h istoric
hills
by Ken Weber
A hundred years ago, our community newspapers in this rather quiet patch of rural Canada tended to bury the outside world in the back pages. But when Canada followed Britain into war, everything changed.
Our local press on the eve of the Great War
O
n June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the AustroHungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo. It did indeed become a “shot heard round the world,” but for the weekly papers in these hills, the event was simply too remote to disrupt the focus on local concerns. The notorious Bertha ar myworm, for example, had appeared in plague-like numbers and was threatening to chew down crops all the way from Georgian Bay to Lake Ontario. If that weren’t scary enough to country people, there was the news that Melancthon farmer George Coutts had lost 17 cows in two weeks to a disease that looked like anthrax. Other local issues ranged from the vil lage level (Palgrave could not attract a teacher to its local school despite the exceptional salary of $700 a year) to the regional level (37 Lodges had marched in the 1914 Orangemen’s Parade in Shelburne, but officials were in a dither because five Lodges, without apology or explanation, had failed to appear). Meanwhile at the provincial level, James Whitney and his temperancesupporting Liberals had just been reelected to Queen’s Park and prohi bitionists across Ontario were – with appropriate sobriety – dancing in the streets. Altogether, there was too much going on at home to fret about matters in far-off Europe. 68
IN THE HILLS Summer 2014
A Sunny & Quiet July The early summer of 1914 must have seemed an exceptionally peaceful time in these hills. Even the provincial election, usually worth a brawl or two, hadn’t aroused much feeling. The Orangeville Sun called it the quietest one in memory. The Brampton Con servator got a little more excited and declared Peel safe (from liquor) for another ten years, while the Bolton Enterprise barely mentioned the elec tion results, concentrating instead on the year-end marks at Bolton Public School.
With politics and booze out of the picture, sports news had taken over. Alton’s baseball team was hot. So was Erin’s, so the traditional Alton-Erin competition was on again. Brampton’s lacrosse team, the Excelsiors, had travelled all the way to Vancouver for the Mann Cup and lost in a controversial, protested game. And the most popular sport in the world in 1914 – boxing – earned headlines when Jack Johnson successfully de fended the heavyweight crown he’d won from Canada’s Tommy Burns in 1908.
The Public’s Right to Know or …? Early in August 1914, the government issued an appeal – not a directive – to Canada’s newspapers asking them not to print any information about the makeup, readiness or movements of local regiments. Days later, when 230 officers and men from Dufferin and Peel (part of the 36th Peel Regiment) were ordered to report to the new training camp in Valcartier, Quebec, practically every paper in the hills not only published this fact, but even gave specific details about who was reporting, complete with name, rank, age, home area, military experience and even marital status!
It was, though, the proverbial calm before the storm. Soldiers in the millions were being mobilized in Europe that July, but subscribers to local newspapers here were informed instead that the Shelburne branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had installed a public drinking fountain across from Chalmers’ and Puckering’s store, and that in Grand Valley Ed Broadhacker’s 13-year-old son had recovered from his fall off a load of hay. When they scanned the national news, readers learned of a new design for the Canadian $2 bill, that the Anglican Church of Canada was planning to change “hell” to “hades” in the Book of Common Prayer, and that a confused whale had been trapped in Charlottetown harbour.
Was Europe Just Too Far Away? Not that international news was ig nored in the local press. The Home Rule struggle in Ireland was updated every week, as were the chronic civil wars in Mexico, but much of what made it to print was wire-service “fill.” The Erin Advocate, for in stance, in what must certainly have been a slow news week locally, devot ed space to Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands and her thoughts on losing weight. On July 10, the Bolton Enterprise covered Franz Ferdinand’s elaborate funeral in Vienna in a three-line blurb that was
P eel A r t G aller y, M u se u m and A r chives
From the front page of the Brampton Conservator, August 5, 1914. Illustration credit the Montreal Star.
