Category Archives: Irish Heritage of Canada

February 18, 2024 · 8:13 pm

How the County Meath brothers Richard and Arthur Reshaped the British Empire East and West

Richard was the older of the two brothers. The Colleys had been in Ireland for many generations when his grandfather changed the name to Wesley on inheriting the Dangan estate from his cousin Garrett Wesley. Richard was born in Dangan Castle in 1760 and would adopt Wellesley as his surname when he was 29, as would his brother Arthur.

After 17 years in the Houses of Commons and Lords, and in Government, Richard was appointed Governor General of India in 1797. After seven months at sea, Richard Colley Wellesley arrived in Calcutta: he “would change the history of India as much as Napoleon would change that of France; indeed, though his name is largely forgotten today, in the next seven years he would conquer more territory in India and more quickly, than Napoleon conquered in Europe.’ The quote (p. 335) is from William Dalrymple’s magnificent page-turner The Anarchy, The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and The Pillage of an Empire. Revealingly, the chapter is called ‘The Corpse of India’.

Richard’s aim was to displace his employers, the East India Company (EIC), with British government control over all of India and to oust the French (p. 337). In achieving this, through divide and conquer, and with a massive investment in the EIC’s private army, Richard laid the foundation for the British Raj. As Dalrymple writes, by the end of his tenure, Richard was the real emperor, with 600 professional civil servants, and a well trained army of 155,000. His king had gained an additional 50 million subjects. London was largely unaware of what Richard had done. Richard had concealed it from his nominal bosses in the EIC. The Government was focused on the threat from Napoleon (whose failed Egyptian campaign ended any French hopes of challenging for control of India), ‘But within India everyone knew that a major revolution had just taken place…The sinews of British supremacy were now established. With the exception of a few months during the Great Uprising of 1857, for better or worse, India would remain in British hands for another 144 years, finally gaining its freedom only in August 1847.’ (p.382)

It had taken cunning and courage to be sure. Richard’s brother Arthur, a major general, faced off against two Maratha armies in August 1803, the dominant power in the western Deccan plateau. The Maratha’s had learned European methods of warfare and had well used French mercenaries like the brilliant general Benoit de Boigne to train their infantry and artillery. In the ferocious battle of Assaye, Arthur had two horses shot from under him, staff officers killed near him as grape shot flew all around. A horse still carried its headless dragoon as Arthur forged the Khelna river. Dalrymple’s thrilling account (pp 369-372) records the bloody outcome of Arthur’s victory, his first ‘close-run thing’: 6,000 dead Marathas and one third of Arthur’s army, 1,584 out of 4,500 troops. General Lake’s conquest of Delhi in September sealed India’s fate: impoverishment as Britain plundered its wealth and shipped its global textile hegemony to Britain.

As I have written here previously, Arthur would reshape Canada in the wake of the US’s failed invasion attempt in the War of 1812. He determined to fortify Canada believing that it was the bulwark of the British Empire, graphically illustrated when Napoleon cut off Baltic timber from the British navy. In 1804, Henry Caldwell, from Fermanagh who had fought with the distinction against the French in Canada, persuaded Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, the Lord of the Admiralty, that Canadian timber could provide for Royal Navy what it had formerly secured in the Baltic. The Canadian lumber industry was born and Caldwell along with his wife’s nephew George Hamilton (from Dunboyne) would make their fortunes as lumber barons in respectively Quebec and the Ottawa Valley. Arthur had a point about Canada: even in the twentieth century Churchill imagined taking the Royal Navy to Halifax should Hitler succeed in conquering England.

The careers of both Richard and Arthur came together over the infamous Koh-i-Noor diamond. I cannot recommend highly enough http://www.empirepod.com by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple. The four podcast episodes about the diamond combine as enthralling story-telling. The massive diamond was swiped from India and given to Queen Victoria. Uncut, it was a major disappointment to the crowds that came to see it at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Though warned that a flaw would split it, Prince Albert decided to have it cut and polished using a bespoke steam-powered grindstone. The honor of the first pass went to Arthur, the hero of Waterloo, Duke of Wellington. The process split the diamond in half, though the final product was still the size of a duck egg. Queen Victoria often wore it as a broach. It is today part of the crown of Elizabeth the Queen Mother. India, along with Pakistan and even the Taliban, demand its return.

