Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 766
In the days before the Great War, the days of the great fortunes and of the great snobbishness that went with what the McGill professor, mentioned above, called the “oppressive and plutocratic atmosphere” that surrounded the richer class in Montreal, in those days the idea of Westmount carried something of a touch of second rate, something that could almost be pushed to the comic point of a standard joke. The old burlesque companies on circuit always carried as part of their stock in trade the name of a “dud” suburb to go with each theater town, Chelsea for Boston, Parkdale for Toronto, and so on. Westmount was saved from this by the existence of Verdun with an asylum in it. But even at that it seemed to lack class. Those days are long gone by. Westmount grew beautiful as Montreal grew shabby. The Prince of Wales Terrace is a dingy place beside the Upper Boulevard, and Westmount ladies get their hair dressed and their beauty renewed on Sherbrooke Street, Montreal. The millionaires’ houses are being demolished, rushing in piles of brick and dust down the contractors’ chutes. The Westmount houses climb higher and higher to the sky.
It is no part of the present work to discuss the story of the Great War as it affected Montreal. Such a chronicle belongs elsewhere. But in a sense Montreal was perhaps more profoundly affected by the reaction of the Great War and of the collapse and depression which followed it than any city in Canada. The war brought a great shift of personal and social values. The leaders of finance, explaining in their clubs that the war would only last six months because big business wouldn’t allow it to go further, soon gave place, disregarded, to other leaders and other thoughts: to the volunteers drilling on the McGill campus, men who are the generals of today humbly learning to form fours; Professor Auckland Geddes as the man of the hour, the man who knew and had known; with him the little old Duke, the Governor General, back on a soldier’s job, up and down the campus beside Auckland Geddes, which in front, which behind, no one knew; the departure of the overseas regiments of 1915 marching to the ships, their women clinging in their ranks, then later, as wisdom intervened, the port closed as now, troopships that moved silently down the river in the early morning, with never a farewell except from hands that waved good-by from the windows of factories where work never stopped. All this needs no recital. It is back again.
After the war followed the brief aftermath of high prices, the momentum of the war machine mistaken for the new impetus of peace. Then followed the collapse of prices that struck down agriculture, nature taking a hand in with dust thrown in the western farmer’s eyes; with this the wreck of factory industry, with nothing to make and no one to buy; and as the consequence, not the cause, the reflection, not the light, the mirror, not the picture, the collapse of the Montreal Stock Exchange values that demolished, part of it forever, the world that was. It is claimed by some people that the financial dominance enjoyed in Canada by Montreal may not survive. Finance was struggling back to life as best it could between the depression and the present war, but certain large and new interests had sprung up, notably the northern mining interest, which Montreal was either slow in seizing or unfortunate in not getting. It is said, or at least whispered, that Toronto now seriously threatens the financial priority so long held by Montreal. Yet for this no one need worry. When peace comes and with it, under a wise extravagance instead of a foolish parsimony, the new development of Canada begins on a scale never before known, there will be plenty of finance and money for both cities. After all, there are two classes that we have always with us, the poor and the rich.
FOOTNOTES:
Henry Dalby, Montreal Herald, 1913.
(Sir) H. B. Ames, The City Below the Hill, 1897.
Report of the Cannon Commission, 1909.
J. I. Cooper, Montreal, 1942.
Carl Bergithon, The Stock Exchange, 1941.
CHAPTER XII. The Port of Montreal
The Magic of the Sea. Geographical Advantages of Montreal. Twentieth-Century Improvement of the Ports. The Jacques Cartier Bridge. The Barrier of the Ice. The Shipping List. Many Cargoes. River Steamers and Lake Freighters. The St. Lawrence Seaway.
FOR ALL PEOPLE of British and kindred descent there is an abiding attraction in a seaport. The shipping that comes and goes connects the harbor with the seven seas and the faraway peoples of the outer world. The poet who wrote a hundred years ago of “the mystery and beauty of the ships and the magic of the sea” found words to express the common thought of all the people whose national heritage has been the sea.
