The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (20 page)

Farther along the crowded ship’s rail, young Robert Holtby felt a lump in his throat as he too realized that he and his family were bidding goodbye to Leeds and that, in all probability, he would not see his school friends again. The thought was too much for him; he could not bear the spectacle, and so turned away and made his way down to one of the holds. When dinner came, the food was so awful he forgot one misery and replaced it with another.

The
Lake Manitoba
was a reconverted troopship from the South African war. According to the British Board of Trade, it was supposed to carry seven hundred passengers, but there were close to two thousand crowded on board. The steerage passengers were divided into sections, each with its own cook: single men in one hold, married couples in others. The more affluent travelled in second-class cabins. There was no first class.

Paul Sylvester Hordern, the thirteen-year-old son of a drygoods merchant from Coalville, Leicestershire, scrambled about with his father looking for their bunks. They finally found themselves in the forward hold with seven hundred others. At first sight, as they made their way downward, the setting seemed shipshape, the walls painted gleaming white. Only later, when the big waves hit and the whitewash peeled off the walls, revealing a layer of manure, did the Horderns realize this had been a cavalry ship.

The holds, dark, smoky, and fetid, had two or three tiers of bunks. A second-class passenger, Stanley Rackham, a younger brother of the famous English illustrator Arthur Rackham, visited one of the holds to locate his vast array of luggage – he was travelling with 350 pounds – and thanked his Maker he didn’t have to spend much time below. Rackham had crossed the Atlantic before on an earlier trip to Canada. What would it be like, he thought, when the weather grew rough and the people crammed into these bunks grew seasick? He shuddered to think of it and decided never to go below again.

Almost everybody
was
seasick. Paul Hordern was overcome so suddenly in his upper bunk that he didn’t have time to shout a warning below. Fortunately somebody across the way shouted, “Duck!” and the man below jumped aside, reproaching Hordern.

“Why the devil didn’t you holler?” he asked.

“How can I with my mouth full?” Hordern replied. There was a six-inch layer of sawdust below his bed to handle such emergencies.

Robert Holtby was so sick he wished somebody would come along and pitch him overboard. When, after a few days, he recovered enough to swallow solid food, he found he could not face eating in the hold, with its smell of soup, potatoes, and sour sawdust and with a foot and a half of bilge water slopping back and forth. He shovelled some food into a plate and went up on deck where he found a hundred people like himself, sniffing the salt air and trying to balance their plates on their knees. And here, when the weather was fine, they could hear the strains of a portable organ and youthful voices piping familiar hymns.
Choirboys?
A close approximation, certainly. For here was Miss
Laura Sisley, a banker’s daughter from London, and her charges, a dozen underprivileged boys from the church club she ran in the inner city. She had come into a small fortune on her father’s death and was using the funds to bring them all out to the new land, where she hoped to settle them together in their own community near the Barr reserve.

Miss Sisley’s organ was a welcome diversion from the sombre side of shipboard life. For now, during this voyage, the disillusionment with Barr began. He was the least diplomatic of men, and by the time the ship reached Saint John he had managed to antagonize a good percentage of the passengers, especially those in steerage. One of these, Harry Pick, may have been exaggerating when he wrote that “it speaks well for British love of law and order to record that only eleven fights, seven incipient mutinies, three riots and twenty-two violent interviews with Barr … occurred during the voyage”; nonetheless, it was a stormy passage.

Much of it was Barr’s own fault. He had painted the rosiest possible picture; now, faced with reality, his flock turned on him. He did not mix with the passengers as Lloyd did but kept to himself in his cabin. Lloyd gave regular lectures on Canada, complete with question and answer sessions. In his dealings with scores of complaints from passengers he was tactful, clear, and forthright. More and more, as the voyage progressed, they turned to him as their natural leader. It was Lloyd that most of them had seen in London, not Barr. The latter seemed to have an aversion to contact with strangers.

They made an odd pair, the squat, heavy-set Barr and the reed-thin Lloyd with his cadaverous features and his long side-whiskers. Lloyd was leaving England forever. With his wife and five children he would make his home in the new colony that would one day bear his name.

