Читать книгу Call Me True - Eleanor Darke - Страница 11

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WORKING FOR PERKINS BULL

1931–1938

In late 1931, True was hired by William Perkins Bull to collect a library of Canadiana which he wished to give as a wedding present to his son whose home was going to be in England. About 400 first editions were desired, together with the autographs of the authors, of the illustrators, of the editors and of the subjects of biographies.¹ True’s work on this project must have impressed Bull because he then appointed her his Chief of Staff, in charge of all the personnel, male and female, engaged in researching and producing his histories of Peel County. Bull’s original intention had been to produce one 50-60 page book on the subject, but the project soon grew into an obsession. He hired scores of researchers and interviewers and began production of a remarkable series of books that Augustus Bridle of The Toronto Daily Star described as “a delightful hodgepodge of history and biography written with the guile of an ancient mariner.” Topics ranged from the history of sports to military undertakings to the Orange Order to the life of Sitting Bull. He hired some of the best artists in the country to illustrate them.² True was quoted as assuring the reporter that “if it sounds as though we were going far afield, let me assure you that is only because of ramifications made by early Peel settlers and their affairs.”³ In another article she was quoted as asserting that she “considers Mr. Bull’s undertaking the most important piece of historical research ever undertaken in Canada, and...only a wealthy and extremely public-spirited man could do it.”⁴

It was certainly a big project. The same article stated that “Miss Davidson is in charge of practically all details of the work. Her staff consists normally of 20 but has run up to 70. A tremendous amount of research work has to be done: looking thro [sic] private files, letters, newspapers, libraries and by personal interview. Everything is traced to prove its authenticity.”⁵ The books were produced in limited quantities and most were given to libraries and museums. In 1938, True told a Regina reporter that “three out of the 20 central staff members are working on old family histories of Peel people. These sketches occupy 32 large steel files and include the complete record of every 25 acres in Peel from the original crown grant. Four of the staff members are stenographers; two are filing clerks, and three are artists. Indexing, proof reading, summarizing newspaper articles of ancient date, all this is part of the undertaking.”⁶ Several sources have cast doubt on how much of the writing of these books was actually done by Bull, or whether he acted more as an editor, using the very comprehensive writings of his research staff and of True Davidson. None of the books credits anyone other than Bull by name, a decision for which many criticized him later. True, however, knew that her work would not be acknowledged by anything other than a paycheque. As an article written at the time noted “...while Miss Davidson’s name will not appear in these works, and will be forgotten when the books are remembered and prized, there is no doubt but that her work, in them, will remain.”⁷ The same article noted that “Miss Davidson is largely responsible for the compilation of the material, and naturally, while Mr. Bull himself is the authority, he must depend on someone who has a background of historical research, knows something of apt illustration, of binding, and all the other details which follow the gathering of the material itself.”⁸ True was realist enough to recognize that the employment opportunities for writers, researchers and illustrators during the Depression were too few for any of them to be able to insist upon written acknowledgment as well.

True began working for William Perkins Bull in 1931 and rose to be second-in-command of his extensive staff of researchers, writers and illustrators. True later said of him that he was “a robber baron in the wrong age...but I grew very fond of him.” Courtesy the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library

The paycheque had to suffice, but there is also some doubt about how regularly it arrived. Doris Tucker remembers True telling her about a time when she had to march into a large dinner party that Bull was having and demand that he pay “the girls” so they could go home for Christmas. “She never said an awful lot about how he behaved, just about him not paying the girls and I just wondered if at the time whether she got paid.” Harry Evans, who came to know True while she lived in Streetsville, remembered his mother saying that “ [True] hated Perkins Bull because he didn’t pay her ...”⁹ His older brother, Garfield Evans, wrote to me that:

