Category Archives: Canada

August 3, 2023 · 6:13 pm

The Irish and the Colonisation of the Prairie North-West

Ever heard of John Palliser, William Francis Butler, John Macoun, Garnet Wolseley, George and John French, Lief Crozier, or Frederick Middleton? All were leading figures in the colonisation of the Prairie North-West. All of them were from Ireland.

Some context. Canada confederated in 1867 following an earlier phase in the 1840s of responsible government that held the British appointed executive accountable to locally elected assemblies. Canada as a Dominion consisted initially of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Manitoba became the fifth Province in 1870, British Columbia the sixth in 1871, and PEI the seventh in 1873.

The one and half million square miles to the north and west of Canada was Rupert’s Land, granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles II in 1670. The rest was the North-Western Territory, ‘added’ in 1821. The Indigenous inhabitants who had called it home since time immemorial were not consulted about the HBC’s charter or its claims to civil authority over their ancestral lands. (There is evidence of human settlement in Bluefish Caves, fifty miles from Old Crow in Yukon dating to 24,000 BCE: the first human presence in Ireland is 8,000 years ago.)

By the 1860s and the development of railways, British officials in the Colonial Office in London blanched at the cost of opening of this land to settlement. Yet they feared too that the United States might shift their manifest destiny northward after reaching the Pacific. Britain was keen that the newly confederated Canada establish its claim to the North-West before the Americans got any ideas. Enter John Palliser proposing an expedition to the North-West.

John Palliser grew up in an Anglo-Irish family settled in Ireland for many centuries. By the 1840s, Palliser’s devotion to big-game hunting had taken him deep into the interior of northern North America. His proposal to return came at an opportune time for the Colonial Office. With persistent support from fellow-Irishman at the Colonial Office John Ball, the Colonial office agreed to sponsor a scientific expedition to the Northwest. With an eye to projecting sovereignty and learning about the region, the Colonial Office offered support of £5,000 (over £400,000 today).

We cannot tell when Palliser himself reframed the expedition in his mind from hunting to exploration, but his leadership of the expedition over three seasons was marked by indefatigable good humour, no matter the hardship, and egalitarian charm to all he met. This kept his team together despite the truculence of one member. Significantly and singularly, it meant that the expedition avoided any violence in what was widely regarded as the hostile territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika). Lewis and Clark’s violent encounter with members of the Confederacy in 1806 had not been forgotten. The lack of violence around Palliser’s travels through the region was all the more noteworthy because both Palliser’s party and the Indigenous knew that the expedition portended settlement, colonisation, and profound changes ahead.

Indeed, the “scientific” purpose of the Palliser Expedition was to investigate the potential of the land for transport infrastructure, agricultural and mining development, with the intention of settling a whole new European population there. This was science as colonisation. Even Palliser’s recommendations were not ultimately heeded by this impulse to colonise. He recommended against trying agriculture in a triangle of semi-arid steppe that later bore his name, the Palliser Triangle. Yet indeed homesteads were established in Palliser’s Triangle and the region was subject to punishing periodic droughts.

Palliser’s report was prodigious, full of data. It would remain a standard reference point for many years. Writes Irene Spry: “After Prince Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory had become western Canada, the Expedition’s successors made much use of its Report. Outstanding among them were the geological survey teams, the North-West Mounted Police, and the negotiators of the Indian treaties. Among them, too, was Sandford Fleming, Engineer-in-Chief of the Canadian Pacific Railway, who was ‘very desirous’ of making Palliser’s acquaintance and did contrive to meet him. He always took a copy of Palliser’s Report with him when going over the ground the Expedition had covered, finding it of great use.” [Palliser Papers, pp cxxxii-cxxxiii]

Palliser is remembered today in many place names in Alberta. However, like so many of the Anglo-Irish in British North America, both his direct contribution and his Irish identity has been largely forgotten. Comeragh House was burned down at the end of the Troubles in 1923, along with his personal papers. Thanks to the efforts of The Champlain Society, devoted to the preservation of the stories, rigorously tested against the highest academic standards, of those who helped create Canada, Palliser’s papers were compiled and published in 1968, superbly edited by Irene Spry. Her introduction is marvellous. She captures so much detail and personality, without losing sight of the geopolitical context and the consequences of the Expedition. Spry’s account of the Expedition is a classic: The Palliser Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (1963). Palliser is buried at the Comeragh Church of Ireland cemetery, near Lemybrien, Waterford.

The American Civil War had consumed not just vast numbers of people, property, and materiel, but any capacity for foreign affairs beyond the demands the war. (The transatlantic cable between NL and Ireland was delayed until 1866). After 1865, Reconstruction was a priority and would remain so for years.

Almost immediately after Canadian Confederation, London set about organising the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada through a sale agreement for £300,000 in 1869. A sale was prosaic but profound; who could challenge a transaction with money changing hands?

Another key advocate for Canada’s westward expansion getting Prime Minster John A. Macdonald’s attention was John Macoun from County Down, hired as the Geological Survey’s first naturalist and an obsessive collector of flora and fauna. Macoun, at the time a 51 year old botanist, would lead the development of the first natural-history collections for the Museum of Nature and become the founder of Canadian natural history. Through his popular talks in Ottawa he promoted the productive capacity of the North-West, while underplaying the rigors of its winters.

Before the Dominion of Canada could establish its control over the North-West, the Métis of the Red River Settlement mounted an armed resistance and asserted their rights to their land, culture, and livelihood. Under the leadership of Louis Riel (his surname possibly from Reilly or O’Reilly some generations previously), the Red River Métis established a provisional government in late 1869 and negotiated the establishment of Manitoba as the fifth province to enter the Confederation the following year. The Manitoba Act however did not contain an amnesty for the members of the Provisional Government.

To assert its authority in the region, Canada organised a military expedition under the command of Garnet Wolseley. Wolseley was born in Dublin in 1833 and his family seat was in Carlow. However, his father died when he was young, leaving his widow to raise seven children. Under financial pressure, she educated Garnet in Dublin rather than England (as was the custom) and he joined the British Army to start a career, without having to purchase the commission thanks to his father’s service. Wolseley made his way up the ranks through energy, bravery, and leadership. A decorated soldier who saw active service in colonial wars in Burma, India (rebellion), and China (Opium War), and losing sight in one eye in the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, Wolseley travelled to and investigated the American Civil War from the Confederate side. He was active countering the Fenian raids into Canada as Deputy Quartermaster (at 34, the youngest ever in that role).

Macdonald therefore picked a brave and experienced officer, “the most capable British soldier of the period” says the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), to lead the Red River Expedition against Riel and his provisional government. The Expedition had a two-fold purpose: end the Red River Resistance and project sovereignty over the region to forestall any American intentions.

Wolseley wanted to know more about the territory before committing his troops. He picked another Irishman as an intelligence officer to go in advance of the main force and report back. William F. Butler was born in 1838 in Tipperary and as a young boy witnessed the terrible effect of the Great Famine. As the DCB notes: “William Francis Butler was born into an impoverished family of Tipperary gentry with a tradition of service to the British crown. As a child, he observed the ravages of the Great Famine and seems to have been left with a permanent sympathy for the underdog. Although his education was interrupted because his father spent all his money aiding famine victims, Butler developed a passion for history and biography that occupied his leisure until his death.”

An experienced soldier, Butler had no experience of the rigors of the Northwest but he was tough and learned quickly from Indigenous guides and trappers. He convinced Riel of his peaceful intentions and was free to travel. Butler covered over four thousand miles on foot, horseback and dogsled, from Lake Superior to the Rockies, north to Edmonton and Lake Athabasca, along the Saskatchewan River, and back to Winnipeg. A talented writer, like Wolseley himself, Butler’s report was published as The Great Lone Land. It became a best seller and instant classic of Western Canadian History. Thanks to the great McGahern’s Antiquarian Books here in Ottawa, I got a copy. It is a great adventure story, with beautifully descriptive passages and vivid characters he meets along the way. Butler, from a Catholic family that survived centuries of turmoil in Ireland, demonstrates a huge empathy with the Indigenous communities whose lifestyle and even existence faced extinction in the face of the white settlement to come.

One of Butler’s tasks was to make recommendations to ensure the rule of law before an influx of white settlers in an area that had been roiled by tensions between Indigenous people, commercial hunters and trappers, stoked often by sales of whiskey (one of the forts, near present-day Lethbridge, Alberta, was actually named Whoop-Up). A Catholic and life-long advocate for Home Rule for Ireland, Butler was keen to bring order with the least amount of corruption. His recommendations led to the establishment of the Northwest Mounted Police, modelled on the Royal Irish Mounted Constabulary.

Like Palliser before him, Butler was acutely aware that he was participating in work that would bring an end to an Indigenous way of life in areas whose very lack of European settlement was what he found most alluring about it. The Cree, he wrote, had yet to suffer injustice at the hands of the white man because their land was theirs, their hunting grounds undisturbed. But their days were numbered, he lamented, “and already the echo of the approaching wave of Western immigration is sounding through the solitudes of the Cree country”. He continued in an eloquent summary of colonialism’s progress:

“It is the same story from the Atlantic to the Pacific. First the white man was the welcome guest, the honoured visitor: then the greedy hunter, the death-dealing vender of fire-water and poison: then the settler and exterminator – everywhere it has been the same story.” [The Great Lone Land, p 242.]

(Interestingly, Butler rose to become Commander of British Forces in South Africa in 1898 but resigned, sympathetic to Boer demands for home rule and unwilling to take the offensive against them. Failure in the war fanned Butler’s fame. He died in Bansha Castle, Tipperary, in 1910. Bansha Castle is a wonderful guest house today.)

Briefed by Butler and very well prepared, Wolseley led the Expedition from Toronto in May 1870. Expectations, notably in the US, were high that it would end in abject failure. They had not reckoned on Wolseley. According to the DCB, Wolseley “moved a force consisting of nearly 400 British troops, over 700 Canadian militia, and a large party of civilian voyageurs and workmen from their port of embarkation at Collingwood, Ont., to the Red River between 3 May and 24 August, without losing a man. Altogether the expedition made 47 portages and ran 51 miles of rapids.”

Wolseley’s expedition completed its mission, though Riel and his followers had abandoned Fort Garry and Riel himself fled south to the US. This was itself a good outcome, considerably easing tensions. The Anglo-Irish Governor John Young (Lord Lisgar) had warned Macdonald against execution were Riel intercepted. Years later, Riel’s execution after the 1885 North-West Resistance was a travesty of justice. It embittered the Métis and French Canadians against the federal government and exacerbated tensions along ethnic, linguistic, and confessional lines across Canada.

One of the most arduous military marches in Canadian history, hacking out new roads in places, Wolseley proved it was possible to reach the North-West without a major detour into US territory. (US refusal to allow Wolseley pass on their side of the rapids on the St Mary River led to the construction of the Salte Ste Marie Canal.) If Palliser had avoided provoking confrontation through inter-personal skills, Wolseley did so through the size of his force and the overweening power of the British Empire he represented. The expedition’s projection of Canadian authority was an unmistakable signal to the US about who ruled north of the 49th parallel.

Informed by Butler’s report, Macdonald instructed that the policing of the Northwest should be modelled on the Royal Irish Mounted Constabulary. The man he picked to lead it had briefly served in the Royal Irish Constabulary, George Arthur French from Roscommon.

The extended French family was deeply rooted in Galway for centuries, with a base created in Roscommon through a grant of five thousand acres. French found himself impecunious like successive Anglo-Irish generations who did not inherit land. They had to fend for themselves, often finding employment in the service of the British Empire. George French’s professional career personified this. French enlisted in the Royal Artillery, a branch of the armed services open to those who could not pay for commissions in, for example, the cavalry. Before he did so, he briefly joined the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which was to prove consequential for him. In 1862, two years after being commissioned as a lieutenant, French arrived in Kingston as an inspector of artillery for the Canadian militia. Canadian Confederation in 1867 was followed by plans for the withdrawal of British forces in 1870. French was in a key role overseeing the transfer to Canadian militia of forts and artillery. The militia would need artillery batteries and at his urging the Department of Militia and Defence instructed him in 1871 to establish and run artillery schools at Kingston and Quebec. In the 1870s then, French was one of the many Irish, Anglo-Irish, and Irish Canadians making Canadian nationhood a reality.

