First Person. Valerie Knowles
state of bankruptcy. Another sister of Norman’s, Ida Francis, also married a prominent Ottawa lumberman: John A. Cameron, son of the late John A. Cameron, who had been a partner with W. C. Edwards in the lumber business which eventually became the W. C. Edwards and Company.
Norman Wilson, in other words, was well-connected and he was able to benefit from his connections. After attending public school in Cumberland, he continued his studies at the elite Toronto boys’ school, Upper Canada College, thanks to the generosity of his brother-in-law and guardian, W. C. Edwards, who also assisted in the education of Norman’s brother, Reginald (Reggie), born in 1875. From Upper Canada College, Norman went to the Ontario College of Agriculture at Guelph, where he obtained a bachelor of science in agriculture. Equipped with his degree, he returned to Cumberland to work the family farm and to become a vicepresident of the Russell County Agricultural Society and president of Cumberland Township Agricultural Society.
However, Norman was not content to be just a working farmer and a self-described member of that “class of toilers who are the greatest wealth-producers of Canada.” As befitted a protégé of W. C. Edwards and the son of a township reeve, he entertained political ambitions. In 1904, thanks in large part to Edwards’s influence and the prominence of the Wilson family, the young farmer became the unanimous choice of Russell County Liberals for their standard-bearer in that year’s general election. Having won the nomination by acclamation, he then went on to defeat his Conservative opponent, J. E. Askwith, in the election, by nearly a thousand votes. When Cairine Mackay first met him, he had served one year in Parliament and would have another three to go, after which he would become manager of the W. C. Edwards and Company mills at Rockland, Ontario.
If young Cairine had any plans for her future when she first met Norman Wilson, they were those of most starry-eyed girls of her generation and circumstances: a handsome lover, a blissful courtship and marriage, and the raising of children in a happy home.5 At this point in her life, she could not conceive of playing a role of any consequence outside the home and a traditional marriage. Still, she did not rush into matrimony. Not until some three years later, in 1908, did she become engaged to Norman, who then swept her off to Quebec to participate in that city’s tercentennial celebrations and to meet the stocky bachelor who shared a desk with him in the House of Commons in 1908, William Lyon Mackenzie King.6
The W.C. Edwards’ sawmill, Rockland, Ontario c 1908.
The marriage took place the following year, on 23 February, Cairine Mackay’s birthday month and later the month of her elevation to the Senate. It was held at nine in the evening at gloomy Kildonan, transformed for the occasion into a bower of spring flowers, palms and laurel. The ceremony, reported the Montreal Herald, was performed under a large white floral bell in the inner drawing room by the Reverend Dr R. W. Dickie, the tall, striking minister of Crescent Street Church. Cairine appeared in an Empire gown of ivory duchess satin with a panel skirt embroidered in silk and pearls. Her veil, which had been worn by her mother at her marriage thirty-seven years earlier, was of silk embroidered net. For a bouquet she carried lilies of the valley and white orchids. Orchids, in fact, would figure in Cairine’s later social life because whenever they dined out or entertained, Norman would present her with an orchid corsage.7
Members of the bridal party included Cairine’s sister, Anna Loring, as matron of honour, Isett Baptist, a cousin from Trois Rivières, and friends Elsie Macfarlane and Mabel Murray-Smith. The groom was attended by best man, Senator Edwards, and the ushers were George Parent, Harry Christie of Ottawa, and Edward Mackay, Cairine’s youngest brother.
The ceremony was followed by a supper served in the large dining room that overlooked the back garden and the slopes of Mount Royal. Later, Cairine and Norman left for Montreal’s Place Viger Hotel, the bride muffled in ermine furs and wearing a dark blue broadcloth dress, trimmed with a collar and cuffs of white embroidered silk. After a short stay at the Place Viger Hotel, the couple journeyed to New York, where they had first class accommodation on the S S “Baltic,” a “twin screw steamer” that sailed for Liverpool on 27 February.8 Their wedding trip would take them to London and the Continent before their return to Canada and a radical change in life-style for the new Mrs Wilson.
Twenty-two years after her mother’s death, Janet Burns would observe that her father was “a most devoted husband” and that her parents enjoyed a good relationship. It is a sentiment echoed by other close observers of the couple, but at the time of their marriage there must have been those who wondered if the match could be a durable, happy one. Cairine, after all, was quiet and introverted with an interest in reading and stimulating conversation. Her husband, although basically shy, was outgoing and gregarious with family and friends, not given to deep reflection, and, certainly not by any stretch of the imagination, intellectually inclined. Norman, however, had the best of dispositions and a strong sense of his own identity and self-worth. These qualities, plus the couple’s mutual devotion would make for a rewarding relationship and eventually allow Cairine to pursue a career of her own outside the home, something almost unheard of in the conservative, upper class circles from which she came.
The first decade or so of married life, however, epitomized the lifestyle decreed for a woman of her circumstances: raising children and acting as chatelaine of a large home. Only the setting struck an incongruous note because after her marriage to Norman, the physical contours of Cairine Wilson’s world changed dramatically. Leaving behind the enchanting city of Montreal with its busy harbour, glinting church spires and Mount Royal, she went to live in a small eastern Ontario mill town, situated some twenty miles east of Ottawa, in gently rolling country beside the Ottawa River. No longer would one of the most elegant avenues in North America—mansion-lined Sherbrooke Street—be the centre of her physical universe. For the next nine years it would be replaced by a three-storey, red-brick house and its immediate surroundings in Rockland.
When Cairine Wilson arrived in Rockland, in April 1909, it was a town of almost four thousand, the overwhelming majority of whom were French Canadians, many descendants of settlers who had left overpopulated Quebec parishes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to work in the W. C. Edwards and Company lumber mills. In a recital of bald facts, the 1908 edition of Lovell’s Gazetteer of the Dominion of Canada reveals that the town boasted three churches, twenty stores, three hotels, one flour mill, one sash and door factory, two lumber mills, one mica factory, a bank and telegraph and express offices.
The English-speaking population numbered only three or four hundred people in the years that the Wilsons made Rockland their home. Nevertheless, this small minority held a commanding influence in the town’s affairs, occupying the top positions in the W. C. Edwards and Company and in the civic administration. A tightly knit community, they developed their own institutions—two Protestant churches, a public and a secondary school — and indulged a passion for such organized sports as hockey and curling. Curling was especially favoured by company officials, who built their own curling hall and mounted a winning team against rivals from Ottawa, Thurso, Cumberland and Buckingham.9 One of the company skips was Norman Wilson, who, after the family’s move to Ottawa, became a leading force in the Rideau Curling Club, serving as its president from 1928 until 1942.10
For her part, Cairine Wilson would have little time for recreational activities, organized or unorganized, during this period in her life. On the rare occasions when she did, she would drive the pair of Roan ponies that she had received from the Edwards for a wedding present or help the family gardener to tend the large vegetable and flower gardens on the Rockland property.
Work, of course, dominated the lives of all the townspeople in these years for most worked long hours six days a week. The largest employer was the W. C. Edwards and Company whose two lumber mills at Rockland were managed by Norman Wilson. The largest of these was built in 1875 to replace an earlier and more modest mill constructed in 1868. That was the year when W. C. Edwards, then a young man of twenty-four, embarked at Thurso, Quebec on the steamer “Caroline” of the Ottawa Forwarding Company, his former employer, and disembarked at what is now Rockland to dig and prepare the foundation for the first of many sawmills in what would become a lumbering empire. With forwarding merchant,