Читать книгу Candid Chronicles: Leaves from the Note Book of a Canadian Journalist - Hector Willoughby Charlesworth - Страница 8

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In The Man of Property, John Galsworthy, drawing a picture of the massive Swithin Forsyte, speaks of "the unnumbered generations of his yeoman ancestry"; and such was the condition of my grandfather Solomon Charlesworth, who came to Port Hope in the year 1830 when it was still known as Smith's Creek (or Crick, to give it the neighbourhood pronunciation). Like himself his ancestors had been yeoman farmers in the vicinity of Hatfield, Yorkshire, since Saxon times; and my grandfather had through family tradition imbibed a great deal of sound knowledge that is now taught as agricultural science. Hatfield is a name which conveys little of historic or geographical significance to anyone, but it is one of the few places that are named in the most ancient maps of England; and the suffix "field" signifies that at some time an important battle, probably between Danes and Saxons, was fought there. I ran across a reference to it in a delightful archæological volume, Annals of a Yorkshire Parish, in which it was named as one of the villages conferred by a Plantagenet King on the Earls of Warren for loyal services. Charlesworth, a purely Saxon name, is rare enough in Canada now, and was extremely so when I was a boy; but there were plenty of people of that name in the vicinity of Hatfield a century ago.

Solomon, my grandfather, was the eldest of eleven sons, four of whom came to Upper Canada and took up large allotments of land in various parts of the colony. As I look back it is plain that among them, with the seven brothers who stayed at home, there must have been a considerable accumulation of capital; for the four who journeyed across the Atlantic built substantial homes, and had ample means to clear and stock their farms. In looking over the history of settlement in Ontario it is plain that during the period between 1825 and 1850 this country enjoyed the finest accretion in the form of British immigration, backed by capital sufficient to carry on systematic development, that has ever fallen to its lot. If one traces the family history of many of the public men of the last generation, one finds that their forbears were men of this class. The movement which brought so many solid men to Upper Canada was not haphazard. The vision of Canada as the granary of the Empire is much older than many people of the present century imagine, and was conceived long before the wheat-producing possibilities of the great North West were known. It was a direct result of the difficulties England had experienced in obtaining adequate food supplies during the Napoleonic wars, and the increase of population which ensued after Waterloo emphasized the problem. More than one hundred years ago the statesman and economist William Huskisson, who became Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1827, pointed out that the Empire could be made self-supporting in the matter of corn supplies through the development of the agricultural possibilities of Canada. It was preached as a patriotic duty to the squirearchy and yeomanry of the British Isles, and it was, I assume, this sane Imperialistic movement, as well as the fact that it was necessary for some members of a family embracing eleven brothers to scatter, that brought my grandfather to Canada. He was born in 1804, and died in 1878, when I was but six years old. I remember him as a vigorous bearded man with piercing eyes, and a very tender heart; for tears would come into his eyes at any casual hurt to myself or my younger brother and sister. I learned afterward that he was a man of very impassioned temperament. Upon one occasion, in a rage, he had accidentally killed his favourite horse. He was obliged at all times to keep himself under very stern control. He brought with him from Yorkshire many of the stern ideas of old-fashioned British parenthood; thus, my father as a little lad was obliged to stand up at meals in order to keep his back straight, like the unfortunate youngsters in that lugubrious juvenile classic, The Fairchild Family! Though none of his people had been Quakers, but on the contrary staunch Church of England folk, he used "thee" and "thou" in intimate intercourse in the Continental fashion, which I take to have been a survival of ancient Saxon and Danish usages in lonely Yorkshire parishes.

My father used to read Tennyson's North Country Farmer with constant delight because the character who reveals himself therein reminded him so much of his sire; not that my grandfather used the difficult dialect in which Tennyson wrote the poem, but that those views on life were so characteristic of him—scorn for neighbours "who never mended a fence", and the like. Though nominally a devout Christian he was a pagan in his inherent belief in what I may term the "personality" of his land. To the end of his days he despised, more than anything else on earth, a "bad farmer", whose fields and fences were shabby and whose stock was poor and ill-fed. He was a strong believer in the land's need of rest, just as a human being needs a rest, and always at least one of his large fields was in "summer fallow", plowed and tended and freed of weeds, but left idle to drink in refreshment from the sun and rain. Another of his theories was that it was a crime to sell straw. All straw must go back to the land in the form of fertilizer; it was "owed" to the land as he put it; and if he had lived to their time he would have deeply scorned the "wheat miners" of the prairies, whose aim it is to get all that can be gotten out of the land as quickly as possible and give nothing back.