When Barr did meet with the colonists he often lost his temper. Once, in a fury, he fled to the bridge and threatened to turn a firehose on the malcontents. No sea voyage in those days was a pleasant experience, but this vessel was so badly overcrowded that whole groups of families were squeezed together below decks, with little privacy. There were far more passengers than the lifeboats could accommodate, and there was not nearly enough fresh water. The colonists were forced to get along on partially distilled salt water, so brackish it ruined the tea.

The food in steerage was dreadful; but then it always was-the British colonists probably fared better than the Galicians. The difference was that they were not used to it. The potatoes were rotten, the
meat tough, the cutlery dirty. There was no butter and no bread, only ship’s biscuit. In Ivan Crossley’s words, “We didn’t die but we damned near starved to death.” Crossley and his Irish comrades sat at a long table in steerage; when the steward arrived with a basket of hard-boiled eggs he would roll them down the table, the diners grabbing at them as they whirled by.

Many of the stewards who had signed on for the voyage quit before the ship sailed when they heard the
Lake Manitoba
was carrying immigrants. Barr was forced to hire replacements from among the passengers, but not before some ugly scenes occurred. Lloyd was called to one dining room to settle a fracas between a group of Boer War veterans and a covey of stewards. One of the ex-soldiers had thrown a pot of jam at a diminutive red-faced waiter, and the two were spoiling for a fight.

“Sure, I threw the jam tin at him,” the veteran barked.…

“What, a little fellow like that?” said Lloyd mildly. “You might at least help him to scrape the jam off.”

Without further ado, the soldier complied and the two shook hands.

Barr was the kind of man who always ran from trouble. Driven half crazy by passenger complaints, he shut himself up in his cabin and refused to see anybody. Ivan Crossley and a group of friends went to his cabin and demanded that he come to the dining room to see how bad the food was. Barr agreed, and that night in the hold he stood up on a wooden box and tried to explain that he was doing his best to improve both the meals and the conditions aboard ship. At that point somebody threw a ship’s biscuit at him. It was three inches thick and the size of a saucer, and it hit Barr squarely on the nose, knocking him from his box and touching off a mêlée. When the ship’s crew finally rescued the hot-tempered clergyman, he retired to his cabin for the rest of the voyage, crying out that his charges were nothing but a bunch of savages.

The Sunday service conducted by Lloyd on April 5, when the ship was twelve hundred miles out of England, provided a contrast to the hurly-burly of the dining rooms. William Hutchison, a twenty-seven-year-old colonist from Southey Green, near Sheffield, thought it the most interesting and impressive service he had ever attended. It was held in one of the holds, with the men sitting on their cots or leaning on the rails of the bunks, smoking their pipes and listening as three violinists accompanied the hymns. Looking about him, Hutchison could not help observing the incongruousness of the surroundings: the
gun cases, coats and hats, kit bags hung on nails, boxes, trunks, bundles of rugs and bedding strewn about – an improbable setting for an impromptu evensong.

Few of these men were farmers, in spite of what Barr had told the Canadian government. But then one of Barr’s problems was that he was inclined to tell people what they wanted to hear. That flaw lay behind the hyperbole in his pamphlets and the rosy interviews he continued to give to the press. Those few colonists with farming experience were surrounded by a knot of men eager to learn the fundamentals of agriculture. As one remembered: “Very few had the remotest conception of what conditions actually were or what difficulties would have to be overcome, but trusted blindly to our leader and all his promises.…”

During the voyage Barr urged his people to pick out their homesteads, sight unseen, from a large map. It would, he said, save time and confusion, and besides, the terrain was so uniform it didn’t matter where they settled: every quarter-section was like every other one. This was a bald lie. When one man, a stonemason, asked for a homestead with “enough rocks on it to build a house,” Barr cheerfully agreed. “I’ve got just the thing for you,” he said, marking out a quarter-section on the map. But Barr had earlier told Lloyd that “not a stone would be found in the new colony that was bigger than a walnut,” a remark that Lloyd had reason, later, to curse.

