The Nicholson Women in their Big Hats
If TV is any indication, 100 years later, we’re still obsessed with the Edwardian Era.
Last year, the Emmy winning costume drama Downton Abbey was such a huge hit more shows were produced for 2011. The iconic Upstairs Downstairs was also brought back to life last year, to less critical acclaim.
Downton Abbey, in my opinion, is merely a more stylish rehash of the original excellent Upstairs Downstairs.
As it happens, I watched all four seasons of the 1972-75 Upstairs Downstairs on dvd for the first time just last month. I had missed the show the first time around . My university years, you see.
I decided to finally take them it in because, for a rather long time now, I’ve been engrossed in my own personal Edwardian Era Saga. (Well, in Canada we call it the Laurier Era.)
I’ve been researching background to a stash of family letters from the 1910 era that I discovered in an old trunk, letters belonging to the Nicholsons of Richmond, Quebec. That would be Norman and Margaret Nicholson and their grown children, Edith, Herbert, Marion and Flora.
Like Upstairs Downstairs (and Downton Abbey) these letters cover the exciting era of the suffragettes, Model-T Fords, the rampant Typhoid Epidemics. Fun stuff . But all from a decidedly middle class (and oh-so- Canadian) point of view.
These family letters number over 300, and they are full of ghosts and gossip, and gossip about ghosts.
The Nicholsons were prominent E.T. citizens (cash poor and connection rich, as it happens) and they knew all the other leading citizens and they filled their letters with news about said citizens and all the goings-on of their town, “the Local News” as they slyly called it.
In 1910 Richmond was at a tipping point: It was bleeding citizens to the big city and the wild but job-rich West. So, the letters are doubly significant.
In the back of my mind, these past 5 years, I had an idea to convert these family letters into a quasi-fiction of some sort, to re-imagine them for a young female audience.
But it wasn’t until last year, when I stumbled on 1911 Canadian Census online that all the pieces for this story suddenly fell into place.
There before my eyes, in rather faded gray pencil strokes, under Richmond-Wolfe, Quebec, was ‘the official’ statistical story of the Nicholson family – and their entire community.
In a June 1911 letter, Margaret actually mentions being enumerated in a letter to her husband who is away in Ontario working on the Transcontinental Railway.
”The Census man was around, I gave him your age as 60. Is that right? I always save five for myself. How was that? He did not take Herb's or Marion's. So that is over.”
Yep, Margaret lied on the Census. She lied about her age, about her husband’s salary, about her daughter Edith’s salary.
Much worse though, her other daughter Marion, my husband’s grandmother, was left off the Census entirely. She is not listed in her family residence on Dufferin in Richmond, and not at her Montreal rooming house on Tower. I did find prodigal son Herb at a rooming house in Qu’Appelle , Saskatchewan. He is one of six boarders there. One other is a bartender and one other, YIKES, a woman working as a stenographer. (Had temperance-minded mother Margaret known she would have caught the first train out West and dragged him back by his ear.)
With this wonderful online resource, I was able to travel back to Richmond Quebec in June 1911, EXACTLY one hundred years ago, and snap another complementary mental picture of that interesting community from another, less anecdotal (less bitchy?) angle.
And one NEW Census fact surprised me (sort of): French-Canadian families lived all around them!
You see, you wouldn’t know it from the letters. Call it Two Solitudes Syndrome.
Right then and there, I decided to include a two solitudes-style theme in my quasi-fiction based on the letters, which I have called Threshold Girl and put online at
www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf.
Threshold Girl tells the story of Flora Nicholson, the youngest Nicholson child who graduates from St. Francis College in 1911 and is accepted at Macdonald Teachers College in beautiful Ste. Anne de Bellevue (despite failing French.)
So, I decided to create a pivotal fictional French Canadian character, for context. But which French Canadian would young Flora Nicholson, over-protected youngest daughter of straight-laced (literally!) Presbyterians, meet up with?
The Milliner! This was the age of big hats, after all. And in 1910 women of all persuasions, all classes, loved their hats.
According to the 1911 Census, the milliners in Richmond were Miss Vitaline Goyette, 27 and Miss Eugenie Hudon. So, I created a milliner’s apprentice, a Miss Gouin, who is lively and outgoing, a little too much for rather repressed Flora. (Millinery was the ‘glam’ job for women in 1910, but apprentices were largely unpaid, and this sad fact figures in my story.)
The online Canadian Censuses serves up many treasures for the aspiring writer of Period Pieces.
At the turn of the last century, I can see from the 1901 Census, almost every family living in the posh College Street area of Richmond had a live-in servant. By 1911 almost nobody did.
Something serious changed over the decade.
So, in 1910, it wasn’t only the cash poor Nicholson women who had to sew and wash and press their own shirtwaists and mince their own beef for the cottage pie and beat their own carpets out on the front lawn twice a year.
Clearly, most middle class women in Richmond, in that era, lived an IN-BETWEEN STAIRS kind of existence. They aspired to the genteel life, giving teas on their day at home, going to the local Opera House, but they still scraped their knuckles raw in the scullery after the fact.
Why was that? Well, likely because the working class women were choosing to work in factories rather than as domestics. (So I further made Miss Gouin from Magog where the Dominion Textile Factory was located.) )
Yes, in 1910, there was a Servant Problem in Canada and if you believe the press reports, it was the very rich who were truly suffering. One Society Woman, at a 1913 meeting of Montreal Council of Women complained that the lack of qualified nannies was, indeed, ‘a child welfare problem.’
Flora’s school, Macdonald College was founded to teach the agricultural sciences to young men and the domestic sciences to young women. In this way, young women destined to marry would become better homemakers (and solve all the problems of industrialization: dirty houses, dirty habits, dirty thoughts) and poor women would be trained as domestics.
A sexist, racist and ill-conceived policy, it has been argued by eminent historians over the century, and who am I to disagree. And just one of other good reason to study the Edwardian (Laurier) era, 100 years after the fact. (Over and above the pretty costumes.) Not only in the UK, but here in Canada. Lest we see history repeating itself.
