Category Archives: Archival

The Holts’ house on Grande Allée, Quebec City, probably decorated for the royal visit in 1939.

John Holt and Helen McIlwraith Holt

Written for the archivists of Weston Corporate Archives and of the Archives et bibliothèque nationales du Québec, and with special thanks to André Lamontagne
May 2022

PHOTO ABOVE: The Holts’ house on Grande Allée, Quebec City, probably decorated for the royal visit in 1939.

As the Ukrainian crisis unfolded in 2022, the news reported on historic mansions around London owned by Russian oligarchs. One of these was the Victorian Athlone House, formerly Caen Wood House, located on Hampstead Lane in Highgate. In my research on the McIlwraiths, I had come across this building before. In 1912, John Holt of the Holt-Renfrew store at Quebec City and his wife Helen (Nellie) née McIlwraith were on a tour of Europe, using stopovers in Paris and London to cultivate their contacts in the garment and fur industries. At the time of their visit to Hampstead Lane, Caen Wood House was occupied by Thomas Frame Thomson and his family, and the Holts enjoyed tea and a walk through the grounds. The afternoon in these beautiful surroundings, “among the finest I’ve been in” as Helen confirmed in her travel diary, was a welcome respite from the recent terrible news of the sinking of the Titanic that had the Holts frantically buried in newspapers for days on end.

Born and educated in Scotland, Thomson was acclaimed for his role in developing South American, particularly Argentinian, transport facilities. Nellie does not expand on the connections between her family and Thomson, but there are at least two possible ones. Early in his career, he served as Resident Engineer of the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire Railway, and at a later stage one of many posts included that of Chairman of the Otis Steel Company in Cleveland, Ohio. The McIlwraiths came from Ayrshire and carefully nurtured their links with family and friends throughout Scotland. Indeed, rather than meeting in Canada, John and Helen appear to have fallen in love at an exhibition in Glasgow where his firm was showing furs and she was enjoying an extended visit with family. And in a second potential link, a group of businessmen from Painesville, Ohio, who were instrumental in founding the steel industry in Hamilton, included Will Child. His son Philip and Nellie’s nephew T.F. McIlwraith became friends at Hamilton’s Highfield School in the years before the outbreak of WWI, and a few years after the war T.F. married Will Child’s niece Beulah Gillet Knox. Sadly, the sinking of the Titanic was not the only catastrophe that the Holts came to associate with their visit in Europe: Thomson had only one more year to live when the Holts visited Caen Wood; at 46, he accidentally shot himself while extracting cartridges from a sporting gun.

One of the surprises of archival work is the way in which even individuals who in their own time were quite prominent can practically vanish from record, and although the Holt-Renfrew store remains a well-known institution in Canada, the Holts are a good example. Her nephew’s wartime letters indicate that Nellie generously shared her wealth with family members who needed support, but overall the Holts’ presence in the family papers is relatively slight. It includes several travel diaries, among them Nellie’s journal recording the trip to Europe during which they visited Caen Wood House. Two years earlier they had journeyed from San Francisco to Hawai’i, Japan, and China before taking the trans-Siberian express through Russia. They were a devoted and stylish couple, and their glamour was such that at Monaco, John was mistaken for the American financier J.P. Morgan, not to mention a Russian prince who temporarily made off with Holt’s dress trousers during a switch in hotel rooms. In contrast to his business partner George Richard Renfrew, John Holt – who died in 1915, not long after the trip to Europe – does not have his own entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, but the Weston Corporate Archives and the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec were able to provide obituaries documenting the couple’s busy involvement in local charities, sports events, and civic celebrations. More recently, interest in Quebec’s patrimoine, including its tourism industry, has somewhat filled in the picture: members of the Facebook group Et si la ville de Québec nous était contée have posted vintage photographs of the Holt Zoo that existed from 1901 to 1932 near Montmorency Falls, and Gaétan Bélanger has published a book on the zoo (2020).

One of my favourite recollections as a researcher concerns a visit in the dead of winter to the Grand séminaire du Québec, with icy winds howling in from the St. Lawrence. I was working on my first book, Canadian Travellers in Europe, 1851-1900 (1987), and the archivist brought out diary after diary of travelling priests (who were often also pioneering scientists) for me to look at. Every so often, however, an item in the séminaire’s card catalogue had her produce a hand-wringing “Oui, nous l’avons – mais où?” In trying to reconstruct the lives of some of the individuals in Writing the Empire, I more than once sympathized with her exclamation.

 

The Holts’ house on Grande Allée, Quebec City, probably decorated for the royal visit in 1939.

With thanks to Professor T.F. McIlwraith for making the photo available.

Bella Coola Hereditary Chief Lawrence Pootlass (Nuximlayc)

Bella Coola and After

Written for University of Toronto Archives and Records Management System
Eva-Marie Kröller and John Barker

A photo of Hereditary Chief Lawrence Pootlass (Nuximlayc)

Eva-Marie Kröller

Bella Coola Hereditary Chief Lawrence Pootlass (Nuximlayc)

Hereditary Chief Lawrence Pootlass (Nuximlayc). Photographer: Connie Brian. Estate of Mary (McIlwraith) Brian.

