash in hand, figured up the expenses, and were ready to declare a dividend. The shareholder brought his tokens—his chips, if you like—to the counter, and on the dividendial basis was given cash, or credit for more goods.

With ten children, eight of whom lived to maturity, the voluntary treasurership of a village co-operative store, with the quarterly dividends added to the weekly wages at the Crum works, didn’t furnish many luxuries to the Hanna family, beyond the unsearchable riches that came to us from the Sabbath journeys to Pollokshaws. As the next to the youngest, I did not know personally of the harder struggle which beset the heads of artisan families when all their children were small. But, even in the sixties, life was a constant experiment in frugality. At the Thornliebank school we were all average scholars, I think, and in my thirteenth year my father obtained for me the job of office boy at the headquarters of the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, in Madeira Court, Glasgow.

Call it the coincidence of the commonplace, the accident of association, if you like; but several years ago, while certain negotiations were proceeding for the purchase of land and the erection of grain elevators in the West by the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, one could not help contrasting the change in that commercial enterprise, since his first acquaintance with it; and noticing also the difference there was between running messages from Madeira Court, and looking after the interests of a railway that connected tidewater on the St. Lawrence with tidewater on the Pacific, and had fifty thousand shareholders in the British Isles.

In those far-off days finance was a simple art, though it involved some fine adjustments. The pay in Madeira Court was four shillings a week. Out of that, return railway fare over four miles, and a midday meal, had to be provided. Transportation took about a third of the income—a trifle more, when one remembers that there was a mile walk to and from the Kennishead station, Thornliebank not being on any railway. Shanks’s pony cost something for shoes. At midday there was resort to Jenkins’s Cooking Depot, on Jamaica Street—a place where a bowl of soup, a slice of bread and a halfpenny cup of coffee offered some justification for the unchallenged boasting about free trade and cheap living which was a part of British electioneering for nearly sixty years.

The Scottish Wholesale is an enormous business in these days, with a turnover of a hundred million dollars a year. When I was on its payroll, and very proud of my job, the office force, I think, was ten. Of course, there were no telephones or typewriters. The treasurer was a machinist at Thompson’s, on Finneston street. It was part of my duty to carry the check book to him, to get batches of checks signed.

My first responsibility for observing a time-table schedule was impressed upon me rather interestingly by the Wholesale Co-operative’s first manager, Mr. James Borrowman.

“Noo, laddie,” he said, as I was off to the treasurer with cheques to be signed, “Hoo soon d’ye think ye can be back wi’ the signatures?”

I gave a close estimate, kept within it—and later discerned that my astute chief had made me set my own speed, below which it was quite inexpedient to fall.

The office work was light enough to permit of a few observations on the methods of what was then very high commerce indeed. Tea-tasting, I remember, was a subject of absorbing interest—perhaps it had something to do with the application for a clerkship on a Ceylon plantation.

There was almost sacramental gravity about old George’s preparations for testing the tasting and blending qualities of Oolong and Souchong. No home brew of these fantastic days is elaborated more carefully than the liquid bouquets in Madeira Court were compounded. With great respect to competent housewives, one may be allowed to remark that heating the pot before infusing the tea is not enough to bring to the human senses all the aromatic marvels of an artistic cup of tea. There is a delicate science of perfumery in the perfect production of the most cheering beverage. To induce a truly exquisite bouquet the cup must be heated before the tea is poured into it—and then, indeed, you have a liquid meet for the gods.

Less than a dollar a week, with railway and restaurant expenses to be paid out of it, though the hours were only from nine to six, could not long satisfy the son of the Thornliebank co-operative treasurer. After about nine months at Madeira Court the post of junior assistant to the Kennishead stationmaster fell vacant, and I was the successful applicant for the position. “Junior assistant to the stationmaster” is as big-sounding a title as one can think of for that post, after many years’ diplomatic strain in trying to find titles for railway officials whose deserts, occasionally, were in inverse ratio to their appraisals of them.

