1913 Read online

  If Manitoba’s real-estate boosters, immigration agents and local politicians (often the same men) were to be believed, Winnipeg was a sure-fire city of the future. Fuelled by the powerful combination of rising commodity prices, immigration, foreign investment and hard graft, Canada had boomed in the decade up to 1913. ‘The poor relation’, noted one British economist, explaining the flow of capital from London across the Atlantic, ‘has come into her fortune’.23 Within Canada, nowhere had boomed as much as on the prairies, where the four ingredients of the dominion’s economic success came together most intoxicatingly. The new visitor was to be left in no doubt: Winnipeg was a city which was going places.

  Winnipeg, capital of the prairies, a city destined for worldwide greatness. Or so its promoters claimed in 1913.

  ‘Winnipeg’, noted an illustrated souvenir booklet of the time with only a little exaggeration, ‘can boast of the most rapid growth of any city in the world’.24 ‘Just thirty years ago’, it reminded its readers, the area where they now stood had been ‘bare prairie with a few rough buildings occupied by the Hudson Bay Company and a score or so of aggressive pioneer settlers’. How things had changed. Winnipeg was no longer a settlement but a city; not the end of the line but a crossroads; not a hard-scrabble outpost but an entrepôt for the world economy, collecting and then sending out an ever-increasing stream of grain. ‘Winnipeg the Wonderful’ it was dubbed, giddily:

  Immense buildings of brick, stone and marble … replace the few shanties and their Indian and half-breed inhabitants; whilst the many lines of Railway and Electric Street Cars take the place of the groaning and squeaking Red River Carts … Churches, Colleges and first-class Educational facilities abound. The Dominion and Municipal Public Buildings are a credit to any city. Many miles of Asphalted Streets and Granolithic Sidewalks bear witness to the ‘go ahead’ character of Winnipeg’s citizens … The whole of the Transcontinental Railway Traffic goes through the city. Main Street both in its length and width is one of the finest streets in the world.25

  Admittedly, all these glories were still doled out to a relatively small number of actual live Winnipeggers, numbering only 150,000-odd in 1913. (In typical booster fashion, the Canada Newspaper Directory of that year estimated Winnipeg’s population at much more: 205,000.)26 But there was plenty of room for expansion, the city limits extending to 14,861 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan Island.27 In 1913, the tram-line extended to the outskirts of the suburb of St Vital, which then consisted of little more than a grocery store, a few scattered homes, and a long line of telegraph poles stretching into the distance. ‘Welcome’, read a makeshift triumphal arch representing entry to St Vital, with ‘Prosperity’ and ‘Progress’ painted in large letters on to smaller arches to the left and right, alongside two shields bearing the word ‘Enterprise’.28 Build it, and they will come, was the philosophy of Winnipeg’s city fathers.

  Thus far, it had worked. After all, there were three times as many Winnipeggers in 1913 as in 1900, a far cry from the 241 recorded in the Canadian census of 1871 – or from the 1,600 canny inhabitants who, two years later, had got their scrawny frontier town ennobled as a city so as to allow them to borrow more money for its expansion. The ‘Million for Manitoba’ league, founded in 1911, urged ever-greater migration in order to populate and farm the plains of central Canada. According to the Canadian Annual Review of 1912, Winnipeg was already the largest grain centre in North America, having edged out Minneapolis a few years previously.29 In 1913, the doors of the opulent Fort Garry Hotel, even grander than the city’s Royal Alexandra Hotel, opened for the first time. Postcards advertised Fort Garry’s $2,000,000 cost. The assessed value of Winnipeg’s land reached $259.4 million that year, $100 million more than in 1912, and twenty-five times the total in 1900.30 Winnipeg’s banks cleared over $1 billion. And there was more to come. ‘As the Canadian West and North unfold their almost limitless wealth in lands and forests and mines’, asserted a publication of the Industrial Bureau, ‘so the importance of Winnipeg must grow and the fundamental resources of Winnipeg expand’.31 ‘Thank God for Now!’ wrote one optimistic Winnipegger in an article in May 1913, ‘these present times are the greatest and the best the world has ever seen’.32