Among the illustrations I collected for Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853-1948 was a collage of photos. They had been taken at the potlatch held in Bella Coola just before the publication, in 1992, of the second edition of T.F. McIlwraith’s The Bella Coola Indians (UTP), originally published in 1948. I came to know these images very well because the sheet containing them was so large that it had to sit on top of the files and so displayed the photos every time I opened the box.  The image that gradually occupied me the most was a snapshot of hereditary chief Lawrence Pootlass (Nuximlayc) holding the two volumes of the 1948 edition, tattered and patched from frequent use. He was addressing his community, McIlwraith’s family, and editor John Barker, all of whom had been invited to honour T.F.’s memory and “his work among [the Nuxalk] nearly seventy years earlier.” Endorsements from Pootlass also preface both the second edition of The Bella Coola Indians and the collection, edited by Barker and Douglas Cole, of McIlwraith’s field letters (2003). As several reviewers have insisted, including Jacinda Mack (Nusqumata), McIlwraith’s hosts were his research partners who – according to Radio Nuxalk inviting listeners to share their thoughts about the anthropologist earlier this summer – endeavoured to “teach and prepare McIlwraith for the knowledge he was allowed to save for future generations.” An audio book, Ya Wa Smsmalh Ts (Our Good Stories), was also presented on Radio Nuxalk, including readings from The Bella Coola Indians. The scene echoes the evenings on which McIlwraith’s research partner Jim Pollard had his granddaughter read to him from the book when it first appeared. Together with Nuxalk hospitality and appreciation, the photo of Lawrence Pootlass encapsulates his community’s self-confidence and pride.

As I worked through the letters documenting T.F. McIlwraith’s adolescence, army days, and studies at Cambridge, the meaning of “education” became increasingly complex.  The months he spent at Bella Coola introduced a sharp break from the entitled imperialism informing his early upbringing, a development that speaks to the careful teaching he received from the Nuxalk and his readiness to receive it. A second break reinforced the first. The manuscript of McIlwraith’s research on the Nuxalk was completed in 1927 but censorship and other reasons discussed by Barker and Barnett Richling delayed publication until 1948. The intervening years brought the rise of fascism and the Second World War and confronted McIlwraith with the consequences of the racial theories that underpinned his anthropological studies at Cambridge. Some of these ideas linger in his book, left essentially in its 1927 version, and he had much more to learn, but he was alerted for good to the disastrous and global consequences of racism. At a symposium, organized with C.T. Loram from Yale University and opened three days after the Second World War began, Indigenous delegates expressed their thanks for the invitation and assured their “white brothers” that they intended to return the favour for any gathering they might themselves call in the future, “for the purpose of finding solutions to the white man’s dilemma in a social and economic order that has, during the past decade, gone on the rocks.”

Like his teacher A.C. Haddon in his book with Julian S. Huxley (1935), McIlwraith began to combat racism in the public wherever he found it, whether it be the disrespectful treatment of Indigenous veterans or the prejudicial depiction of history in historical pageants and fiction.  Thus he angrily informed the author Mabel Burkholder that her views of Native people in the Hamilton region were altogether wrong, and he requested that the post-war organizers of the Brébeuf pageant at Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario demonstrate respect in their depiction of the Iroquois.

Jacinda Mack (Nusqumata) has called McIlwraith’s research an “important instrument of reclamation.” In vivid illustration of “books have their fates,” The Bella Coola Indians and the field letters describing its genesis are not only foundational and collective research but have become part of a living culture.

 

On Authorship of The Bella Coola Indians

John Barker

In the summer of 1990, I was approached by a Vancouver dealer in antiquarian books. He had learned of my interest in TF McIlwraith and was able to offer me The Bella Coola Indians for $900. I was sorely tempted, but the price was way beyond my paltry assistant professor salary. Yet the event lit a fuse. I had been using one of the two copies of the work at the UBC Library. Both were in wretched shape: whole sections had been cut out and replaced with pasted-in photocopies. I was troubled that such a significant work, having narrowly escaped the claws of Ottawa censors in the first place, appeared to be destined for the Rare Books room, available only to the most determined researchers. So, I initiated a campaign to save it, enlisting a score or so of academics to bombard the University of Toronto Press with letters in support of reprinting or creating a new edition of the BCI. After the Press expressed wary interest, I made arrangements to visit Bella Coola. A new publication of the BCI and theform it might take hinged on the approval of the Nuxalk Nation.