The foundational event in the establishment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was its famous March West in 1874. Its purpose was to bring ‘order’ by establishing a presence in key locations and project Canadian authority over the region. Macdonald chose French to become the first Commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police, the RCMP’s forerunner. Aged 32, he served from October 1873 to July 1876. The Government in Ottawa refused London’s request to send him back to the British Army because he was “urgently required.” The March West made the arduous journey of 2000 km and established bases at Fort Macleod, Swan River, Bow River, Fort Walsh and Fort Saskatchewan.

Enforcing strict standards of probity in the new force, a strict disciplinarian and very assertive with the authorities in Ottawa, there were tensions between French and the Government. Yet a review of what he and the NWMP police had achieved was deemed very successful and French demanded that Ottawa thank his force for their accomplishments. After fifteen years’ service in Canada, French returned to his British military career and rose to the rank of major-general in 1902, retiring two year later. It was a measure of the dramatic changes in Canada that French travelled across Canada in his seventies by train on the eve of WWI.

Among French’s 16 officers during the March West was his dashing and fearless brother John. An expert horseman, he cut quite a figure with his jet black hair and beard. John built a career in the NWMP (as would two of his sons), retiring in 1883 with the rank of Inspector, to take up farming and become a local politician. With the outbreak of Riel’s North-West Resistance in 1885, John raised a militia of 34 men, known admiringly as French’s Scouts. John was killed at the Battle of Batoche, shot through the chest reputedly by Métis combatant Alexander Ross who also died in the battle.

By 1885, another member of the famous March West, Lief Crozier from Newry, had been promoted to Inspector in the NWMP. (The only surviving red tunic from the March West was worn by Crozier and is currently on display at the Canadian Museum of History.) Crozier was prone to bouts of irrational behaviour that at times convinced his soldiers he was insane. He explained this as “prairie madness” and the episodes did little to thwart his career. Crozier warned Ottawa that Louis Riel’s return the previous year would cause trouble but Ottawa did nothing. Outnumbered by Métis at the battle of Duck Lake, nine volunteers and three NWMP officers were killed but Crozier escaped thanks to the intervention of Riel. He was promoted to Assistant Commissioner and resigned in 1886, disgusted that he was not chosen to take command of the force. He opened a general store in Oklahoma and became a popular figure regaling his customers with stories of his adventures.

The North-West Field Force sent to suppress the Second Resistance was led by Major-General Frederick Middleton, born in Belfast in 1825. “Middleton was 59 and his days of active soldiering should have been over, but under a Blimpish exterior he hid remarkable courage and endurance, considerable common sense, and more practical experience of frontier warfare than most British officers of his seniority.” [DCB] By 15 May, the Métis stronghold of Batoche had fallen and Riel was in custody.

Pompous, bad tempered, and fearless, Middleton was a canny soldier but failed miserably at winning friends and influencing people. He left a trail of outrage when he left Canada, accused of stealing a Métis’ furs and being dishonourable to his fellow officers. The DCB concludes: “In 1896 he was appointed keeper of the crown jewels, a fitting rebuke to those who had harried him from Canada as a thief. To the end, he remained fit and active, walking daily and skating when he could. He died suddenly in his quarters at the Tower of London.”

Of course I write all of this from my privileged position and white, European, Irish perspective. The view from the Indigenous side is profoundly different. I can only guess at it principle features, knowing nothing of the trauma and damage inflicted on generations of Indigenous families and communities. The fate of their homeland was decided across the ocean by kings, merchants, and strokes of a pen. The Indigenous assisted and rescued trappers and travellers (explorers only to us Europeans!). This hospitality facilitated the mapping and observations that led to colonisation. Treaties entered into with great solemnity and trust were vitiated, by London but in the main by Ottawa. Confederation and colonial legislation led to the expropriation of their land and the near destruction of their freedom, languages, ways of life, and culture. The formation of the NWMP and later RCMP became the cutting edge of imperialism, enforcers of the pass system on reserves, and the detention of their children in the Indigenous Residential School system.

A balanced and accurate account must record Indigenous agency. Indigenous communities had over millennia developed their societies and cultures in some of the most challenging environments on earth. As keepers of knowledge and in their relationship to the land, they lived far more sustainably than the European socio-economic model that colonised their homeland. They responded to the European presence as guides, allies, trappers, and traders. As the 19^th century progressed, Indigenous people faced almost impossible odds with concerted attempts to annihilate their culture and identity. The Residential School System was established on the basis of a report by Nicholas Flood Davin from Limerick.

The Irish involved in the colonisation of the Prairie North-West shared characteristics. They were Irish, deeply rooted in Ireland. Anglo-Irish by birth, heritage, upbringing, and lifestyle, they made choices based on necessities and the opportunities available to them. Most of those opportunities were available through service or business in the British Empire. Whatever they thought about the demands for Irish Home Rule, or indeed the impact of the Empire on the Indigenous peoples forcibly brought within its ambit, they were loyal servants of the Empire. They doubtless shared its self-declared values as well as the biases of the age when it came to notions of what constituted ‘civilisation’. Some of those opportunities, notably those in Canada, called for an adventurous spirit, courage, good horsemanship, and a hardy constitution.

The Irish of the North-West were not alone as émigrés from a colonised Ireland engaged in colonisation on behalf of the British Empire. Over 30% of the British Army throughout the 19^th century were from Ireland. They were many generations of Irish similarly engaged in British North America, whether willingly like the Anglo-Irish leaders of the late 18^th century (the Carletons, Parr, Bulkeley, Patterson, Hamilton et al), or unwillingly like the Famine refugees. People made choices in circumstances scarcely conceivable to us today.

We in Ireland have notions about constitutes our history, derived in part from our struggle against the very Empire that many Irish served. Our perspective in the 20^th century was derived too from an official narrative that was largely shaped by the republican seam in our history which took root after the French Revolution and was canonised by the Easter Rising in 1916. It is as satisfying as it is simplistic. Yet the Irish in history are all the more fascinating when looked at in their myriad roles from in and not just against the British Empire.

The Irish in Canada remind us that our history is more complicated than official narratives and approved perspectives allow. Exploring these complications allows us to embrace all of the seams of Irish history – Catholic, Protestant, nationalist, unionists, loyalist, republican, imperial Irish, and the many identifies that formed and changed over the generations.

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

3 August 203

2 Comments

Filed under Anglo-Irish, Canada, Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Frederick Middleton, Garnet Wolseley, Imperial Irish, Irish in Canada, John Macoun, John Palliser, Lief Crozier, North -West Mounted Police, NWMP, William F Butler

June 25, 2023 · 6:04 pm

Colonial Twins: Ireland, Canada, and the Great Irish Famine

Address to the Famine Summer School at Strokestown Park House, 24 June 2023

Four Propositions

First, that the Ireland, England’s first island colony, played a key role in the development of its first continental colony, North America, and its later colonies in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and elsewhere. That role continued in British North America even more forcefully during and after the American Revolution.

Anglo-Irish from late 1700s (Guy and Thomas Carlton, John Parr, Walter Patterson, George Hamilton and his brothers, John Caldwell, Richard Bulkeley et al) to the Three Governor Generals (Monck, Young and Blackwood) before, during and after Canadian Confederation. Wellington played a decisive role in the development of Canada after 1812 with his project which I call ‘Fortress Canada’.
Irish Protestant tenant farmers leaving Ireland after 1800, notably from Ulster and Wicklow/Wexford.
Irish Catholic tenant farmers, soldiers, and labourers, drawn by opportunities in the building of canals, jobs in the lumber industry, and the prospect of land owning.
Middle class Influencers: Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Nicolas Flood Davin, Ogle and James Robert Gowan, George Arthur French, explorers, missionaries, educators, journalists, and leading business figures.

Second, that local national government is a key factor in social and economic success and destiny. Conversely, its absence is a key determinant. Ireland and its capital city prospered in the 18^th century with a strong (Protestant but indigenous) Parliament. Both collapsed into extreme poverty, urban decay, and economic malaise in the 19^th century (Belfast excepted). The abolition of the Irish parliament in 1800 combined with the nature of Britain’s direct rule, are the key determining factors influencing the development of Ireland socially, economically, culturally, politically and demographically. The origins of the Famine and the authorities’ response to it lies in the Act of Union of 1800. The abolition of the national government and its role in the Famine does not feature as it deserves to in the historical narrative. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that agreed to the abolition of their parliament signed their own death warrant by handing power to London (e.g. the Encumbered Estates Act). The fate of Denis Mahon perfectly illustrates that the fate of the Anglo-Irish when disempowered in the face of a great calamity.

Third, that Canada was the future that Ireland never had: The Rising of 1916, the executions, the War of Independence and partition dramatically shifted the paradigm from the consensus of Irish nationalism that reigned from 1870 and earlier. What the Fenians failed to achieve in 1848, 1866, 1867, and 1870, they achieved spectacularly with the Rising, against the backdrop of fifty years of refusal by London to grant Home Rule. The official narrative of the new nation state offered no room for the role of the Irish of the Empire, nor even of Redmond’s National Volunteers, ten thousand of whom fought and died in WWI to validate Ireland’s claim to nationhood. It also therefore obliterated three centuries of Irish involvement in Canada.

The outcome in terms of public history has been to generate a misleading narrative of rebellious nationalists – read Catholics – and loyal unionists. In fact, the historical record suggests that reversing the polarity would be a more accurate reading. This has implications for all-Ireland reconciliation and greater mutual understanding.

Fourth, that Irish settlement overseas is the product primarily of colonialism not immigration, though immigration takes place of course, the search for economic opportunities abroad. However, colonialism provides the only coherent narrative for the Irish abroad over three centuries.

Transatlantic colonialism is also necessary to understanding the creation of the North Atlantic axis between Western Europe and North America, and indeed the fate of the Indigenous of the Americas. This relationship has been globally consequential: victory in two world wars, the Cold War and now reshaping global geopolitics.

Ireland and Canada wrested our destinies into our hands in 1867 and 1922. Had we done so more contemporaneously our bilateral relationship would have been very different. With this new autonomy, new official narratives were required about what we stood for in terms of values and ambitions. In the early formative period, this rendered inconvenient the degree to which Ireland was involved in the Empire: 30% of the British Army in the 19^th century, 70% of Wellington’s Peninsular Army, innumerable administrative positions, and participation in settler projects.

However in recent decades, just as Canada has wrestled with the colonial impact on the Indigenous, Ireland has begun to recover the complexity of its past, and the many strands of Irish identity that have varied by social position and over time. I have often said that Yeats’ line about 1916 as a terrible beauty is born, is really the birth of a terrible simplicity. Our history is complicated as is our role overseas. Not for nothing is this motto of our project Fifty Irish Lives in Canada 1632-2016: “It’s complicated!”

The Famine in Canada and Ireland:

In 1847, Canada learned the lesson of not controlling its immigration laws. For many Irish in Canada, the Famine has created a false origin story. As Prof Mark McGowan has stressed throughout his research, Irish settlement patterns in Canada were established in the generations before the Famine.

For Canadians today, we have to remind them of the heroic and compassionate story of their response to the arrival of Famine refugees. Their assistance, often at the cost of their own lives, is a universal story with a moral lesson about helping the stranger on your shore.

The Famine created the iron triangle of the farm, the church, and the pub. The farm had to be passed on to one son intact. Sexuality had to be policed. The Church was there to do that. The pub was the social life of men waiting for their parents to retire so he could inherit the farm, the necessary condition for marriage. The pub was the place you went not to meet someone. The land clearances and consolidation of farms enabled by the Famine generated the strong farming class that dominated the politics of Ireland. The vacuum of direct rule empowered the Catholic Church not just in its partnership with the strong farming class but in the provision of health and education. Famine enabled the Catholic Church to rise as the pre-eminent national organization for the mass of the population. That Ireland of the second-half of the 19^th century owed so much to the formative influence of the catastrophe of Famine, rendered memorialization problematic until recent years. To remember the Famine was to revive guilt, loss, gain at the expense of the victims and helplessness. Best forgotten because it was too traumatising to remember.

It is only in recent decades and the efforts of Jim and Caroilin Callery, and a new generation of historians, that the Famine is taking its rightful place. I would to pay tribute to Jim and Caroilin for what they have achieved here at Strokestown House. The establishment of the National Famine Museum and the mobilisation of historians like Jason King, Christine Kinealy and Mark McGowan has focused new attention on this seminal event. Their efforts have not only deepened our understanding but altered our perception of the Famine. It has done so by putting the tenants and the tragic fate of Denis Mahon at the heart of the story, based on the rigorous use of the archives here. The many creative ways in which this Museum tells this story have influenced both academic and public history. It is a wonderful achievement that has yet to offer much much more.

