An Economic History of a Family

By Joan Baril

Our lives, ideas, pastimes, beliefs and to a large extent, basic character are determined by our economic situation or so many beleive. But when people write family histories, economics is usually peripheral. Yet, often the major family events such as moves, marriages and births, can be linked to the economic situation. In memoirs, character analysis often occurs without explanation as accident or quirk but I think the economic situation should be taken into account when considering a person’s character and behaviour.

I was born in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression. My father, William Allen, was thirty five years old and my mother, two years younger. They had been married for ten years, ten very happy and prosperous years, the best of their lives.

My father was a policeman with a steady wage. The Depression was a benefit to him. It meant low prices and low rents which allowed him and my mother to rent small houses in good shape. They owned good furniture: walnut dining and bedroom suites, wool rugs and a wooden kitchen set. They had all the newest electrical appliances: stove, fridge, iron and vacuum. They owned a car, a model A and later a model T. They had a large white Samoyed dog. When I came along, a hired girl arrived every day to do the tough cleaning and laundry. Even though my father worked shifts, there was still time for socializing. They went to the movies once a week and played badminton on those Thursday evenings when my dad was not working. Sometimes they ate in restaurants. Snapshots of picnics with friends, swimming at Boulevard Lake and drives in the country filled an album.

To them, this was prosperity and they loved it. Both my parents had difficult childhoods. My father, born in Birmingham, England, in an area called Aston which was the heart of the slums, was the son of a jack-of-all-trades father who eagerly joined the First World War, leaving behind a sickly wife and five children under thirteen to fend for themselves. He was soon killed by a sniper at the Battle of the Marne.

My father had left school at ten to find boy jobs in various small manufactories, one of which was a picture framing factory where, in some sort of accident, he lost the tips of the fingers of his left hand. When he was twenty, he took advantage of an immigration scheme to come to Canada hoping to look up an uncle who lived in London, Ontario, but the uncle had moved and my father, who had arrived with two pounds in his pocket, signed up with a bush camp near Auden in Northern Ontario. The wages were paid at the end of the winter and my father was able to stretch the money until a job was found for the summer, usually as a farm labourer. Thus the wages subsidized these periods of unemployment but even so he managed to save a bit until, with blinding good luck, in 1925, he got a job as a policeman in Port Arthur and so was able to marry.

Two things must be noted about the new recruit. Because he was six feet two inches tall, he filled the requirement that policemen were to be over six feet in height. Secondly, he was English. Only native Canadians, Scots and the English were hired into the force, the idea being that these ethnic groups were more honest than the Italians, Finns, Ukrainians and other eastern Europeans who made up a large part of the city’s population. Prejudice distorts the economy in many ways and is often useful to the employers but in this case the requirements provided no benefit to the police services. Female police were unknown. Also of note is the fact that my father never chose his career. Like many working class people at the time, he took the job that luck sent his way; whether he liked it or not was beside the point.

His first years in Canada working in bush camps and farms were hard but now, happily married and with a good job, I imagine my father felt as if he had been blessed. My mother, who had arrived in Canada with her parents when she was in her teens, was able to find a job as a dressmaker at Bryan’s, a popular ladies wear store in down town Fort William, the neighbouring city. Her outgoing nature brought her many friends but she was especially close to her older sister Elizabeth, also called Sissy, who immigrated to the Lakehead shortly after my mother, bringing with her her husband Joe and two small children, Ethel and Watson.

My mother’s childhood in Jarrow on Tyne in northern England, had been blighted by a bad-tempered father and the low energy of a sickly mother. Her father, Thomas Derbyshire, a short energetic man, worked at Palmer Shipyards in Jarrow but twice, when Palmer’s shut down, he went to Canada to work in bush camps as a harness maker. In the early 20’s, he immigrated to Canada permanently, taking his family to Fort William, a good move as eventually Palmer’s closed permanently in 1935, throwing the entire town out of work. He always spoke in bitter terms about Palmer’s and its rich owners and supported unions wherever he worked. He too had lost the tips of his fingers in an industrial accident.