Eamonn

Ottawa

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August 28, 2023 · 7:19 pm

Searching for the Graves of Palliser and Butler in Ireland in the Summertime

It may seem like an unseasonal hobby.  Seeking out graveyards and searching through their long damp grass of a summertime in Ireland.  No beach for me with its tedious horizon and throbbing ennui.  Give me the name of some historical figure and send me to find his or her grave.  It has its rewards. On this trip to Ireland, I had two names in mind, John Palliser and William F. Butler.

Palliser was born in 1817, descendant of a Protestant clergyman who had arrived in Ireland in the 17th century.  Though born in Dublin, Palliser’s family roots lay between the Galty and Comeragh Mountains.  The area forms part of the Goldenvale, the richest farmland in Ireland. If his surname rings a bell, its because the prolific English novelist Anthony Trollope borrowed it for the main character in his ‘Parliamentary’ novels that were popularised by a BBC dramatisation in 1974, The Pallisers.  (Trollope’s fifteen year stay in Ireland saw him develop as both a public servant and novelist).

Palliser shared in the outdoor pursuits of his landed peers, in which horsemanship was a prized skill and hunting an obsession. His love of hunting took him to the prairies of North America in 1847.  Longing to return there, his proposed expedition to British Northern America was sponsored by the Colonial Office as a scientific one that also had the ulterior purpose of projecting British sovereignty above the yet to be defined border of the 49th parallel separating British North America from the United States. 

Palliser’s report of three  years’ exploration between 1857 and 1860 was a landmark, opening the way to eventual settlement of what became Alberta.  Irene Spry’s history of the expedition details the thrills, dangers, and hardships of the expedition, led with exemplary diplomacy and tact on the part of Palliser (The Pallister Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (Toronto, 1963)).  His leadership skills were tested in  territory that suffered lawlessness and much conflict between Indigenous communities and interloping hunters and traders, including those from the United States.  Whiskey as a trade commodity caused untold social damage.  Palliser’s hunting skills were put to good use helping to feed the expedition members with bison, deer, wapiti, mountain goat, sheep, wild fowl, fish and just about anything else edible. His knowledge of horses ensured success in trading for replacement stock from the local Cree and Blackfoot. 

After further adventures, notably hunting in Russian territories, Palliser spent the end of his days in Comeragh House, trying as best he could to manage his heavily mortgaged estates.  I was keen to find the grave of this consequential but largely forgotten figure.

According to the RIA’s online Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), Palliser was buried in 1887 in Kilrossanty Church of Ireland Cemetery. Google Maps put it northwest off the N25, west of Kilmacthomas and near Lemybrien. It was a fine sunny day.  Under the Comeragh Mountains, the narrow roads with their high hedgerows and overarching trees wound gently uphill.  After a bit of back and forth, we found the gates across from a cottage (the Sexton’s house, said a sign) that led to the chapel and graveyard.  The grass was lush and deep, though generally the graveyard looked well kept.  The chapel was locked, with tell-tale cobwebs across its keyhole.  Inside, the pews were still there as if waiting for the return of the local gentry in  carriages, horses, and Sunday finery. Beneath tall pines we found the Palliser grave, a low crypt enclosed by a modest railing.  A bronze plaque had been placed there.  The legend said that it had been presented in August 1977 by the Province of Alberta to honour Palliser’s expedition as a significant contribution to the development of the Province. Lingering at Palliser’s grave brought a sense of intimacy with the vivid accounts of his adventures in the prairies of the Northwest.

Next on my list was the final resting place of William Francis Butler.  He was born in Golden, Co Tipperary in 1838. While the Butler was a prestigious and storied one in Ireland, his family were a cadet branch without much wealth. His father was a substantial farmer though he rented far more land than he owned. Butler had to make his own way in the world and his thirst for adventure brought him to a career in the British Army, despite the disadvantages of being a Catholic and without the money to buy an officer’s rank. Though a Catholic and a Home Ruler, his adventurous life as an officer of the British Army had not only taken him to Canada but involved him in some of the seminal colonial events of the British Empire in the latter half of the 19th century: rebellions in Burma and India, attempting to rescue General Gordon in Sudan via Egypt (where he recruited Canadian voyageurs to man a fleet of boats), fighting the Ashanti in West Africa, and reluctantly countering the Boers in South Africa. 