“I can remember one of the men talking about being questioned by this woman. Quite a discussion followed. It seems a lot of them had been questioned. ... [Many years later while staying with his brother] he handed me a book and I nearly fell over. “Peel’s Fighting Men” by some big wheel that had a master farm and piles of money named “Bull.” It was True Davidson that did all the work. She did the whole thing, interviews, pictures, before and after and it must have been a hell of a job. Now get this. He never paid her! The big stuffed shirt got away with it.¹⁰

However, in later interviews, True always spoke well of Perkins Bull. “He was a very shrewd man, a good businessman. He paid me a proper screw [a good salary] and this was during the Depression when people were working for nominal sums.”¹¹ She was likely all the more grateful for being given a position of such responsibility at a time when there was considerable public pressure to force women to return to the home and leave the jobs for the unemployed men. True described Bull as “a robber baron in the wrong age...but I grew very fond of him.”¹² I doubt that she would have been so generous in her comments if he had cheated her consistently. The book mentioned by Garfield Evans came out after True had left Bull’s employ, while he was under newspaper attack and gossip prompted by the death of his guest, an American heiress, Mabelle Horlick Sidley. Mrs. Sidley had been a major financial contributor to Bull’s historical projects. One newspaper interview of the time quoted Bull defending the money (estimated at $1-1.5 million) Mrs. Sidley had spent by saying that “it was spent among friends and in works in which she was enormously interested...She followed this work closely and took great delight in its progress....It was spent in harmony with the way in which her father and her mother and her brother...lavished their cash and gifts...on things in which they were interested and which appealed to them as being worthy.”¹³

Perkins Bull is another name about which there have been rumours of a romantic attachment on True’s part. Charlotte Maher told me that “... if you wanted to be romantic you might almost think there was something going on there [with Bull], you might almost have thought there was.” Clara Thomas doubted this, however. “True wasn’t that interested....I pity the man who made a real pass at her including Perkins Bull. He would have met his match.” Certainly Bull respected her abilities. In a letter sent to a friend in Regina he called her “my right hand man” and asked that “Should it be convenient to give her a friendly handshake on my account, I will appreciate it. Such of the folk of Regina who happen to meet her will, I think, find her a young lady of parts and attainments.”¹⁴

True doubtless enjoyed working with yet another strong, dominant man, one who had experienced an exciting life and who was devoting himself to a project which she highly valued. She said of him “Mind you, he was a tartar. But so was Fred Gardiner. You know, in a way W.P. and Fred Gardiner were quite a bit alike. Both of them were big heavy set men and both of them were pretty domineering. I’m pretty domineering myself and I used to fight with W.P. in his day just as I fought with Fred in the one year I was on Metro Council with him.”¹⁵ True always loved a good fight and had a grudging respect for those who fought her best. Bull was married, a devoted parent who wrote to his children weekly, and the same age as her father. If True felt any romantic attraction towards him, she was unlikely to have acknowledged it to herself—or to him. Additionally, whatever she may have felt for him, his style of life was very different from that which she had been raised to respect.

Descended from a prosperous pioneering family which had produced several clergymen and successful farmers, William Perkins Bull was born in 1870, the eldest son of Bartholomew Bull and Sarah Duncan Bull of Brampton. Lucy Booth Martyn says of them that they “owned the largest herd of Jersey cattle in the world—it was considered amusing for local residents to tell innocent outsiders that they got their milk from Bulls!”¹⁶

Bull was described as a “big man, with a distinctive curly beard at a time when beards were unusual.¹⁷ Another article wrote that “by the 1930s, he had grown to look remarkably like the former king, Edward VII. He was over 6 feet tall, heavily built, magnificently bewhiskered and often wore a black cutaway suit with a black satin waistcoat. He was, to say the least, a commanding figure.”¹⁸ He had enjoyed an adventurous career, engaging in Arctic explorations, trips with surveying parties in the western provinces and with inspectors of Indian reserves.¹⁹ It is stated that “from his earliest days as a student, Bull had vowed that one day he would be rich and famous and by the time he was 30 he was both. He had a brief and rather inauspicious career as a lawyer in Toronto. By 1910, through his unaccountable talent for making money and a somewhat flamboyant way of investing it, he had acquired a 25,000 acre plantation in Cuba and, shortly afterwards, launched a 50,000-acre development scheme in western Canada.”²⁰ He also became founder and director of Ingram and Bell, founder and president of the Okanagan Lumber Company of British Columbia, founder, director and treasurer of Mississauga Lumber Company and president of Sterling Oil Company of Ohio.²¹

