“Burma Road” (1942), by Edna Jaques

Jaques, Edna. “Burma Road.” Lethbridge Herald (13 February 1942).

I found this while looking (rather unsuccessfully, I might add) for anything about Asia or the War in Canadian newspapers by Dora Sanders in the early 1940s.

At first I thought to myself: “Surely Burma is jungle, and humid, not a dry, dusty desert?” but then I consulted my oracle, Madame Google, who tells me that there is extensive desert in Burma, but that are not (as I also suspected) any hyenas.

Still, readers would not miss the intent, I am sure.

Dora Sanders in the Circle of Young Canada

Dora Sanders’s contributions to the “Playtime for Little People” column on the Circle of Young Canada page of the Toronto Globe: “To The Robin” (26 June 1915), “My Flower” (15 January 1916), “Daylight Savings” (1 July 1916), and “Wonderments” (19 August 1916).

Dora Sanders’s contributions to the “Playtime for Little People” column on the Circle of Young Canada page of the Toronto Globe: “To The Robin” (26 June 1915), “My Flower” (15 January 1916), “Daylight Savings” (1 July 1916), and “Wonderments” (19 August 1916). Playtime Prizes of one dollar each were “given to boys and girls from 11 to 13 years old for the best letter on any subject, the best story or nature letter, and the best poem, photograph or drawing.” Dora won “best poem for April” in 1915 and “best poem for January” in 1916 but it is not certain if “My Flower” was in fact the winning January 1916 poem. The correlation between publication and winning is tenuous; not all winning poems appear to have been published. Dora Sanders’s daughter Pat Carney, in her memoir Trade Secrets (Toronto: Key Porter, 2000), notes that her mother “published her first poem, ‘Song of the Trees,’ the the Globe in 1915″ (26), but I at least could not find it in the Globe’s online archives.

Here are all the poems I did find. They are barely legible, but hopefully can be parsed.

New entries coming soon: Dora M. and Byrne Hope Sanders

There are still so many women to include…

I’m creating entries for Dora M. Sanders, aka Dora Sanders Carney, journalist, author, and mother of BC politician Pat Carney. Her biography came out in 1980, which does not put her on our radar, but she also (we discover) was a journalist in the 1930s, which does. Her sister, Byrne Hope Sanders, is also on our list of women to include, so I will be adding her soon, as well.

Meanwhile, I have run across a couple of articles by Dora M. Sanders in the Maclean’s archives that reveal her position regarding women’s rights, especially politically. The first article —dealing with border crossings—seems prescient, given her own experiences during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1939.

Sanders, Dora M. “Shackled!” Maclean’s (February 2, 1933), 17, 41.

Sanders, Dora M. “Women Won’t Be Free,” Maclean’s (August 15, 1933), 8, 33.

More about Katharine and Helen Bagg

Today, I am going through all of our authors to discover who has or has not been added to Wikipedia… Yes: all 800 authors. It’s rather time consuming, especially when I go down the inevitable rabbit holes the internet provides, like discovering a beautiful photograph of Joyce Marshall on an island in an Ontario marsh, or coming across a twist in the convoluted biography of Marian Osborne that needed to be untangled, or landing upon this blog post from 2017 about the children of Stanley Bagg of Montreal, lamenting that the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has left out his four daughters, two of whom (Katharine and Helen) are authors in our project…

The post is written by Janice Hamilton, Stanley Bagg’s great-great-granddaughter, who assisted us in our initial creation of our entries; we are really grateful to her, here, for filling in more details of these authors lives.

Now that we can travel again…

Some day, I want to take a holiday on a narrow boat in England. So, I thought to myself, why don’t I think about recreating the trip recorded in V. Cecil Cotes’s Two Girls on a Barge (1891), given my love of all things Duncan and my recent research about that text.

So I went through the text and tried to unravel the route. You think it would be easy, as it is a line, not a web, but there are a couple of items inconsistent with the actual geography of the canal. Still, the route does go from A (London) to B (Coventry), so all is not lost.

Here’s the page references from the text, and a bit about each. The Canal River Trust has a fabulous dynamic map. I have copied the pertinent parts and marked the mentioned places.