In 1870 Butler had been engaged as an intelligence officer by the leader of a military expedition to confront Louis Riel, the Métis leader who had led the resistance to settlement around the Red River settlement (today’s Winnipeg).   Riel’s provisional government was instrumental in creating the Province of Manitoba, but the Act establishing it contained no amnesty for his actions.  The expedition was led by Dublin man Garnet Wolseley, regarded as the most capable British Army officer of his generation.  Public opinion in the US gleefully assumed failure.  Wolseley proved his mettle by successfully leading 1100 troops supported by 400 voyagers from Lake Superior to Fort Garry, building 40 miles of road and undertaking 47 porterages. Riel had fled to the US by the time Wolseley arrived at Fort Garry, but the expedition was a key event in the colonisation of the prairies.  Butler’s role had been to explore the territory in advance of Wolseley, in the course of which he met Riel (it is fair to say Butler was unimpressed).  He was then commissioned by the Lt Governor to continue his explorations.  Butler’s recommendations led to the creation of the Northwest Mounted Police, later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Through it all, Butler kept up his writing.  His account of his adventures in the prairies of the Northwest, The Great Lone Land, had been a bestseller. It remains today an immersive read, full of descriptive gems, and suffused with much admiration for Indigenous life and sorrow at its inevitable extirpation by white settlers. Butler’s sympathies were influenced by his upbringing.  His father had impoverished the family by charitable donations during the Great Famine.  He had brought his young son to see the terrors of evictions which left an indelible mark on Butler and a sympathy for the oppressed and the doomed.  In his writings, Butler is clear about the savagery of the white settlers and his doubts of the true values of Victorian progress, however inexorable its course.  He seemed happiest travelling alone in the untamed wilderness of the Canadian Northwest. Butler’s novel, Red Cloud, The Solitary Sioux, was on the syllabus of Irish secondary schools up to the 1930s.

On retirement from his successful military with the rank of Lt General and a knighthood, Butler lived at Bansha Castle, Co Tipperary, near his birthplace at Golden and purchased for him by the British Government as a house of favour. He died there in 1910, and was buried locally with an impressive military escort.  The DIB noted his burial at Killardrigh (from the Irish for church of the high king).  This proved hard to find because the cemetery is locally called Killaldriffe. However, find it we did, with the lavender backdrop of the Galty Mountains resplendent under a bright blue sky.   A stone plaque cemented into the wall of the cemetery reads: “This is the burial place of Lt Gen William Francis Butler…famous soldier, author, Irishman.”  It quotes a poem by Butler found among his papers with the plea to “give me but six foot three (one inch to spare)/ of Irish ground, and dig it anywhere/and for my poor Irish soul say an Irish prayer/above the spot.”

We found his grave beneath a modest Celtic Cross at the far end of the graveyard, overlooking the rich pastures of the Goldenvale.  There is a heavily overgrown early medieval church ruin in the graveyard but it was clear too that the cemetery has been in use continuously to the present day. 

Nearby, I found Bansha Castle but circumstances meant I could only see it from the outside.  We repaired to our accommodation at nearby Bansha House, run by the marvelously hospitable Mary Marnane.  In the sitting room, surrounded by memorabilia of the grand old house’s horse-rearing and horse-racing legacy, which continues to this day, we met another guest, Claire from the US, whose great, great, great, grandfather was Darby Ryan.  In two hours’ time, his famous 1830 lyric ‘The Peeler and the Goat’ was to be commemorated at the local Church of Ireland in the heart of the village.  (The Wolf Tones put its mocking lines to music in a rousing, tongue-twisting rendition, available on YouTube.)  We couldn’t resist Claire’s invitation and joined the large crowd at Ryan’s grave and later in the church, now a community centre, packed for talks about Ryan with a keynote address by Tipperary historian Denis Marnane. It is one of the wonderful features of many small Irish towns and villages that local history generates both expertise and popularity.

The historical connections between the southeast of Ireland and Canada are deep.  In the 17th century, fishermen from Waterford and Wexford were the first Irish in Newfoundland, there for its great shoals of enormous cod.  After the rebellion of 1798 and the dissolution of the Irish Parliament, there was a virtual exodus from south Wicklow and Wexford, many Protestant farmers.  Recession in Ireland after the end of the Napoleonic Wars boosted emigration, and the religious balance shifted to Catholic emigrants in the 1820s, drawn by employment on Canada’s canals and fortifications, and available land for farming. Irish soldiers fighting in the British Army were settled in British North America to help deter any thoughts of invasion and annexation by Washington.  This strategy of fortification and settlement was devised by Irishman, the Duke of Wellington whose influence on the development of Canada in the 1820s and 1830s was profound. Irish Catholic tenants from Wicklow (such as the Coollattin estate of the Fitzwilliams) were subsidised to emigrate to Ontario in the late 1840s and 1850s to speed the switch to pasturage.