The youngest of four girls, my mother was removed from school at fourteen in spite of her objections and apprenticed to a dressmaker in Newcastle. She assumed, as did everyone else, that this training would stand her in good stead for life even though the wages of dressmakers in large establishments were low. In the twin cities, (Fort William and Port Arthur), the trade existed only in large department stores or home businesses and again, the pay was poor. As soon as she married, she was required to leave her job at Bryan’s Ladies Wear, but, I imagine, she was quite content to give up the long hours to stay at home. Thus my mother brought no money into the household as was the custom of the day but when the inflation of the late 40s and 50s arrived and drastically lowered their standard of living, she was not able to bring in much money although she tried to do so by home dress making and later, taking in a border.

It is interesting to consider the role diet plays in the economic life of a person. Neither of my parents ate well as children. In good times, my mother had plenty of English working class food with its emphasis on bread products, fried meats, boiled vegetables, no salads or little fresh produce, supplemented, only in good times, with large floury desserts. On the other hand, my father experienced reduced rations. For the rest of his life he was always grateful for a good dinner and he had the habits of those who have faced scarcity by eating everything, even mouldy crusts and hard bits of cheese. Poor fare contributes to sickly children and although neither of my parents could be described as sickly, they were not physically strong. My father, in the bush camp, had to work as a cookee rather than a bush labourer, because he could not keep up with the French Canadians and Eastern European men who did the better-paid heavy work. He often mentioned the absolute exhaustion of farm labour. My mother also had a low energy level. She would rather smoke and read a book or talk on the phone than do housework but she did it in a grumbling fashion as if it was tiring and later, when she tried to do home sewing, she found the daily routine exhausting and complained about that as well. As was common at the time, both my parents smoked heavily, a habit which ended their lives early. In these ways my parents, products of the English working class, were at a disadvantage when compared to the robust immigrants and Canadian born working class people around them.

By 1935, the Great Depression was ending in the United States but was deepening in Canada. In some areas, such as southern Quebec, money almost disappeared and the people reverted to barter. In other places, such as the dust bowl of Saskatchewan, hunger sat at the table. Unemployment was close to forty percent. Both my grandfather, Thomas Derbyshire, and my uncle, Joe Sewell, were laid off when the local shipyard closed its doors, leaving six people in my family destitute.

Like my mother, my Aunt Sissy did not work outside the home and so neither she nor my grandmother were able to contribute to the family finances. The custom of the working class wife leaving the work force upon marriage was a comparatively recent one. In the 19th century, there are many accounts of married women working, either as farm labourers, or in mines, domestic service, manufactories or family business. Nevertheless the middle class ideal to have the wife stay home to care for the household and the children was taken up by the working class as progress. Trade unions, whose campaign for a living wage meant a family wage, and most feminist groups, supported this as policy. Instead of fighting the abysmal wages and working conditions of many women’s jobs, the preferred solution was to get the majority of women out of the labour force entirely.

It became a point of pride among working class men that the wife should not work, even if it meant hardship. This strongly held ideology skewed the economic life of families and the economy as a whole. In Canada, everyone, except a few thoughtful feminists, accepted the idea although, in practice, married women worked on farms and some made money sewing, baking, cleaning, laundry work, taking in borders or running a corner store or other small family business. But the ideal became so firmly fixed that large businesses and government routinely terminated single women at their marriage and refused to hire married women. Married female teachers, secretaries and nurses were almost unheard of and those that continued to work would be allowed to do so only in unusual circumstances such as the illness of the husband.

