“What made you come to Canada?” is a frequent question, to which the answer usually is, “To better my condition.” It is my own story, though oddly enough, I came to Montreal to work for the Grand Trunk at a smaller salary than I was getting in Glasgow as a clerk on the Caledonian. Was that Scottish-like—was it wise or otherwise? If an answer be desired, it can perhaps be found in a sketch of the Scotland I came from—the Scotland of an average industrious family that owed everything to labour and nothing to fortune—the sort of family that has been supplying Canada with people ever since immigration hither ceased to be a purely French process.
One speaks about one’s early years primarily because it affords an opportunity to say a word for upbuilders of Canada who never saw Canada, but who gave to Canada what she has most needed and still needs—people, sound of body and of mind, and grounded in a faith that may be stern, but has at least been steadfast, and has given its followers the vitalities of character and success.
A friend has a habit of saying that his mother is one of the greatest Canadians, though she has never lived for a single month ten miles from her birthplace in the south of England. On the day this is written he tells me she is keeping her ninety-eighth birthday, and that, to date, she has given sixty-five children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to Canada. For fifty-five years she has been writing letters to, and getting letters from, Canada. Her stake in the country has been infinitely more precious than that of the millionaire who dies without seed.
Most theatre-goers have seen “Bunty Pulls the Strings”, Moffatt’s verra Scotch play. The piece is developed around Bunty, the managing daughter of a typically Presbyterian house. It is really a depiction of life near Glasgow—some people think, of an extinct species of existence. Its religious aspects are incomprehensible to a generation that knows not its Shorter Catechism, as they are serious to the participants, and homelike to many people in Canada scarcely past middle life.
One of the characters speaks of going to Thornliebank. The father of the playwright was William Moffatt, well known as an elocutionist in Scotland fifty years ago, who used to give readings from the “Reciter” of his own compilation. He was a frequent visitor to Thornliebank. For nearly twenty-four years I never lived anywhere else.
“Bunty” is a transcript from southern Scottish life, as I knew it, within an hour’s walk of Glasgow. The church scenes, including the presence of the collie among the worshippers and the deposits of copper on the collection plate outside the door, before the spiritual food has been dispensed, are as true to fact as a Canadian winter is true to Jack Frost.
The Thornliebank folk as I knew them, and as I was one of them, are reproduced in “Bunty” with a fidelity that shows how dramatic the commonplace can be. Thornliebank was and is a village almost entirely of one industry. The Crum Print Works employed several hundred people. The Crums were among the first manufacturers to recognize that they owed to their employes more than the smallest wages that they would consent to work for. The influence of Robert Owen, the socialistic employer of New Lanark, had spread to our locality. The Crums furnished certain institutional services for the village. They were circumscribed enough, in comparison with what has been done by the Cadburys at Bournville and the Levers at Port Sunlight, but were considerable advances on the average standard of industrial amenities in the mid-nineteenth century. They were the heralds and examples which, in due time, produced the Bournvilles and Port Sunlights, the Garden Cities and the town planners.
Roundabout, Thornliebank was known as the model village, because of the Crums’ commonsense philanthropies. There was a commodious village club, the facilities of which, and especially the library, were greater than the membership fees. Sport was not the feature of country life that it has since become everywhere—perhaps because that was still the era when Shanks’s pony was the steed on which people put their odds. It was also the era of mutual improvement expressed in musical and literary endeavour. In the Literary Society my sphere was humble enough, though I recall the labour with which I set forth the fruit of researches on such subjects as the history of railways.
The Thornliebank Choral Union was nothing extraordinary, of course, except perhaps that its daring members constituted me their treasurer, and managed to renew their courage when the annual meeting recurred. But Thornliebank’s chief musical fame was derived from its brass band, into the glories of which I was never initiated. It had (speaking from memory) twenty-four pieces; and was in much demand for excursions and celebrations over a pretty wide territory. The pay for a long day’s activity wouldn’t be more than twenty-five or thirty dollars—think of that, ye who inhibit musicians from playing with a Pageant Chorus, because of a union punctilio.