Читать книгу A Sporting Chance - William Humber - Страница 12

3 CANADA’S EARLY YEARS

MARSHALL “MAJOR” TAYLOR’S TRIP TO OTTAWA in the summer of 1902 seemed a lost cause. All of his equipment, including his bike, had been lost. Walking among his fellow cyclists prior to the afternoon’s races, however, he met a young Toronto amateur Willie Morton. Taylor was a professional rider so they would not be competing against each other.

“I’ve got a bit of a problem,” Taylor told the young Canadian. “My bike got lost in transit but it’s a lot like yours.”

“Why not try mine then. If it fits, you can use it after my race,” Morton volunteered. In true storybook fashion they each won their respective races.

Major Taylor was a rarity in those days, usually the lone Black athlete at a cycling event. There were only a few others. C.E. Marshall, a Black Canadian rider, competed in match races around the same time in British Columbia.

Taylor was an American, originally from Indianapolis, who later moved to Worcester, Massachusetts. Here, his professional success earned him enough money to afford a house in a better neighbourhood. Today Worcester’s pride in Taylor is shown by plans for a monument in his memory, but while he was alive his fellow citizens took up a fund-raising campaign to buy his house and encourage him to leave town.

A few years before his Ottawa adventure, Major Taylor had arrived at the World Championships in Montreal in 1899 as the favourite in the one-mile professional event. He’d recently set that distance’s world record. European promoters were already inviting him to compete across the ocean. He was featured in their premier cycling publications.

Taylor’s major rivals in the championship race were the Frenchman, Courbe d’Outrelon, and the renowned Butler Brothers, Tom and Nat, who along with another brother, Frank, were among the most feared competitors in North America. They ensured that the championship field had some of the world’s most accomplished cyclists.

Marshall “Major” Taylor, a pioneering Black American cyclist, found success and support in Canada at the turn of the century.

“Fast and furious they came around the last turn,” said the Montreal Gazette. “Within sight of the white line, the coloured rider crouched lower than ever over his mount and made a finish that would have caused the most sensational of them all to turn green with envy.”

Taylor was ecstatic. “I’ll never forget the thunderous applause that greeted me and the thrill when the band struck up the Star Spangled Banner. I felt more American at that moment than I had ever felt in America,” he said.

The irony of the last comment is obvious. It took a Canadian crowd to illuminate Taylor’s nationality and it was in that same city, 47 years later, where the integration of modern baseball would commence with Brooklyn’s signing of Jackie Robinson to play for the minor league Montreal Royals.

Nor did the Canadian connection end there.

The Butler brothers provided Taylor with his greatest challenges. Andrew Ritchie’s biography about Major Taylor (1988) portrays them generously, particularly the youngest brother, Tom. He describes Tom Butler as a Boston cyclist but the family was from Nova Scotia. While they may have been occasionally ruthless in working together to deny Taylor victory, they were generally fair-minded and accepted his right to compete in this mainstream competition. Had they objected to his presence, as white American athletes were doing at the same time in other sports, Taylor probably would have been barred.

Above, Tom Butler’s display of polite and gentlemanly behaviour to the Black American cyclist Major Taylor has been credited with helping maintain that sport’s integrated character at the turn of the century. Right, Nat Butler (c. 1846-1943) of Nova Scotia’s renowned bicycle racing family who did much to support open competition in one of the few integrated sports of the day. Both photographs courtesy of the Sports Heritage Centre of Nova Scotia.

Ritchie describes Tom Butler’s behaviour in the 1899 season as, “Polite and gentlemanly compared with the racism of many of Taylor’s 1898 opponents. The 1899 races were marked by much greater fairness and recognition of his [Taylor’s] right to compete.” Ritchie calls the Butler brothers, liberal east coast athletes, but like the spectators at the world championships that year and like Willie Morton a few years later, they shared a Canadian identity.