• Page 2: “She sat down with a decided air, and we composed a note to Messrs. Corbett, of the London Salt Works. For, as everyone knows, Messrs. Corbett’s boats are some of the best of those which ply between London and Birmingham.”
  —John Corbett (1817-1901), was notable in the salt trade: “Corbett acquired in 1852 the premises of [two salt works] companies, which stood respectively on opposite banks of the Worcester and Birmingham canal. Within a few years the enterprise was completely transformed [including] the acquisition of fifty canal boats, the cutting of tributaries from the canal to the lofts in which the salt was stored, the building of a railway—the property of Corbett—which traversed the works […] and the establishment of a wagon factory, a foundry, fitting shops, sawmills, and a brickyard. […] For his workpeople he built model houses, gardens, schools, a club-house, lecture-room, and dispensary. In 1859 he abolished female labour on the works, a step now commemorated by a window placed by public subscription in Stoke Prior church. He sold the works in 1889 to the Salt Union” (Dictionary of National Biography).
• Page 12: “The Cadet must have waited a long time on the wharf at Paddington, when we did at last arrive prepared to start.”
  —The Paddington Canal (or Paddington Arm) runs from Paddington Basin to join the Grand Union Canal in Bull’s Bridge, near the Hayes and Harlington Rail Station (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddington_Arm).
• Page 21: “It was the Bargee’s face that shone over the bulwark with a tentative inquiry. ‘Being Willesden, there’s stabling for the ‘orse, at least if you think proper!’.”
  —At Willesden, the Paddington Arm now runs beside rail tracks and through an industrial area.
• Page 42: “So we left Uxbridge far behind, with its funny little streets and utterly uncomprehending air. … And dawdling through the morning, we came after a long while to Rickmansworth.”
  —Uxbridge is just north of Cowley, and just past the junction to the Slough Arm canal. I think if I were to repeat the journey, I’d have to pop up the Slough Arm, for nostalgia’s sake. Slough has always been an object of local derision: “Come friendly bombs and drop on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now”; also a sign posted between Slough and Maidenhead when we lived in Windsor read: “Slough, twinned with Chernobyl.” It’s really not that bad, but it is not Home Counties idyllic, certainly.
• Page 45: “We found our canal lingering lovingly through Lady Keppel’s park the third morning of our wanderings.”
  —“Lady Keppel’s park,” the estate owned by the Capell family since 1627, is now Cassiobury Park in Watford./https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiobury_Park). Cotes notes that they “had come to Lady Keppel’s acres through ‘a many’ locks. First a pound and then a lock, a lock and then a pound — ‘pound’ being a canal definition of the level reaches that lie between the locks — and we had begun to feel like some sort of accomplices in a very old book of the Arabian Nights. For these locks were, many of them, quaintly picturesque, with the quaintness that arises from an undisturbed possession of themselves” (page 45–46) but as the map shows, such a description is far more apt for the stretch of canal they encountered on the next day, between Hemel Hampstead and Marsworth.
• Page 59: “But fate having brought us to King’s Langley, the city of a Liliputian street, we paid the homage due at the shrine of local precedent.”
  —King’s Langley has a Roman villa excavated just to the south; not much else to say.
• Page 65: “So we found Stoke Brewin, with its low-roofed cottages among its grass-grown roads.”
  —”Stoke Brewin” is actually “Stoke Breuene,” which lies just south of the Blisworth Tunnel; not sure what it’s doing at this point in the narrative.
• Page 66: “ ‘Hitch their waggons to the Polar system of an Uxbridge or a Rickmansworth!’ quoth Mr. Squif, studying the old grey tower of the little church.”
  —Rickmansworth is not otherwise mentioned, but it lies just south of Watford so, like Uxbridge, they would have already travelled through it.
• Page 67: “Well, then, there was Berkhampstead. Berkhampstead reclining its lank self away inland, but staying for a little space on the side of the canal to dabble its white stones.”
  —Berkhamstead boasts Maria Edgeworth, Graham Greene, and the Whomping Willow from the Harry Potter movies.