The first house he built lay east of Port Hope, Ontario, on the old "base line" which ran between that town and Cobourg, and it commanded a view of the harbour and its lighthouse. It was there that my father, Horatio George Charlesworth, was born in 1847. My grandfather's knowledge of soils taught him that a little north of Port Hope there was clay suitable for brick, and in addition to farming he established an industry which provided the materials out of which many of the older houses and stores in that quaint and charming town were built, though the earliest are of limestone. Subsequently, about 1855, he acquired five hundred acres of bush land about five miles north of the town on either side of the gravel road which runs from Port Hope to Millbrook and Peterborough. Clearing bush land on which there is a large accumulation of dead leaves is like buying a pig in a poke. A considerable part of his location turned out to be gravel, and would be of immense value were it located near a big city to-day, but was useless except for road-making in his time; but he bethought himself to make this tract profitable by importing Leicester sheep, which thrive on gravel land. Broken patches too stony for tillage he stocked with Durham cattle. In primordial times the glaciers had been all too prodigal in dumping boulders about, and many of the fields were fenced with stone walls, laboriously put together in those days when labour was cheap, and when a large farm was a small community.

If one stands on Ward's Hill, Port Hope, on the old roadway that used to run back of Trinity College School, one may see straight away to the north, across four miles of beautiful rolling country, the gables of the farmstead my grandfather completed in 1859, set down among ten acres of apple orchard. In blossoming time, when the apple trees, the giant lilac bushes, and the locust or acacia trees were in bloom, the sight and scents were thrilling in their loveliness. I have memories of summer nights when the singing in the chapel of Trinity College School could be heard across four miles of valley, and when as the moon rose the whippoorwill would respond with plaintive cries.

A beautiful farmstead indeed, but, after labour-saving machinery did away with the need of much farm labour, desperately lonely for the women folk. I had an aunt, my father's sister, who made the garden a dreamland of flowers, but who literally died of loneliness in the home she loved too much to leave; for the old house lay half a mile away from the main-travelled road; and the nearest highway, an old line road dividing the township of Hope in Durham county from the township of Hamilton in Northumberland county, though visible, was seldom used.

My grandmother, born Mary Pullen, was also a Hatfield girl, and one of several sisters. She had become affianced to my grandfather before he left Yorkshire, and in 1832, when his house on the "base line" was ready for her reception, she came out with her stock of linens and married him. Some of her sisters followed and married in this country; and one became the mother of my second cousin, the late James Elliott, of Montreal, for many years General Manager of the Molson's Bank of Canada. My grandmother was a tall active woman who loved life. She also loved her dairy, but beyond that indulged in few of the strenuous labours of the pioneer farmer's wife. Her sharp tongue always reminded me of that of Mrs. Poyser in George Eliot's novel Adam Bede, but she was fairly well educated for a woman of her period, when feminine education was regarded as a superfluity. She was a staunch Tory, and every day read the Mail after it was established in 1872 (the year of my birth), from the first column to the last. My parents used to laugh when they went to see her because she would allude to many events in Toronto which had escaped their casual perusal. She was a confirmed reader of newspapers and periodicals and her attic was full of old copies of Godey's The Lady's Book, Harper's Weekly, and the Rural New Yorker. It was a delightful place in which to while away a rainy day. There as a little boy, I learned all about the iniquities of the "Tweed Ring" in New York through the cartoons of Thomas Nast.