We are now graced with the next iteration of the story of Strokestown House and its tenants. Hunger and Hope, The Irish Famine Migration from Strokestown, Roscommon in 1847. The book is a brilliant addition to the history of Famine, edited by Christine Kenealy, Jason King and Mark McGowan. Through great sleuthing and research, they uncover and retrace the journey of the tenants from Roscommon to Canada. The title Hunger and Hope eloquently sums of a human story of trauma and resilience.

If we are now through post-revisionism grappling with the Famine in our collective understanding, we have yet to approach the role of colonialism in Ireland and the role of the Irish in colonialism. I would argue that the role of the Act of Union must be considered as a formative event in the unfolding narrative of the Famine and its ramifications, for example. Yet the role of colonialism in Ireland is much wider than the Famine, its ripples reaching to issues of the present day. This deserves analysis and understanding, well worth the dangers of navigating the shoals of counter-factual history. We cannot understand the role of the Irish in Canada over three centuries, nor arguably in many parts of the former British Empire, without the framework provided by colonization in Ireland and transatlantic colonialism. That is a topic for another day.

Eamonn McKee

Strokestown House

24 June 2023

Lilias Ahearn Massey: The Utility of Glamour and the Value of Privacy

(The Bytown-Ottawa Heritage Trail: the Fabulous Ahearns concluded)

Lilias Evva Ahearn was born in 1918 into a family that had a local dynasty in Ottawa. Her father Frank had married Nora Lewis in 1909. Frank returned from the front in 1916, having been wounded. As a war hero, scion of the business empire built by his father Thomas, and soon-to-be sports mogul, Frank was quite the man about town. She was named after Frank’s mother who had tragically died giving birth to her aunt, also called Lilias. The family home was 7 Rideau Gate, a walk across the road from the gates to Rideau Hall, official residence of the GG.[1]

Lilias would have learned from the outset of her life that attention was her due; from her doting parents, from the powerful people that visited them, and from the press. As a young girl, she was often the prized flower girl at weddings of the local elite. As she grew, her life was regularly reported in the press. Gregarious by nature, a natural and witty hostess, Lilias learned to use to tools of glamour as an asset. And then she had the wisdom to leave that behind, to discover the value of privacy.

The Ahearn family were no mere spectators to the comings and goings of the Governor Generals that passed their door on their way to their official residence at Rideau Hall. Her grandfather Thomas was a confidante of Prime Minister MacKenzie King and later a member of the Privy Council. Her father Frank was a busy man in a city that the family had done so much to modernize and develop. Lilias grew up in an atmosphere of politics and glamour within the small resident elite of Ottawa. Family lore was rich, reaching back to John Ahearn, her great-grandfather and the Irish-born blacksmith who had come to what was then the rough lumber Bytown in the late 1840s or early 1850s.

In her perceptive view, the historian Charlotte Gray wrote that the Ahearns were Ottawa ‘lifers’, not like the ‘self-important comings and goings of the Dominion capital’. The Ahearns and their Ottawa friends took access to the GG’s Residence as a right, not a privilege, she notes. When she was 18, Lilias the debutante was presented at Rideau Hall:

“They [the lifers] included the Southams, the Sherwoods, the Scotts, the Keefers – and the Ahearns. Thomas Ahearn, known as the King of Electricity because he brought electric street cars to Ottawa, was Lilias’ paternal grandfather. Lilias Ahearn was born in the family cottage at Thirty One Mile Lake, a grew up with both the assurance of a rich man’s daughter, and the insecurity produced by Establishment Expectations.”[2]

The first years of Lilias’ life were momentous. Canadians had just come through the trauma and victory of Vimy Ridge in 1917, a decisive episode in the formation of Canadian identity. The Winnipeg General Strike put government on notice that Canada had to provide decent lives for all its citizens. The year she was born saw women granted the vote. This, combined with social change and the impact of technology, gave Lilias a degree of freedom and autonomy that generations of Ahearn women could not have dreamed.

Other reliefs to the slavish lives of women were coming on stream. Like her mother Nora, Lilias would have servants in the house, a dramatically different lifestyle to that of her grandmother, and even more so that of her great-grandmother. At any rate, the harnessing of electricity for domestic appliances achieved by her grandfather would transform households. He had invented the electric oven but others would apply the technology to a host of other functions, including fridges, irons and above all the washing machine, the greatest liberation from drudgery since the invention of clothes.

As a toddler, Lilias would have been known to Lord Byng (GG 1921-26), who had been the Commander of the Canadian Army Corps at Vimy and a Canadian hero. Byng was an avid sportsman and loved the Ottawa Senators so much that he rarely missed a game. That the Senators were owned by her father reinforced the social ties. However, the Byng-King crisis must have strained relations. It was a complicated tussle between Prime Minister MacKenzie King and the Governor General about the dissolution of parliament. As the crisis roiled, Frank and his father Thomas no doubt supported their friend, the Prime Minister. The outcome saw a significant evolution in the role of the Governor General. At the Prime Minister’s insistence, the Governor General from then onwards represented the British monarch only, not additionally the British Government.

As Lilias matured into a young girl, Viscount Willingdon arrived at Rideau Hall in 1926. This was also a momentous year as the Imperial Conference degreed that all Dominions within the Commonwealth were members equal in status to Britain. The Governor General henceforth represented the crown but acted on the advice of the Canadian Government.

Society was changing fast, driven by the upheavals of war and the speed of technological development. Willingdon was the first Governor General to travel by air, flying return to Montreal.[3] Telecommunications technology had fascinated her grandfather as a boy and propelled him into fame as an inventor and wealth as a businessman. Telecommunications were was developing apace. Grandfather Thomas was the technical expert for the first official transatlantic phone call made a Canadian Prime Minister in 1927. “The same year he was appointed the chairman of the broadcasting committee for the diamond jubilee [60^th] of confederation and oversaw the earliest coast-to-coast radio broadcast.” [4] Thanks to his expertise, the celebrations were broadcast on radio, including the first ringing of the new carillon at Parliament’s Victoria [now Peace] Tower. A year later her granddad was appointed to the Privy Council.

By 1932, Canada had its first trans-Canadian phone system, thanks in large part to Thomas Ahearn. The Governor General by then was the Anglo-Irish Earl of Bessborough who inaugurated the system from his study in Rideau Hall with calls to all his Lieutenant Governors.

When World War II erupted, Lilias joined the Red Cross and was part of the Royal Canadian Airforce. She met and fell in love with Flying Officer Douglas Byrd Van Buskirk from New York. As reported in the press, on 9 November 1941, Lilias learned that her husband was missing in action. Then she received the fateful telegram from London that he had been killed in an air raid over Germany. It had been a massive formation flying in bad weather. It took severe casualties with 37 bombers and 15 fighters failing to return. Buskirk and his crew were buried in Dusseldorf, according to the German authorities. Lilias had just enlisted in the Canadian Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She then joined the Canadian Red Cross in England as an ambulance driver, the press reported.[5]

Charlotte Gray again: “Then she reverted to type and married into the closet thing that Canada could offer as an aristocracy: the immensely rich Massey family.” The splashy wedding in 1946 certainly lit up dreary post-war Ottawa. Lilias had a blast and her wedding photo with her handsome husband Lionel and five bridesmaids shows it.

Lionel Massy himself had by this stage an interesting career. He had served as Press Attaché for the British Commonwealth Relations Conference in Australia in 1938 which might have started a diplomat career (his father had been Canada’s first High Commissioner or ambassador in Washington). However, he joined the army on the outbreak of war and served as a captain in the King’s Rifle Corps. He fought in Egypt and Greece where machine gun fire injured both knees and he was a German prisoner of war between 1941 and 1944.

In 1952 Lionel’s father Vincent Massey was appointed as the first Canadian to serve as Governor General.[6] Lionel accepted the post of Secretary to his father but with reservations about the impression it might create of turning the office into a family affair.

No such reservations dogged his wife. All of Lilias’ background, character and natural gifts had prepare her for her next and most significant role. Since Vincent was a widower, Lilias was a natural choice to act as chȃtelaine, or vice-regal consort. Once she, Lionel and their three daughters were ensconced in the cottage on the grounds of Rideau Hall, Lilias took up her duties with gusto. “The Masseys organized the most divine dinner dances. Vincent had a sense of style from his years in the diplomatic service, and Lilias was an excellent hostess,” recalled one contemporary.[7] Dinners, lunches, receptions and even movies filled the Massey calendar. Lilias hosted with aplomb guests like Eisenhower, Nehru, Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Queen Juliana and Haile Salassie, and a host of European crown heads.

One of Lilias’ first duties was to represent her father-in-law at the 1952 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London. Interestingly, Vincent himself opted to stay in Canada:

“Mr. Massey revived the use of the State carriage in 1953 when it was used in Ottawa for the Coronation celebrations of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Amid much pageantry, the carriage brought Vincent Massey and his staff to Parliament Hill under escort by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Mr. Massey introduced Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation speech, broadcast in London and around the world. The carriage he used that day is still used for the opening of Parliament and during official State visits. To commemorate Her Majesty’s Coronation, Mr. Massey issued silver spoons to all Canadian children born on that day, June 2, 1953.”[8]

As the first Canadian citizen to be Governor General, Vincent Massey was a tireless champion for Canada, making 86 trips around the vast country. He travelled extensively “visiting every corner of the country – where plane or ship couldn’t reach, he went by canoe or dog team.”[9] On all but two of his travels, Lilias went with him, showing again that adventurous streak, grabbing life with both hands. When he had decided to remind Canadians about their great arctic territory and its Inuit culture, she flew with him when such air travel still had its dangers. She was the first airborne woman over the North Pole.

Lilias used her talents and glamour to support the image of Canada’s first native Governor General and to demonstrate that Canada could hold its own with world leaders. She and her family illustrated too what an immigrant family could do if and when given the opportuntity. Canada had given them that. And they had given Canada much.

When Vincent’s term concluded as Governor General in September 1959, the Masseys left Rideau Hall. Lionel took up a post as administrative director at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, promoted to Associate Director in 1963. He died suddenly two years later of a stroke, aged 49. Lilias moved back to Ottawa and into an apartment. She passed away three decades later in January 1997.

In a way, an era ended not with her death but thirty years earlier when she returned as a widow to her home town. By the time she had left Rideau Hall, Canada had established itself as a nation in its own right. A new chapter was beckoning in which Canada would forge its own modern identity with a refashioned constitution, a new national flag, and a vibrant creative culture. As members of the jet-set, Pierre Trudeau and his wife Margaret channelled a new kind of glamour.

At so many levels, the 1960s and 1970s challenged virtually every aspect of the society in which Lilias had grown and prospered. With a strategic insight worthy of her father and grandfather, she manifestly grasped this. Privacy was her new value. On return to Ottawa in1965, she closed the door on the limelight. Perhaps she intuited too that the iconoclastic new era would change the traditional deference of the press to social elites, rip the veil that shielded their affairs, illnesses and scandals from the public eye. Glamour had utility but now demanded more imtimacies and with it more dangers for those who wielded it.

From now on, as Gray records, Lilias’ social circle were the friends she had known all her life, the aging lifers of Ottawa. Lilias and her friends no doubt watched with interest the political and cultural forces reshaping Canada but their greatest adventures were in their memories.

Lilias was the last leader of the Ahearns. They had made an enormous contribution to Ottawa and a significant one to Canada. Within three generations they had through talent and energy moved from a blacksmithing immigrant from Ireland to a business empire, the Privy Council and on to Rideau Hall. That said something about them, the fabulous Ahearns, and it said something too about Canada, their land of opportunity.

Today, Lilias’ old family home at 7 Rideau Gate is the Canadian Government’s official guest accommodation and the Prime Minister lives in the cottage that hosted Lionel, Lilias and their family in the glory years when the Masseys ruled Rideau Hall.

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

18 December 2022

[1] As I have written elsewhere, bought by Irish GG Monck and extensively developed by the Anglo-Irish Lord and Lady Dufferin.

[2] https://www.facebook.com/wwiicdnwomensproject.org/photos/pcb.248477750075474/248477500075499/?type=3&theater

[3] https://www.GG.ca/en/governor-general/former-governors-general/viscount-willingdon

[4] http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ahearn_thomas_16E.html

[5] There is also a strange reference to the granting of annulment in the marriage of Lilias Ahearn and Wilbur Pittman Roberts, ibid, WW II Canadian Women’s Project, ibid.