There may be more magnificent sensations than those of an Original Seceder five months short of his fourteenth birthday, selling tickets to Glasgow through a little wicket door; but if so, I know them not. The danger of giving too much change was not serious. We were only a short line, without through connections. As with other small systems, we made the most of our name. Something over thirty miles of route were called the Glasgow, Barrhead and Kilmarnock Railway. Most of the passenger traffic was to Glasgow, third-class fare, fourpence. Saturday was the busy day. The operatives used to leave the mills at five on Saturday afternoons, instead of the customary six o’clock. Jock and his wife, and sometimes a bairn or two, would go to the city for an evening’s shopping, and free gazes at the places they did not enter. To go to Glasgow and not get a drink of whiskey, fifty years ago, was like going to Niagara and shunning the Falls.

Business hours at Kennishead station were from before the first train in the morning till after the last train had come in from Glasgow at night, for which six shillings a week was the reward. Saturday nights one sometimes overtook groups walking home from their evening’s outing. Often one could hear Jock trying to walk straight, and Mary chiding him, sometimes under, and sometimes very much over, her breath. But, however uncertain the gait on Saturday night, there were dignity and poise in the approach to church next day—proof indeed of the difference between spirituous and spiritual walk and conversation.

The standard story which illustrates the commingling of the spiritual and the spirituous belongs to a locality near ours. The Scotsman who drank scientifically exhibited three stages of spirituous possession. The first was when, having first exalted his horn, he was in a meditative mood. The second stage saw him determined to discuss politics. When the saturation point was reached nothing but a religious argument would content his soaring mind.

When the United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church were fused, those who rejected the union were called the Wee Frees. In a town further up the line the controversy between the Wee Frees and the U.P.’s painfully persisted. One night a believer in the union, who had been to Glasgow, was wiggling a waggly way homeward when he saw the manse. He rang the bell, and insisted that the maid take him to the minister, to whom he said he wanted to discuss the trouble with the Wee Frees, and to propound a settlement. The minister, seeing his condition, urged that as the hour was getting late, and his caller had to be up early in the morning, he had better come next evening, when they would fully discuss the great question.

“To-morra’ nicht—to-morra’?” quoth the spirituous caller. “To-morra’ nicht I shan’t care a d——n aboot it.”

Eighteen months at Kennishead brought promotion to the ticket office at Pollokshaws, a mile and a half nearer Glasgow. Ten shillings a week, and a twice-a-day walk across the long side of the triangle of which Thornliebank, Kennishead and Pollokshaws were the vertices, were the main changes involved in this advance; although Pollokshaws, being a town of about eight thousand people, the ticket sales were larger than at Kennishead. Another change was not so pleasant. The walk home perforce was alongside the churchyard wall, which afforded too many inducements to contemplate humanity’s latter end, to be pleasant to an undeveloped youth who liked company, but had no curiosity about epitaphs when the midnight stroke was nigh.

From Pollokshaws I was transferred to Barrhead, the station farther out from Glasgow than Kennishead. One of its leading productions nowadays is the Shanks bath and toilet equipments, which are famous the world over. The business was then in its struggling infancy. Many a ticket have I sold to the original Shanks on his way to Glasgow, carrying with him samples of his wares.

Barrhead was interesting to me because it was the birthplace of my mother, as I was reminded soon after beginning duty there. As a sweet faced old lady asked for a ticket to Glasgie, I noticed she was eyeing me closely. Receiving the cardboard, she said:

“They tell me ye’re Janet Blair’s son?”

I said that was so.

“Ay,” she went on, “I knew your mither weel, lang before ye were born. She was a grand girl, and a fine-looking woman. My, but ye’re no’ a bit like her.”

Barrhead saw the end of my service of the G.B. and K., for in 1875 I obtained a clerkship at the Caledonian freight station at Buchanan Street, Glasgow. The first thing I learned there was that Presbyterian strictness was nothing compared to one brand of railway rigidity. The office was six miles from home, and a few minutes’ walk from the South Side passenger station. The first morning train arrived there at nine o’clock. Wishing still to live at home, I asked my immediate superior to excuse me from beginning work until shortly after nine, if I made up the time at noon, or in the evening. He refused: and so, for a year I walked the six miles from Thornliebank six mornings a week.[2]

Discipline can be fearfully and wonderfully enforced. Probably no chief of a big organization ever entirely escaped criticism from his subordinates for being at times more exacting than they thought circumstances warranted. But it is likely that subordinates receive more consideration than they are aware of because their chief has not forgotten that his own early subordinations were not all lavender.