At the time, I knew Bella Coola only from McIlwraith’s unpublished letters and Harlan Smith’s photographs. It was much changed, of course, but I recognized several landmarks and was thrilled to be there. I soon learned that several families had treasured copies of the BCI secreted in their houses. A battered set, held by Chief Pootlass in the photograph above, was stored in the Band safe. I was curious to learn what people remembered about McIlwraith’s visits. It turned out they recalled very little. Instead, the elders wanted to talk about Jim Pollard, Captain Schooner and other elders who had contributed so much to the BCI. My hosts arranged a meeting of Nuxalk elders. Conversing in the Nuxalk language, they enthusiastically approved the project. I then asked my next make or break question: did they want a reprint or a new edition? McIlwraith had a poor grasp of Nuxalk, translating material instead from the simpler Chinook Jargon. Further, in the long journey of the manuscript, he had re-edited most of the stories several times, in some cases translating long passages into Latin and then back into English. It was their call, but I knew that editing the work would probably sink the project. They insisted on a reprint. “These are the words of our grandparents,” they said. “They must be respected.”

I write this story to point to a common but significant ambiguity in anthropological publications. All ethnographies are collaborative, born out of conversations, the results effectively multi-authored. Yet they typically appear as the single-authored work of the anthropologist. The Nuxalk elders appreciated the work McIlwraith carried out, but they were absolutely clear about who the authors of the BCI were. I was impressed by their firmness and clarity, which inspired the opening sentence of my Introduction to the reprint: “Ethnographies begin as conversations between anthropologists and their hosts…if you listen closely, you almost hear the voices.” This seemed commonsensical, so it came as a surprise when the reviews came out and my words were praised and/or criticized as laying a “postcolonial” framework on a classic work.

It is obvious from his fieldwork letters, that McIlwraith was perfectly aware of, indeed reveled in, a rewarding collaboration with his Nuxalk friends and adopted family. A shift happens in his extended correspondence with his tormentors at the National Museum in which he describes the BCI as an objective “scientific” work. He makes clear in the painful final pages of the BCI that he expected the Nuxalk culture, if not the people, to be “blotted out” by “White civilization” and made no effort to return. I wonder if he knew of the 42 sets purchased by Nuxalk from the Kopas general store in the late 1940s at the then steep price of $30, an early act of repatriation. I expect he would have been delighted to know that the reclaimed work became a vital resource in the revitalization of Nuxalk traditions, alongside the vibrant memory culture maintained by the elders. Watching his son, Tom, decorated and dancing at the Pootlass-Brown potlatch in 1992, I felt the smiling presence of his father.

In one of the less friendly reviews of my Introduction, I was criticized for writing so little about McIlwraith’s family background. This deficient has now been addressed by Eva-Marie Kröller’s brilliant Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853-1948. The entertaining liveliness of McIlwraith’s letters and the fluency of his analysis of Nuxalk spirituality and social organization did not arise sui generis; they too were multi-authored.

 

Dresden 1913

Written for the Verkehrsmuseum, Dresden
Eva-Marie Kröller

She would “give worlds to be [back in Dresden,] absolute worlds,” Eileen Plunket wrote to her friend Beulah Knox in December 1913 after both of them had left the exclusive girls’ boarding school of the Misses von Gruber on Eisenstuckstrasse in Dresden. Beulah, future wife of the anthropologist T.F. McIlwraith, travelled throughout Europe during 1913 and 1914 with the family of her cousin, T.F.’s best friend Philip Child. The Childs spent extended periods in Dresden and Lausanne to enable the “children” to improve their knowledge of German and French, and they also studied Spanish to be prepared for their tour of Spain. In Dresden especially, Beulah was exposed to the city’s vibrant mix of tradition and modernity before the First World War.

Despite her longing for the companionship at the Pensionat after she had left it, Eileen did her best to be as objectionable a student as she could possibly manage while she was there. Her cousin Doris Blackwood, somewhat better behaved, also attended. Both were the granddaughters of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, former governor-general of Canada. Eileen’s father, William Plunket, had served as Governor of New Zealand from 1904 to 1910, and the interest of the NZ press in the family’s activities remained strong even after they had left: much information on Eileen’s family may be located through NZ’s Papers Past collection.  The same is true for the life of Doris Blackwood, who accompanied Ronald Munro Ferguson, 1st Viscount Novar, and his wife Helen (Doris’s aunt) to Australia when he was appointed Governor General in 1914. When war broke out, Doris was trapped in Australia for the duration, and the Australian Press – as collected in the Trove database – faithfully followed her every move whether it was in the war effort or as social butterfly.

Eileen and Doris also counted the satirist and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan among their ancestors, and  – as Andrew Gailey relates in The Lost Imperialist: Lord Dufferin, Memory and Mythmaking in an Age of Celebrity (2015) – his influence is said to have created a tradition of bad language especially among the family’s women, including Eileen. Once the war got underway, she described her German fellow students as “dirty pigs!” and, to make her feelings amply known, underlined “pigs” three times. However, people on her own side did not fare much better. As recorded in his diary, Lieutenant Colonel Mackesy listened to her, aghast, as she addressed a fellow passenger on the Remuera with “You dirty lousy old man”:  “Glad I have no daughters,” Mackesy concluded – as well he might. Eileen’s irreverence and spunk did, however, serve her well as an ambulance driver for the all-female Hackett-Lowther unit in France. Although she married Captain Rowland Lionel Barnard in her thirties and had two children with him, she appears to have discovered or confirmed her attraction to women while serving in the unit, and Una Troubridge’s diaries have her arrive with a female companion at parties also attended by Toupie Lowther, Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall, Nellie Rowe and Romaine Brooks.

