Those who have always been accustomed to the magnificent distances of Canada frequently marvel at the small acquaintance many British people have with their native country. What may seem a phenomenal ignorance is oftener only a proof of an ancient fiscal limitation. In Thornliebank we knew about Loch Lomond, the Trossachs, and the glories of the more northern hills and glens. But to go to Loch Lomond, for instance, was a financial adventure, as well as a serious railway journey, to be followed by costly coaching along the shore. Ben Lomond, the three-thousand-feet mountain which stands like a sentinel over the twenty-two miles of islanded water, is forty miles from Glasgow—the distance of Hamilton from Toronto. Last summer we motored from Glasgow to the hotel at the foot of the mountain, and back again, in four hours. Besides the scenery so often mentioned but so seldom described, we saw the proofs of the disappearance of the former age, which, admirable as it is from the point of view of the popularization of what used to be the joy of a few, still seems rather flippantly to challenge the majesty of the prospect—I mean the abundance of travel by motor char-a-banc.
Gasoline has indeed done wonders for travel; but a big bus, rolling along at twenty miles an hour, with as many passengers as the first steamer that plied on the Clyde—the “Comet” in 1812—is not the picturesque sight that a tally-ho, with horses four, and an echoing horn used to be. Naturally, an old railroader is all for better transportation, and the multiplication of fares; but, the old ways had their good features, and, somehow, one has a lingering feeling that it were better for the older-fashioned picturesqueness, which the multitude could not see, to remain than that everything in life should be subdued to gas—and perhaps, in time, to jazz.
On the whole, the men who gave most of their time to the kirk also served the community most consistently in other spheres. Fifty and sixty years ago the larger duties of citizenship were not commonly open to men who worked for wages. My father was past fifty before the ten-pound householder had a Parliamentary vote. The teaching of men like Robert Owen, and the rise of trade unionism, synchronized with intellectual, social and economic advances among working people who didn’t cease to read when they left school. Mechanics’ Institutes abounded. Co-operative societies sprang up in almost every industrial community in the Lowlands of Scotland and the north of England. There was one in Thornliebank, of which William Hanna was the treasurer.
The organization of a local co-operative business was very simple—its methods also. A society was formed, goods bought for the co-operative store, and the members paid cash for them. At each buying they were given metal tokens representing the amount of their purchases—it was a coinage which obviated the necessity for the intricate labors of bookkeeping. At the end of three months the committee took stock of the store, compared the value of the goods with the standing at the last quarter day, counted the cash in hand, figured up the expenses, and were ready to declare a dividend. The shareholder brought his tokens—his chips, if you like—to the counter, and on the dividendial basis was given cash, or credit for more goods.
With ten children, eight of whom lived to maturity, the voluntary treasurership of a village co-operative store, with the quarterly dividends added to the weekly wages at the Crum works, didn’t furnish many luxuries to the Hanna family, beyond the unsearchable riches that came to us from the Sabbath journeys to Pollokshaws. As the next to the youngest, I did not know personally of the harder struggle which beset the heads of artisan families when all their children were small. But, even in the sixties, life was a constant experiment in frugality. At the Thornliebank school we were all average scholars, I think, and in my thirteenth year my father obtained for me the job of office boy at the headquarters of the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, in Madeira Court, Glasgow.
Call it the coincidence of the commonplace, the accident of association, if you like; but several years ago, while certain negotiations were proceeding for the purchase of land and the erection of grain elevators in the West by the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, one could not help contrasting the change in that commercial enterprise, since his first acquaintance with it; and noticing also the difference there was between running messages from Madeira Court, and looking after the interests of a railway that connected tidewater on the St. Lawrence with tidewater on the Pacific, and had fifty thousand shareholders in the British Isles.
In those far-off days finance was a simple art, though it involved some fine adjustments. The pay in Madeira Court was four shillings a week. Out of that, return railway fare over four miles, and a midday meal, had to be provided. Transportation took about a third of the income—a trifle more, when one remembers that there was a mile walk to and from the Kennishead station, Thornliebank not being on any railway. Shanks’s pony cost something for shoes. At midday there was resort to Jenkins’s Cooking Depot, on Jamaica Street—a place where a bowl of soup, a slice of bread and a halfpenny cup of coffee offered some justification for the unchallenged boasting about free trade and cheap living which was a part of British electioneering for nearly sixty years.
The Scottish Wholesale is an enormous business in these days, with a turnover of a hundred million dollars a year. When I was on its payroll, and very proud of my job, the office force, I think, was ten. Of course, there were no telephones or typewriters. The treasurer was a machinist at Thompson’s, on Finneston street. It was part of my duty to carry the check book to him, to get batches of checks signed.
My first responsibility for observing a time-table schedule was impressed upon me rather interestingly by the Wholesale Co-operative’s first manager, Mr. James Borrowman.