• Page 72: “ ‘Leighton Buzzard it ‘ull be to-night,’ said Mrs. Bargee next day. ‘It’s a good stoppin’ place is Leighton, and there’s fodder for the ‘orse.’ But Mrs. Bargee was flustered as she stated this as a predetermined fact. If she had not been flustered she would immediately have added, ‘leastways, in the best of our endeavours it will be Leighton Buzzard.’ Perhaps that was an added reason for our not finding ourselves at Leighton when the evening came.”
• Page 75: “Therefore we went up to Tring at once.”
• Page 83: “ ‘Blisworth,’ shuddered the voice, almost involuntarily, it seemed.”
  —Blisworth Tunnel is the first tunnel they encounter. Apparently, as the horses couldn’t get through the tunnels (obviousl), two men would have to “leg it” through, lying on the deck and using their feet on the walls of the tunnel to propel the boat along. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/narrowboat-legging
• Page 88: “We went amiably together to beg roses from a dewy garden situated on a promontory of the conclusive name of Northampton Amen.”—I can find no place with this name, but a canal branches off to Nonrthampton at Gayton Bridge, just after the Bliksworth Tunnel.
  “ ‘There was somebody inquiring for you down at Fenny Lock yesterday when I come through,’ said a tall brown bargee — ‘a stranger-man’ — accosting the roses principally, as we came back to the barge.”
  —Fenny Stratford Lock is near Bletchley.
• Page 107: “Sunday had anchored at the Seven Locks with us in idleness.”
• Page 109: “We had turned out of the Grand Junction and crept up a smaller channel that branches out of the main stream somewhere between Watford and Crick. An unfrequented channel — a sort of a baby canal, where the water was so shallow that, leaning on the bulwark, one could see the tangled roots of the reeds, and the silly little shoots and foolish, straggling grasses which grow on the brown wrack of last year’s sedge. Then the stream had grown broader and deeper, and more still and dignified, and there stood in front of us the Seven Locks like seven cool white sisters in some old quiet park with the water all about them.”
  —This description is not consistent with modern maps of the canals, but there is a story. The Leicester Line Arm of the Grand Union Canal was previously the Leicestershire & Northamptonshire Union Canal, which ran from the junction of the River Soar with the Trent & Mersey Canal through to Market Harborough. It was extended down, intending to meet up with the Grand Union Canal just south of Watford (Leicestershire), but the dates of the construction of this Arm are not easy to find. The “old” Grand Union Canal and the L&N Union Canal were purchased (by a company named Grand Junction—hence the confusion about the names Grand Union and Junction Canals) in 1894, three years after the publication of Two Girls on a Barge. So it is likely that the only waterway connecting the two at the time was a small canal where the larger one would soon be. If this were true, the small canal would have led directly to the Seven Locks at Watford.
• Page 128: “It is a long way by canal from the Seven Locks to the Braunceston Tunnel, and it was noon when we reached the gorge between the quivering larches that creep by the dark portal in the hill.”
  —The route from the Seven Locks to the Braunceton Tunnel would have been to backtrack through the small canal to the Grand Union Canal proper.
• Page 136-37: “So we glided on, as the afternoon was waning, to Braunceston, Mrs. Bargee’s home.”
  —After Braunceston, in order to get to Coventry, the route leaves the Grand Union Canal and heads north into the Oxford Canal, which runs from Oxford to Exhall, where it junctions with the Coventry Canal. The route then runs south from that junction into Coventry.
• Page 139: “One day he stood still on the bank, and the Bargee, indicating all the meadows in a large-minded way, observed, ‘This be Rugby, sir.’”
  —Rugby, as is mentioned in the book, was not only the name of the town but also of the preparatory school run by Dr. Thomas Arnold, father of poet Matthew Arnold and author William Arnold.
• Page 144: “Stealthily, silently creeping up between low banks, slowly gliding by the shingle to the denser shadows of Godiva’s town, we came to Coventry, and on the farthest outskirts of her mantle, just where its border wears a sheen of poetry and its hem curves gently to the water, we dropped anchor, lingering.”—Coventry, much described in the book, is where the journey ended. The barge and fittings were sold up, and the travellers returned to London. The Grand Union Canal continues from the junction with the Oxford Canal, through Leamington Spa, on to Birmingham.