Keenly interested in her fellow students who came from the aristocracy and moneyed classes all over Europe, Beulah kept up a lengthy correspondence, complicated by the war, with girls in Britain, Germany, and Norway, but she was not intimidated by the many baronesses and insisted that to be “really exclusive,” one had to be “Miss.” Her refusal to be star-struck is a notable feature of her letters home to her family in Painesville, OH. Although she and the Childs kept up a formidable program of opera going that included all of Wagner’s Ring cycle, she did not share her fellow students’ Schwärmerei for the stars that had Eileen slip the baritone Waldemar Staegemann an amorous letter and other students, even normally level-headed ones, go into raptures over tenor Fritz Vogelstrom’s “ripping” legs. Much as she enjoyed the opera, Beulah’s preference was to balance these highbrow performances with popular entertainment such as tango teas, the cinema, automobile shows. She did not care for exhibitions of modern painting, but was intrigued by modern dance as practiced by a fellow student who had studied with Isadora Duncan, doing “all kinds of little hops + runs + walks.” With regular air service established between Leipzig and Dresden, the spectacle of Zeppelins travelling overhead was a frequent excuse for the girls to interrupt their studies and run to the window. For inclusion in Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853-1948, Dresden’s Museum of Transport provided a photo – probably a composite – of a Zeppelin passing over the city’s baroque silhouette.

Eileen disrespectfully referred to the Misses von Gruber as “the Grubs,” but without knowing about it, Beulah and her fellow students were being taught by women who came from a German family of distinguished educators, academics and scientists. Their descendants in Germany and the United States along with Germany’s federal archive (the Bundesarchiv) and various city archives confirmed that the careers of the Grubers and the Kromayers, to whom they were related by marriage, took them all over the expanding Wilhelmine empire and also into Ottoman territory. With their international clientele gone and their teaching staff forced to return to their countries of origin, however, the von Grubers’ Pensionat folded a few months into the war.

Worse was to come when, in the next generation, an ancestor from Izmir and Jewish family members attracted the attention of Nazi Germany’s racial police, as did evidence of leftist politics. Emigration was the only way for several members of the family to save themselves. Heinrich Kromayer’s memoir for Harvard University’s contest “My Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933,” held at Harvard’s Houghton Library, depicts the alarming situation that compelled his family to leave.

With thanks to the Verkehrsmuseum Dresden and to Professor T.F. McIlwraith for permission to reproduce photos.

The Bird People

Written for Special Collections, Fogler Library, University of Maine
June 2021 (Revised May 2022)

Thomas McIlwraith (1824-1903) was known throughout North America as an important ornithologist of his time. Cabinet-maker, manager of gas works and coal dealer, his true passion was the birds. His book, The Birds of Ontario, went through two editions (1886, 1894), and he was one of only three Canadian founding members of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Self-taught, McIlwraith communicated with professionals like Joel Asaph Allen, William Brewster, Joseph Grinnell and Robert Ridgway, and when it came to preparing for publication or dealing with critical reviews of his publications, he could rely on being mentored by them. A collection of postcards exchanged with these scientists, as well as birdwatchers, taxidermists and dealers in guns, has been deposited in the archives of the Hamilton Public Library (HPL), and his youngest son’s logbook describing several years of bird watching with his father is held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. A typescript of The Birds of Ontario (2nd edition), with annotations possibly inserted by his daughter Jean who edited the book for him, also survives at the HPL.  As a trained musician and a writer, she may be responsible for the strong emphasis on music and literature in the second edition. This feature, however, appears to have been vetoed by botanist John Macoun when he and McIlwraith were planning a collaborative work on the birds of Canada that remained unfortunately unpublished. Macoun considered the musical and literary allusions unscientific – or so we must extrapolate in the current absence of Macoun’s letterbooks.

In turn, Thomas McIlwraith’s ornithological network provided important contacts for his daughter when she was looking for work after her mother’s death in 1901. Among the correspondents in the HPL postcard collection is Manly Hardy, a trapper and naturalist from Brewer, Maine, whose daughter Fanny (also spelled “Fannie”) became a well-known naturalist herself as well as an expert on regional folklore. In her book Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and her Quest for Local Knowledge, 1865-1946 (2013), Pauleena M. MacDougall describes the collaboration between father and daughter along with Eckstorm’s own studies and, in doing so, offers a corrective to an understanding of such work as entirely dominated by male researchers. In a series of letters exchanged between 1901 and 1902, Eckstorm agreed to act as “godmother” to Jean McIlwraith when her mother’s death and her father’s increasing debility left her in a precarious emotional and financial situation. Eckstorm was particularly sympathetic because, in quick succession, she had herself just lost her husband and young daughter.