He owned three enormous homes: one in Cuba, another in Toronto at 3 Meredith Crescent in Rosedale and a third in London, England. During World War I he had financed and operated the Perkins Bull Hospital for Canadian soldiers in a large house across the street from his London home.²² He was famous for the liberality of his hospitality, entertaining the families of the wounded officers in his home on several occasions, and was known in the highest circles of London society during the war years. The newspapers even claimed that he had been a personal friend of King George V.²³

Bull did the majority of his writing in the dining room of his Toronto house, Lorne Hall, while True worked in its library, which he called the “Book Room.” Martyn described the house as having “replicas of bulls... everywhere...The large mat outside the front door...had a bull pictured on it, while statuettes of bulls in china, glass and bronze stood on tables and mantels, and pictures of bulls hung on the walls....the platter in the dining room of Lorne Hall showed a magnificent bull. Even the blue end papers of the Peel County histories carried a large bull, as did William’s stationery... These numerous bulls were all well-endowed and provided much conversation, frequently ribald.”²⁴

Bull had wanted fame as well as wealth and, if fame is measured in column-inches of newspaper copy, he achieved that goal too. During one of his many trips across the Atlantic to Britain, he met Colonel William Horlick, who had become a multimillionaire from the sales of his patented “Horlick’s Malted Milk.” Bull soon became a close friend of the Colonel’s daughter, Mabelle Horlick Sidley, and acted as her lawyer when she sought a divorce from her husband, Dr. John Streeter Sidley. This case was long and nasty. At one point Dr. Sidley sued Mr. Bull and his wife, alleging injury to health through shadowing and harassment from detectives. Then, the federal narcotics squad raided Mr. Bull’s and Mrs. Sidley’s apartments on suspicion that they were dealing in drugs or some other illegal activity. Nothing was found and both were given a formal apology. The police in tapping their telephones had misinterpreted the codes and signals they were using in connection with her divorce action. Bull was quoted at the time as saying, “They are great wire tappers down there, I am not losing any sleep over the matter.”²⁵ Mrs. Sidley eventually obtained her divorce. Her husband died five years later.

Then, Bull was involved in a traffic accident near Quincy, Michigan, and although considered in serious condition, insisted upon being taken to Canada for treatment. This led to yet more pages of newspaper speculation, including suggestions that he had been in flight from Al Capone and his gang, a story which Bull always denied.

Bull had a talent for getting newspaper coverage, even when not involved in court cases. While True Davidson was in Regina, researching a book about Sitting Bull for him, the newspapers reported that Bull had told an audience “that the United States was founded by Communists and criminals.” The same article quoted True as admitting “that it was startling, but...Mr. Bull was known for his disturbing way of backing such statements by historical facts...”²⁶ The historical basis later given for this statement was the fact that Britain had sent convicts to the United States before the prison colonies were established in Australia and that the Puritans were Communists because “they held property in common and shared the proceeds of their labour” during their first years of settlement.²⁷ True also was to become famous for her use of effective “quotable quotes” when dealing with the media. Did she learn the art from Perkins Bull?

During her seven years with Bull, True continued to write and submit short stories and articles for magazines. She joined and became an active member of the C.C.F., working mainly in the educational branch, writing and assisting with courses. Among the material she wrote for them was an article, “Our Canadian Heritage,” a play, “Out of This Nettle” on which she wrote the note, “performed at various C.C.F. meetings throughout Toronto and elsewhere. Could be altered by susbstitution of socialist or reform for C.C.F.”²⁸