Major Taylor’s Canadian success confirmed his status as one of the greatest and earliest Black sports champions in an integrated sport. He later toured Europe and Australia drawing the same sensational reviews earned in Canada. He returned to America in 1904 on his way to the world’s championships in Europe. In San Francisco, however, he was refused entry at restaurants and hotels. Strangers walked up to him on the street and racially abused him. His white travelling companion and good friend, the Australian racer Don Walker, rather disgustedly said to Taylor, “So this is the America about which you have been boasting in Australia?” Taylor had no response.

Canadians might think that Major Taylor’s treatment by their countrymen reflected a national virtue superior to that of Americans. The full story however is not so comforting.

THE OTHER SIDE

There are few records of Black sports participation in the pre-Civil War era but this was generally true as well of white working-class Canadians who did not have the financial means or status to compete in many sporting pastimes. Nevertheless at the time of the Rebellion of 1837, Sir Francis Bond Head had described “Several waggons full of the Black population in Canada, a most powerful, athletic set of men, who of their own accord, and at their expense, had come over to the frontier briefly to beg, in the name of their race, that I would accord them the honour of forming the forlorn hope in the anticipated attack on Navy Island….”

This athleticism was no doubt a response to the kinds of manual labour available to recent Black settlers, but there are other references in pre-Confederation accounts of sporting connections. A local history of Bowmanville, east of Toronto, claims that the town’s barber in the 1840s “was a coloured man named Smith. He was tall, straight and muscular, something of a pugilist, and up to all kinds of circus performances. He was here, off an on till well up in the sixties.” In 1866, the Toronto Daily Leader newspaper condescendingly described a sleighing party involving the local Black population by noting, “…a large number of darkies were rejoicing…The ebonies were got up in great style…this most comical portion of the great human family.”

But it was by the water that the first significant Black sporting opportunities emerged. So much of the economic life of new communities like Toronto depended on lakes, rivers and oceans as sources of food, power or transportation. Water taxis plied the lakeshore, schooners delivered goods, fish were caught and recreation was available.

Eli Playter’s diary of life in early Toronto (then known as York) provides a small portrait of what life may have been like. On July 1, 1802, he writes, “…walk’d down on the bank met Mr. Dean & stop’d some laughfing at a little black boy in a small skift working to get ashore in a very awkward manner & some one waiting for the Boat on shore swearing at him & frittened him out of half his witts…”

The first organized rowing competitions in Canada date back at least to 1813 in Newfoundland and the 1830s in Halifax, before arriving in Toronto by 1839. The first major competition occurred in 1848. “On those two historic days,” said rowing historian Robert Hunter in 1933, “the waters of Toronto Bay fairly boiled in the wake of lumbering fours-with-keel, pairs, doubles and singles.” Physical supremacy and prizes varying from £7.10 to silver sculls provided motivation for those competing in what were derisively referred to as barges. Among the early stars was Richard Tinning whose wharf was at the foot of York Street. There were no distinctions between amateur and professional. Everyone competed for money and races were often interrupted by emergency calls to save nearby sailors in distress.

ROBERT BERRY: CONFEDERATION-ERA ROWER

For working-class citizens, a rowing competition was an extension of their daily work. In the first month after the birth of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867, members of the Toronto Rowing Club, the premier such organization in the country, passed a resolution “Precluding any coloured man to enter in any but the fisherman’s race at the upcoming regatta.” The club’s president, Angus Morrison, was both a Member of Parliament and a future Toronto mayor. Their actions were directed against a man many knew and had competed against. The “coloured” man was Robert Berry, a fisherman by trade who worked for the Ward family, after whom a Toronto island was named.

A letter writer identified only as “ JUSTICE” commented in the August 9, 1867, Globe, “Your correspondent would like to enquire…why such an order has passed in a Canadian club, where justice and freedom is claimed for all men. If the coloured man is so made inferior to all other classes of men, why should our generous Club admit one of the humblest of the people in the fisherman’s race, and allow him at a former regatta to take some of the principle prizes. And if such a frivolous distinction has been forced on the coloured citizens simply on account of the colour, it should meet with the strongest disapproval by all logical men.”

The Globe agreed with the letter writer and said, “The Regatta Club has acted unjustly, illiberally, and illogically. If coloured men are not fit to run all the races they are not fit for the fisherman’s race. This is the first instance within our memory of a stigma being attached in Canada to the colour of a man’s skin in an open and public manner. No injustice of that sort would be tolerated in England. It is an importation of one of the least excusable Yankee prejudices.”

