From Wikipedia Public Domain picture.
Well, well.
I have pretty well completed by first draft of Milk and Water my free ebook about Montreal in 1927. I just have to re-type the edits I've made on my hard copy. They are more like chicken scratches so I had better do it soon.
Anyway, I went to the Web to check out some background for a paragraph where my grandfather Jules Crepeau, Director of Municipal Departments, mentions Herbert Ames and his 1997 book, the City Below the Hill, where it is written that Montreal still has many homes with privies, that is holes in the ground for poop.
(This Ames has sort of gone down in history as the PRIVY GUY. That's how Pierre Berton sums him up in Marching As to War, or some other of this books. And maybe that's all he deserves.
Ames was a rich Presbyterian, born of American parents, who tried to 'clean up Montreal' in late 19th century, figuratively and literally, Civic Politics and Privies.
He became one of the few Anglo Aldermen of the period (it had been a long while since Anglo Industrialists bothered to run for Council, preferring to pull strings in other, more profitable, ways.)
In 1904 (around) Ames become a Tory MP in Ottawa and in 1928 he went to work for the League of Nations. Prohibition was his great cause apparently.( Hmm. That's one year after 1927, when at least one of his Tory Cronies, Senator Lorne Webster, made 4,000,000 on the Montreal Water and Power Purchase.)
ANYWAY, looking up info on this man, I stumbled upon something that was most peculiar..
...an August 1921 article in the Financial Post, ostensibly a profile on Ames, that waxes hyperbolic about the corruption at Montreal City Hall.
I had read similar stuff before, by a man named Beck, who in 1913 founded a short-lived Montreal tabloid, Beck's Weekly. As it happens, the first (and only?) issue of Beck's weekly contained an expose of my grandfather, then Assistant City Clerk, who supposedly had been caught in a set-up accepting a bribe. My grandfather sued Beck's Weekly for libel, and won, if only symbolically, as Beck was ordered to pay my grandfather but 100 dollars.
Beck's Weekly stopped publication, and Mr. Beck, who had previously worked as an editor at the Montreal Standard and Montreal Herald, went on to work for the Pulp and Paper Industry in PR.
So he left the profession. Or did he?
His obit in the Gazette (1937, if I recall) claimed he stopped publication of Beck's Weekly due to the outbreak of war. Yea, right!
HMMMMM. Suspicious.
I double checked, and the author of this Financial Post article, published just one month before my grandfather got his job as Director of City Services, was "The Make Up Man."
I strongly suspect the author of this piece to be Beck. (I'm pretty good at deconstructing literary style.)
He appears to idolize Lord Athlostan. Or is it Atholstan. I never can remember. Hugh Graham of the Montreal Standard and Star, the guy whose rants against the Montreal Water and Power purchase brought down my grandfather, obliquely, or not so obliquely. (Beck no doubt was ecstatic when my grandfather got guillotined. Beck died a year before my grandfather, as it happens. Death evens all scores.)
So here's (potentially) a failed reporter with a major ax to grind, describing Montreal as "a convenient sea-wharfing spot for industrialists, but otherwise a French city and so hopeless."
I mean the man could write: he should have gone to Hollywood.
On the inside front page of this Financial Times out of Toronto, there's a blurb promoting this biographic feature: "Montreal is ruled in a business way by a relatively small faction of financiers and business leaders who all live in another city -Westmount and which is ruled by the great French majority who vote a solid French ticket for the City Hall. Thus the people who pay the biggest taxes have little say in the spending of them. It has been with efforts to bring about something better that Sir Herbert has been closely identified with."
My GOSH. Were they serious? Great fodder for my next draft of Milk and Water.... I already have Tom Wells mention the cronyism at Montreal City Hall and my own Grandfather answer, "And you don't have your cliques? Your clubs? Where you give jobs to all your friends and their children?"
I did see that Ames in 1915, supported a English business man for Mayor, a Mr. Macdonald.
