This is from the Gazette. 1928. Mederic Martin pleads for Anglo Voters.
In my play Milk and Water about Montreal City Hall in 1927, I start with a telephone conversation IN ENGLISH between Mederic Martin, the Mayor of Montreal, and my grandfather, Jules Crepeau.
Not likely, but I needed to do it.
The device I use: I say that the Mayor has a representative of the Royal Prince in his office...I make it a matter of respect. The Mayor and the Prince liked to party, apparently.
Now I wonder if the Prince spoke French to the Mayor. He no doubt could speak French.. But then, this is a representative and not an official one, a friend.
Oh,well.
Once again I stumbled on something interesting on the Internet while looking up something else. I found a 1914 Canadian Review that summed up the Montreal Municipal Election of 1914.
Now, up until that time, there had been a policy of rotating French and English Mayors. Martin, an alderman and a Member of Parliament, said "Poop to that" and ran for Mayor anyway, appealing to French voters' sentiment.
A lame English candidate was parachuted in to run against him. (Many highly qualified English Montrealers weren't invited to run for the candidacy.)
The 'lame' English Candidate, who also spoke French and German, wanted to put in a Central Library with branches and perhaps a subway. Imagine!
Anyway, apparently both the English and French Presses were against Martin, but he won the election anyway. Montreal Tramways supported him. (They are the monopoly owned in part by the Forgets, my grandfather's relations.)
Anyway, Martin won and immediately started grabbing more power for himself. (There were only 3 anglo aldermen elected in that council.)
Martin already had a reputation for being shady, so this article said. Anyway, I guess that's why in 1921 the City Charter was amended. An Executive Committee was put in lieu of a Board of Control and almost all power taken away from the Mayor.
And a new powerful position was created, Director of Municipal Services. My grandfather's post.
Perhaps that's why, in August 1921, one month before my grandfather got his job as Director of City Services, the Financial Post in Toronto ran a story by a writer under a silly pseudonym, the Make-Up Man, condemning the institutionalized corruption at City Hall and saying they 'create jobs for their friends.'
I suspect the author is one Edward Beck a former (short term) managing editor of the Montreal Herald and the Montreal Star.
Edward Beck was a journalist who, in 1914, tried to entrap my grandfather into accepting a bribe in a sting operation involving Burns Detectives and a wire device called a detectaphone.
Beck almost did bring my grandfather down, but no cigar. My grandfather salvaged his good name in court.
(Beck and some others had taken down three Quebec legislators using a similar scam earlier in the year over bribe-taking in 1913. He must have felt confident he could get my grandfather.)
It must have burned Beck no end that, in 1921, my grandfather went on to fill this new powerful post of Director of Municipal Departments.
Of course, in 1930, my grandfather himself was brought down by Camillien Houde and who knows who else. That was just one month before Edward Beck, now a PR person for the Pulp and Paper Industry, passed away in Montreal. He got his satisfaction, I guess.
Beck's obit says Edward Beck started his crime tabloid Beck's Weekly (where he wrote about my grandfather is vicious terms) in 1914 and ended it due to the outbreak of war.
It was in the first edition where he tried to take down my grandfather, calling him the worst kind of grafter.
"The City Hall is a sweet-scented sink hole of pollution if men like Crepeau speak the truth. Their greedy official hands take toll of contracts, levy tribute on ordinances, and prey upon the poor city labourers. Graft, graft, graft is written over the doorways, the lintels and on the doorposts."
Hmm. 1914 is where my Tighsolas stories Threshold Girl come together with my Milk and Water story.
Marion's Story (untitled) will end in 1913 October when she marries Hugh Blair, a Scottish/French Canadian from Three Rivers with a Cree grandmother. Marion didn't get to vote, but Hugh Blair probably voted for the English Mayoralty Candidate. Or did he? They lived in NDG in 1914, on Marlowe I think.
(PS. I used three different terms for my grandfather's job, because the newspapers of the era also did.)
