The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (24 page)

Settled Canada owed a debt to the English. With the French and the Scots they had founded and formed the Canadian nation. In Ontario, where British soldiers had twice saved the country from the Americans, theirs was the dominant bloodline. Schoolchildren memorized the names of all the British monarchs, and all the English heroes from Hereward the Wake to Cecil Rhodes. Indeed, as much English history as Canadian – perhaps more – was taught in the schools, while American history was ignored. The Union Jack formed the frontispiece of more than one elementary reader, with the accompanying Imperial slogan, “One flag, one fleet, one throne.” Every map proudly showed the world bespattered with Imperial red.

What had gone wrong? Why didn’t the English who arrived in Canada live up to their Kiplingesque billing? Surely they were not,
could
not be, typical! The general feeling in Canada was that somehow the country was getting the wrong
kind
of Englishman, that somewhere in that land of neat hedgerows and country lanes there existed a different breed: stalwart yeomen, the very backbone of Empire. Was there an English plot to jettison the ne’er-do-well younger sons of the gentry, the lazy, snobbish aristocrats, and the unreliable clerks and office workers by shipping them off to Canada?

Worse yet, was Canada being used as a wastebin for convicts and paupers, the offscourings of the London slums? Suspicion deepened in 1905 when charitable societies in Britain began to pay passage to Canada for an increasing number of English while others were subsidized by public funds under the Unemployed Workmen’s Act of that year. In one case, it was revealed, the master at a workhouse received twelve shillings for every inmate he sent to Canada. By 1908, when 70
per cent of all deportations from Canada turned out to be British, the government enacted an order-in-council refusing entry to anyone whose way had been paid by a charitable organization it had not officially approved.

The belief that Great Britain was dumping her undesirables in Canada is inherent in J.S. Woodsworth’s book
Strangers within Our Gates
. Woodsworth told the story of an English magistrate reprimanding a youthful criminal: “’You have broken your mother’s heart, you have brought down your father’s gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. You are a disgrace to your country. Why don’t you go to Canada?’“ “England,” Woodsworth declared, “has sent us largely the failures of the cities.”

In his book, the same man who was to occupy the pinnacle of the pantheon of socialist saints showed a harsh pragmatism: “We sympathize with these poor people, but we are glad the Canadian government is taking steps to prevent the ‘dumping’ of these unfortunates in Canada.” He was equally firm in his opposition to the emigration of Dr. Barnardo’s destitute children. “Children from such surroundings with
inherited tendencies to evil
[my italics] are a very doubtful acquisition to Canada.”

But it was not the slum dwellers who couldn’t adjust to life in Canada. It was the middle and upper classes who, Woodsworth believed, stubbornly refused to adapt to Canadian conditions and suffered from “a certain arrogant superiority and exclusiveness.” The English were seen as snobs who criticized everything in the West because it wasn’t like the Old Country. In 1905, the London
Standard’s
reporter, H.R. Whates, covering the immigration boom, was bluntly told: “The Englishman is too cocksure; he is too conceited, he thinks he knows everything and he won’t try to learn our ways.” Almost every English writer who visited the West during that period found the same thing. The Scots, and to a lesser extent the Irish and Welsh, were welcome. The English were not. Basil Stewart’s advice, arrived at after he worked on the railway, was that prospective immigrants should keep their opinions to themselves, never tender advice unless asked, and try to show a willingness to learn.

But the English – or some of them – did not find it easy. Seduced by the roseate literature of the steamship companies and the immigration agents, they expected too much of Canada. English girls were told they could get wages of twenty dollars a month as domestic servants. Clerks were told they could get good positions in stores and factories.
Prospective labourers were enticed with tales of forty-dollar-a-month wages on Western farms at all seasons. None of these promises held much water. As a result, many English men and women were disillusioned and openly scornful of their adopted country.

They felt themselves entitled to better treatment; after all, they had been brought up that way. Every newspaper, every book, every hour of schooling had drilled it into them: the English were superior, the colonists were inferior. These people brought the English class system with them, or tried to. Reporters who visited the Barr tent town in Saskatoon were taken aback to discover that even under those conditions the English had separated themselves into distinctive groups based on class.

Everybody had talked of the need for assimilation and the ease with which the English could melt into the Canadian ethnic landscape. Now it dawned on Canadians that the Englishman was no more assimilable than the Galician, perhaps even less so, given his native stubbornness and his general air of superiority. This should have come as no surprise, since for all of the Victorian era English colonists from Kenya to Kashmir had refused to conform to local customs and to learn local idioms, preferring instead to create a little bit of Old England, walled off from native contamination in the jungles, velds, and coral strands of Empire. In short, they
weren’t
all that different from Kipling’s empire builders who had worn wing collars in the South Pacific and kept clear of the natives in Poona and Shanghai. Now the Canadians were being treated as wogs and fuzzy-wuzzies, and they didn’t like it.