From Buchanan Street occurred my last move in Scottish railway service, in 1877. With one of the best men I have ever known for my chief, Mr. R. M. F. Watson, I helped to open Stobcross station, which the Caledonian established through an arrangement for using the North British right of way. I was Mr. Watson’s only clerk. In a week or two after the opening we needed more help; and so for the first time I ranked a little ahead of a colleague. Here I stayed five years, advancing in pay from twenty-two to forty shillings a week—and two pounds was quite a salary on a Scottish railway forty-five years ago. Stobcross to-day does an enormous business. One can wish for the younger men that they have as fine a superior officer as we had in Mr. Watson.

The Caledonian was a large railway, as railways ranked in a country the extremest length of which is only as far as Sudbury is from Toronto, which could be tucked into Lake Superior, and no spot in which is fifty miles from salt water. There were, of course many promotions in the Caledonian service; but it didn’t take very long for a young fellow who was looking a little farther ahead than Saturday night to learn that a clerk outside the head office stood mighty little chance of developing from a weekly wage-earner into a salaried official. Perhaps, if I had remained in Glasgow I might have become station master at Stobcross, and been regarded as quite a fortunate officer.

Because a country youth working in the city went home every night and was, in the main, devoted to his native heath, it must not be supposed that he gave no heed to city affairs. Democracy had a mighty hold on Scottish young manhood in the seventies and eighties. The ten-pound householder was a Liberal, and though I wasn’t a ten-pound householder, I was a Liberal too, and took enough interest in statesmanship to help the party in the 1880 election, and to help myself to as much of the first-class oratory as was available before the polling.

The Reform Act of 1867 gave Glasgow three members, all representing the same constituency. But, by one of the machinations devised by old-fashioned politicians, who loved not democracy, the elector could only vote for two. In a way, I suppose, this was a device for obtaining proportional representation; by very good luck it might win the minority something more. The party which believed itself to be the stronger—in those days anything more than two parties would have seemed an absurdity, if not a crime—would run three candidates, hoping to elect all. The weaker would run only two, hoping to elect at least one.

In 1880 the Glasgow Liberals were in a great majority, and put up three candidates: Dr. Charles Cameron, proprietor of the “Glasgow Daily Mail”; Mr. Charles Middleton, of Caldwell & Middleton, and Mr. George Anderson. All three were big men physically, and were collectively dubbed “Eighteen feet of Liberalism”. The Conservatives nominated two candidates. It was the Liberals’ business to distribute their votes scientifically. This could only be done by an efficient ward organization, which would know all the Liberal voters, and instruct them to vote in the right proportions for Cameron and Middleton, for Cameron and Anderson, and for Middleton and Anderson.

There was no rule against Caledonian Railway employees working according to their political consciences, in their own time; so that evenings found me, as the election approached, helping to work out the tally. The Liberal three were elected with very few votes separating each of them, and did their bit in enabling Lord Rosebery to win his bets—that he could count the Tory members among the Scottish sixty on one hand, and that they would all be able to drive into Palace Yard in the same cab.

Lord Rosebery, then a young, but rapidly rising peer, was on the platform at the meeting which Gladstone addressed in the old City Hall as an accompaniment to his most wonderful Midlothian campaign. I cannot add anything to the stock of public knowledge about a very great man, but may perhaps furnish an illustration of the proverbial attention of Mrs. Gladstone to her husband, and of a forgetfulness which kept him on the level of other spectacle-using persons.

Mrs. Gladstone who almost invariably accompanied her husband to his political meetings, sat next him while he was speaking with magnificent eloquence and vigour to a delighted audience, who were all standing, and were prevented from swaying dangerously by being roped off in squares, on the iniquitous support given by the Beaconsfield Government to the unspeakable Turk who had slaughtered offenseless Bulgarians, and should be cleared out of Europe, bag and baggage. The old gentleman—he was already seventy years of age—wished to read a quotation, and felt in an upper vest pocket for his spectacles. They weren’t there. He patted each vest pocket vigorously—no spectacles. Then he hunted for them, until Mrs. Gladstone quietly arose, and pulled them down from his forehead to his nose—and all was joy.