John Palliser and William Butler were just a part then of the very significant Irish contribution to the development of Canada that stretched over three centuries.  While some 109,000 Irish Famine refugees arrived in Canada in 1847, twenty percent of whom would die in the process, the year marked the end of major Irish emigration to Canada.  Much of the Irish contribution to Canada has been forgotten, as has so much of what happened in Ireland in the decades prior to the Famine.  It was also obscured by the centrality of the US in emigration from Ireland for the second half of the 19th century. This is the way of things.  History moves on and contemporary events and concerns rewrite history.  What was significant previously loses relevance, just as the obscure can gain significance and prominence in official narratives, the stories we tell ourselves.

The next morning, we set out find two nearby sites that in their own way illustrated this point.  Knockgraffon proved elusive, though I knew it was near Bansha.  Our drive spiraled into a tightening circle on our target, a tree-covered prominent hill.  Suddenly a finely preserved Norman tower sprung into view.  I knew that the Butlers had built one at Knockgraffon.  A short drive further along the road revealed a stumpy hill, not looking at all significant with its thick hedging.  Yet that was Knockgraffon.  The name means the Hill of the Rath of Fionn. In Gaelic Ireland, for centuries before the arrival of the Normans in 1169-70, this Hill was central to the O’Sullivan rulers of the area.  It was the site of the inauguration of their kings.  As I climbed the short, sharp slope to its top, I could see why.  The summit presented a fine 360-degree view of the surrounding land, rich and fertile all the way to the slopes of the Galty mountains. Part of the regnal inauguration in Gaelic Ireland was the candidate holding a white wand and pointing to all points of his kingdom.  The emergence of nearby Cashel as the centre for the kings of Munster and the defeat of the O’Sullivans by the Normans robbed Knockgraffon of its role.  The O’Sullivans were forced to decamp to the wilds of Kerry. The Butlers claimed the land and built their tower at Knockgraffon, part of the defensive network that spread out from their famously impregnable castle at Cahir.

Heading north toward Golden, we found Athassel Priory.  Across a dung-strewn field that was mercifully dry underfoot, we crossed a delightful stone footbridge and through the stone-arched ruin of a gatehouse.  The extent of the site was unexpected and impressive.  Even more so were the ruins of the many magnificent buildings that had comprised the Abbey complex.  I had not expected anything on this scale, though Athassel had been Ireland’s largest priory.  It was founded by William de Burgh right at the outset of Norman colonisation. The sheer height of some of the remains was stunning (photos on my instagram account, eamonnseye).  I tried to imagine the priory in its heyday.  It must have been magnificent: So large and well endowed it generated a sizeable town in its environs.  When it was dissolved in 1537, the lands went to the loyal Butlers.

Athassel has been ruins for centuries and its significance lost, its fame eclipsed in the modern imagination by earlier Christian monasteries like Clonmacnoise.  The latter fit the official narrative of Independent Ireland in a way that an Augustinian priory at the heart of Norman Ireland could not.  The de Burghs became Burkes, now regarded as indisputably Irish, just like the Butlers. What we remember is a matter of selection, how we remember a matter of choice.

I left the beautiful area of the Comeragh and Galty mountains satisfied with small objectives achieved.  I mentally checked the possibility that at some future point the graves of Palliser and Butler will feature in an Irish-Canadian heritage trail. I wondered too about how we designate so many of them and their peers as Anglo-Irish, not simply Irish, or even in some references as British.  The so-called Anglo-Irish had been in Ireland for many generations, even centuries.  The Butlers had been Old English, descendants of the Normans and other early English colonisers, but had kept their Catholic faith.  So, William could be Irish but Palliser, a Protestant, Anglo-Irish:  Questions of history, historiography, even of philosophy but hardly irrelevant to the politics and future of our island. 

Thinking about the Irish in Canada, about the imperial Irish, Protestant and Catholic alike, I find to be endlessly enriching.  It is a gateway into our own history and role in the British Empire.  The imperial Irish far outnumbered those aligned with republicanism, in careers and activities if not beliefs. As I have written elsewhere, Canada was the future Ireland never had, displaced by the dramatic paradigm shift triggered by the Easter Rising in 1916 and all that flowed from it.  After a hundred years of Independence, I think we are ready to embrace the complexity of our past. We are free to choose to find a place for figures like Palliser and Butler.