Montreal has a rare and picturesque scenic beauty; mountain and river and its far horizon give it an unsurpassed interest for the eye. It carries all the romantic charm of its varied history. But for many people its most appealing aspect is that of a great port, one of the greatest in the world and in many senses unique among all the ports of the globe.
Many a simple dweller in the city whose life and livelihood are quite unconnected with the operations of the harbor, who perhaps rarely visits it, unconsciously feels it a part of himself, bringing him a touch of maritime life, a whiff of the open sea. Such people follow in their morning newspaper the annual fortunes of the harbor as a part of their own existence. They live in an unending sea story. They feel a new awakening each year at the news that the Gulf is all clear below Anticosti, news of heavy northwest winds at Fame Point, no ice in sight from the Seven Islands, and light breezes to dead calm reported off Rimouski. There is a charm in the names of these queer places, strung into a thousand miles along river and gulf, with no other meaning or history than points of navigation, places for range lights, fog bells and weather reports, ending at the Strait of Belle Isle where the last ice goes out to let in the first ship. Such people feel a personal pride in the annual spring victory of the great icebreakers pounding against the ice jams below Lake St. Peter and follow the award of the harbor’s annual gold-headed cane for the first ocean ship in port as inland people follow the ball games of their league.
Such a reader in the heyday of the summertime, with dog days of heat and tourists, finds his delight each day in looking down the long and varied shipping list that covers a page or more of print, the calendar of the great liners ready months ahead and arrivals and departures from all over the world. Then comes the autumn and with it the rush of the grain ships that warns of the annual passing of navigation, the winter sleep of the port. The great passenger liners drop out in wary prudence, while the grain carriers fight on to the last, fed by the lake boats from a thousand miles up, making their last trip out of Fort William in blinding snowstorms and bitter cold. Presently the last is gone, the buoys and marks removed; Fame Point is silent; the river steamers are packed tight in their harbors, fast asleep until spring — and the ice rules again. If it were not for the barrier of ice Montreal might easily be the greatest port in all the world. But the “if” is as large as the St. Lawrence and the Gulf below, both of which are utterly unconquerable.
But for the ice! For consider what an extraordinary geographical position is occupied by the Port of Montreal. It is the farthest inland seaport of any importance in all the world, one thousand miles from the sea. Yet by the good fortune of geography it is closer to Liverpool than any seaport in the United States. Montreal shows a distance from Liverpool of 2760 miles, Portland 2783, Boston 2861, New York 3043, and Philadelphia 3179. Yet conversely, apart from the Hudson Bay route, Montreal is the nearest ocean port to Central Canada and to the Middle West of the States. The great technical development of the Port of Montreal, in relation to engineering facilities for unloading, loading, and storage of freight, its extent of berths and wharfage and its ability to meet the great expansion of the passenger trade, did not, as already said, take place until the present century. The change came because it had to. The increasing size of modern steamships involved not only deeper and deeper dredging but facilities for mechanical loading, fueling, and repair. The reference is here not to the increasing size of freak ships, such as the Great Eastern, or record ships, blue-ribbon ships needed for national prestige, but the increasing size of what is called the “economical” ship, giving the maximum returns for a minimum of proportional cost. The increase of economical size comes from increased efficiency in building, new methods of carrying and using fuel, and the increasing opportunity to secure large cargoes without delay. Such economical ships of first-class commerce runs now represent a tonnage that runs up to twenty thousand tons. A port unable to gather freight rapidly enough, load and unload fast enough, and offer water deep enough to float these ships could not survive as a world port. Montreal has never been concerned with “big ships” in the world’s top class. The top ocean tonnage before the present war was represented by the Queen Elizabeth (85,000 registered tons), the Normandie (82,435), a group of a dozen ships of more than 35,000 tons. These ships fill a large place in the world’s eye, a small place in the world’s trade. Montreal’s 20,000-ton Duchesses represent the main fleet of the world’s commerce.