To how great an extent one may seem to belong, in the eyes of a generation which is losing the use of its legs on the King’s highway, to a period almost as remote as the Flood, may be judged from the fact that, as a matter of course, after the meeting, I walked the six miles to Thornliebank, the last train having gone before the meeting was over.

Ambition being neither extinguished nor satisfied in the agreeable associations of Stobcross, and Asia, as far as I knew, having yielded a blank, it was natural that one’s outlook should turn to the Western continent, where railways were then being built, we often heard, at a tremendous rate.

I wasn’t reckless enough to throw away a certainty for a chance of having my railroading confined to hitting the ties, and I never felt the imperious call to get back to the land. So, in the late summer of 1882, I answered an advertisement for clerks on the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada. The Grand Trunk, it became known to us later, was in one of those difficult situations from which it was scarcely ever free. Circumstances had compelled it to extend its territory by taking over other lines; but it scarcely appreciated the significance of the advent of a tremendous child among the giants—the Canadian Pacific Railway.

This strange circumscription of outlook seemed to be inherent in the management of the railway from London, which proceeded as though the railway business could support a Downing Street of its own, which gave to “colonial” enterprises, by a species of absent treatment, the superior direction of men who never saw what they fancied they were managing; and who imagined that the appearance in their chosen field of young, ambitious and capable rivals was an impertinent incompetence.

The C.P.R. in 1882 had reached Winnipeg, though the road round the north shore of Lake Superior did not connect with Port Arthur till 1885. Steel was laid beyond Regina. The general manager, Van Horne, had a unique genius for railway pioneering, and a driving power to which his employers had the sagacity to give a free hand. Somewhat similarly to what happened when the construction of the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific were in full swing, there was a great demand for all kinds of men who knew something of the railway business.

Van Horne immediately drew heavily on the Grand Trunk—in fact he drained it of a great deal of material that was in line for promotion. In those days an increase of five dollars a month was a powerful temptation to an aspiring subordinate in a freight or passenger department. The offer of an additional ten was an irresistible bait. The Grand Trunk general manager was Mr. Hickson; his assistant was William Wainwright. The general auditor was T. B. Hawson. The era of vice-presidents in charge of departments had not yet arrived. The Grand Trunk was not only directed from London, but its chief officers were sent direct from English railways. The three just named were from the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway.

As its name indicated, this was a purely provincial line. It has since developed into the Great Central, with its own fine terminal in London—Marylebone Station. Fifty years ago an officer on, say, the London and North Western, or the Great Northern, would have felt it beneath his dignity to accept a post on a “colonial” railway.

In England, at that time, the solemn importance that was attached by railway operators to their work could be gauged by the interminable extracts from Acts of Parliament about tolls, printed in big type, which adorned the walls of country stations, but which even those who had missed one train and were waiting for another never had the courage to read. Manifestations like this were possibly due to the necessity for fighting for recognition as an entirely respectable section of the business world which distinguished the earlier years of steam locomotion. Landowners regarded it as beneath their duty to their ancestry and posterity to ride in a vehicle which anybody might use for a financial consideration. When they deigned to use the railway they had their own coaches strapped to flat cars, and believed they were riding in state.

One alludes to the non-Canadian management of the old Grand Trunk, not as a criticism, but as a fact, which has had agreeable results for oneself. If, when the C.P.R. had carried its policy of abstracting men from the senior road, replacers had been sought from the bright Canadian youths who were then flocking to the United States, this tale might never have been told. But the old country management looked to the old countries for clerks, as they did for directors.

The Great Western, serving a considerable portion of Ontario beyond Hamilton, was taken over by the Grand Trunk in August, 1882. The acquisition extended the demand for clerical assistance, for the accounts of the two elements in the amalgamation were kept separately for longer than now seems to have been necessary. The audit department therefore required considerable augmentation.

Perhaps because my father was a treasurer, accounts had never been uncongenial to me. I could enjoy straightening out the mess that some unlucky book-keeper had made. I gravitated to the auditors’ brigade, and, on November 2, 1882, after a voyage on the Phoenician, which convinced me that marine transportation was not my long suit, I reported at the Grand Trunk head office, at Point St. Charles, Montreal, and began forty years of railroading such as can never be repeated in Canada. Then there was much land to be possessed. Now, there are certain deficits to be dissipated.