Eamonn

Rathfarnham, 28 August 2023

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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 19th 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 19th 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 18th 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 20th 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

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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 18th century with a strong (Protestant but indigenous) Parliament.  Both collapsed into extreme poverty, urban decay, and economic malaise in the 19th 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 19th 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 19th 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

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March 8, 2023 · 8:30 pm

50 ILIC: Bishop Michael Fleming, radical pastor with a long legacy in Newfoundland

The monumental Basilica of St John’s, the Taj Mahal of the Irish in Canada, is the legacy of Bishop Michael Fleming.  Son of a tenant farmer in Kilkenny, Fleming was educated and ordained in Wexford at a time of growing Catholic mobilization. Fleming modelled his episcopal leadership in Newfoundland on Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation and the Catholic Church’s Ultramontanism. He transformed the Irish Catholic community, colonial politics, and Newfoundland itself in a lasting way.

From the 1680s Irish fisherman had joined in the annual migratory cod fishery to Newfoundland, the only place outside of Ireland bearing an Irish name, Talamh an Éisce, land of the fish.   The resident Irish Catholic population grew in parallel with its English Protestant counterpart. With Newfoundland under the Penal Laws, each occupied different ends of the socio-economic scale.

Arriving in 1823, Fleming found Newfoundland grimly familiar: a comfortable mercantile Anglican elite led by the Crown-appointed Governor that discriminated, disenfranchised, and marginalized the Catholic Irish from all offices of influence. Lives were brutishly hard fishing, seal hunting, or scrimping a living from smallholdings Catholics were debarred from owning. When a smallpox epidemic broke out in Petty Harbour in the winter of 1835-36, Fleming lived with the poor, tended to their sick, and built a church. That was what he had done everywhere he travelled, leaving a trail of churches and newfound pride in his wake.

Fleming treated Newfoundland as if it were Ireland and determined to reverse Catholic humiliation and poverty.  On trips home, he recruited 36 priests, forged like him in O’Connell’s Ireland of politically mobilized Catholics. Fleming opened a school for young girls in 1833 run by Presentations Sister from Galway. The Sisters of Mercy from Dublin established a girls’ school for the small Irish middle-class, while Franciscans were brought to teach boys.  For Fleming, the students were future leaders.

Pastoral work paralleled fearless engagement in politics.  O’Connellite mobilization, fundraising, boycotts, and even excommunications were deployed. Support was offered to Liberal candidates who endorsed Fleming’s agenda.  Governor Thomas Cochrane and a handful of ‘respectable’ Irish Catholics (dubbed “Mad Dogs”) resisted, prompting sectarian tensions and, on occasion, riots. By 1832 Fleming and his reformers had won Catholic Emancipation. Formidable Catholic voter support for the Liberal Party, and state funding for Catholic schools soon followed.

Crown vexations over this ‘troublesome priest’ led to protests to Rome. In response, Fleming cultivated the cardinals. Through St. Isidore’s Irish Franciscan College in Rome, he sent them smoked Newfoundland salmon. He visited the Holy See and in 1837 submitted his report, Relazione, an impressive account of his travels and pastoral work along with counter-allegations of persecution by the colonial authorities. By 1840, fresh complaints from Newfoundland’s new governor, Henry Prescott, prompted Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell to ask Rome to remove Fleming.  Rome summoned Fleming.  The bishop ignored it. When British mandarins let Fleming see the secret inflammatory correspondence of Prescott, it was Prescott who packed his bags.

A factor in Fleming’s strong position was his ambitious cathedral. In Relazione, Fleming cleverly alluded to obstacles put in his way to securing land for this project, five years of “vexation and annoyance”. By 1838 Fleming had secured the Barrens, formerly site of the garrison overlooking St Johns, informally a location of Irish faction-fights and hurling matches. He put his formidable organizational and fundraising skills into top gear.  Small donations from low-income Catholics and some sizeable ones from the wealthy, including Protestants, flowed.  The larger Newfoundland community marshalled as a workforce, cutting timber and fencing land. In two days during May 1839, thousands of men, women, and children excavated over 4,250 tonnes of soil, women hauling it away in their aprons. 

Construction of the cathedral took fourteen years and 35,000 tons of granite.  In wintertime, up to his waist in water on the beach at Kelly’s Island in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, Fleming loaded cut stone into small boats for transport to the building site. Limestone from Galway was used on exterior walls, and granite from Dublin was used for the quoins, mouldings and window frames. Five

 times he scoured Europe for materials.  By 1847 he was too ill to travel. Financial setbacks and a great fire in St John’s the previous year did not deter him, even as the fire consumed his papers.  Frail and failing with tuberculosis, Fleming whispered the first mass within the cathedral in January 1850, its chill cavernous shell a glimpse of future grandeur beyond the dust, scaffolding and exposed rafters. He knelt in prayer, occasionally helped, but finished the Mass.  That was his last public rite. He was sequestered until July when he died and was interred in his cathedral’s vault.