[6] The family had made its fortune with the Massey-Harris company, founded in 1891, the largest producer of agricultural machinery in the Commonwealth, later Massey-Ferguson, so well known and loved in Ireland that the Massey-Ferguson is synonymous with tractor. Vincent’s brother was the Hollywood actor Raymond Massey.

[7] Cited by Gray, op cit.

[8] https://www.GG.ca/en/governor-general/former-governors-general/vincent-massey

[9] Ibid.

Frank Ahearn: Businessman, MP, and Sports Mogul

(Bytown-Ottawa Heritage Trail: The Fabulous Ahearns cont’d)

Thomas Franklin Ahearn, known as Frank, was in Ottawa in 1886. By then his father Thomas had embarked on a career that would see him successfully establish a business empire with Warren Soper and a reputation as Canada’s leading inventor and moderniser of the city of Ottawa (see blog). Frank showed similar drive and ambition to his father, embracing with gusto a varied career as a military officer, businessman, parliamentarian and sporting mogul.

In his young days, Frank played ice hockey with his pals, using an old street car from his father’s company as a dressing room. Ice hockey indeed would be a life-long devotion and mark one of his significant contributions to Ottawa and Canada.

In the meantime, World War I intervened and like so many other Irish Canadians, Frank joined the army as a lieutenant with the First Canadian Supply Division, Mechanical Transport in January 1914. He served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France, saw action, was promoted to captain and was wounded. He returned home in 1916 and later became orderly officer to the Minister of the Militia, Sir Sam Hughes.[1]

Frank rekindled his love for hockey, managing amateur junior and senior hockey. “He became interested in professional Hockey because he felt that was the best way to get the city a badly needed new facility. Besides, he’d grown tired of the huge gray area represented by the term amateur during this period.”[2] Frank became a part-owner of the Ottawa Senators in 1920 and was a key figure in the evolution of the sport from amateur to professional.

The Ottawa Senators were a storied team since their foundation in 1883, the first club in Ontario and a founding member of the National Hockey League. They won the first Stanley Cup challenge in 1893 and kept it until 1906. They returned to winning form in 1920 when Frank became a part owner of the team, along with the founder and majority owner Edwin ‘Ted’ Dey.[3]

Tommy Gorman was another part-owner, one of the greatest managers and talent spotters in ice hockey history, winning seven Stanley Cups during his career. First generation Irish, Tommy was born in Ottawa of an Irish father, Thomas Patrick Gorman who was born in Kilmanagan, Co Kilkenny in 1849. Thomas Patrick was a newspaper editor so it was not surprising that his son Tommy became a writer with the Ottawa Citizen in the years up to 1921, writing about his great passion, sports.[4]

The Senators won the Cup again in 1922 again in 1923. It was then that Frank bought the Senators from Dey who was retiring. The Senators won the Stanley Cup again in 1924, with Frank demonstrating “his prowess as a handler of player personnel.”[5] Tommy sold his share to Frank in 1925 and went to New York to establish professional hockey there. The Senators were champions again in 1927, the (possibly) eleventh and final time they won the Championship.[6] The team for the 1926-27 season included some of the greats of ice hockey, Irish Canadians like King Clancy, Alec Connell, Cy Denneny, and the ‘Shawville Express’ Frank Finnigan (so called because he got the train to Ottawa but I’m sure it had something to do with his style of play!)[7]

Frank’s biography in the Hockey Hall of Fame:

“Ahearn was not one to shy away from significant transactions. After winning the Stanley Cup he sent Hooley Smith to the Montreal Maroons for $22, 500 and the immensely talented Punch Broadbent. A few years later sold King Clancy to the Toronto Maple Leafs for two players and $35,000. The latter move was one of desperation as the Depression took its toll on the once proud franchise. Ahearn fought hard and lost a great deal of money trying to keep the Senators afloat. He successfully lobbied for the team to be excused from the 1931-32 season. The next year the club finished last and was forced to relocate to St. Louis, Missouri were it ended for good after one season. Despite the ending, Ottawans enjoyed many years of outstanding hockey as a result of Ahearn’s commitment.”[8]

Along with Gorman and Dey, Frank was part of the consortium that built the Ottawa Auditorium, home to the Senators from 1923, capable of hosting 10,000 spectators. It was located beside what is today the Canadian Museum of Nature on the site of what is now a YMCA. The Auditorium’s fortunes waned along with the team’s decline from greatness. It went into receivership in 1936, with Gorman returning to take ownership in 1945.

Throughout these years, Frank was a leading businessman, following in the footsteps of his famous father, taking over the Ottawa Electric Railway Company in 1938 when Thomas Ahearn died. Two years later he headed the Ottawa Electric Company and had many business interests in realty, car manufacture and investments.

Frank was certainly a chip off the old block and in addition to his interests in business and hockey, he was elected to Parliament where he served for almost a decade between 1930 and 1940, a Liberal MP first for Ottawa City and then Ottawa West.

Frank’s family home was at 7 Rideau Gate, a fine detached residence, where he lived with his wife Norah, son Thomas and daughters Joan and Lilias. Frank died in 1962. That year he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Four years later he was inducted into the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame.

Frank, his wife and children were the last private family to live at 7 Rideau Hall before it became the official guest accommodation of the Canadian Government. And that is part of Lilias’ story.

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

17 December 2022

[1] Parliamentary Profile, https://lop.parl.ca/sites/ParlInfo/default/en_CA/People/Profile?personId=507 and his biographical entry in the Hockey Hall of Fame, https://www.hhof.com/HonouredMembers/MemberDetails.html?type=Builder&mem=B196201&list=ByName

[2] https://hockeygods.com/images/14791-Frank_Ahearn_Ottawa_Senators_President_and_Owner

[3] Wikipedia entry, Edwin Dey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Dey

[4] Thanks to Michael McBane for establishing the Irish birth of Tommy’s father.

[5] Hall of Fame biography: https://www.hhof.com/HonouredMembers/MemberDetails.html?type=Builder&mem=B196201&list=ByName

[6] It is a matter of some dispute whether in fact they won it 9, 10 or 11 times.

[7] Finnigan won the Stanley Cup again, playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs. After his sporting career ended in 1937, Finnigan had a problem with alcohol and Frank Ahearn got him a job. Finnigan overcame his drinking problem and managed hotels in the area. His daughter Joan became a writer and collected many stories of the Irish in the Ottawa Valley. She wrote the screenplay for the 1968 docudrama, The Best Damn Fiddler Player from Calabogie to Kaladar which won the Canadian Film Award, as did the film itself. Margot Kidder, famously playing Lois Lane in the Superman movie, made her film debut in the movie.

[8] Op cit.

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Filed under Canada, Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Bytown-Ottawa Heritage Trail, Frank Ahearn, Irish in Canada, Ottawa Auditorium, Ottawa Senators, Tommy Gorman

December 5, 2022 · 2:24 pm

Thomas Ahearn, the ‘King of Electricity’ and the Man who Made Ottawa

The Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage Trail: the Fabulous Ahearns, cont’d.

Coincidentally, the man who would create modern Ottawa was born the year that the city changed its name from Bytown. In hindsight, this was auspicious. If Bytown owed its existence to the Duke of Wellington, Ottawa owed its entry to the modern era to Thomas Ahearn.

We do not know much of Thomas Franklin Ahearn’s early life but considering the energetic, confident and brilliant son they had raised, John and Norah must have been loving and supportive parents. Young Tom would have seen up close the magic worked by his blacksmith father, heating cold black iron until it glowed orange and soft enough to be shaped. Satisfied, his father plunged it hissing into cold water. A kind and patient father would have answered his son’s questions, turning the young lad’s wonder into curiosity about the infinite variety and utility of the things that could be made. Likely too that Tom’s close friend Warren Soper visited the forge. The boys supported each other in their exploration of the new scientific breakthroughs reshaping the world. If metallurgy had fashioned civilization for millennia, and steam the age of industrialisation, harnessing electricity birthed the modern technological age.

It must have been a well-read household for Thomas was exposed enough to new developments to develop a passion for electricity. He grew up as telegraphy came of age, spreading around the world, its binary signal spreading information in hours where before it would have taken weeks. That flow of information was transformative: for markets, armies, technology, and daily life. By the time Tom was eleven, the New York businessman Cyrus Field was hailed a hero for successfully laying the transatlantic cable, finally uniting the world’s telecommunications and putting the last piece in place for a truly globalized world. It is hard not to think that Field was an inspiration to young Tom.

Tom wanted to be a part of this but he was expelled from the College of Ottawa for misbehaviour.[1] The lack of a formal education mattered little to him. He joined the Montreal Telegraph office at Chaudière, as a messenger really intent on learning about the application of electricity. After a stint in New York, Tom returned as the company’s chief operator, then hired some years later aged twenty-five by Bell Telephone. Bruce Deachman writes about this in an anecdote that tells us much about Tom: “This latter development was not without some irony: In 1878, Ahearn, perhaps unaware of the misdeed he was committing, infringed on Alexander Graham Bell’s patent when, after reading an article in Scientific American, made the first successful long-distance telephone call from Ottawa using handmade sets he’d built from cigar boxes to place a call to Pembroke. Ahearn later sold the boxes for $16 to settle an outstanding hotel bill.”[2]

Tom knew the practical end of electricity but when he realised he was undercharging for his installation work he knew he needed a business partner. He turned to his childhood friend Warren Soper and in 1881 they formed Ahearn & Soper Telegraphy and Electric Light Contractors. IN 1882, their Ottawa Electric Light Company installed sixty-five street lights, Thomas working him with two Irish laborers draping the lines as they went along. The lights were powered by Canada’s first hydro-electric power from a wheel and generator at Chaudiere Falls. They won a contract with the Canadian Pacific Railway to install telegraph lines and began building a local business empire. “The following year the young men were awarded a contract to introduce electric lights into the House of Commons. The lights were switched on in January 1884, a full year earlier than at the Capitol in Washington, DC.” [3] It would prove to be a life-long partnership that created modern Ottawa and earned them the title the Edisons of Canada.

Ahearn is most famous for the invention of the electric oven and stove. “On 17 January, 1884, he cooked the first dinner with teh appliance in Ottawa’s Windsor Hotel before a collection of VIP journalists. The oven was over 6 feet [2 metres] in height and width and in the words of the Ottawa Citizen, ‘It was hot enough to roast an ox.’ The dinner consisted of Saginaw trout, potato croquettes, sugar-crusted ham, lamb cutlets, stuffed loin of veal, strawberry puffs chocolate cake, and apple pie.” [Sweeny, pp 351-2]

The year 1884 was also significant for Thomas personally. On 25 June, he married Lilias MacKey Fleck. In May 1886, Lilias gave birth to their son, Frank. Two years later, she gave birth their daughter but tragedy truck and Lilias died in childbirth. Grief-stricken, Thomas named his daughter Lilias. Lilias’s fate in childbirth was one of the great dangers that women had faced and continue to face. She would not see her children grow, nor her daughter Lilias marry the publisher Harry Stevenson Southam, one of the resident elite families of old Ottawa. Frank would call his daughter after her, an Irish tradition.

Ahearn and Soper literally electrified the city and brought lighting and phones to the Parliament, factory floors, the streets and homes. In 1887 they used thousands of light bulbs to decorate Parliament in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In 1891, Thomas Keefer transferred the rail charter to Ahearn and Soper. Keefer was the son-in-law of the builder of the Rideau Canal and founder of Bytown, Thomas Mackay. Keefer had developed the Rockcliffe neighbourhood and used horse-draw railcars to connect it to the town centre. With the charter in hand, Ahearn and Soper introduced electric trams, the new lines literally generating Ottawa’s suburbs as houses sprung up along them. Ever inventive, Ahearn installed electric heaters in them. The tramline went first from Bank Street to Landowne, spawning the Glebe neighbourhood as the local farmer sold lots for housing. Ahearn and Sopper bought the land adjacent to planned lines the next time. To ensure his streetcars did a good business at the weekend, Ahearn built amusement parks at Rockcliffe with, of course, electric merry-go-rounds. He helped encourage the first skiing in the region on the scenic slopes there overlooking the Ottawa River.