Her love of reading and of news she no doubt owed to a favourite grandfather of hers, a certain William Moat, a noted schoolmaster, whose house still stands in Hatfield and was visited by a relative of mine since the war. From his name I take it that he was not a Yorkshire man originally, but a Caithness man,—and the Caithness men are not really Scotsmen at all, but are of Scandinavian origin. At any rate he was a "character", a joyous person who had his special chair in every public house in the district. He would come home singing, and give his little grand-daughter a penny for pulling off his boots; and sometimes he would take her to Doncaster Fair, then as now a great event in Yorkshire. The most interesting fact my grandmother told me of her childhood days was how the news of the triumph of Wellington over Napoleon at Waterloo reached Hatfield. Readers of The Dynasts, and other works by Thomas Hardy, will recall allusions to the measures adopted to rouse England in case of the landing of the dreaded "Boney" and his troops—a catastrophe long feared. Faggots were piled on every hill top, to be lighted in case of a landing, so that within an hour after a landing the news to rise and arm would be conveyed from south to north, from east to west. When Napoleon was conquered there was no further use for these, and on the night when news of Wellington's victory reached Yorkshire the faggots on the hill-tops were lighted for purposes of rejoicing, not alarm. My grandmother well remembered the dancing and drinking and rejoicing and the beacons of victory flaming on every hill top.

My father got his classical name, Horatio, from an uncle, a favourite brother of my grandmother, who settled in Elmira, in western New York, and became a noted free-thinker and speaker in the days when Robert Ingersoll, whom he knew very well, was carrying on his campaign against orthodoxy. I saw Horatio Pullen once, a charming man of distinguished bearing and a great flow of conversation; but I think he was regarded rather as a family skeleton because heterodoxy was much more seriously regarded forty years ago than it is to-day. Yet his name had no baneful influence on the nephew who bore it, for he remained a staunch churchman who to the end of his days, recited the Athanasian creed with the more fervour, because I, his elder son, was inclined to laugh at its obscurantism from the time I began to think for myself.

The higher education in Port Hope, as in most Upper Canadian towns in my father's youth, largely consisted in reading at a Latin school. This was conducted by one John Gordon. Boys were taught first to cipher accurately, to speak grammatically, and to write clearly; but Latin was the main thing. My father by the age of sixteen had gone up as far as Sallust, the Roman historian, who no longer figures in curricula. John Gordon used to knock Latin into his pupils in the good old-fashioned way with a liberal use of the rod. At this school my father knew as boyhood friends Col. Harry Ward, who represented Durham in the House of Commons for a long period, and afterwards went on the bench; Seth Smith, a noted lawyer and descendant of the fur-trader John Smith, who founded the settlement; Charles Seymour, and other noted men of the midland counties. His favourite among all the group was Lt.-Col. Arthur Williams, M.P., member for Durham, and who died in command of the Midland Battalion in the North West Rebellion of 1885. Lt.-Col. Williams's statue, with drawn sword, the best work of the sculptor, Hamilton McCarthy, stands in the old market square of the town.

Of all my father's school chums the most interesting was Volney Vallencourt Ashford, born on an adjoining farm on the "base line". In the excitements of the American Civil War, Volney Ashford, whose name indicates romantic leanings in his mother, ran away to the South and fought in Mosby's guerilla cavalry, which refused to surrender after Lee had signed the peace. Afterward he made his way to the Sandwich Islands, and in later manhood obtained an ascendancy over the late King Kalakua. In the late eighties he was almost dictator of Hawaii as Commander of the Forces, and his younger brother, Clarence W. Ashford, who had studied law, was Attorney General. After King Kalakua's death, Ashford was suspected of trying to take personal possession of the Sandwich Islands, by some scheme like the abortive plan which forms a part of the action of Richard Walton Tully's famous drama The Bird of Paradise. At the behest of the United States Government the two Ashfords were deported to California; and intervention finally resulted in the annexation of the Islands, a step to which the Ashfords were strongly opposed. Volney died in California, but Clarence Ashford in later years was permitted to return to Honolulu. In 1912 my brother, L. C. Charlesworth, of Edmonton, was strolling about the streets of Honolulu when he saw the sign of "Clarence W. Ashford, Attorney-at-Law". He made his way upstairs to a dingy law office and saw an old gentleman sitting at his desk, to whom he gave his name. "From Durham county, Canada?" the lawyer asked. "I am Horatio Charlesworth's son," said my brother, and with that Mr. Ashford gave a shout, "Aloha" (the Hawaiian greeting), that could be heard a block away. It turned out strangely enough that he too had a son who, having left the Islands, had settled in the Edmonton district.