To the researcher, the internet can be an exhilarating and infuriating place to be. At times unexpected yet crucial information is tossed up casually on the first try, at others the web produces, straight-faced, data such as genealogies that turn out to have less to do with actuality than wishful thinking. In this case, the letters between Eckstorm and McIlwraith were located through the Nineteenth Century Index database, a reputable source to be sure but also one curiously selective in its listings of manuscript collections. I was however doubly fortunate because Desirée Butterfield-Nagy, the archivist at the University of Maine, turned out to be a prompt and knowledgeable guide in navigating the archive which arrived almost at once in a gratifyingly substantial collection of scans.

Their initial connection through their fathers’ ornithological studies is threaded throughout the letters, with Jean collecting letters of introduction to “bird people” in New York’s publishing business and Fannie proposing that she meet her brother, an illustrator of naturalist works also working in New York. But their discussions were much broader, allowing Jean (who came from an emotionally reticent family) to pour out her troubled thoughts to her friend. They disagreed over her future place of work because, unlike Eckstorm who had enjoyed working for a publisher there, Jean disliked Boston as an “intellectual snob-centre.” Instead, she was attracted to the bohemianism of New York and reported with exhilaration on her first few weeks of independence. She was instantly surrounded by female friends, many of them musicians and writers though there were also a mathematician, a theosophist, and a nurse, some already working in New York and others flocking to the city for a visit. One of her friends steadfastly accompanied her on her rounds to all the important publishers until work had been lined up.

A brief diary McIlwraith kept of her early days in New York remains in family possession, and some of it made its way verbatim into her letters. The exuberance of her correspondence with Eckstorm is a valuable antidote to the disillusionment that overcame her in later years, and it is a happy coincidence that this exchange has been preserved.

A full finding aid for the Fannie Hardy Eckstorm collection is available from the Fogler Library. For Jean McIlwraith’s letters, see p. 22:

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1183&context=findingaids

Acknowledgement: With thanks to Professor T.F. McIlwraith for providing scans of illustrations from The Birds of Ontario.

 

The Academic Family

 

In Memory of Chris Meade, and For Downing College Archive, Cambridge.

In a study that is concerned with family networks such as Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853-1948 (UTP, 2021), it is always a fascinating moment when – intentionally or not – they become enmeshed in another nexus or even several of them at once. During officer training at Cambridge and as a member of the British Army of Occupation in Germany, young T.F. (“Tom”) McIlwraith formed close relationships with his army friends that he found difficult to leave behind when he was demobilized, but he was also drawn into the academic family both in the literal and the figurative sense well before he began his studies with W.H.R. Rivers, A.C. Haddon and William Ridgeway at Cambridge. His initial guide was A.C. Seward, Master of Downing College from 1915 to 1936, who recommended that he study anthropology and introduced him to his colleagues. Equally important for T.F.’s welfare was Seward’s wife Marion, a relationship strengthened by Tom’s friendship with scientist Michael Sampson, fellow student at St. John’s College and future husband of the Sewards’ daughter Phyllis. In numerous ways, the support McIlwraith enjoyed from his Cambridge mentors extends the findings of scholars like Tomás Irish and Heike Jöns who have investigated the significance of the academic family for teachers and students alike.

McIlwraith’s initial contact with the Sewards was not promising. He and his fellow soldiers sniggered at the “the funny old boy” who joined them in April 1918 to observe drill and, apparently not knowing any better, replaced the proper military salute with a careful bow. McIlwraith acknowledged that this decorous gentleman was “a grey-haired and venerable old don” and indeed Master of Downing College, but it took a month until he had learnt to comment more respectfully on him. The young soldiers were dismissive when the Master objected to them climbing through windows at Downing College, but they mended their ways when the Sewards began a tradition of inviting soldiers from Peterhouse College, especially overseas soldiers, to their home for conversation and entertainment, even if the food they served never seemed to be enough for their bottomless appetites. T.F.’s first encounter with Marion Seward was similarly inauspicious: for Empire Day at the Tipperary Club, a fellow soldier volunteered Tom’s services for a recitation of Kipling’s “The English Flag,” and he crumpled up the note bowing out of the occasion only because, faced with Marion Seward’s note of grateful thanks, he suddenly remembered his manners.

Researching the Sewards and their role in WWI Cambridge was a daunting exercise. Its eventual success proved the significance of the internet but also of the humble clippings file in establishing the necessary connections. The nature of the “giddy club,” as he called it, at which Tom McIlwraith recited Kipling’s poem remained elusive until Jenny Ulph, College Archivist of Downing College, forwarded a clipping identifying it as the Tipperary Club, one of several such organizations in WWI Britain. A search through contemporary Cambridge newspapers clarified its wide-ranging social and educational activities on behalf of military families, partly inspired by similar initiatives during the Anglo-Boer War, and the royal and military patronage it enjoyed. Indeed, Marion Seward’s efforts on behalf of the Club were so strenuous that they were blamed for her early death from heart disease shortly after the war. Cambridge University Press printed a commemorative booklet – a rare item found by accident among AbeBooks offerings – in which her husband eulogizes her as one whose “religion was service,” and which describes the Club’s working-class women as forming her honour guard at the funeral.