Ahearn combined many traits, from creativity and constant tinkering with new devices, building networks of people to advance his projects, and thinking big about how to develop Ottawa. “However, it was his ability to find solutions to particular technological obstacles impeding the progress of large systems that gave his companies an edge over the competition. He was always innovating, interconnecting his machinery in new ways, and adapting inventions to his needs. He was also a master of promotion. On 29 Aug. 1892 he invited members of the Ottawa elite to an “electric” banquet. An entire meal was cooked in a powerhouse on electrical appliances that he had designed and constructed. The food was delivered to the dining room of the Windsor hotel by streetcar.”[4]

Thanks to Ahearn and Soper, Ottawa was first in all these things, ahead of Montreal and Toronto. “By 1900, it was reported there were 100,000 incandescent light bulbs burning in the city, more per capita than anywhere else in the world.” [5] Ahearn drove the first car in Ottawa, notably an electric one using batteries. He was forever inventing and held almost thirty patents in Canada and the US. He applied his technical genius to make ovens[6], fridges, water bottle warmers, streetcar heating systems, insulators, battery jars, arc-light carbons, motor brushes, recording machines for music, telephones and telegraphs systems.

Ahearn was a close supporter of both Wilfred Laurier and Mackenzie King, the latter appointing him to the new Federal District Commission tasked with the development of the city’s parks and roads in 1927. Thanks to Ahearn we have the Queen Elizabeth Driveway and the Champlain Bridge. A year later, the Prime Minister appointed Ahearn to the Privy Council.

Tom Ahearn died in 1938. Anna Adamek sums up his life in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography thus:

“Thomas Ahearn’s career was truly remarkable. Although he was born in a poor working-class family, he became one of Ottawa’s richest and most influential entrepreneurs. His outstanding technical expertise, but also his intuition, allowed him to compete successfully with members of the city’s business elites and build powerful political alliances. Through the companies he founded and the institutions he led, Ahearn realized his vision of Ottawa as a modern, industrialized capital and greatly contributed to its transformation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Deachman again: “Tom, as he was known his entire life, grew up in lockstep with the new city, and it’s impossible to imagine what Ottawa might look like today without his influence. Along with his business partner, Warren Young Soper, Ahearn touched the lives of everyone in Ottawa, through transportation, electricity, beautification and leisure and entertainment. The pair’s interconnected business enterprises very much shaped how and where the city grew, as its population soared from just over 10,000 when Ahearn took in his first breath, to about 150,000 when he exhaled his last.”

We can look forward to a full treatment of Ahearn’s life when a new biography of Ahearn and Soper is published by Laura Ott. Ott has said that Ahearn and Soper are “among the most unrecognized people for the type of impact they had on the city.”

Tom’s son Frank built a memorial to his father and you can see it now in the Glebe, at the corner of Bank and Holmwood. As well as an image of his father, the memorial was combined with a drinking fountain, a wonderful symbol of the utility that Tom brought to the life of his beloved city of Ottawa.

So we are lost for choice when it comes to putting places on the Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage trail marking Tom Ahearn’s impact on the city.

Up next, we look at the remarkable life of his son Frank in the continuing saga of the fabulous Ahearns.

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

5 December 2022

[1] Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), entry by Anna Adamnek.

[2] Capital Builders: Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper, the ‘Edisons of Canada’, Ottawa Citizen, 4 April 2019.

[3] DCB.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Canada Post issued a commemorative stamp in 2011 featuring Ahearn’s electric oven. The oven had won him the gold medal at the Central Canada Exhibition in 1892 and featured in the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Ibid, Ottawa Citizen.

John Ahearn, founder of an Irish Canadian Dynasty

The Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage Trail: the Fabulous Ahearns

In three generations, the Ahearns progressed from an Irish-born blacksmith to the Privy Council and to a leading role in the Governor General’s Office, along the way creating and shaping the modern city of Ottawa. Each generation more than deserves tribute and whether individually or collectively, the Ahearns were indeed fabulous. Here is the story of the fabulous Ahearns, John, Thomas, Frank and Lilias. Each were a leader of their generation. They will be great additions to our heritage trail. First up, John Ahearn.

We do not know much about John Ahearn other than that he was born in Ireland in 1806. He married Honorah (Norah) Power, date and location unknown. He or they immigrated to Canada and he worked his trade as a blacksmith in what was then Bytown. The home of John and Norah was on Duke Street in the working class neighbourhood of Lebreton Flats, not far from Chaudiere Falls on the Ottawa River.

We can guess what brought him to the Ottawa Valley. By then the long struggle between Britain and France for global dominance was over and thanks to the Duke of Wellington, the construction of the Rideau Canal had begun, a strategic communication between Kingston and Montreal away from the St Lawrence, the likely point of attack of the United States. There was already a thriving lumber industry, dating back to the Napoleon blockade that had cut off Baltic timber. The Irish could find cheap passage as living ballast on the lumber ships on the ships’ return leg from England and the naval shipyards there.

In the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys, there were jobs in the lumber industry, though the work was dangerous and rough. There was cheap land to buy when the trees were cleared, though clearing giant tree stumps and rocks was backbreaking. However, the canal and plans to build almost one hundred locks and dams meant that there was plenty of good work for skilled craftsmen like carpenters, stone masons and blacksmiths. All of these opportunities drew in the Irish at a time when the Irish economy was in recession after the boom times of the Napoleonic wars.

John packed up his belongings, probably too the tools of his trade, and began the long sea passage across the great North Atlantic, up the St Lawrence to Montreal and then the Ottawa River to its confluence with the Gatineau and Rideau Rivers. He married Honorah Power, but we do not know whether they met in Ireland or in Canada. Her life would have been one of hard labour, giving birth and running a household without any modern conveniences. The brutal winters added to her chores, as did the muddy spring time and mosquito infested summers. Cut off from home and the support of relatives, loneliness must have been a factor too. Prevalent illnesses would have added distress as well as the ever fear of death. Throughout all of this, Norah was wife, mother, cook, cleaner, nurse, moral conscience and educator. Raising a family in these conditions was nothing short of heroic.

The construction of the Rideau Canal had stimulated a new settlement dubbed Bytown after Colonial John By, the engineer in overall charge of the canal’s construction. Officers and gentlemen worked and lived around Barracks Hill while the Irish and French workers settled in the swampy area of Lowertown. The market, taverns and shanties there became known as Byward. Perhaps indicating his status as a craftsman and perhaps too intent on avoiding the violent quarrels between the Irish and French in Lowertown as they competed for jobs and dominance, Ahearn settled in Lebron Flats, at Duke Street.

By any stretch, John’s life was fabulous, moving from an island scarred by British colonialism and savage sectarianism, across the incalculable expanse of the North Atlantic, perhaps guided by some old letters that had promised opportunity. For somebody from Ireland, the vast scale of the St Lawrence must have been awe-inspiring. He probably stopped at Quebec and then Montreal, bustling cities cacophonous with French speakers and up close with Indigenous residents, visitors and fur traders. As he travelled up the Ottawa River, he would have seen the giant rafts of squared logs, topped with cabins and guided downriver to Montreal by strong and hardy lumbermen. He would too have seen Indigenous travelers in their birch bark canoes, including warriors, hunters, and families.

When he arrived, John would have found Bytown to be boisterous and half-built, with muddy streets, shanties and some grand stone buildings, yet a city ambitious for its future. He could admire the success of fellow Irishman John Egan who had risen to be the leading lumber baron in the Valley and an influential politician. Ahearn would have noticed that the immediate region was stripped of trees. He must have gazed in wonder at the Gatineau hills and beyond the wilderness of bear and wolf stretching infinitively west and north. Imagine his first winter in Canada as all of this fell under a crystalline spell of snow and ice. At least he would not have been short of company in the large Irish community, the cadences of the Irish language common among his fellow immigrants. John and Norah’s son Thomas Franklin was born in 1855 at their home in Duke Street, Lebron Flats.

Next up, we look at Thomas’ life and his role as the founding father of modern Ottawa.

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Tagged as Ahearn and Soper, Bytown, Bytown-Ottawa, Irish in Canada, John Ahearn Bytown, The Fabulous Ahearns, Thomas Ahearn

November 24, 2022 · 2:56 pm

Irish Night on the Hill, 23 November 2022, Remarks

Failte romhat, a chairde, welcome everyone. Tá an-athas mór orm, I’m delighted to see you all here. Good evening ladies and gentle, friends of Ireland. What a thrill to have you all here this evening.

This is our third Night on the Hill. The first two were organized by Jamie and my dear colleagues Jim Kelly and Michael Hurley. Tragically, both passed away in their prime. Earlier this year, I was shocked to get a phone call saying that Jim had died suddenly last St Patrick’s Day. It is impossible to reconcile his wife Anne and their two daughters, Orla and Ciara, to their loss. That is permanent, eased only by loving memories.

However, it was some comfort to recall to Anne how many people Jim had touched in Canada with his humanity, his warmth and his professional integrity as a diplomat so proud to represent his country. Knowing Jim’s love for Canada and the Irish in Canada, he would be well chuffed about our gathering this evening. We remember him this evening.

There is no better place for a Parliament than on a Hill. I love this Hill. At the confluence of the Ottawa, Rideau and Gatineau Rivers, this Hill was always a meeting place. We acknowledge that we gather on the traditional territory of the Anishinabek and the Algonquin.

We recall too that it was John Egan from Galway who played the instrumental role in securing the land at Maniwaki for the reserve at Kitigan Zibi in 1853. Egan arrived here in 1830, penniless. He became the Ottawa Valley’s leading lumber baron. He helped to develop Bytown through lumber, stream boats and rail connections, and as a leading politician. Egan entertained Governor General Lord Elgin during his visit to Bytown as part of the campaign to make it the capital city of Canada.
Egan sold land at half price to the Irish. That is why we had such strong Irish settlement in the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys. I’d like to recognize our Irish friends here from Brennan’s Hill, Martindale and Venosta in Gatineau and from Douglas.

The Duke of Wellington was born in Dublin and raised in Trim. Most of his soldiers were Irish. Without Wellington, there would have been no Rideau Canal. No canal, no Ottawa.

Michael McBane is here, a great local historian. Thank you Michael for all your research on this region’s Irish Heritage. It is thanks to Michael that we know that Famine Irish emigrants died of fever on this hill, men, women and children, in 1847. Thanks to Michael too, we know that some 300 hundred of their remains lie in Macdonalds Gardens Park. We are working to commemorate that site.

Thanks to Canadian compassion, like that of Sister Bruyère of the Grey Nuns, most of the Famine Irish survived in Bytown as well as all along the St Lawrence River, from Quebec and Montreal to Kingston, Toronto and Hamilton. Through such Canadian compassion, the Irish found hope here. Through the opportunities in Canada, the Irish found success here.

The Irish gave much to Canada too. Irish and French workmen built the Parliament complex. In the halls of Parliament, Thomas D’Arcy McGee could marvel at the outcome of the negotiations for Confederation in 1867. His friend, Lord Monck from Tipperary, was the Governor General who played a key role in steering those negotiations to success.

Indeed, the first three Governor Generals after Confederation were Irish; Monck, Lisgar and Lord Dufferin. Monck bought Rideau Hall. Lord and Lady Dufferin added the Ballroom, the Tent Room and skating rinks there, making it the centre of social life in Ottawa. They were part of a long line of Anglo-Irish Governor Generals, Lieutenant Governors, officials and soldiers who shaped Canada, from Guy Carlton to the Duke of Wellington.

Thomas Ahearn, son of an Irish born blacksmith, brought electric lighting to Parliament. With his genius for invention and his command of the science of electricity, he brought electric power to Ottawa, electric trams, an electric car and even invented the electric oven. His son Frank Ahearn owned the Ottawa Senators when they won the Stanley Cup in 1923, 1924 and 1927.
Frank and his daughter Lilias lived at 7 Rideau Gate. She became vice regal consort to her father-in –law, Governor General Vincent Massey, and accompanied him to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Today their home is the Government’s official guest house. In three generation, the fabulous Ahearns went from blacksmith, to business empire, to Rideau Hall itself. That says something about them. And it says something great about Canada too.

So we are working on a Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage Trail. Call it reverse colonization. By the time we’re finished, Ottawa will be Canada’s leading Irish town. I’d like to welcome newly elected Mayor of Ottawa, Mark Sutcliffe. Great to see him here and have to chance to brief him on our plans to promote the city’s Irish heritage.

I’d also like to recognize Robert Kearns and William Peat from the Canada Ireland Foundation. They have been working for years to promote the Irish Story in Canada and have fantastic plans for the future. We deeply value our collaboration with you.

Grant Vogl of the Bytown Museum is here too. Grant and his team at the Bytown Museum do such great work promoting Ottawa’s great heritage. We’re looking forward to taking our work with them forward. Celebrating the Irish story in Canada is an exciting journey of discovery.