The cathedral, finished by Fleming’s successor Bishop John Mullock of Limerick, was a triumph of Ultramontanism and neoclassicism, embellished with statues by the best Irish artists. Fleming’s cathedral was the largest architectural and cultural achievement of Ireland’s pre-Famine diaspora, a statement of faith in the future. At its consecration in 1855, Archbishop John Hughes of New York left determined that his city should have a cathedral to match the achievement of Newfoundland’s poor fishermen.

Fleming’s achievements were extraordinary.  Fired by injustice and inspired by his hero O’Connell, he used his determination, guile and talents to advance the status of Newfoundland’s Catholic Irish.  In the Franciscan tradition, he eschewed the fine living and clothes customary of many bishops.  Fleming devoted his life to the young and the poor through the provision of opportunity and pride. His cathedral (named Minor Basilica in 1955) was designed to instil that pride, its grandeur hardly out of place had it been built in Rome itself.  Just as enduring was Fleming’s political legacy which forged the politics of his Irish community and of the island, orienting Newfoundland away from Canada and towards Ireland and Europe. If Fleming had had his way, Newfoundland might well have become Ireland’s fifth province. Newfoundland only officially joined Canada in 1949.

Further reading:

Susan Chalker Browne, The Story of the Basilica of St. John the Baptist, (St John’s, 2015).

J.B. Darcy, Fire Upon the Earth – The Life and Times of Bishop Michael Anthony Fleming  (St. John’s, 2003).

“Michael Anthony Fleming“, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Vol. VIII, at http://www.biographi.ca

J.E. FitzGerald, “Michael Anthony Fleming and Ultramontanism in Irish Newfoundland Roman Catholicism, 1829-1850,  CCHA Historical Studies 64 (1998): 27-45.

J.E. FitzGerald, “Conflict and Culture in Irish-Newfoundland Roman Catholicism, 1829-1850” Ph.D. thesis, Univ. Ottawa, 1997.

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March 3, 2023 · 6:41 pm

50 ILIC: Tadgh O’Brennan and the Irish of New France

Born Castlecomer, County Kilkenny, 1632. Died Pointe-aux-Trembles, Quebec, 1687.

Eamonn McKee and Mark McGowan

Tadhg Cornelius Ó’Braonáin, Tadhg O’Brennan, known as Tec Cornelius Aubrenan, may have been the first documented Irish-born immigrant to Canada.  There had been other Irish who had set foot in Canada before him, such as the fishermen who had settled in Newfoundland, and perhaps Irish women among the Norse explorers to what was known in their sagas as Vineland, now disputed as either Newfoundland or Cape Breton. The honour of being known and named in official records, however, lies with Tadhg O’Brennan.

Born around 1632, it appears that Tadgh was from a parish near Castlecomer, County Kilkenny.  In a thoroughly researched paper published in 2002, Louis Aubry, one of his descendants, suggested that his father was Connor O’Brennan who held lands in Kilkenny.  He further speculates that ‘Diasonnay’, the phonetic record of Tadhg’s birthplace recorded on his marriage certificate, is probably a parish called Dysert near the river Dinin, a tributary of the Nore River just north of Kilkenny city.  There he finds Dysert Bridge where the two rivers called Dinan converge.

The O’Brennans held their strategic lands and became known as a military force in the region. By the time of the Cromwellian invasions, in 1650, however, the O’Brennans were unable to hold their estates and it is likely that Tadhg was one of the many Irish soldiers allowed to leave for France after the Cromwellian invasion.  In France, and though likely illiterate, Tadgh would have learned French, essential to his decision to move to New France. 

Tadhg arrived in what was then New France in 1661 at the age of 29.  He married Jeanne Chartier on 9 October 1670 in Notre Dame Cathedral in Quebec City, although they moved to the Montreal area where they had their family.  Tadhg and Jeanne had seven children, Madeleine Therese (1671), Catherine (1673), Jean-Cornelius (1675), Jean-Baptiste (1676), Francois (1677), Geneviève (1679), Etienne Aubrenon, who died in infancy at Repentigny, in 1681.  Tadhg died at age fifty-five in 1687 and is buried at Pointe-aux-Trembles, near Montreal.