Despite the fact that Volney Ashford never resided in Canada after he left Port Hope during the American Civil War, he kept up a fairly continuous correspondence with my father. I met him on one of his visits home after an absence of a quarter of a century—a short thick-set man with an immense military moustache, and the bearing of a buccaneer. My father told me that as a boy he would "sooner fight than eat". When he went back to Honolulu he sent me a complete unused set of all the postage stamps that had been issued by the government of the Sandwich Islands up to 1888, to augment my collection. When I was eighteen stamp collecting seemed a childish pursuit to me, and I sold my album for $10. I was told by an expert philatelist the other day that if the set contained a 2-cent blue of a certain issue (which it probably did) I had thrown away riches, for that particular stamp is worth $12,000 at the current catalogue price.

Another treasure sent us in 1889 by Ashford, which would to-day have much value for collectors, was a copy of the Honolulu Gazette, containing the original text of Robert Louis Stevenson's open letter to Rev. Dr. Hyde, of Honolulu, in defence of Father Damien, the sainted missionary to the leper settlement of Molokai. It is perhaps the finest and most powerful piece of prose that Stevenson ever penned, but Stevenson in 1889 was not the famous figure that he has since become. I do not think that Col. Ashford was interested in the literary eminence of the author, but as a government official he knew the value and sacrificial character of Damien's work among the lepers; and he shared the general contempt which at that time prevailed in the South Seas for missionaries of the comfort-loving type. I well remember my father reading aloud to the family the ringing and mordant sentences in which Stevenson contrasted the luxury and ease in which Dr. Hyde lived at Honolulu with the conditions under which Father Damien served the lepers. None of us had the slightest conception of the value that copy of the Honolulu Gazette would ultimately possess for Stevenson collectors; but it was preserved for more than ten years. Ultimately, as so many precious souvenirs do, it fell a victim to the custom of spring house-cleaning.

In many respects Volney Vallencourt Ashford was the most interesting man that Durham county ever produced, not excepting the late Sir Sam Hughes—a man whom he in temperament much resembled—and it is regrettable that he failed to write his memoirs before he died.

Among other boys of the old days in Port Hope was a certain venturesome youth who in the days when Blondin, the high wire walker, was an international sensation, set about to emulate him. Those who knew the quaint old town are aware that its business centre lies in a valley between hills through which Smith's Creek, now called the Ganaraska River, meanders.

This lad strung a wire between two buildings on either side of the stream, and in the presence of hundreds of assembled farmers and townsmen repeated Blondin's feat. Subsequently he took an Italian name, Signor Farini, and joined Dan Rice's circus. He later travelled with the circuses of P. T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh, saved his money, and in old age was a man of substantial means. A year or so after my father's death in 1910, I was in a Toronto hotel, and a fine-looking, dapper stranger, hearing the clerk address me by name, accosted me and asked me if I were a relative of H. G. Charlesworth. On being told that I was his son, he asked whether I had ever heard him mention Signor Farini, the wire walker, and revealed his identity with that once famous being. His real name was William Hunt. He gave the suggestion of a retired manufacturer rather than of one who had thrilled thousands in many parts of the world by his feats "under the big top".

I have alluded to the unsettling effect of the American Civil War on Canadian youths of the early sixties; but indeed the whole period from 1850 to 1870 was one of many changes and excitements in Upper Canada. In the mid-fifties the construction of the Grand Trunk Railway from Montreal to Sarnia gradually revolutionized transportation, which up to that time had been based on those traditional conveyances, ships and wagons. It brought in its train much land speculation, inflation of values, bank failures, and new avenues for trade. In assisting my friend, Victor Ross, in the preparation of that vast work The History of the Canadian Bank of Commerce which, under Sir Edmund Walker's initiative, became in reality a history of Canadian finance, I had occasion to look into the social and economic changes brought about by the coming of the railways; and the period was assuredly a stimulating one for growing boys. When the long political turmoil in the United States found its climax in civil war, Canada became a natural source of supplies, and farmers and merchants made profits they had never dreamed of as possible. Though in 1866 the markets of the United States were closed to them by the denunciation of the Reciprocity Treaty, the accumulations of that period of inflation lasted well into the black days of the seventies.