This night is also about friendship. Saying thanks to all our friends and supporters. And working together to build the relationship between Ireland and Canada.

Canada has been a great ally to Ireland. Next year, we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Canadians played a key role in our peace process. Canada was a founder member of the International Fund for Ireland in 1986. Canadians supported the talks process. Judge Peter Cory became a legend for tackling the issue of collusion in Northern Ireland, a wonderful man of compassion and impeccable integrity. General John de Chastelain played a key role on the Decommissioning Commission in taking the gun out of Irish politics. Al Hutchinson helped consolidate the new policing as Police Ombudsman.

Our Peace Process is a work in progress. We are working to restore power-sharing, to remit the damage caused by Brexit. Our future faces challenges that are daunting but exciting, the prospect of unification. That is journey where Canadian support will be vital. Because in Canada we learn that divergent loyalties can happily the same space in peace and stability.

I would like to say a special thank you to my wife and our small team at the Embassy for all that they do promoting Ireland in Canada. They have worked really hard to make this event happen. The team was led by Second Secretary Sally Bourne and she did a terrific job pulling all this together. A warm round of applause and thanks to them.

We have to say goodbye to John Boylan, our Deputy Head of Mission and I know a friend to many of you here. We will sorely miss you John, thanks for your outstanding contribution and best of luck for the future to you, Deirdre and your family.

I would like to acknowledge the Sue Healy school of Irish dancing, and dancers Nora and Nessa Healy, Joely Henderson, Rosalie Boisselle, Hannah Clegg, Ainsley Smith, Lauren Mortimer, Anna Jackson and Adele Stanton-Bursey. Thank you!
Piper Ross Davison, thank you! That’s a genuine set of pipes he’s got there, Uilleann pipes! None of this blowing in a tube stuff!

I would like to pay a particular tribute to my friend James Maloney, Member for Etobicoke. It has been my honour and pleasure getting to know him and to count him as my friend. Thanks to his leadership and support of the Parliamentary Friendship Group, March is officially Irish Heritage Month. And we have great plans for the future. James, the floor is yours.

I am honoured to introduce Senator Robert Black. If his devotion to farming and agriculture is anything to go by, he definitively has Irish genes!

I am now honoured to call on his honour, Kevin Waugh MP. Kevin distinguished himself in his great speech on the Second Reading of the Motion to Irish Heritage Month. In fact, he proved his Irish credentials by breaking into song!

Eamonn McKee

Ambassador

Ottawa

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Tagged as Bytown-Ottawa, Global Ireland, Ireland in Canada, Irish Canadians, Irish Diaspora Canada, Irish Night on the Hill

November 11, 2022 · 7:45 pm

I’m adding Rideau Hall to the Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage Trail

On the hunt for the Irish heritage of Ottawa, or as I like to call it the Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage Trail, the more I look the more I find. Like the fact that the first three Governor Generals after Canadian Confederation were Anglo-Irish. I am proposing to add Rideau Hall, the official residence of the Governor General, as a candidate for inclusion on the Irish Heritage Trail in Canada’s capital city.

And from my latest discoveries, I’m going to propose 7 Rideau Gate, the Canadian Government’s official guest house, as well as the actual wrought iron gates to Rideau Hall, both with strong claims to deserve inclusion. More on those anon, but here’s Rideau Hall’s claim to Irish heritage (we’re not just handing them out to anyone!)

We know that Thomas D’Arcy McGee was a founding father of Canadian Confederation in 1867. Indeed, Canada’s Confederation and the political settlement underpinning it were the result of the influence of Britain, Ireland and the United States, the latter two as warnings on how not to run a country. D’Arcy McGee’s knowledge of Irish history, British politics, and his aversion to the United States were the source of much of this influence.[1]

What appears to have been forgotten is that after Confederation, the first three Governor Generals in the premiere Dominion of the Commonwealth were Irish, more precisely Anglo-Irish. They all played a role in developing the function of that office, the representative of the British sovereign monarch in Canada.

The last Governor General of Provincial Canada and the first Governor General (GG) of the Canadian Confederation was Charles Monck, 4^th Viscount Monck. Born in Templemore, County Tipperary, and educated at Trinity College Dublin, he served for a time as MP for Portsmouth. As GG to Provincial Canada from 1861 to 1867, Monck diffused tensions with the US that threatened war and strongly supported Confederation throughout its negotiation at the Quebec, Charlottetown and London Conferences, working hard to ensure consensus.

As his biography says on the GG’s official website: “Lord Monck’s skill as a diplomat in Canadian-American relations was matched by his ability in promoting Confederation. He helped build ‘The Great Coalition’, the consolidation of the Reform and Conservative parties that was key to the colonies’ pursuit of federalism. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, he was a tireless promoter of unity and played a leading role in the preparations for a federal union.” “I like him amazingly”, wrote John A. MacDonald of Monck, “and shall be very sorry when he leaves, as he has been a very prudent and efficient administrator of public affairs.”[2]

Monck lived in Quebec during this time. When he became GG of the Confederation he travelled to Bytown and chose Rideau Hall as the GG’s official residence, purchased for $82,000 in 1868. As a keen horticulturalist, he did much to develop the gardens and grounds. After his duties in the new Confederation ended, he returned to Ireland to serve as Lord Lieutenant of County Dublin from 1874 to 1892 (not to be confused with Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; the Dublin position was abolished in 1922). He died two years later in Enniskerry, aged 75.

Monck was succeeded by John Young, 1^st Baron Lisgar. He was Anglo-Irish, born in Bombay. His father was William Young of Bailieborough Castle, Country Cavan. The castle was known as Lisgar House, hence John’s title. William had bought the castle in 1814 and laid out the plans for the town of Bailieborough. His son John was MP for Cavan for twenty-four years, rising to Secretary of the Treasury and Chief Secretary of Ireland from 1852 to 1855 (essentially running the country on behalf of the British Government) under Prime Minister Robert Peel. After stints in colonial service in Greece and New South Wales, Young was appointed as the second GG for Confederated Canada, serving until 1872.

In his time as GG, Young was raised to Baron or Lord Lisgar in 1870. He faced crises provoked by Fenian raids into Canada and the Red River Rebellion led by Louis Riel. In both cases, he strongly counselled against executions to avoid creating bitterness and division. He worked closely with PM Macdonald to ease tensions. The Red River Rebellion had been sparked by the transfer of Prince Rupert’s Land (the incomprehensively large territory that drained into Hudson Bay, ranging from Alberta to Nunavut) from the Crown to the Confederation. Riel demanded land rights on their holdings and autonomy for the Métis. In 1870 Manitoba was created after negotiations with Riel but Métis demands failed to materialize and Riel was exiled to the US in 1875[3].

Lisgar helped ease long standing tensions with the US that had their roots in the American War of Independence, had flared up in the War of 1812 and had festered ever since. He travelled to Washington to meet with President Ulysses S. Grant.[4]

According to his official GG biography: “In both conflicts, Lord Lisgar was a wise mediator who helped lessen some of the potential bitterness. He also prevented the execution of the captured Fenian invaders by sending a sternly worded telegram to those who were ready to apply quick justice.” It goes on to say that “Lord Lisgar and his wife, Lady Adelaide Annabella Dalton Lisgar, added many important traditions to Rideau Hall. They held the first recorded New Year’s Levee in 1869, while he was Administrator, and organized Christmas and Garden Parties. And in 1872, the noon gun firing on Parliament Hill was established, and the Governor General’s Foot Guards army regiment was created. The first duty of the new regiment was to provide a guard of honour for Lord Lisgar on his departure from office in June of the same year.”[5]

The third Anglo-Irish GG was Lord Dufferin. Because of the pandemic, I only recently met the Governor General, Her Excellency Mary May Simon, at Rideau Hall. After our meeting, in which we discussed the Irish contribution to Canada of course, we were given a tour of Rideau Hall, including the opulent Ballroom with its massive Waterford crystal chandelier (1200 pieces), and the Tent Room with its startling marquee-like interior of alternating vertical white and pink stripes. These magnificent additions to Rideau Hall were the work of the Lord and Lady from Ireland, one of the more consequential occupants of the Governor General’s Residence.

Frederick Temple Blackwood, the future Lord Dufferin, was the only son of Price Blackwood, 4th Baron of Dufferin and Clandeboye in what is now Northern Ireland. The Scottish Blackwood family had settled in the area to the east of Belfast city on the southern shores of Belfast Lough in the early 1600s.

Frederick’s mother Helen was a granddaughter of the famous Irish playwright, satirist and MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He was a very devoted son and built Helen’s Tower to celebrate her, a wonderful folly in the Clandeboye demesne based on the traditional Scottish tower.[6]

As a young student, Frederick visited Clonakilty in West Cork to see the wretched conditions of the Great Famine and raised money for relief of the poor and starving. He was a student at Eton College which he hated, and left after two years without a degree. Not that he needed it: with the early death of his father, he became Baron of Dufferin and Clandeboye in 1841.

Frederick cut a dash as a young aristocrat with his good looks, kind heart, and charm. By 1850 he was a member of the House of Lords. Some years later he sailed in the North Atlantic and his humorous travelogue, the popular Letters from High Latitudes, demonstrated his fine writing skills. He turned to diplomacy where he was involved in the negotiations at the end of the Crimean War. He had a distinguished and influential series of postings in Lebanon, Syria and India.

In the meantime, Frederick had married a distance cousin, Hariot Rowan-Hamilton of nearby Killyleagh Castle (the Blackwoods had a keen eye for a good marriage that enhanced their position). They would be blessed with twelve children in all. She would prove to be an adept diplomat herself, and they were the quintessential power-couple. In 1872, Frederick now Lord Dufferin, travelled with his wife to Rideau Hall to take up his appointment as Governor General.

The Dufferins remodelled Rideau Hall adding both the Ballroom and the Tent Room. He also built rinks for skating and curling for public use. They hosted balls, theatre, and concerts, making Rideau Hall the centre of social life in the young capital city. He created the GG’s Academic medals to reward scholarly achievement.

Dufferin was keenly political and an admirer of Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald. He watched the young Confederation’s parliamentary business closely and solicitously. Within the Privy Council he felt it was his right to engage on substantive matters with Ministers. As he put it, “Within the walls of the Privy Council I have as much right to contend for my opinion as any of my Ministers, and in matters of the moment, they must not expect me to accept their advice merely because they give it but must approve it to my understanding and conscience.”

Dufferin commuted Ambroise Lépine’s death sentence for killing Thomas Scott during the Red River Rebellion. Though Scott was the son of one of his tenants back in Ireland, Dufferin considered him a ruffian. Like his fellow Anglo-Irishman, the Duke of Wellington, Dufferin kept a wary eye of US’s interests in Canada, and urged facilitating Canadian self-government as much as possible to ward off the US, noting that Quebec “has in great measure saved the English population from Yankification.”

The Dufferins were very taken with Quebec, no doubt its Francophone ambience appealing to both of them. They were horrified when the City started to demolish its old walls, campaigned to stop it, and raised funds to preserve them. They created a promenade, Dufferin Terrace with views of the St Lawrence, an enduring landmark in the city. Thanks to their invention, Quebec was in a good position almost a century later to become a UNESCO world heritage site.

Dufferin and his wife visited every Province, including Indigenous communities from whom they received gifts of native craft and art. He strongly endorsed the Prime Minister’s plan for a cross-Canada railway. They went out of their way to attend events where they had a chance to meet all walks of life and not just the social elite. Lady Dufferin published her letters to her mother as My Canadian Journal and considered their time in Canada as the happiest of their lives. This was reciprocated by the Canadians. The popularity of this Irish couple in Canada is shown in the number of streets, schools and places named Dufferin.

Monck, Lisgar and Dufferin were the Confederation chapter of a long and influential Anglo-Irish legacy in colonial Canada stretching back to its most formative period during and after the American War of Independence. Figures like Guy Carleton Baron Dorchester (born in Strabane), in Quebec and then GG of Canada, his brother Thomas (also Strabane) as a military leader and first Lt Governor of New Brunswick, Richard Bulkeley the founding father of Nova Scotia and John Parr, Lt Governor of Nova Scotia (both from Dublin), and Walter Prendergast (Foxhall, Donegal), first Lt Governor of St John’s Island (PEI).[7] Perhaps most consequential of them all, as I have written elsewhere, was the Duke of Wellington (born in Dublin, family from Trim) without whom there would have been no Ottawa at all.