Tadhg would have not felt isolated as an Irishmen in the St. Lawrence Valley. In 1700, “Tanguay’s Parish Registers” report that of the 2,500 families living in the colony, about 100 were natives of Ireland, and there were 30 other cases where either the husband or the wife was Irish-born. In parish registers, the local priest just listed the individuals as “Irlandais,” without reference to county of origin. Among those discovered in the  records of 17th century include Jean Houssye, dit Bellerose, who was actually John Hussey, married in New France in 1671. He was a native of Dublin and son of Matthew Hussey and Elizabeth Hogan of St. Lawrence O’Toole Parish. In 1688, Pierre and Jean Lehait were living in Quebec City, and were brothers formerly known as Peter and John Leahy from County Wicklow. Peter was a servant in the entourage of Governor Louis de Baude, Count de Frontenac. Similarly, two other Irishmen, Jean Lehaise (John Leahy) and Jean LeMer St.Germain, dit Irelande, of Thurles, were both granted land by the Sulpician Fathers, the seigneurs of the island of Montreal. Finally, in 1704, Jean Baptiste Riel was married at Isle du Pads. Antiquarian, John O’Farrell, suggests that he may actually be John Rielly of Limerick, and a distant ancestor of the famous Canadian patriot, Louis Riel.

The naturalization records from 17th century New France also list a number of women whose sometimes Gallicized names suggest Irish origin: Marie Washton (married to an Irish colonist); Anne Lord (Tierney); Catherine Dunkin (O’Dongen); Martha Finn; Madeline Alleyne (O’Halloyne); and Marie-Charlotte Brojon (O’Brogan). They may have come directly from Ireland, been refugees from the English colonies, or taken captive by French and Indigenous raiding parties on the frontiers of New England.

While Catholic refugees fleeing from the English and Protestant Colonies as far south as Virginia provided one of the sources of Irish migration to New France, the French and Spanish militaries were another important agency of emigration. Irish expatriates, like Tadhg who had joined the French army of Louis XIV often appeared in the regiments stationed in New France. Timothy Sullivan, for example, was a native of Kerry who had served with the Spanish Dragoons, and after having escaped capture by the English, fled to Montreal via the New England colonies. In 1718, he appears as a physician in Montreal, with a Gallicized surname Sylvain, and married the widowed mother of Marguerite D’Youville, the founder the Sisters of Charity, or Grey Nuns. Similarly, Charles de Latouche McCarthy, was born in Brest in 1706, France, son of Irish refugees. He was a decorated captain in the French navy and served in New France from 1737 to 1763. He married Angelique-Jeanne Guillimin, the daughter of a member of the Sovereign Council. He served New France with distinction through the wars of the Austrian Succession (1740-47) and the Seven Years War (1756-63). During the latter war, Governor Pierre Riguad de Vaudreuil assembled an Irish Company of troops consisting of deserters from the English army, Irish colonists, and refugees in New France. His Irish company was transferred to the European theatre of the war before the fall of New France in 1760.

We do not know much about Tadhg O’Brennan’s life in Quebec.  Nevertheless, he represents several generations of Irish men and women who recognized that there was no future for themselves or their faith after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. They found temporary homes in France, either through the military or the merchant trades, and many ended up in France’s colonial possessions in North America. Other Irish had found themselves in the New England colonies, but fled to New France for the liberty of practicing their Catholic Faith. Tadhg’s family lineage, and that of Sullivan and McCarthy, were in themselves a plumb line that reached deep into Ireland’s history.  As a microcosm of early Irish migration to Canada, Tadhg is a fitting character to have the honour of being the first officially recorded Irishman in Canada.

Further Reading:

Thomas Guerin, The Gael in New France (Montreal: Private, 1946)

John O’Farrell, “Irish Families in Ancient Quebec,” in Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada. Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988. Pp 281-94. Originally published on 15 January 1872 as a speech to the Hibernian Benevolent Society of Quebec.

Tanguay Collection, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes Québec, 1608 à 1890. Online: https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/2177/

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March 2, 2023 · 1:34 pm

Fifty Irish Lives in Canada: Preface

Today we celebrate the start of Irish Heritage Month, officially recognized as such by the Government of Canada thanks to the leadership of James Maloney MP and the Canada Ireland Parliamentary Friendship Group.

In celebration of Irish Heritage Month, we will launch Fifty Irish Lives in Canada on Friday March 3rd. Please join James, me, and our guests online for the event. From this day onwards, we will publish one profile of the Irish in Canada over the past three centuries. The profiles we are launching resoundingly affirm that indeed the story of the Irish in Canada is a fascinating one. Its richness lies in its complexity.

