First Person. Valerie Knowles
ad, this most comfortable of family residences boasted bay windows and a wide verandah in the rear as well as a “faultlessly laid out” interior and “light and cheerful” rooms. Even allowing for some descriptive license on the part of the copy writer, it must have been an inviting house, not gloomy and depressing like Kildonan. However, it was at Kildonan that Cairine Mackay was born and it was here that she would pass her impressionable years before her marriage in 1909.
Robert Mackay had moved his family into the Sherbrooke Street mansion shortly before the birth of his youngest daughter and not long after the death of his cousin, Henrietta Gordon, who, by the terms of Joseph’s will, was allowed to occupy Kildonan for a period of five years after her uncle’s death. For the next forty-five years, until its demolition in 1930, the house would be owned exclusively by Mackays or by the Robert Mackay estate.
The child born to Jane and Robert Mackay on 4 February was christened Cairine (Gaelic for Catherine, the name of Robert’s older, unmarried sister and of his beloved cousin, Catherine Gordon) and Reay (after the chief of the Mackay clan) on 23 June 1885 by the Reverend A. B. Mackay at Crescent Street Church. With this ceremonial sprinkling of water, she was formally initiated into the Presbyterian church, one of her great-uncles’ preoccupations and destined to be a major force in her own life.
The details of Cairine Wilson’s childhood are sketchy because she seldom referred to it in conversations with her own children. We do know, though, that her gruff, demanding father exercised a powerful influence and that relations between the parents and their children were punctilious, so formal as to perhaps move the wistful daughter to say in an interview granted in 1930:
I earnestly believe that parents and children both gain more by establishing a close comradeship than by the parents standing aloof and accepting the position of judge, disciplinarian and critic of their children. There is no reason why parents should not be pals of their children and still have respect and reverence and obedience from them. In fact I think they are more likely to possess these from children who feel that their parents are understandingly one with them, than are the parents who insist on implicit obedience and rigid respect without having first won the loving confidence of their children.23
The stiff relations between parents and children could not detract, however, from the basically warm, kind nature of Jane Mackay. To her children in distress, she was the embodiment of sympathy and loving attention, as young Cairine realized all too well when, on a trip to Europe, she was taken ill and longed for her mother.24
Mrs Robert Mackay, mother of Cairine Wilson.
We can assume that as the child of a wealthy family that had just become part of the elite of this young country, Cairine was raised according to the essentially bourgeois standards of her class. These called for ladies to speak softly, to not appear intellectual and to strive at all times to be decorative. Instead of sipping madeira or port at the table after dinner, as did the men, it was their lot to withdraw to spacious drawing rooms to chat about children, servants and fashion and to indulge in the latest society gossip. In 1892, in Montreal, this would probably have been dominated by revelations concerning “the most sensational elopement” the city had ever known, that of Jack, the eldest son of Andrew Allan, one of the millionaire partners in the Allan Royal Mail Steamship Line, and the wife of a bank inspector named Hebden.25
But if the latest doings in society were welcome topics of conversation, some subjects — money and sex — were taboo. Indeed, ladies were not even supposed to think about them. Probably the greatest taboo, however, was feeling. Not only did a member in good standing of the bourgeosie, especially the Scots-Canadian middle class, not express emotion, he or she did not even mention it. People whose work owed its existence to feeling — writers, artists, actors — were as declassè as tradesmen. Equally horrendous was marriage outside this bourgeoisie unless it was to someone from the British gentry or aristocracy. Anna Mackay upset her father merely by marrying an American. Robert Loring might be charming and well educated, but nevertheless he was an American and that alone placed him beyond the pale!
Like most heads of Scottish-Canadian families, Robert Mackay was a strict disciplinarian who actively supported a “spare the rod and spoil the child” regime. Since he was also a devout Presbyterian, he insisted that his children be raised according to the dictates of Scottish Presbyterianism. One of the driving forces of the Scottish character, it emphasized the duty of each Christian to manifest God’s will in everything he did or, as the more lyrical phrase has it, “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Not surprisingly, this translated into a divine calling to work (the Protestant work ethic) and a God-given responsibility to demonstrate initiative, risktaking and foresight. Yet, contrary to what many people think, it did not result merely in a desire to accumulate material riches. Along with it went the concept of stewardship, the belief that individuals should use their talents and any wealth that they had to benefit their fellow brothers and sisters.26
These and other Calvinistic positions — for Presbyterianism was deeply rooted in Calvinism — were incorporated in the faith’s standard catechisms: the very detailed Larger Catechism and the less formidable manual of instruction, the Shorter Catechism (“for such as are of weaker capacity”). Coming as they did from a staunch Presbyterian home, Cairine and her siblings were instructed in the Shorter Catechism, which has 107 questions and answers, the first of which reads: “What is man’s chief end? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Luxury for the Mackay children was therefore tempered not only by a very strict upbringing but also by the teachings of their church. Perhaps because of this, the boys, with the notable exception of the painfully shy and abstemious Edward, earned a reputation for being rather wild in their youth. In fact, one of their chief delights was to down a few drinks and then career around the top of Mount Royal on horseback.
Young Cairine, however, never rebelled overtly against her puritanical upbringing or against the earnest self-denial and self-discipline that Scots Calvinism implies. Nevertheless, all these influences made for a very shy, reserved woman who found it difficult to express emotion and who was seldom demonstrative, even with members of her own family and friends. Those who came to know her well, though, would discover that beneath the reserve was an abundance of warmth and compassion, qualities that perhaps were inherited from her mother and then nurtured by circumstances. Much more obvious were superb organizing skills and her talent for righting misunderstandings with tact and diplomacy. These were developed as early as the age of twelve when her mother began saying, in the event of any domestic difficulty, “Cairine will settle it.”27
For those privileged to live in Montreal’s large ornate houses in the late Victorian period, life had a lot to offer. Still, the early childhood years that Cairine spent at Kildonan were not particularly happy ones. As her mother was frequently ill and Kildonan was a large household, she had a lot of responsibility thrust on her shoulders, including the care of her younger brother, Edward, to whom she was very close before her marriage. Far removed from her daily orbit, because of their age differences, were her older brothers, Angus, George and Hugh. Yet Cairine greatly admired the eldest, Angus, perhaps because he was more widely read than the others and she had developed a taste for books and learning. She had to do most of her admiring from afar, however, because Angus went off to Boston to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and after his graduation, in 1894, settled in North Dakota where he supervised some of his father’s mining interests. George, the second eldest, also left Montreal, to attend MIT briefly and then, after a short stint as a bank clerk in Montreal, to serve in the Boer War. After the conclusion of hostilities, in 1902, he struck out west, and put down roots in Alberta, eventually becoming one of Lethbridge’s best known and most publicspirited citizens. Hugh remained in Montreal, where he graduated in law from McGill University in 1900 and went on to become one of the city’s most prominent corporation lawyers and company directors.
In her early childhood years, Cairine would have seen more of Edward and her three sisters, Euphemia (Effie), Isabel and Anna than her older brothers. For this reason the early deaths of the older sisters, Euphemia and Isabel, were especially poignant. Both succumbed