  The hub of Winnipeg was, as it is today, where Portage Avenue meets Main Street. Around that nexus, and along those two streets, lay most of Winnipeg’s main buildings, each proclaiming in their own way the city’s confidence and verve. To the north, on Main Street, lay the Union Bank Building, a skyscraper which would not have looked out of place in downtown New York, a dozen storeys high. To the west, on Portage, was situated Eaton’s department store, occupying a whole city block, said to employ over a thousand staff and the jewel in the crown of a retail and distribution empire. Close by, on Lombard Street, was the Winnipeg Grain and Produce Exchange. Here, on the floor of one of the largest commodity exchanges in the world, the price of grain was determined by reference to the wholesale price achieved in Liverpool, England, from whence the information was cabled under the Atlantic three times a day. An electric wheat clock registered the Winnipeg price from minute to minute.33 A little further out, in 1913 the first stones were laid for the new Manitoba Legislative Building, intended to be one of the most impressive and most stately edifices in Canada, if not the world.

  The names under a collection of snapshots, marked ‘Representative Business and Professional Men of Manitoba’, in the 900-page Twentieth Century Impressions of Canada left no doubt as to British supremacy in the city.34 Beside one ‘Kelly’ lay two more. Around a ‘Davidson’ lay ‘Black’, ‘Robinson’, ‘Prior’, ‘Kelly’ (again), ‘Thomson’, ‘Hall’, ‘Hudson’ and ‘Wheatley’. Yet there was more to Winnipeg than just its Britishness – its Masonic clubs, fox-hunting and marching bands – important though it was. As in Canada as a whole, and western Canada in particular, the face of the city was changing. Thirteen countries had consular representatives there, including Austria-Hungary, Italy and Sweden.35 The city had five synagogues for its bustling Jewish community, with one part of the city called ‘Jerusalem’ as a result. It had German, Swedish and Icelandic Christian congregations. Winnipeg’s population in 1913 was sufficiently diverse to sustain an astonishing variety of newspapers: four German (one with a circulation of 21,000), two Hungarian weeklies, five papers for the super-literate Icelanders, three for the Swedes, as well as the Polish Gazeta Katholicka and papers for the Norwegian, Jewish and Ukrainian communities.36 One of Winnipeg’s richest men, who died in the United States in 1913 – and so did not feature in the snapshots of the Twentieth Century Impressions – was William Leistikow, born in the German city of Stettin (now the Polish city of Szczecin).

  Most immigrants were less fortunate than Leistikow. Visitors venturing to the area around the Canadian Pacific Railway yards, known as the North End, were faced with tightly-packed wooden houses, without sanitation and with little protection against the harsh Canadian winter. Here, voices spoke in languages strange and foreign to most Winnipeggers: Polish, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian. While infant mortality ran at 112 for every thousand live births in Winnipeg’s Ward 1, the district that was the home of the prosperous elite, in Ward 5, around the CPR yards, it ran at 282 per thousand.37 In a series of broadly positive articles on immigration in the Manitoba Free Press in May 1913 James Shaver Woodsworth, a Methodist who worked in the North End, warned of the corruption that new immigrants brought to local politics when they became new citizens, and of the end of the ‘quiet Canadian Sunday of our childhood’, to be replaced with more raucous European beer-drinking.38 However, like most in the city, he also welcomed the spirit and colour of the new migrants, their musical culture and their vivacious engagement with life. ‘At a joyous Polish wedding festival at which I was a guest’, Woodsworth recalled, ‘I saw some of the strange old [Polish] folk-dances, survivals of by-gone days, and heard the bursts of patriotic music that at home [in Europe] alien authorities had for years tried in vain to crush out’.39 ‘As the strong
faces glowed with an almost reverent enthusiasm’, he continued, ‘I caught a glimpse of qualities and gifts that will yet bring honor to this Canada of ours.’ There was work to be done to build Winnipeg, and these were the men and women to do it.