Marion Seward had another identity: she was a painter. She was associated with a community of landscape artists at Walberswick where the Sewards owned a cottage, and as a skilled botanical artist, she illustrated her husband’s books. When this became impossible because of other commitments during the war, her daughter Phyllis, trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, filled in for her when he published Fossil Plants: A Text-Book for Students of Botany and Geology (1917). T.F. McIlwraith benefitted from Seward’s work as an artist too when she presented him with two sketches of Cambridge as a keepsake before he was deployed to the front. He immediately sent these home to Canada for safekeeping where they rested, unidentified, among the family papers until the gradual emergence of the Sewards’ story allowed his son to recognize them for what they were.

An important document that brought the two strands of Marion Seward’s work together was a journal with water colour sketches describing the couple’s trip to the BAAS Congress in Australia in 1914. Along with the best of British and European scientists also on board the Euripides, they were informed of the outbreak of WWI by “marconigram” while they were at sea. Her description of visiting with dozens of her husbands’ pupils, now in professorial and administrative positions throughout the British Empire, not to mention the sudden challenges of running a conference under wartime conditions and returning home as the enemy began to torpedo ships, provides an extraordinary female counterpart to the archaeologist Henry Balfour’s journal of the same occasion. Even in the early days of the war, both Sewards’ commitment to service as their religion was apparent. Found circuitously through an obituary of one of her descendants, Seward’s diary remains in the possession of the family, and it is a treasure. 

Here are two of Marion Seward’s watercolours from the 1914 trip to Australia:, along with the matching entries in her journal:

Sunday, 12 July 1914

The night was quite comfortably cool.  P [Phyllis, the Sewards’ daughter] and I took our cameras to the muster and tried to get snaps of the Captain as he inspected the men. Went to service [;] some of the passengers had practiced the canticles so that we sang them which made the service brighter. I asked the Captain if he would be shocked if I sketched on a Sunday (one never knows how easily a Scotchman may be shocked) but he said ‘please thyself and it can’t hurt me.’ However, after trying hard for a quarter of an hour, had to give it up as my board was nearly blown into the sea and it was impossible to steady a brush in the wind. Rested and did one small sketch in my book until tea.

Thursday, 17 September 1914

[After war had been declared, sketching and photographing was curtailed, and the Montoro observed blackout after sundown].

After a rest had quite a busy afternoon doing odds and ends of mending etc. and after tea, Dr Lander, Dr Sidgwick and I had a game of tennis which was warm work. Then more sketching until it was time to watch the sunset, colour was gorgeous, brilliant red with purple clouds. Every place was shut up again at sundown and it was very close. We sat on the deck in the dark as before, but were a little more lively as Dr Lander told some [S]cotch stories and B. [Bertie? A.C. Seward] told others, had a nice talk to Prof. Forbes when having some refreshment before going to bed […]

Acknowledgements: With thanks to Clare Meade for permission to reproduce two water colours from Marion Seward’s diary.

 

Imperial Connections

Written for Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library

March 2021

In January 1918, eighteen-year-old Thomas F. (“Tom”) McIlwraith from Hamilton, Ontario arrived in Britain for officer training, expecting deployment to the Western front later that year. Laden with packages and letters, he found his way to Rutland Lodge in the village of Petersham near Richmond. There he was welcomed by the “Hills-Phillips combination,” as he referred to them, specifically Hilda Phillips and her mother Evelina Hills. Both show up often in McIlwraith’s WWI letters, now held in the George Metcalf Archival Collection at the Canadian War Museum. They offered hospitality when McIlwraith was on furlough, received and forwarded his mail, and took him sightseeing around London, Kew Gardens, and Hampton Court.

It was clear from Tom’s letters home that there was a friendship of long standing between the Hills-Phillips families and the McIlwraiths, but it was less clear who the Hills-Phillipses were. Yet the mere fact that they occupied Rutland Lodge, a grand though freezing mansion with most its rooms shuttered, and that they employed a staff of eight in the middle of the war suggested that a closer look at them was in order.  What was their connection to the McIlwraiths who were not affluent at all? As I relate in Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853-1948 (University of Toronto Press, 2021), the networking of Tom’s family took them repeatedly beyond their middle-class world, socially and intellectually, and the following account illustrates the tight web of archival research that gradually clarified this particular association.

To begin with, McIlwraith’s brief reference to meeting Sir Lionel Phillips over lunch at Rutland Lodge sent me to biographies of Sir Lionel, a South African financier who made his money in diamond mining. He also escaped execution following his participation in the Jameson Raid in 1895-6, but by WWI he was thoroughly rehabilitated from this episode: he had been knighted and become chairman of the Central Mining and Investment Corporation in London as well as being “appointed a member of the Imperial Munitions Committee, which was concerned with the development of Britain’s mineral resources,” as Maryna Fraser writes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Both of his sons were at the front, Harold in France and Frank at Salonica.