The
Lake Manitoba
reached Saint John harbour on April 10, 1903. To the passengers’ dismay, it could not dock, for this was Good Friday, a sacrosanct holy day. That was not Barr’s fault; he had made it clear that the delay in sailing was the Beaver Line’s doing.

Now a group got together and raised a purse of three hundred dollars to buy Lloyd a buggy and two ponies, but for Barr there was no gift. The passengers’ tempers flared when it was learned that Barr had had eight thousand loaves of bread baked and intended to sell them at double the going price. “The old rogue is trying to make some money out of us,” Robert Holtby wrote in his diary.

On Saturday the distraught immigrants found they faced days of waiting while customs officers inspected a mountain of luggage. And what luggage! Few had conceived of a country where vans and lorries did not shuttle back and forth between communities. Barr had promised a transport service; Barr’s lambs took him at his word and brought their worldly goods to Canada; one colonist brought a ton of baggage. There were at least half a dozen pianos, heaps of furniture, cases of
books. There were bathtubs, jewellery, banjos, bicycles, gramophones, sewing machines. There were vast wardrobes of clothes, including formal wear. There were parrots and canaries in cages, and, these immigrants being English, well over a hundred dogs, all tied up on the afterdeck and howling to be exercised.

At this juncture, Barr vanished; he simply couldn’t take the responsibility. Lloyd went directly to the
CPR
, which was as eager as anyone to get the trains moving, and managed to have the customs inspection waived. The ship docked at 5 a.m. on Easter Sunday. At nine the first of four trains left for the West.

It was not possible to sort out the luggage. Piles of boxes and trunks jammed the freight shed to the point where the owners could not squeeze between them. Everything was trundled onto the baggage cars to be identified later at Saskatoon; that included the blankets the passengers had brought. A pile of blankets purchased for sale by the Stores Syndicate, however, was on the dock. Lloyd proceeded to dole these out to his shivering charges, keeping a careful record of those distributed. Just before the last train left, at midnight, Barr turned up, apparently drunk, and got into a screaming altercation with his partner, implying that Lloyd was stealing the blankets. He even tried to sell some at four dollars apiece but in his fuddled state had difficulty counting the money. Ivan Crossley watched in amusement as Barr tried ineffectually to make change. When Barr gave him back two dollars too much, Crossley returned it. “You’re the first honest man I’ve seen in the community,” Barr told him. Typically, Barr did not travel with his charges but left for Saskatoon on the regular
CPR
train.

The two Horderns, father and son, refused to buy Barr’s bread and stocked up instead at local grocery stores, having learned that food was difficult to get aboard the trains. They bought cheese, beans, and canned goods, which they ate cold because the one small stove on each of the crowded colonist cars was in constant use by women brewing tea. The train swayed so badly one night that young Paul, in the top bunk, was thrown directly across the passageway onto two sleeping colonists.

“Where did you come from?” one asked.

“Leicester,” said Paul Hordern sleepily.

For once the newspapers, whose reporters greeted the trains at every major stop, had no reservations about the new arrivals. The Americans, still burning with the idealism of the revolution, might make a virtue of welcoming the huddled masses and downtrodden of Europe,
but Canadians preferred their own kind. The
Ottawa Citizen
, so vicious in its condemnation of the Galicians and Doukhobors, was delighted that everyone spoke English. The
Globe
found them “a splendid class,” the
Winnipeg Tribune
“a fine looking lot, above the average.” To the
Manitoba Free Press
they were “strong, manly, clean, well dressed, intelligent.” The Toronto
News
pulled out all stops in describing the women of the party: “Rosy-cheeked English farmers’ help, sinewy and graceful, and with a glitter of gaiety and intelligence about their eyes, they filed through into the platform yard, to carry with them into the unknown West the destiny of a nation. The hands that rock the West’s cradle will be strong enough to rule the world of Canada in a few years.”

Sifton’s people, determined that there should be no further bad publicity as a result of Barr’s dereliction, watched over them like shepherds. In Winnipeg the party was astonished to discover that the immigration offices had been kept open all night to greet them and that Obed Smith was actually at work at four in the morning when one section pulled in. Here, two hundred bachelors left the trains to seek work.