Audrey Alexandra Brown (1904-1998)

The things you find when dancing about the internet…

I’m adding some missing references to our entries, and came upon a 1934 collection of essays by Martin Burrell that includes a biography of Audrey Alexandra Brown. Our entry for her is not as well fleshed out as it could be, so I know what this afternoon’s task will be…

But I thought you might like to have the whole essay to read, as she is a little known but quite interesting poet from Victoria, back when the Victoria and Islands branch of the Canadian Authors Association was highly active and populated with great talent.

Burrell, Martin. “Audrey Alexandra Brown.” Crumbs are Also Bread (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934): 313-327.

Brown AA – bio in BurrellDownload

Ellen H. Gregsten (1831 – 1923)

I received a request for information about Ellen Gregsten from Christine Campana. Sadly, I was absolutely no help, but she did send the link to the FindaGrave page for the author. There, we are told that

Ellen was one of six children of John Robinson, a printer (from Omagh, County Tyrone Northern Ireland), and Mary Turner or Sarah (Maiden Name Unknown) … an orphan, raised in Liverpool … Ellen married William Gregsten on 29 February 1860 in Liverpool, England, at St. Bride’s church. At the time, William lived there on Clayton Square, and Ellen lived on Falkner Street. Soon after their marriage, some time in 1860, they left England and moved to London, Middlesex County, Ontario, Canada. Although William died there in 1869, Ellen chose to remain in Canada for the rest of her life.

The FindaGrave entry also includes a photo, and a few pages of Gregsten’s chapbook, My Secret: A Story in Rhyme; a second chapbook/pamphlet, My February Wish, has no date.

If anyone has any information about this author, please contact us, and we will pass the information forward to Christine Campana.

Lydia Frances Williamson (“Richard Scrace”)

I love connection to community…

I while ago, Ed Butts, of Guelph, Ontario, sent an email asking if we had a better copy of our photo of Lydia Frances Williamson for an article he was writing. The original is from John W. Garvin, ed. Canadian Poets, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1926), so it was easy to provide. His article has come out today in the Guelph Today news.

Butts, Ed. “Get to Know Two of Guelph’s Lesser-known Composers and Poets.” Guelph Today (26 April 2021). Web.

Hearing More Voices: English-Canadian Women in Print and on the Air, 1914-1960 (2020), by Carole Gerson and Peggy Kelly, a review by Phyllis Reeve

How dare the 1970s Children’s Literature community reject Anne of Green Gables as a “classic,” because the success of LM Montgomery‘s novels was “viewed as symptomatic of their lack of serious value”?

Like Phyllis Reeve, the reviewer of Carole Gerson and Peggy Kelly’s Hearing More Voices: English-Canadian Women in Print and on the Air, 1914-1960, I was appalled to learn of such an opinion. I’m sure that readers of my generation (interestingly, those who would have encountered Anne in the early 1970s) absolutely considered Anne of Green Gables already to be a classic. Another favourite of the reviewer is children’s author and radio presenter Mary Grannan (“Just Mary”). This is undoubtedly why she opens her review with a foray into her childhood reading, but in addition to children’s authors, Hearing More Voices presents more broadly “aspects of the lives and works of Canadian female writers and broadcasters within a tumultuous period during our socio-economic and political history: 1914-1960.” Like our CEWW project, the authors focus on lesser known writers who are all very well worth reading about.

“In the Land of the Tsar,” by Rosamond Kershaw

Kershaw, Rosamond. “Five Days in the Land of the Tsar.” Canada Monthly 17.4 (February 1915), 222-226; 17.5 (March 1915), 102+

Only three years after this article, despite Tzar Nicholas’s willingness to abdicate, the Russian Imperial family was taken from their home, imprisoned in Aleksandr Palace, then removed to Siberia, where they were shot and bayoneted on the order of Vladimir Lenin on 17 July 1918. The article below notes that St. Petersburg is “now Petrograd,” a sign of the changing times already in Russia.