Collectively, the first three Anglo-Irish GG’s made significant contributions at a critical period of the new Confederation, bringing experience, confidence and an abiding sense of affection for Canada to their roles and the office itself. They literally left a physical mark in Rideau Hall but left too a legacy in the functioning and public perception of the office of Governor General.

Eamonn

Ottawa

11 November 2022

[1] The prolific D’Arcy McGee was admitted to the Royal Irish Academy on the strength of his 1863 A popular history of Ireland. See Michele Holmgren’s treatment of D’Arcy McGee’s literary influence in her Canada to Ireland, Poetry, Politics, and the Shaping of Canadian Nationalism 1788-1900.

[2] https://www.gg.ca/en/governor-general/former-governors-general/viscount-monck

[3] Riel returned to lead the Northwest Rebellion in 1885, was caught and executed. His execution generated the deep and long lasting bitterness that Lisgar had striven to avoid in the aftermath of the Red River Rebellion.

[4] Lisgar welcome the first British royal to the Confederation in 1869, Victoria’s son Prince Arthur. Prince Arthur would return as GG and commission Wilhelmina Geddes to create the magnificent WWI memorial stained glass window in St Bartholomew’s, the chapel of the GG and the GG’s Foot Guards, installed in 1919.

[5] https://www.gg.ca/en/governor-general/former-governors-general/lord-lisgar

[6] Since the 36th Ulster Division trained there, the tower served as the model for the Ulster Tower in Thiepval to commemorate Ulster’s fallen in World War I. Helen’s Tower is available to rent for a holiday.

[7] The second Lt Gov of PEI was Edmund Fanning, born on Long Island but apparently of Irish parents.

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Tagged as Bulkeley, Canada, Carleton, Dorchester, Dufferin, Irish in Canada, Lisgar, Monck

November 6, 2022 · 9:35 pm

Memorial Service and Rededication of the Restored Geddes Window

Remarks at St Bartholomew’s Church, Ottawa, 6 November 2022

Eamonn McKee, Ambassador of Ireland

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go leir. I am honoured and delighted to a part of this service today as we rededicate this wonderful stained glass window by Irish artist Wilhelmina Geddes.

I want to pay particular thanks to Reverend Father David Clunie for inviting me to be a part of this restoration project. I thought at first he was just looking for money but I quickly realized that what he really wanted was my endorsement as the Irish Ambassador. He rightly intuited that this was a really important dimension to this endeavor.

Since our first meeting at the home of our neighbors Rob and Joanne Nelson, this has been great, a certain highlight of my time here. I have to say as a civil servant you do not often start a project and get to see it finished! But here it is less than two years later and how wonderful. The detail and clarity is amazing.

We should acknowledge too the restoration team who must have a special feeling for this window and they cleaned and restored it piece by piece. They have done a wonderful job.

Thank you then to David, his fundraising committee and all the supporters of this wonderful piece of Irish art, newly restored and good for another one hundred years.

The Geddes Window was commissioned in early 1916 when so much was in flux in Irish society and in art. Geddes was an artist working in the medium of stained glass, at the Túr Gloine studio in Dublin, part of a revival of artisanal craft and the medieval world. As Reverend Clunie noted, the medieval motif makes this work ageless.

When I approached my colleagues back at Headquarters, they immediately recognized the significance of this project and gathered funding to support it.

We hosted a reception last Thursday at Residence to mark the completion of the restoration. We premiered David’s wonderful documentary on the history of the Geddes Window. Beautifully done and soon to be online and available to the public. Well done David and all the volunteers who shared in its making.

As a result of the restoration, St Bartholomew’s and this Geddes Window will be a gem in the Bytown-Ottawa Heritage Trail on which we are working. We hope this will help make more people aware of this treasure, both here in Canada and in Ireland.

We will also put Rideau Hall and Rideau Gate on our Irish Heritage Trail. Call it reverse colonization!

These Church walls bear the names of Governor Generals. The first three after Confederation in 1867 were Anglo-Irish: Viscount Monck, born in Tipperary and educated at Trinity College Dublin; Lord Lisgar whose father was from Bailieborough in Country Cavan; and of course Lord and Lady Dufferin, Frederick and Hariot Blackwood, probably the most consequential couple to live at Rideau Hall as they transformed the function of that office.

The last private family living at No 7 Rideau Gate, now the Government of Canada’s official guest house, were the Ahearns. Lilias Ahearn Massey grew up there and became vice regal consort, attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. From her Irish-born blacksmith great-grandfather, her grandfather Thomas and father Frank Ahearn, to that august role was but three generations

The Geddes Window represents a time in Ireland’s history when local loyalties and aspirations, hopes and fears collided with global events and the outbreak of World War I. The struggles in Ireland were projected onto the wider screen of European hostilities.

Ulster loyalists resisting Home Rule joined the Ulster Volunteer Force and then the 36th Ulster Division to fight for King, country and little Belgium.

Irish nationalists insisting on Home Rule joined the National Volunteers and then the British Army to fight for home rule for Ireland and little Belgium.

Irish Catholic Canadians joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force King, country, and home rule for Ireland.

They all fought and died for what they believed were noble causes.

The noble cause of Irish freedom also called to Irish patriots who fought for Ireland in the streets of Dublin in 1916 and paid the ultimate price for their beliefs.

We honour our patriot dead at our Garden of Remembrance. There in 2011, Queen Elizabeth II paid her respects. It was an historic peacemaking gesture in reconciling Ireland and Britain. In this year of her passing, we remember her too.

So this window is part of the mosaic of our shared history. Irish, British, and Canadian. Nationalist, unionist, and Commonwealth.

We remember today the 200,000 Irish men and women from all traditions who enlisted in the Great War and the 35,000 who fell.

To what degree they were betrayed by the great powers that led them to such horror and sacrifice remains a live historical debate. That debate enhances our memorial of them. It serves to remind us that war is a solemn and grim business.

That as all soldiers know who must put their lives on the line, the greatest honour is reserved for the peace makers.

We are honoured today to have with us a soldier and a peace maker, John de Chastelain. He and his fellow members of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning helped take the gun out of Irish politics.

It is the peace makers who strive to avoid conflict until all other options are exhausted.

And when that fatal price is paid in the fight for our beliefs, we honour the fallen, we remember them.

Thank you.

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October 26, 2022 · 8:30 pm

Wellington and Ottawa: How an Irishman and a Pot of Spanish Silver Transformed Canada

It is hard to imagine the development of modern Canada without the decisive intervention of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, and one of the most influential Anglo-Irish figures of the 19th century. Without his vision of Canada as a strategic bulwark protecting Britain’s global hegemony, there would have been no Lachine, Rideau or Welland Canals, no Bytown hence no Ottawa, and no modern Halifax. The names of Wellington’s men, sent to build up Canada and administer British North America are now common place names of streets and universities across the country. Their job was to protect Canada from US invasion and annexation. Wellington himself had the authority, the manpower and, critically, a huge pot of Spanish silver to realize his vision of Canada as Britain’s indispensable ally. Without Wellington, British North America could well have been absorbed into the United States as many American political leaders expected and demanded for most of the century.

Famously, the Duke of Wellington was said to have retorted about his Irish origins that ‘being born in a stable did not make you a horse.’ In fact, Wellington had never said that. Rather Daniel O’Connell quipped that about Wellington which radically alters its meaning. [1]

For the record shows that Wellington maintained his connections with Ireland even as he rose to famous as the most significant figure in the defense of the Empire from Napoleon. Wellington was born on Merrion Street in Dublin and raised in Ireland. His family had deep roots there going back at least six generations. His Cowley (later Colley[2]) forebears arrived from England around 1500 and successive Irish patriarchs were members of the Irish House of Commons. Their lands were near Trim and Wellington was raised there and in Dublin, leaving when he was twelve to go to Eton (where he was deeply unhappy). Wellington led many Irish into battle wherever he fought (70% of his army in the Peninsular War were Irish). As Prime Minister, Wellington delivered Catholic Emancipation in the face of ferocious opposition from his own Tory party and the king. As as Freemason, Wellington was a life-long member of his Lodge in Trim.

As I have written elsewhere[3], generations of Irish imperial soldiers and administrators made their careers in North America and had formative influence on the development of British North America as the French departed in 1763 and the American War of Independence ended in 1783.

Like many of them, Wellington joined the British Army when an elder brother inherited the family estate. Yet without ever serving in British North America, it was Wellington who exerted such decisive influence on the colony’s development.[4]

Wellington’s vision for Canada was triggered by outrage at the events of 1812. The titanic struggle between Britain and France for global supremacy had been going on for a century, with episodes fought in North America, Ireland, the Atlantic, the West Indies, the East Indies, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798, for example, had been an attempt to access Asia and take control of India, thereby directly threatening British hegemony in Asia and the world. Nelson’s naval victory at The Battle of the Nile quickly put paid to that ambition.[5]

“The Napoleonic Wars of 1800-1815 were a global, not just a European struggle,” writes Dominic Lieven in Russia Against Napoleon. The battles were fought in Europe during the climactic phase of this global contest because successive British naval victories had confined Napoleon there. The stakes could not have been higher. “It was in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras that Britain consolidated its hugely powerful global empire, both territorial and commercial…. Napoleon’s attempt to create a European empire was simply a last, heroic effort to balance British imperialism and avoid defeat in France’s century-long conflict with Britain. The odds were very much against Napoleon, though by 1812 he had come seemingly very close to success.”[6] In June 1812, Napoleon’s Grande Armée of almost 700,000 men invaded Russia.

That same month, with the British Empire’s future on a knife edge, the United States declared war on the UK and invaded its territory in British North America. As Sweeny notes, that the American Ambassador in Paris was on the campaign trail with the Grande Armée helped cement the impression that the US was taking advantage of Britain’s peril (the Ambassador froze to death in Poland and the return leg). In reality, the war party in Washington were infuriated by Britain’s seizure of US ships and crews and general interference in its trade. To Wellington, the US attack was a grievous stab in the back. Britain had to divert some of its best troops to defend Canada, as well as part of the Navy to ward off the US-backed privateers plundering British merchant ships in the North Atlantic.

After the disaster of Napoleon’s Russian invasion and then Waterloo, writes Sweeny, “Wellington’s problem was no longer France, it was the United States. Everything had to be done, from diplomacy to money power to fortifications, to prevent the Americans from capturing British North America.”[7]

Thanks to the Napoleonic blockade, Canada was already substituting for the loss of Baltic lumber to build and repair Britain’s navy. Hemp for ropes and sails were vital to the British Navy: a frigate required fifty tons every two years. Most of that came from Russia, a supply line that had been threatened by Napoleon.[8] Canada’s supply of hemp was limited but could be encouraged longer term. As an imperial strategist, Wellington became convinced that the key to Britain’s global military security was British North America. He decided to fortify Canada, ensure that it had secure transportation links along the St Lawrence linking Kingston, Montreal and Quebec, was capable of defending the coast and trade routes across the North Atlantic from a base at Halifax, and had a strong settled population of loyalists along the St Lawrence in the vulnerable Ontario region.

Wellington was uniquely placed to carry out his plan. As Master General of the Ordnance in 1818, Commander-in-Chief in 1827 and Prime Minister from 1828-1830, he had the authority to order British Army engineers and sappers to help build vital infrastructure. [9] To finance his endeavours, and by a bizarre twist of history, the Admiralty had a treasure of Spanish silver beyond Parliamentary control. Thanks to Sweeny’s indomitable sleuthing we now know that in 1808 Napoleon’s banker proposed, and the British accepted, a deal to split a vast consignment of Spanish silver, minted in Mexico, and transported by a fleet of twenty-six ships of the Royal Navy. The Admiralty’s share of the silver was kept offshore to avoid destabilizing the British financial system; or at least that was their argument.[10] By 1818, Wellington was free to spend it in Canada.

Without the need for Parliamentary approval or oversight, spend it he did. In return for free transportation for the military on the proposed canals, Wellington subsidized the building of the Lachine Canal at Montreal, which opened trade along the upper St Lawrence and the Ottawa Rivers. The canal was built with mainly Irish labour under the direction of Scottish master stone mason and building contractor Thomas Mackay (from Perth, Scotland).

Wellington also sanctioned the building of the Rideau Canal to link the Ottawa River to the St Lawrence at Kingston and thereby protect supply lines between Montreal and the Great Lakes in the event of an American attack across the St Lawrence. While mainly for military reasons, it made commercial sense too. The US plan to build the Erie Canal, linking the Hudson to the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence, threatened to snuffle out Montreal’s export trade with Europe by providing easy access to New York.

