The Cross on Mount Royal

The Crepeaus 1928 ish

Well, there's a cross on Mount Royal, as every Montrealer knows, but I just learned that it was erected in 1924, during the tenure of my grandfather Jules Crepeau as Director of  City Services of Montreal. I am writing a play about him called Milk and Water

According to  Sarah Schmidt, author of Domesticating Parks and Mastering Playgrounds, a McGill University History Thesis written in 1996, this was no random act. Years before, the Protestant elite of Montreal had rejected a plan to have a statue of the Virgin Mary on the Mountain as against all they believed in. No goddesses on Mount Royal.

Schmidt says that the tramline to Mount Royal, completed in 1929, was the next step in a process where the French of Montreal re-claimed the mountain for themselves. 

She said the French newspapers saw this tramline as a coup for the French working class. She mentions Mayor Martin and Camillien Houde as both being from working class backgrounds. Martin was Mayor off and on in the 10's and 1920's. Houde was mayor from 1927 to 53 (I think) on and off too.

Odd, because just today while I was looking on the National Assembly website's historical pages for something else, I found a speech by Camillien Houde where he denounced the tramway line. He said working class parents would never send their children way up the Mountain. He thought it was a money grab by the tramway people. He wanted local parks set up for the kids to play in.

Funny... Houde was speaking commons sense here. Working class people did not have the time to spend with their kids for long trips in the park. Houde seems to be acknowledging that kids from large families often were raised by older siblings and went out without their parents.

My point exactly with respect to the motion pictures. The mothers thought it safe if an older child brought a younger child to the cinema, which would be nearby, in their neighborhood. Until 1927.

My play, Milk and Water, where I have Jules Crepeau my grandfather  have  a long talk with Thomas Wells, my husband's grandfather will try to make sense of this... Thomas Wells was a founding member of the Rotary Club and very involved in "the boy problem." (The Montreal Rotary established Weredale House and Shawbridge Boys Farm.)

He, himself, being a busy upper middle class man, hardly spent any time at home. And his wife liked it that way, or so said my father in law, who was raised by an aunt.

There's a joke in the family. My father-in-law at 5 or 6 had a bad dream and he went to the top of the stairs and cried out for "ANYBODY."  He had no special person taking care of him. Indeed, his mother didn't like boys.

I decided to write Milk and Water when I found a card of condolence sent by Houde to the widow of Thomas Wells, May the boy-hater, in 1951 or 52. Can't recall exactly. "Hey," I yelled to my husband. "Camillien Houde knew your grandfather."

Houde sent my own grandfather packing in 1930... for a dubious reason. He was blamed for the sketchy circumstances around the Montreal Water and Power Purchase in 1927.

That's what I was looking for on the National Assembly Website: a reference to the 1926 amendment  allowing the City of Montreal to buy stocks in the Company, rather than just expropriate it. Because a short time after, Lorne Webster, the Industrialist, offered to buy Montreal Water and Power from the majority stockholders and he flipped it, making 4,000,000 in a few months when the Montreal City Council finally got around to OKing the purchase in a secret session on February 14, 1927. My grandfather's personal Valentine's Day massacre.  Got it? 

I wanted to see who promoted this amendment. I wanted to see if it was the Honorable Perron, the Minister of Transport, who was a business partner of Webster's. (According to the Fong biography of McConnell.) Alas, I couldn't find it.

All very well, so typical.. except I doubt my grandfather had anything to do with this flip. 

This was all a cause celebre in the press, a scandal some said, but few people in the National Assembly or on the Bench, dared accuse Webster or his cronies of any wrong doing. Business is business they said. Everyone is allowed to make money, even at the taxpayer's expense. (Houde was an exception, at the beginning, but even he had to relent against the big guys. )  But the people wanted a scapegoat. Or Houde said they wanted 'vengeance' for this purchase, ah, and the Laurier Palace Fire, and the typhoid epidemics of 27. They got it, my grandfather. A person the voters hardly ever heard of....

I'm going to have my grandfather say something like "The industrialists are the gods, the puppet masters, and we are the puppets, dancing for their pleasure or something like that... In September 1927 he won't know what's going to happen with respect to the suspicious actions around the purchase/expropriation, but he'll have a sense someone is going to pay for it.