It had been my grandfather's wish that my father should take a University course and enter the medical profession. He had already educated and sent to Oxford the youngest of the seven brothers he had left at home, a youth who entered the Church and married well. By the irony of things the two brothers, separated by an ocean and more than twenty years in time, never set eyes on each other after the parting in 1830. It was a bitter disappointment to my grandfather then, when his own younger son, child of his middle age, refused to enter a profession; but the pressure of the times was all against study for an ambitious lad. The boy elected to go into business; and it is a reflection of the conditions of the time that he first started with an uncle who had become a ship's chandler in Port Hope. To-day to open a ship's chandlery in any lake town would seem like establishing a snake ranch in Ireland; but my father could remember when the old harbour was at times a forest of masts. The carrying trade of the region of the great lakes was long monopolized by sailing vessels; and there were wild times in all lake ports when the sailors were ashore. Along the shore, not only of Lake Ontario but of Lake Erie, are several decayed towns which were important trade centres sixty years ago.

Ultimately (in 1870) my father went to Hamilton, which, as the chief distributing centre for the rich settlements of the Niagara peninsula and what is now Western Ontario, was a great trading point, at which many commercial fortunes were founded. He had entered the firm of John Garrett & Co., long one of the leading shoe-manufacturing concerns of Upper Canada, or Canada West, as it was still called by older residents, though Ontario had become the official name. Though the railways were increasing in mileage, much of the business was still carried on by salesmen travelling with horse and buggy, and deliveries were made by wagon. The hotels in cross-roads settlements kept stables of horses which the travellers hired, as relays. With horse and buggy my father between 1870 and 1872 "grid-ironed" most of Western Ontario. An expert horseman from childhood, a long distance drive he made in 1871 was celebrated among the travelling brotherhood. He was at Walkerton in Bruce county on a Friday night, and conceived a desire to spend Sunday with my mother, to whom he was then affianced. The nearest railway point at which he could take a train to Hamilton was Guelph, ninety miles away by road. Selecting a fine team of horses, he started at four in the morning from Walkerton, and by judiciously resting his horses during the day and superintending their grooming and feeding, arrived in Guelph in time to catch a train for Hamilton at 8 p.m. It represented in all about ten hours of actual driving. Ninety miles in ten hours with a single team over the roads of fifty odd years ago was good travelling; and he left his beasts in such fine condition that after a Sunday's rest at Guelph he found them in form to resume the road.

My father was indeed a type of whom the old adage held: "Give a Yorkshireman a halter and he will find a horse." When he was a boy his father gave him a horse that seemed to be a "crock". He nursed it back to health and sleekness and in a year or so by clever trading—horse trading was a popular sport among the country lads of those days—he had a team of fast roadsters with buggy and harness, all developed from the original "crock". He told me many good yarns about the horse-trading fairs of the midland counties in the sixties. Once he drove to a fair (at Millbrook, I think) and traded horses sixteen times in the course of the day. Returning in the darkness he stopped at a toll-gate on the "gravel road". Another youth drove up alongside, and by the light of the toll keeper's lantern his turn-out looked a tidy one. He offered a trade "unsight unseen". The offer was accepted, and the lads changed from one rig to the other. My father was very sleepy, and waking up from a doze was astonished to find his new acquisition standing patiently at the gate leading to his home. When he got to the barn he found that horse and rig were identically the same as those with which he had started out in the morning.

In truth, though he spent over forty of the sixty-three years of his life in business, my father was never happy except when he was farming, making two blades grow where one grew before, and breeding all kinds of fancy stock, Jersey cattle, of which he was one of the pioneer importers, roadster horses, cocker spaniels, rare poultry; and his hobbies left him continually "hard up". His agricultural enthusiasm made his life one of slavery, though no doubt he was happy in his bondage to growing things. In Toronto, as the city grew, he was constantly moving to spots on the outskirts where he could have space for gardening and at one time in his life, when financial reverses forced him to live in a very small home in a thickly populated street, he literally farmed a 20 × 20 back yard and made the roof of the woodshed a bower of bloom. He died happy in the possession of a large garden at Toronto and a farm at Port Hope stocked with his favourite Jerseys. One day in the late autumn of 1910, he slaved all afternoon planting hundreds of bulbs of the lovely pheasant-eye narcissus; and coming in exhausted said: "I shall not live to see them bloom." He was apparently in normal health, but in February he was taken, the victim of an obscure malignant malady, undoubtedly intensified by a lifetime of overwork—voluntary overwork born of his intoxicating love for growing things. He never neglected business, though he never had much luck therein; but his inborn passion, a heritage of 'unnumbered generations of his yeoman ancestry', robbed him of all his leisure and, finally, of his life.