For the duration of the war, Lionel Phillips moved his entire family from Johannesburg to Britain where, together with his wife, the redoubtable Lady Florence, he worked energetically on behalf of the South African troops. They established a military hospital and clubs for officers and nurses near Richmond, and Tylney Hall, their estate in Hampshire, became an army hospital. As John Buchan in The History of the South African Forces in France (1920) and Thelma Gutsche in her biography of Florence Phillips (1966) have related, the Phillipses were so concerned to create a sense of home for the wounded that “corridors and rooms” were given South African names and Lady Florence even organized “a stuffed ostrich on wheels” for the Christmas festivities. Their son-in-law John Stuart Wortley, killed in action in 1918, leased Rutland Lodge in 1915. Mrs. Hills had left her husband Frank temporarily to his own resources in Hamilton and braved the dangerous crossing of the Atlantic to be with her daughter and her two young children. This is how McIlwraith came to visit the “Phillips-Hills combination” in Petersham.

This gave me a fair bit of information on the Phillipses but it did not tell me much about Hilda’s family or their connection with the McIlwraiths. Gutsche indicated that the Phillipses’ oldest son Harold had married Hilda Wildman Hills from Hamilton, Ontario, and an online genealogy suggested that her father, Frank Hills, was a “Justice of the Peace” there.  As so often in the early days of my research for this book, my first port of call was the late Margaret Houghton, formidable local historian and archivist of the Hamilton Public Library, to whom it was news that Hills was a Justice of the Peace. Instead, she produced an obituary indicating that he had been superintendent of the Stephenson’s Children’s Home. This institution, also known as the National Children’s Home and Orphanage, housed immigrant children and coordinated their employment at Canadian farms and in households, and so represented a milieu quite different from that inhabited by wealthy entrepreneurs like Sir Lionel Phillips.  Both Margaret Houghton and I were, however, for the time being stumped as to how Harold and Hilda could have met. A search of passenger lists indicated that Hilda had visited Britain and according to Gutsche Harold had attended Eton and Oxford, but that information alone did not establish contact between them, and they clearly did not move in the same circles.

The break came from a note located at the National Archives of South Africa in which Sir Lionel wrote to George Christie Creelman, president of the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) at Guelph, about his son’s admission to the OAC, with Governor General Lord Grey – a man with extensive connections to South Africa – as reference. This information enabled the archivist at University of Guelph’s Archival and Special Collections to produce Harold’s OAC academic records between 1908 and 1912, along with details of the farmland he was to manage on his return to South Africa: a total of 12,000 acres in cattle ranching and citrus farming awaited him. There was also a reference to his marriage to Hilda, former student at the nearby Macdonald Institute. Founded by educator Adelaide Hoodless and tobacco industrialist Sir William Macdonald, the Institute was primarily intended to provide young rural women with solid training in home economics, but the program also attracted urban middle-class students. Because Macdonald students married OAC men with some frequency, the program was sometimes referred to as the “diamond ring course,” and Harold duly proposed to Hilda with a diamond ring purchased from Ryrie the Jeweler in Toronto, asking his father to forward the money for it.

The reference to Hilda and Harold’s marriage in turn produced an article on their “Wedding of Wide-Spread Interest” which took place in Wentworth, Ontario in 1913. Tom McIlwraith’s sister Dorothy was one of the bridesmaids, decked out in a “large leghorn hat … in poke style with streamers of green,” as reported in the Hamilton Spectator, and earlier his mother had acted as a referee for Hilda’s admission to Macdonald. Harold’s parents were unable to come to Canada for the wedding, but the article took care to cite Sir Lionel’s involvement in the Jameson Raid and his various illustrious associations, literary and otherwise, including a reference in Gilbert Parker’s novel The Judgement House (1913). The Spectator forgot to mention that John Buchan’s Prester John (1910) was dedicated to Lionel Phillips.

But there was more. Gutsche’s biography of Lady Florence contained photos of Hilda’s husband and son but none of Hilda herself. My efforts to locate a portrait took me to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Johannesburg Public Library, the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, Barloworld South Africa, ARTEFACTS (a website about the built environment of South Africa), the archivists of Balliol and Magdalen in Oxford, the authors of various books on the Phillipses, and finally to the descendants of Harold and Hilda in Britain, with generous help from all. These inquiries yielded among others a South African ladies’ magazine citing Hilda’s education at the Macdonald Institute as a special asset for a landowner’s wife, a stack of letters written by Harold from Guelph about his training at the OAC and his courtship with Hilda, and letters from the early days of their marriage at the Broederstroom Farm in Transvaal. There was also a pile of end-of-term reports from his earlier years at Eton that described his many shortcomings in terms of polished and eloquent rudeness and, together with the letters from Guelph, go some way toward explaining why his management of the farm as well as his and Hilda’s marriage were doomed to fail. At OAC, his favourite occupations were dancing, ice-skating and flirting but analyzing soil samples or looking after baby chicks bored him profoundly. Tom McIlwraith visited with the Hills-Phillipses in Petersham at a time when, ironically, Harold’s long absences at the front temporarily improved the couple’s relations.