The Empress of Britain, whose tragic fate was a disastrous episode of the present war, was the largest boat ever on the St. Lawrence (42,000 tons), but only ran as far as the port of Quebec. The ocean cargo tonnage entering the Port of Montreal in the years just before the war ran to an average of about 5,000,000, the cargo tonnage outward about 4,000,000.
The ship channels of the St. Lawrence cover a distance of 210 statute miles from Montreal to South Traverse which is fifty miles below Quebec. Between Montreal and Quebec the channel offers a minimum draft of thirty feet at autumn low water; in the lower part of it high tide makes a lift of five feet more.
For over three years now the harbor of Montreal has been secluded and surrounded by all the grim secrecy and mystery of wartime. No one may enter its precincts except upon his lawful occasions. Sentries guard the approaches. There are no reports or arrivals or departures of ships, no sailing dates. Silent vessels slip away to unknown ports.
Even such general and vague statistics of shipping, incoming and outgoing tonnage, etc., as are made public are only given in a retrospect that makes them harmless. Information of any sort is forbidden, its disseminator liable to be called to account. Nor would any detailed account of shipping and of operations in the harbor serve any good purpose just now although it might aid a bad one. The war has so entirely altered the nature of the import and export trade that present figures would be meaningless as an account of the national life of the port. For that reason it is better to drop back a few years and view the Port of Montreal at the high point of development it had reached toward the closing years of the 1930s.
The present century has witnessed an extraordinary progress in this development of the Port of Montreal. As the first of the harbor improvements to be noted is the building in 1901 of the present heavy stone revetment wall, already spoken of, designed to hold back floodwater. At the same time the old Common and Commissioners streets were further widened: these originally represented, it will be remembered, the open space between the old fortification wall and the foreshore of the river. Now began, with the construction of Elevator No. 1, the building of the great grain elevators that are the most obvious feature of Montreal Harbour. Their towering height, the shapeless size, with no proportion to the site or scene they occupy, make them, to the eye of art, a blot upon the landscape, a disfigurement of nature’s work. But they have a beauty all their own to a milling company. In any case they mean so much to the life and industry of Canada, to the life line of imperial safety, that the eye that looks on them becomes trained to a new adjustment. The four now standing on the harbor front represent a capacity of 15,260,000 bushels.
Any prejudice against the appearance of the elevators is greatly lessened for anyone who has enjoyed the privilege of seeing the inside detail of their operations. One is lost in admiration at the ingenuity of contrivance which they represent. The movement of the grain along the carriers, its downpour through the chutes, its passage out along the aerial carriers running above the dock sheds to carry it to any needed point — these things represent the last word in the mechanical economic carriage of grain.
The building of the great modern piers or docks that now line the harbor front began at the same period, with the Alexandra and King Edward piers, and Elevator No. 1. What was left of the little Islet Normandin (Market Island), the original shelter that made such a natural harbor as there was beside Champlain’s Place Royale and Maisonneuve’s Ville Marie, was now shoveled away (1903). The island is gone. The ocean liners pass over it. The addition of more railway tracks, a total present length of nearly sixty miles, new sheds, and the building of the Hochelaga high-level wharf, 575 feet long, marked a continuous progress. The harbor was itself extended by Act of Parliament in 1909, from its old boundary just below St. Marys current, and declared to occupy sixteen miles on each side of the river. Its boundary upstream is a line crossing the St. Lawrence 3760 feet above the Victoria Bridge, and its lower boundary is placed at Bout de l’Isle eight and three quarter miles below Longue Pointe Church. The original little harbor had no natural advantages, other than that it was better than anything else available, being just a casual shelter for a few odd vessels. But on the new scale Montreal Harbour has the outstanding natural advantage that it can expand to any extent. Nature placed obstacles upstream, none down. The harbor can go on forever. Whether Montreal stands in the wrong place and whether Maisonneuve should have put it below St. Marys current at the start, is a matter it is now too late to discuss. But for the movement of freight for the erection of plants, works, docks, the lower downstream the easier. The mountain is just in the way.