  Would the boom last forever? There were signs in 1913 that it was running out of steam. ‘Facts are proverbially stubborn things’, editorialised the Free Press, ‘they have to be faced sooner or later … there is, for example, the fact that the production of wheat in western Canada is advancing at a vastly greater rate than the capacity of available markets to absorb it’.40 This could be used as an argument in favour of reciprocal free trade with the United States, with its large and growing market for grain against which Liverpool and even Europe as a whole could not compete. There were other signs that the good times were coming to an end. In 1913, the wages for labour in the farms around Manitoba, having risen hugely over the last few years, began to fall. More and more immigrants to Canada, stopped only briefly in Winnipeg in 1913, before making their way further west to Saskatoon, or Calgary, or Edmonton. These were the new frontier towns – perhaps the new Winnipegs. Ultimately, would Canada’s grain continue to flow west to east (with Winnipeg on the railway line in the middle) or would it increasingly flow west to Vancouver (to be shipped across the Pacific) – or directly south to the United States, circumventing the Manitoban capital entirely? Were Winnipeg’s glory days beginning, or was its moment already past?

  Melbourne was in some ways a cautionary tale for Winnipeg. It too had been the boomtown of the British Empire. It too had been the future, in its day. Back in the 1870s and 1880s, as Melbourne’s central grid layout took shape and as its suburbs began to spread, the city had been awarded the popular moniker ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.41 Grown rich on gold and sheep, Melbourne seemed destined to become the premier Britannic metropolis of the southern hemisphere, and one of great cities of the world. In 1880 the upstart city hosted an International Exhibition, opened with a thousand-strong choir under the dome of the newly completed Royal Exhibition Building. From 139,916 inhabitants in 1861, the population of the city had soared to very nearly half a million by the time of the 1891 census.42

  Then disaster struck. Boom turned to bust. A banking collapse in 1893 frightened off the British investors on whom construction depended. Business slumped. For a decade, Melbourne’s population flatlined. Sydney – viewed by upright Victorians as the centre of uncouth, convict-settled New South Wales – began to catch up. When the various Australian colonies came to federate in the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, Melbourne was still a mite ahead and was duly pronounced capital – but only temporarily, until a new federal city was established, a rural site in New South Wales being selected for construction in 1908, and given the name Canberra in 1913. Two decades after the bust of the 1890s, a British visitor to Melbourne in 1913 found it still a constant topic of conversation. ‘Every one talked to us about it, and told us tales of well-to-do ladies who in a day became penniless, and were thankful to get situations as domestic servants’, wrote Alex Hill, former Master of Downing College, Cambridge, ‘of rich men who were reduced to begging for a clerk’s stool in a shop; of crowds of employees of every kind, who, owing to the sudden bankruptcy of so many firms, did not know where to turn for work.’43

  As Melbourne’s story demonstrated, circumstances could change quickly at the outer edges of the world, bound as they were to the global economy, yet distant from its heart. A loss of confidence could be catastrophic. But Melbourne had ultimately proved resilient. Perhaps it was too big a city to fail economically, exerting its own force field on its hinterland of farms and mines and vineyards, and already sufficiently rich to fund its (more steady) future growth out of savings at home rather than relying on money pouring in from abroad. Federation had made it the nation’s political capital. So while the days of headlong, unrestrained expansion were over by 1913, the city had recovered its poise, its population rising at a more leisurely, but nonetheless quite rapid, pace to 651,000, making it the same size as Montreal – the largest city in Canada – more populous than Madrid, Rome or Amsterdam, nearly twice as large as Washington, DC, and four times the size of Winnipeg.44

  Melbourne was back. On Swanston Street, the Library of Victoria showed off its new dome, the largest reinforced concrete dome in the world, reminding Melburnians of their city’s capacity to be world-beating (albeit only for a few months, until the opening of Max Berg’s Jahrhunderthalle in Breslau, Germany [now Wrocław, Poland]).45 A promotional film of the city was made by fixing a camera to the front of one of the new electric trams that rode down St Kilda Road and through the wide streets of the city. Resurrecting the title ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, the film cut from Flinders Street railway station to the famous Exhibition Building to the tall buildings of the business district to Henley-on-the-Yarra, Australia’s answer to the English rowing regatta.46 The city had regained some of its old verve, and some of its appetite for risk. ‘Its financiers are perennially engaged in preparing fresh “booms”’, wrote Alex Hill, marvelling at the rebound of the ‘elastic country’:

  Such gamblers are the Australians! On board ship they were always gambling. As soon as they landed they began to go in for little ‘flutters’ … Every town has its racecourse. The Melbourne Jockey Club claims that theirs is the finest in the world. They have spent £750,000 on it and its surroundings.47

  In the Melbourne Cup horse race of November 1913, the most keenly attended in Australia, Posinatus came in first, edging Belove and Ulva’s Isle out of the running. Tens of thousands of pounds were won and lost by Melburnians, rich and poor. No matter – the future was bright. Debts would be repaid and new fortunes made.