It was only natural that they should retaliate by scoffing at the Englishman, turning him into a comic figure. The “green Englishman,” the remittance man, the aristocratic snob, caricatured and satirized from Montreal to Calgary (by Arthur Racey, the cartoonist of the
Montreal Star
, for instance, or Bob Edwards in the Calgary
Eye Opener
) contributed to the stereotype. There was some truth in it. In Britain, paperback manuals, endorsed by colonial outfitters who had an interest in selling outlandish gear to emigrants, pictured Canada as a foreign nation full of wild animals and wilder Indians; some emigrants fell for it and arrived armed to the teeth, to the amusement of the natives. Other would-be farmers contributed to the folklore of the country with incredible gaffes.

“Some Englishmen who come out are terribly green,” one homesteader wrote home in 1907. “Did I tell you the story about one living not far from us who thought that bran was very good food for cattle, so he bought three bags of it and SOWED it in the ground; he also SOWED three bags of oatmeal, so as to grow his own porridge. This is not romance, for it actually happened.”

In spite of this calumny there is strong reason to believe that the stereotype of the immigrant Englishman as a snob and a greenhorn was highly exaggerated, in much the same way that the stereotype of the Galician as a dirty, lazy subhuman bore little relation to reality. Between the two census years of 1901 and 1911, more than 150,000 English immigrants made their homes in the West. The largest number settled in Manitoba, where the anti-English feeling was strongest. Could it be that, in Canadian eyes, their crime was the same as that of the Galicians and Doukhobors? Like them, the English resisted the pressure to assimilate, to conform, to become “real Canadians.” For they too were strangers; they too were “different”: they dressed funny and they talked funny and, like so many others who came to the West in those years, they refused to reject the roots of the culture in which they had been nurtured. The extremists among them clung desperately to the old ways; the wonder is that so many others adapted themselves to the new.

2
Remittance men

In the summer of 1905, two young Welshmen, Evan Davies and David James, newly arrived in Canada, were strolling down the main street of Winnipeg, disconsolate because they could find no work, when they fell into conversation with a young Englishman. His name was Jack Ball. He was just twenty-four, tall and thin, fair of complexion, and wearing, of all things, a pince-nez. The eyeglasses made him stand out in the crowd, made him seem a little more distinguished. “I swear that only an Englishman would dare emigrate in such a thing,” is the way Evan Davies put it.

They were glad to know him, for on board the boat the other English had tended to treat the Welshmen as foreigners. Ball was well educated and likeable. In London, he’d been a civil servant. Fed up with the sedentary life, he’d emigrated to Canada two years before, had worked on a farm at Estevan, and had now decided to homestead for himself. After he’d explained to his two new friends the method of obtaining free land, the trio decided to throw in their lot together.

Off they went to Saskatoon, endured the crush at the counter of the land office and, with the amiable Jack Ball’s initiative, found a teamster to take them to their homestead – a stony patch of prairie so unlike the green and hilly country they had imagined before leaving Wales. They were the first settlers in the township, and the loneliness, “so grim, so terrifying,” brought the three together. They built their sod house, fought prairie fires, broke turf to the plough. Evan Davies’s young brother joined them, and all four became close friends as well as partners.

Yet there was a gap between the three Welshmen and Jack Ball that had nothing to do with racial differences. “We had one thing against him – he was a
remittance man.
” In his memoirs, Davies italicized the epithet as he might had Jack Ball been a homosexual or a convicted felon. “He regularly received money from his mother. She sent it to him in a parcel, which usually included books … and a ball of wool. That was all. The ball of wool was the important item, for inside the wool Jack invariably found a fiver. It is difficult to explain why we should have held this gift against him. I suppose we felt that, because of it, he was not obliged to struggle for his living as we were. The anxiety, which bred a determination to see it through, was one stage removed from him by comparison with the rest of us. In spite of his amiable qualities, we never quite felt he was one of us.”

The interesting thing about this account is that Jack Ball wasn’t really a remittance man. He did not –
could
not – live on the pittance his mother sent him. Moreover, unlike the stereotyped remittance man, he was a worker, not a wastrel. Yet so strong was the feeling against the English remittance man in the Canadian West that even this young farmer, receiving an occasional fiver from the Old Country, could not escape the stigma. There were many like him.

The remittance man is part of the enduring mythology of the Canadian West, a kind of human artifact, as significant as the Red River cart or the sod house. There were remittance men in most British colonies at the century’s turn – the name was coined in Australia – but in Canada, more than in any other country, the spectacle of the English black sheep eking out the final days of each month with borrowed funds until his remittance arrives from home forms part of the folklore of every committed Westerner.

He was a figure of fun and also of scorn, in the words of the
Manitoba Free Press
“a useless incumbrance [
sic
] to the country not to be mentioned in the same class with the average Galician or Doukhobour, whom he no doubt regards as inconceivably inferior.…”

The remittance men gravitated naturally to the ranching country of Alberta. “Ranching” had a glamorous upper-class ring; “farming” did not. Here the remittance men could be seen in the lounges and bars of the hotels, clad in riding breeches and Norfolk jackets and wearing round, soft felt hats with enormous brims. These were the superfluous sons of well-to-do English families who, in the words of an English reporter, had “neither the capacity nor the will to make for themselves acceptable careers in the Old Country.”