The launch of Fifty Irish Lives in Canada is the culmination of over a year’s work. The project was inspired by the Royal Irish Academy’s (RIA) publication of Irish Lives in America in December 2021. Surely, I thought, the story of the Irish in Canada deserved no less.

Professor Mark McGowan immediately endorsed the idea. Within days of bouncing emails between various places, the enthusiastic and willing response of the prospective contributors launched what was for all a labour of both love and discovery. Sage advice and expert inputs flowed from David Wilson, Michele Holmgren, Elizabeth Smyth, and others.

The collective wisdom from early on was that we had to confine the candidates to Irish born to avoid being overwhelmed. Being deceased was also accepted as a useful parameter. We realized quickly that we should strive to embrace not just those whose achievements gave them prominence, but those whose ‘ordinary’ lives were emblematic of the immigrant experience.

There is of course a notable predominance of men. Society at the time and in recorded history rendered half the population invisible: lack of respect, education, and encouragement denied women opportunity in life and a place in the record books. Between this launch and eventual publication, there is much work to be done to recover women and their contribution, whether quotidian or prominent.

We intend on publication to include an essay on gender and diversity. We also plan to include a response from Indigenous communities so that we can share the perspective on the Irish in Canada, who came from one colony to help found another one, whether their coming was willing or unwilling, knowing or unknowing about the impact on the pre-European natives of the land that we call Canada but to them was Turtle Island.

As the project gathered pace, we quickly grasped that not only was the story fascinating, it was also complex. In fact, we soon adopted the motto “it’s complicated.” Over three centuries, we see unfold in Canada the story of a complicated symbiotic relationship with the colony of Ireland, England’s first imperial adventure.

Traditionally seen as a story of immigration, the Irish in Canada must be understood as a story of colonialism. Only that can explain why so many varieties of Irish identity and background turned up in Canada: from the émigré Tadgh O’Brennan in the 17th century to the Anglo-Irish colonists of the 18th; from the fishermen of the 17th and 18th centuries; from Protestant farmers and Orangemen to Catholic labourers and the Fenians in the 19th; from the soldiers in Wellington’s British Army who settled in Canada in the 1820s and 1830s to the forced relocation of Irish tenants during and after the Great Famine.

The rich parade of Irish identity and perspectives revealed even in this small sampling testifies to the complicated history of Ireland itself and the key role many Irish played in the British Empire, whether unwilling or, as in many cases, willingly. Canada loomed large in the imagination of moderate Irish nationalists at home who strived for the re-establishment of an Irish parliament. History took Ireland in a different direction in a quickening of events between 1916 and 1922. Canada became the future that Ireland never had.

Tensions back in Ireland played out in Canada, notably between Catholic nationalists and Orange loyalists. Yet Canada provided a society that ultimately allowed such divergent loyalties to find common cause in building a stable and prosperous society.

No figure perhaps encapsulates this complexity more starkly than Nicholas Flood Davin. A supporter of Home Rule for Ireland, a supporter too of votes for women, Flood Davin was similarly inspired to write in 1877 a history of the Irish in Canada to correct a record that suggested Canada was the product of the Scotch, English, French and Mennonite Germans. He had harsh words for those Irish who denigrated their identity: “you may as well seek to fly from your shadow as to escape your nationality.” Yet, it was this proud Irish nationalist who undertook the commission of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald to report on Indigenous issues. He recommended the establishment of the Indian residential school system. From that conjuration of colonized and colonizer much tragedy flowed.

Yet the Indigenous and the Irish found a common humanity too that transcended the forces of history shaping their lives. As we will reveal, the suffering of the Indigenous inspired them to respond to the suffering of the Irish as news of the Great Famine spread and desperate Irish refugees arrived in the traditional lands of the Indigenous.

The project is now open to all submissions, each of which will be part of our online bank of Irish Lives in Canada. Now is the time to submit your favourites. Pick your person, keep the profile to one thousand words and your submission will be eligible for inclusion. We are keen to welcome entries that reflect the rich diversity of the Irish in Canada.

I want to thank all those who have been involved in this project, particularly the contributors and Mark McGowan who has written an overview essay of the patterns of Irish migration to British North America, capturing its duration and complexity with eloquence and clarity.

Following the advice of the RIA, we have adhered to the limitation of 1000 words. That is no easy task and I hope that you agree that we have collectively have achieved it without compromise of thoroughness or eloquence.

Eamonn

Eamonn McKee

Ambassador of Ireland

Ottawa, 1 March 2023

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December 18, 2022 · 7:51 pm

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 [60th] 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.

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December 17, 2022 · 1:38 pm

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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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.

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