  Above all, Melbourne was a good place to live. ‘The beautiful harbour is all very well’, pointed out the Argus, but it was cheaper to live in Melbourne than in Sydney, with cheaper housing and cheaper food.48 There were a few complaints about increasing pollution from the city’s industry, but Melbourne had more parks than other cities too, and was far less densely populated than its New South Wales rival. Relatively well housed, well fed and well paid, Melburnians were also well entertained in 1913. In addition to sporting events – cricket matches, football games – which regularly attracted crowds in their thousands, Melburnians could choose between numerous touring theatrical shows, cheap thrills at the newly opened Luna Park by the beach, or, for those with a week of free evenings, the first full performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Australia (sung in English) at the cost of four guineas. In no other part of the world was the party of the working man so well represented politically, or his interests so well protected. A total of 134 wage boards in Victoria were involved in the setting of workers’ minimum wages by the end of 1913, covering every occupation from bedstead-makers to brewers, nail makers to nightwatchmen, pastry cooks to plumbers.49

  Employers and their allies warned of the unions’ ‘skilful manoeuvring and irresponsible lung-power’ and even of their ‘tyranny’.50 They railed against the ‘dissemination of syndicalist ideas’ and of the dangerous tendency towards disruptive strike action, such as the stand-off which had developed at the Broken Hill mines earlier in the year.51 Workers, meanwhile, fought hard to defend their accrued rights against a range of perceived threats. The Labor Party’s support for equal pay for women, some alleged, was simply a ploy to have women removed from the workplace, reducing the competition for men. The desire to keep Australia ‘white’ was not only about a sense of cultural separateness, it was also about preventing Australian workers from being undercut by imported Asian labour (Indians, Chinese or Japanese). This could be taken to absurd lengths. The Argus reported furious union complaints made in Western Australia about the engagement of a Sri Lankan doctor on an Australia-bound ship when the English doctor on board fell ill.52

  Yet wages in Australia could not be expected to rise forever: long-term growth depended on some level of immigration; specific labour shortages would have to be met. The answer, as the
government saw it, was to encourage British migration – which by 1913 flowed far more to Canada and the United States than to Australia – tripling its spending on assisted migration schemes from the British Isles. Farm labourers and domestic servants could expect particularly high reductions in their fares, mirroring the two greatest labour shortages in Victoria. In the end, however, these schemes brought relatively few new migrants, and certainly not enough to change the established demographics of the state. Unlike in Manitoba, where there were few born-and-bred Manitobans, the vast majority of Victoria’s population had been born locally – not just within Australia, but within the state. As for those born outside Australia, the overwhelming majority were British or Irish, outnumbering the next most populous group of immigrants – the Germans – by twenty-five to one. Melbourne, it seemed, would remain British for a while yet.

  Or Anglo-Celtic, as some preferred it. One of the newest migrants to Melbourne in 1913 was the city’s new Catholic Archbishop, Daniel Mannix. He was, he said, an Irishman, leaving little doubt as to his views on Home Rule for Ireland, the domestic political issue which convulsed the British Parliament for much of the year. ‘For years the Irish people were walking, as it were, through the desert’, he told the cathedral congregation at his welcome speech in March 1913.53 Now, they were on the brink of reaching the promised land. These were hot political issues in Melbourne. Earlier in the year, towards the end of January, over a thousand Catholic Australians had sailed down to the Mornington Peninsula in the annual outing of the United Irish League, who were supportive of Home Rule. The very next day, the Loyal Orange Order held a picnic at Aspendale Racecourse. ‘Orangemen’, they were told, ‘were the watchdogs of liberty’, stirring every sinew to save Ulster from the dangers of Home Rule.54