All these things were done through and by the Harbour Commissioners whose efficiency had been greatly increased by reducing their number to three and multiplying their actual power and responsibility. Montreal owes much to their energy and foresight and in particular to the devoted service of the Chairman, the late George Washington Stephens. It came with a shock of surprise, or worse, to many people, when the Harbour Commissioners lost their posts because the government in power at Ottawa changed in 1911 from the long and fortunate Liberal regime of Sir Wilfred Laurier (1895-1911) to a Conservative administration. It was thought proper to invite the Harbour Commissioners to resign. There was no exact precedent to follow, and so the office was treated as what is called a “political” one. Under British practice a political officer — there are only a hundred or so in the army of officials — is in charge of general policy in the relations between the department and the government. He is not a departmental worker nor a departmental expert. The First Lord of the Admiralty never goes to sea and wouldn’t know the lea-scuppers from the main chains. These people resign as a body on a change of government. Quite different are “permanent” officers trained to work in the department as a lifework. These never resign. The storms of politics, mostly summer lightning, go over their heads. They go on working.
One may judge to which class should have been assigned the Montreal Harbour Commissioners, especially the chairman, who had taken their work as their life and their cause, hoping some day to stand in stone on the Harbour Front beside the Honorable John Young whose statue they set up in 1908. It was not to be. Out they went. This is not to say that the men who followed them in office did not do excellent service. Improvement and expansion went right on. Nor did they terminate when the commission itself was abolished in 1935 in favor of the present centralized system by which all the chief Canadian seaports are under the single control of a National Harbors Board at Ottawa. Each port has its local port master and staff. The change occasioned surprise in outside circles at Montreal, with a certain sense of being degraded in rank. But it was taken on the high authority of Sir Alexander Gibb, whose aid had been solicited for a National Port Survey of the Dominion (1931).
The further deepening of the channel continued till it reached its present thirty-five feet maximum. Elevator No. 3 dates from 1910. The floating dry dock, one of the notable facilities of the harbor, dates from 1912. The Great War brought special labors and for the time checked capital development. But further improvement and construction were carried on more vigorously than ever after the war. The substitution of electric engines for steam (1919) proved a mistake and was abandoned but the construction of the cold storage plant (1919), the purchase of (grain) Elevator B (Windmill Point) from the Canadian National Railway (1923) and the construction in the same year of Elevator No. 3 (Maisonneuve) are marks of the active progress made.
The first of the 20,000-ton Duchess vessels arrived in port in 1928. The close of this epoch saw Montreal by the middle of the 1930s, four hundred years after Jacques Cartier first landed on the island, as the second greatest seaport in North America in the value of its imports and its exports. By the present time the completed wharfage of the port covers ten miles. Its average export of grain before the war was 146,000,000 bushels a year. Ships could load at the rate of 1,000,000 bushels a day.
But the most striking of all the changes, though with nothing to do with the harbor as such, was the construction and completion of the vast Harbour Bridge that now spans the river clear over the top of all the shipping, just at St. Marys current. In order to get the necessary height (162 feet above high water) to clear the highest masts or superstructures of ships coming to Montreal, the bridge had to start far back from the bank of the river (at Lafontaine Street), rising above the houses and over the streets. The monument of the “Patriotes,” executed in 1838, in the Place des Patriotes is almost directly under it. It lifts across the river to piers beside Île Ronde and St. Helens Island in one vast cantilever span of structural steel. From there it runs along a succession of deck trusses on stone piers across the shallow water to the South Shore between St. Lambert and Longueuil. It has a total length of two and one eighth miles. It was officially opened as the Harbour Bridge on May 24, 1930. But the fatal arrival in 1935 of the four hundredth anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s discovery proved too much for Montreal. The bridge was rechristened the Jacques Cartier Bridge.