As I hope to have shown, I have reason to be very grateful for archivists’ knowledgeable and gracious assistance, including the staff at the University of Guelph’s Special and Archival Collections. Their help was essential in the success of this intricate search.

With thanks to Sarah Welham (Research Centre, Johannesburg Heritage Foundation) and Essie Chaphie (Johannesburg Reference Collection) for providing information on and scans from the S.A. Ladies Pictorial.

Former Canadian Literature editor takes international award

Established at UBC in 1959, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review has changed readers’ view of Canlit. Just recently, former editor Eva- Marie Kröller was named Distinguished Editor of 2004 in recognition of her work at the publication’s helm.
BY ALEXANDRA CHU

(Source: “Former Canadian Literature editor takes international award.” Posted: March 24, 2005. UBC Faculty of Arts, April 12, 2005. <http://www.arts.ubc.ca/index.php?id=433&backPID=4&tt_news=734>)

Mar 24, 2005

Former Canadian Literature editor Eva Marie Kröller (center), pictured here with Editor Laurie Ricou (left) and past editor William H. New (right), was recently named Distinguished Editor of 2004.

With recent special issues on black writing in Canada and on literature and war, the renowned Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review is the leading journal for new research and writing in its field.

The U.S.-based Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ), a 450-member organization of editors of scholarly journals devoted to the humanities, recently presented its Distinguished Editor of 2004 award to Professor Eva Marie Kröller in recognition of her work at the publication’s helm.

Kröller, whose research interests include Canadian travel writing and literary history, is the first Canadian editor to receive the prestigious award. She was the journal’s editor from 1995 till 2003.

“It’s a remarkable accomplishment,” said Professor Laurie Ricou, the journal’s current editor. “One of the reasons, undoubtedly, that she won the award was because of the strength of her mentoring mission at Canadian Literature.”

Published and edited at UBC since its inception in 1959, Canadian Literature has contributors from all over the world. Kröller reinforced the stature of the publication by introducing a peer review process and recruiting an editorial board of distinguished scholars from Canada and abroad. She produced 34 issues during her tenure as editor.

Ricou says that several students who worked with Kröller sent letters to the CELJ, hoping to support her nomination and expressing their gratitude for the scholar’s dedication.

The publication has employed between 20 and 25 Arts students to assist with production since 2001, according to Managing Editor Donna Chin.

Kröller recalls spending hours working with students, helping to draw out their talents and develop their research and editing skills. A few of her students even helped prepare the “Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature,” which Kröller edited for publication in 2004. She has also shared her insights into editorial work with the coordinators of UBC’s new career website .

Kristen McHale, a student in the Arts Co-op Program working at the journal, applied for the job in part because she had wanted to learn how a magazine is published. She is currently coordinating the journal’s book review section, as well as contacting publishers and writers. McHale even edits book reviews under the guidance of Ricou.

All three of the most recent editors, Ricou, Kröller and University Killam Professor Emeritus William H. New are recipients of Killam Teaching Awards.

“This is something we do not consider coincidental as mentoring is a large part of an editor’s work,” said Kröller.

Kröller’s award is not the only recognition to come to the journal in recent years. Her predecessor, Professor New, won the prestigious Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies in early 2004. In 2000, Managing Editor Donna Chin received the President’s Service Award for Excellence.

Canadian Literature celebrated its 45 th anniversary last year, an exceptional accomplishment for a journal that began at a time when the study of Canadian literature at universities was a rarity.

“When the journal was first launched, people would say, �Do you think you have enough to fill each issue?'” said Kröller. “It was a very revolutionary thing to do.”

Today, the journal draws its audience from a breadth of international scholars, readers and writers. The journal keeps pace with the expansion of Canadian literature by alternating general issues of scholarly articles with special issues, devoted to specific topics.

“These special issues invariably have been ones that brought new areas of research in Canadian literature to the fore” added Kröller.

“Writers Talking” is this winter’s special issue, which foregrounds Canadian writers who talk about their writing and how personal experiences relate to their work.

Author Francis Itani gives an intimate interview to Susan Fisher in which the author speaks of her personal experiences with deaf people that inspired her acclaimed novel “Deafening.”

The issue reminds Ricou of the journal’s first editor, Professor George Woodcock, a celebrated Canadian writer and UBC lecturer who worked for 18 years to establish Canadian Literature’s reputation.

“He (Woodcock) felt that if the journal was devoted to Canadian literature it should have its pages open to the people who create the literature as well as those who read it and consume it and especially teach it,” said Ricou.

“This issue continues that long history of being a writers forum and a place that’s comfortable for writers as well as academic scholarship,” he added.

The journal also devotes space in each issue to Canadian poetry and includes a large book review section, both of which reflect the editors’ aims to reach as wide an audience as possible.

“Canadian Literature has always been and remains the premier journal in its field,” said Kröller.

Its content keeps pace with new areas of research in Canadian literature, while the excellence and dedication of its staff continue to be recognized by the scholarly community.