Another writer of August 13, 1867, and identified simply as “A Voice From the Bush” in the County of Simcoe (and possibly a Black resident for whom the “bush” often described lands such as the Queen’s Bush in Wellington County which were part of the Crown reserves and therefore not open to titled ownership) wrote, “It was with feelings of astonishment and indignation, that I learned by your paper of yesterday, that the Toronto Regatta Club had prohibited coloured people from competing in their races. I am a loyal man, and endeavour to instill loyalty in others. But loyalty, Sir, implies not simply devotion to our Queen, but attachment to the constitution, to the laws, and to the force of moral feeling which prevails in our country. Now, Sir, I contend that the constitution, the monarch, the laws, and the people of Britain frown upon this miserable distinction of colour—a distinction which is nothing less than an insult to our Creator.

“I lament that in the capital of the Province of Canada, and in the midst of all the light which extended education and science throws on our days, such an outrage on the fair fame of England should have been perpetrated. I look upon this war of colour as a vile Republican prejudice, imported from our neighbours…

“Let me remind them that one of the greatest men of whom England could ever boast, Dr. Samuel Johnson, appointed his servant Francis Barber, formerly a slave in Jamaica, to be his residuary legatee, a position which no British nobleman would have objected to hold…

“God grant we may have no repetition of doings so unseemly and anti-British.”

Robert Berry was one of the first significant Black athletes in Canada in an era in which records are sketchy. He was a friend of the Tinning boys, the Ward family and later Ned Hanlan, the greatest Canadian athlete of the 19th century. One year before Confederation, Berry combined with J. Durnan, son of the lighthouse keeper, and W. Montgomery to row their boat Silver Arrow to victory and a prize of $30 at the annual regatta of the Toronto Rowing Club.

This club, formed in 1856 with clubhouse and rowing quarters at Tinning’s Wharf, was captained by E.G. O’Brien. Over time separate prizes were provided to the gentlemen amateurs of the club. Fishermen were assumed to have an unfair advantage because their occupation contributed to their prowess. Such logic was eventually used to rationalize the establishment of the amateur movement. Although elitist in character, that movement was not explicitly racist.

This lithograph, A Sculling Match—Toronto Harbour, circa 1870s, captures the atmosphere in which Bob Berry competed, The rower may, perhaps, even be somewhere in the scene.

Robert Berry competed against the leading rowers of his day including Richard Tinning’s son, Richard, who once cajoled Berry into practising starts all morning before a race in Lachine, Quebec, and then easily beat him in the afternoon. On another occasion John Scholes, who ran the Athlete Hotel on Yonge Street, outraced Berry over a three-mile course near the northern elevator on Toronto Bay. According to Hunter, “Mr. Scholes at the start of the race proceeded to induce Mr. Berry into an argument which reached such heights of passion that Berry was left mumbling to himself.” Berry practised with the great Ned Hanlan himself though their age difference made a challenge unlikely by the time Hanlan was world champion.

In 1867 Berry was permitted to compete only in the fisherman’s race. He lost. His crew “that has distinguished itself in previous years, was poorly handled, and under proper management should have taken the race,” the Globe reported.

A WATERFRONT HERO

In 1872 Henry O’Brien, son of the Toronto Rowing Club’s first captain, established the Argonaut Rowing Club. It became the new elite organization dedicated to making rowing an amateur sport, one that excluded professional fishermen like Berry.

The next generation of rowers like Ned Hanlan found supporters among Toronto’s gambling fraternity. There would be no new “Bob Berry” because the international rowing realm in which Hanlan now moved was virtually all white.

There was at least one moment of honour left for Berry. On December 7, 1868, a heavy gale and snowstorm wrecked the schooner Jane Ann Marsh near the Toronto Island. Stripping to their underwear and setting out in a small skiff while the storm still raged, Berry and William Ward struggled to reach the floundering ship. Three times their own boat capsized and the careening skiff gashed Berry’s head.