First Person. Valerie Knowles
and none more so than toboganning which had come into its own in the early 1880s. It was the most exciting sport in nineteenth century Montreal because nothing could equal it in speed, skiing not entering the picture until the closing years of the 1890s. To hurtle down steep hills like Ontario Avenue (now Avenue du Musée) or the daunting five-lane toboggan slide that was conveniently situated just across Sherbrooke Street from Kildonan was to ride with the wind and experience thrill after thrill. Even more exhilarating was to race down one of the gaily festooned slides that shot over the ice of the St. Lawrence River during Winter Carnival week, a week which also offered such attractions as driving in a tandem on snowy streets to swirling around the ice at a fancy dress skating ball.
Year round, on Mount Royal, there was riding, the sport that above all captured Cairine’s fancy. That she prided herself on her horsemanship and love of horses is evident in this excerpt from the one diary of hers that survives. Describing a tour that she made of the Scottish border country in 1904, she observes in her large bold hand:
On the way back [from Roslin] Janet and I managed to get box seats much to my delight. Our driver had a very jolly face & although he said little interested me very much I was very pleased when he turned to me and asked if I did not know something about horses. He said he just thought I must.37
Sewing was another great love. Indeed, she became so proficient with the needle that she taught ladies how to sew, and they in appreciation gave her a gold thimble for a wedding gift. Before long, though, sewing would take second place to knitting, the great diversion of her adult years.
In her teenage years, there were the inevitable winter season balls, some of which were staged at the sumptuous Windsor Hotel, where visiting royalty, heads of state, and celebrities, such as Lillie Langtry, usually stayed when they were in Montreal. Others, however, were held in the stately mansions of the Square Mile, one of these being Kildonan, where scores of young people attended Cairine’s own debutante party in 1905. Given her extreme shyness, it was probably a painful initiation.
The Sunday Sun, a faithful chronicler of news in the fashionable set of English-speaking Montreal, informed its readers on 5 February 1905:
During the past week things have been more or less at a social standstill, Mrs Robert Mackay’s dance being the only big private function of the week. It took place on Friday evening and everything possible was done to make it a success. The popular debutante, Miss Cairine Mackay, in whose honour the dance was given, looked exceptionally well in a yellow gown, a charming touch of colour being given by her bouquet of deep tinted roses. She received with Senator and Mrs Mackay, the latter quite recovered from her recent severe cold, looking well in black and white. The charming married daughter of the house, Mrs Robert Loring, was present as well as a large number of the younger married set. Indeed, it was quite a big dance and the rooms were taxed to their utmost capacity. The decoratitions [sic] while simple were pretty.
“The charming married daughter of the house” was, of course, warm, vivacious Anna, six years Cairine’s senior. She had married Robert Loring in the autumn of 1903, following a flurry of entertainments that included teas and dinner dances, all packed into a few short weeks “owing to the illness of Mrs Mackay.”38 After their marriage, Anna and her husband, a Boston native and an MIT graduate, installed themselves in the George Smithers house, on Sherbrooke Street, a couple of blocks west of Kildonan. With Anna’s departure from the family nest, Cairine became the only daughter still at home. And it was perhaps partly to compensate her for some of the loneliness that she undoubtedly experienced that her father gave her a trip to Europe and the United Kingdom in the summer of 1904.
Cairine embarked on her trip at the height of what the French would later call “la belle époque,” that period of remarkable stability that ran from the turn of the century until the outbreak of World War 1. The phrase itself conjures up a host of nostalgic spectacles: elegantly attired gentlemen and expensively gowned ladies walzing in ornate ballrooms to the music of Franz Lehar; women wearing long, flowing dresses and hats with artificial fruits and plumes, waists tightly corseted; bearded men sporting dark clothes and bowler hats in the winter, white linen and Panama hats in the warm weather; leisurely boating on the Seine, and throughout Western Europe generally an air of optimism and extravagance.39 Even in Britain it was a time of worldliness for three years earlier Queen Victoria had died and had been succeeded by her bearded, portly son Albert as Edward VII. With the accession of the champagne-and-fun-loving monarch to the throne, the Victorian age was over and Victorianism as a state of mind and as a mode of behaviour became a thing of the past.
In the company of her life-long friend, Elsie Macfarlane McDougall, and three other girls — Mary Clark, Janet Anderson and J. Alice Gingras —plus three chaperones, Cairine sailed from New York on 25 May on the “S.S. Ryndam,” bound for Rotterdam. After four whirlwind months on the Continent and in Britain, they sailed from Naples for Boston and the final leg of the trip to Montreal.
The diary that she kept of the trip reveals a keen appreciation of art and old world architecture, both of which are described in loving detail. Noticeably lacking, however, is any enthusiasm for the International Congress of Women that was held that June in Berlin. For Miss Hill, a tour chaperone, this Congress was the tour’s raison d' être, but for Cairine Mackay it was a boring event whose social functions and working sessions were to be avoided if at all possible. In diary entries that hint at a latent contempt for aggressive feminism, she wrote:
June 8: “Much to our disgust we were taken after breakfast to the Congress of Women from all parts of the world. Routine business was discussed and after a short time we left, Miss Hill having been elected President’s Proxy for Canada.” June 9: “Reception in honour of the delegates to the Congress of Women.” June 11: In the evening the others went to a reception given by Mrs May Wright Sewell President of the International Congress of Women, but I escaped.”40
A meeting in Berlin with Susan Brownell Anthony, the pioneer leader of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, failed to rate a mention in the diary. Not until she had become a reluctant trailblazer herself would Cairine Mackay refer to the encounter.41
At the Old Ship Hotel, in the seaside resort of Brighton, Cairine just missed seeing Rudyard Kipling, who had left minutes earlier in his car and, in Scotland, she found herself captivated by the beauty of Sir Walter Scott’s country and intoxicated with joy, riding in a horse-drawn coach:
We reached Aberfoyle about 11:45 and after we had eaten our bread on the gallery above the entrance, where our party must have presented an amusing spectacle, we went for a short walk until the coach started. We stood for a few minutes on the bridge mentioned in Rob Roy as the one over which the Baillie and Frank Osbaldestone went. We then got on the coach and had a fine drive from Aberfoyle to Loch Katrine. The scenery was magnificent particularly near the Trossachs and I felt as if I could spend my life driving, indeed to wear a red coat and handle 4 horses was the height of my ambition. The boat Sir Walter Scott was waiting for us so as soon as the passengers were on it started across the lake, which looked beautiful shut in by the mountains, although there was no sun to lighten it. Until I saw the country, however, I had never realized the beauty of Scott’s descriptions.42
Before her marriage, Cairine Mackay made at least two trips to Europe and travelled extensively in Quebec. She also came to know St Andrewsby-the-Sea, New Brunswick, where her father built a summer home, Clibrig, in 1905, after sending his family to various watering spots on the lower St Lawrence River in previous summers. But, with one exception, the rest of Canada was by and large foreign to her. That one exception was Ottawa.
Cairine Mackay’s introduction to this raw, parochial capital came through her father, a Liberal Party stalwart and a friend of its leader, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Robert Mackay, in fact, had been one of four affluent Liberals—the others were Newell Bate and William Hutchison of Ottawa and William Cameron Edwards of Rockland, Ontario and later Ottawa — who signed an agreement calling for the Liberal Party to purchase an Ottawa residence for its chief and then to vest the property in the names of the cosignatories as joint tenants.43 Lady Laurier later bequeathed the residence to William Lyon Mackenzie King, stating in her will, “The