Thanks to the superb quality of his work and management of large projects, Mackay won the contract for the Rideau Canal. Irish labourers again featured strongly in his workforce. Mackay built the first stone building in Ottawa, the canal site’s commissary, today the Bytown Museum.[11] Both he and his partner, John Redpath, were handsomely paid, literally with barrels of Spanish silver coin. Redpath invested his in Montreal, but Mackay decided to put down roots in Bytown and develop it: building fine homes at Rideau Hall and Earnscliffe, an industrial complex and housing in what he called New Edinburgh, and laying out Rockcliffe Park for prized housing development. Soon he and other figures like Governor Dalhousie were intent on making Bytown the capital of a new and vital partner in Britain’s global imperial system.

The same logic informed the decision to build the Welland Canal, to which Wellington lent his support, his own money, and his name.[12] The Welland was planned to link Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, across the Niagara peninsula. Without Wellington’s backing and his Spanish silver, not to mention British Army engineers and sappers, the building of the Lachine and Welland canals would almost certainly have taken longer, and the Rideau Canal would never have been proposed. No canal, no Ottawa. While built for military reasons, their value as vital arteries for trade and the development of the economy were clearly understood at the time. They indeed proved vital to Canada’s economic development in the 19^th century. Even today the Welland Canal is a key part of the St Lawrence Seaway, which handles upwards of fifty million tons of cargo each year between the Great Lakes, domestic markets and overseas ones in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

To protect these transportation routes, fortifications were built at key points, including sixteen Martello towers: five at Halifax, four at Quebec, six at Kingston, and one at St John. Militia units were established to protect the canal locks and dams, as well as to be ready to repulse any American incursions across the St Lawrence or up the Richelieu River from Lake Champlain.[13] Halifax boomed with the decision to make it a strategic harbour for the defence of its North Atlantic waters and the coast of British North America against US intentions.^[14] (Had he lived to see it, Wellington’s fellow Dublin man and the founding father of Nova Scotia, Richard Bulkley, would have been well-pleased to see this development!)

As Wellington downsized the British Army after Waterloo in 1815, soldiers were offered land, supplies and tools “to form a loyal and war-like population on the banks of the Rideau and Ottawa.”[15] Indeed, the British Army and its Royal Staff Corps played a vital role in surveying and building roads to connect the population centres along the St Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers, and establishing fortifications and logistical depots.

As Sweeny writes in his fascinating book on Mackay and the founding of Ottawa, the names of the men Wellington dispatched to Canada to realise his vision “resonate today in the names of hundreds of Canadian towns, cities, counties, streets, schools, and universities”: Charles Lennox the Duke of Richmond, George Ramsay the Earl of Dalhousie, Sherbrooke, Aylmer, Kempt, Murray, Colborne, Bagot, Maitland, Lennox, Drummond, Cathcart, and Arthur. “They were all Wellington’s men. Along with them came hundreds of his staff officers, including Colonel John By of the Royal Engineers.”[16]

Under Wellington’s stewardship and with the active support of the British Army and Navy, Canada was a hive of activity. Canals were being built. New towns were being established, linked by new road networks. Land was being allotted and settled by demobilized soldiers, subsidized as settlers. The lumber industry thrived, and with it the provisioning business so vital to the livelihoods of merchants and farmers. Immigrants flooded to British North America thanks to cheap passage on the ships heading there for cargoes of lumber.

All of this economic activity drew Irish immigrants to Central Canada, about twice as many Protestants as Catholics in the first two decades of the 19^th century, mainly to farm. Catholic immigrants came to build the canals in the 1820s and 1830s, and then settle the land. They also arrived in numbers to British North America as soldiers, journalists, administrators, priests, businessmen and merchants, lawyers and politicians. The Irish lumber baron John Egan boosted the Irish presence in the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys. He not only gave them employment in the lumber industry but offered them land to farm at half price.[17]

One has to remember too that most of Wellington’s army in the Peninsular War in Spain had been Irish, most of Nelson’s navy were Irish sailors, and Irish soldiers had been a sizeable presence on the field at Waterloo, upwards of 40% in some estimates. Indeed, for most of the 19^th century, one third of the British Army were Irish, and Irish Catholic at that.[18] Many of them found their way to British North America either as part of their units or as settlers.[19]

Wellington’s strategic vision of Canada’s value to Britain’s global security was ultimately correct. Britain had beaten Spain as its chief global competitor in the 15^th century. It had ultimately beaten France, its chief rival in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, first in North America on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec and then decisively in Europe at Waterloo. Once the United States gave up its predatory intentions toward Canada, it was a key diplomatic and trading partner with the UK, part of an Anglophone Atlantic sphere of influence. The support of North America as a whole proved decisive in the defeat of Britain’s chief 20^th century rival, Germany, in two world wars. What Wellington could not have anticipated was that his own chief rival in America, the United States, would by the mid-twentieth century eclipse the British Empire.

Wellington’s strategic vision of Canada as Britain’s ultimate guarantor was validated by none other than Winston Churchill. By May 1940, Britain’s situation was so dire that the British Government debated whether to seek a negotiated settlement with Nazi Germany. Over three days, Foreign Secretary Halifax argued in favour. Prime Minister Churchill argued against and eventually had his way. Britain would fight on. When Churchill met the US Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, he argued for more American support. Kennedy believed Britain was doomed to lose the war and that the US should stay out. He told Churchill that the American public was against involvement, his own position in fact. Churchill was convinced that the American public would come on side. Britain would fight on. “I’ll fight them from Canada. I’ll never give up the fleet.” [Fredrik Logevall, JFK, Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956, p. 260]

Before Wellington’s strategic decision to bolster Canada with the Rideau Canal and Bytown, the area was Algonquin territory. The confluence of the Rideau, Ottawa, and Gatineau Rivers had been a gathering point for Indigenous people where they met seasonally to exchange news, trade, pray and feast. ‘Ottawa’ comes from the Algonquin adawa meaning to trade and Odawa is the name of an Anishnabe people. Where the Rideau River cascaded into the Ottawa in two great waterfalls, they made offerings. Samuel de Champlain too admired the plumes of mist but prosaically called them curtains, hence ‘Rideau’. Pioneer lumber baron Philemon Wright had established a small settlement on the northern bank of the Ottawa at the confluence with the Gatineau River. The Algonquin came to trade with the strange new settlers led by Wright, lacking the information to understand that they were the tip of a vast imperial machine that would take their land and crush their civilization.[20]

Ottawa exists today because of Wellington’s order to build the Rideau Canal, which in turn created the means to settle the whole area. In Colonel John By, Thomas Mackay and John Redpath, he had the men capable of doing it. Occasionally, British Army engineers and sappers were needed to tackle tricky problems, and the mainly Irish workforce provided the muscle and skills to build the 47 locks and 52 dams.[21] A Celtic cross stands today at the head of the Canal to honour all those who died through disease and injury, including Irish, Scottish, French, and Indigenous workers. Everyone risked malaria but it took a devastating toll on the most exposed Irish: “The lock sites on the Cataraqui River were hit hard by the malaria epidemics, which killed almost five hundred men, mostly Irish immigrants.”[22]

By 1832, the Rideau Canal was completed, at a cost of $800,000: about as much, Sweeny reckons, as the value of the silver cargo of one ship.[23]

Wellington certainly deserves to have Ottawa’s main thoroughfare named after him in the capital city of a country he did so much to defend against America’s territorial ambitions, bolster its administration, sponsor its settlement, and boost its economic development. His intervention also created the conditions which encouraged the Irish to immigrate to British North America, establishing Irish settlement patterns up to the last great wave of Irish emigration during the most disastrous year of the Great Irish Famine in 1847.[24] Thereafter, large scale Irish emigration to Canada ends. The US was the new destination for waves of mainly Catholic Irish who saw themselves as political exiles, not mere economic emigrants.[25] By then, Irish settlement patterns in Canada were well established and the Irish themselves had already made a deeply felt, if somewhat occluded, impact on the development of Canada. Like Canada itself, the chief architect of this legacy was Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, and his pot of Spanish silver.

Like Canada, Ireland was shaped by British imperial interests. Fears that it would be swept up in French Revolutionary fervour convinced London to abolish the Irish Parliament 1800 and to bind Ireland to Britain in the Act of Union 1800. Yet the same drive to bind Canada as an ally led it to succor the relationship, granting it responsible government in the 1840s and Confederation as the first Dominion of the Commonwealth in 1867. Had Britain taken a similar tact with Ireland, our history would have been very different.

Irish revolutionaries who believed that only force would deliver Ireland’s freedom also so the value of Canada to Britain. The Fenian Brother conspired to provoke an Anglo-America war by invading Canada. Mobilizing Irish and Irish American veterans of the Civil War, the launched several cross border raids between 1866 and 1871. It is a story captured brilliantly in David Wilson’s recently published Canadian Spy Story, Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police.

Prime Minister Churchill, when faced with the prospect of a successful invasion by Nazi Germany, opined that he would take the fleet to Halifax, declaring privately ‘I’ll fight them from Canada!’

Canada’s role as imperial bulwark threatened by a perfidious revolutionary America has faded in memory as the sun set on the British Empire and risen on American global hegemony. Yet this story has led me hear in Canada’s national anthem the echoes of its colonial history: “True patriot love in all of us command, With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.”

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

26 October 2022

[1] Born Wesley but later taking his mother’s name Wellesley.

[2] Wellington’s grandfather, Richard, changed his surname from Colley to Wesley after he inherited the estate of his cousin Garret Wesley in 1728 (Wikipedia).

[3] https://eamonncmckee.com/2022/10/09/celebrating-the-rich-and-varied-contribution-of-the-irish-in-canada/

[4] Wellington earned his spurs with long service in India. He won fame fighting Napoleon’s forces in Spain in the savage war there. More than 70% of his Peninsular Army were Irish.

[5] For a very lively account, see Juan Cole’s Napoleon’s Egypt, Invading the Middle East.

[6] Lieven, Russia against Napoleon, The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, (Viking, 2009), pp 16-17. Lieven’s book is a declared attempt to correct western accounts that underestimate the significance of Russia’s victory and the logistical achievement of chasing Napoleon all the way to Paris. The logic behind Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was shared by Hitler: only by being truly unchallenged in Europe could either hope to defeat Britain. See Timothy Snyder’s incomparable Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

[7] Sweeny, p 49.

[8] Sweeny slightly overstates cutting off the British Navy’s supply of hemp as being the predominant reason for Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

[9] Wikipedia.

[10] Ibid, pp 134-5.

[11] Bytown got its name from Col. John By, the British Army engineer overseeing the canal’s construction. It was changed to Ottawa in 1855.

[12] Ibid, p. 54.

[13] As had happened in the French and Indian Wars; see Fintan O’Toole’s William Johnson, White Savage.

[14] Thomas Raddall, Halifax, Warden of the North, p 167. In an ironic twist, the plans of the new fortification there were drawn up by Colonel James Arnold, son of Benedict Arnold, the arch US traitor.

[15] Sweeny, quoted p 49.

[16] Sweeny, p. 48.

[17] Michael McBane, John Egan, Pine and Politics (Ottawa, 2018). Egan was also instrumental in the land grant for the Algonquin reserve at Kitigan Zibi in the Gatineau Valley at Maniwaki.

[18] Thomas Bartlett, Ireland during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1791-1815, pp 74-75, in the Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. III.

[19] Historian Michael McBane tells me that one of his forebears on this mother’s side perfectly illustrates this pattern: John Kearns (Catholic, b. Enniskillen, Ireland, 1777; d. Plantagenent, Upper Canada, 1863). As a young soldier, Kearns, saw action during the Irish rebellion of 1798. He served in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars in the West Indies, Spain and the Netherlands. He joined the Duke of Wellington’s Army in 1811 and was present at many battles during the Peninsula Wars. He immigrated to Upper Canada in 1818. He held the rank of Colonel in the Prescott Militia and participated in the Battle of Saint-Eustache during the Lower Canada Rebellion in 1837. He represented Prescott in the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada at York (Toronto) from 1836 to 1841 as a Conservative.

[20] Sweeny, pp 12-14.

[21] Ibid, p 144.

[22] Ibid, p 141.

[23] Ibid, p 136.

[24] Mark McGowan, Death or Canada, The Irish Famine Migration to Toronto, 1847 (Novalis, 2009). Donald H Akenson, The Irish in Ontario (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 28-34.

[25] See Kirby Miller’s classic study Emigrants and Exiles.

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