Universities refused to take women students into the professions using the excuse that they would not work for any length of time. For example, most nurses only worked a few years. The collective inexperience of the nursing staff at any hospital was counterbalanced by imposing a military system of supervision. As for teachers, most young women worked on average no more than four years, another example of collective inexperience in every school. Because women teachers were expected to leave after a few years of work, only males got promoted. Thus a privileged situation for male teachers grew up, which they defended by insisting that a woman by nature was unable to do the work of a principal or vice principal or take on any other better-paid job in education. Thus sexism was marched out to defend male privilege in jobs in a scarce market just as racism and prejudice against immigrant groups and francophones contributed to Anglo Saxon privilege. The economic model of husband as sole breadwinner led to increased sexism against women, the diminishing of women’s power in the marriage, the inability of women to leave brutal marriages and the psychological effects of being cast as inferior. Certainly, my aunt Sissy, who was tied to a man who occasionally went on drunken binges and came home to wreck violence, had no choice but to stay in the situation.

And so it was, in 1936, when the entire family moved in with my parents, none of the three adult women were capable of contributing financially to the household, which, besides them, consisted of one wage earner, three small children and two laid off men who probably spent most of their days job hunting or, in the case of my uncle Joe, lounging at the local beer parlour if he did manage to make some money. All lived on the policeman’s wages of my father. I have no idea how they apportioned this salary. The house on Wylie Street was a rental so that expense would come first. The hired girl was let go. The car was sold as well. The big white dog disappeared here too. My mother was pregnant with my sister so the help of her own sister would be welcome but my grandmother, even then, did little but sit in the corner by the stove with an old-fashioned wool shawl over her shoulders. It may have been around this time that she had her first operation for cancer. Illness was feared in working class families almost as much as unemployment. It could be an enormous expense.

I do not think this crowded household stayed together much past a year. Both men found work but I do not know where. It seems incredible to me and a tribute to the frugality of my parents that they were able to buy two unserviced lots on Otto Street, then on the outskirts of town in Port Arthur, and help my grandfather build a three-room cabin on one of them. Perhaps they only partly paid for the lots and the house, but years later, in the 50’s, when they were short of money, and when my grandfather sold the house and the vacant property next door at a good profit in order to move back to England, they expected to receive a part of the proceeds and were very bitter at receiving none.

Meanwhile, the vacant lot was put into potatoes which were parceled out to the three households. In our house they were stored in the basement in a big box of sand under the stairs.

I always found it odd that although most of the local population lived in houses rather than apartments and therefore had both a front and back yard, few working class families grew gardens with the exception of the Italian immigrants who often put every bit of ground into produce. One reason may have been the fact that almost all working class families rented houses because the cost of a down payment and mortgage was beyond their income. Banks were reluctant to lend to working class people because their jobs were seldom stable. In general, renters, who move around, are less likely to have a garden. When my parents managed to buy a house – or rather have one built – on Van Norman Street in 1938, they put in a small garden of raspberry bushes and vegetables but their potatoes still came from the lot on Otto Street. Our vegetable garden on Van Norman Street was almost the only one in the neighbourhood. The dentist at the corner had a berry patch half the size of a city lot but the berries were seldom picked except by the marauding neighbourhood kids, me included. The doctor on Regent Street was the exception. He had a big veggie garden but the working class families around us, including the large Morris and Procter clans, grew not so much as a carrot.

Not growing a garden seems economically foolish especially in hard times. However, custom often prevails over sense. Most people tried to cling to their usual diets during the depression. My parents ate few vegetables but they had become used to meat at every meal . My mother constantly lamented the high cost of meat. She did not buy steaks, the most expensive of the meats, but a large percentage of her food budget went on roast, chicken, chops, liver, minced beef and stewing meat. She had the potatoes from the Otto Street lot but other veggies such as turnip and cabbage were so cheap that it might have seemed pointless to grow them.

My mother made only one cheap dish, macaroni and cheese, and seldom tried any other. She made almost no homemade soups or any of the thrifty casseroles which were featured in the women’s pages of the newspaper. Perhaps my father would not eat them if she had. Aside from macaroni, she knew no pasta dishes. Spaghetti or lasagne were unknown to us. In this way, our immigrant neighbours with their perogies (meatless in bad times), spaghetti (no sauce in bad times) and home made German sausage were more thrifty. The radio programs of the nutrition department of the Canadian government exhorted the housewife to serve fresh veggies and my mother responded by cutting up carrot and celery sticks, her single innovation in an unvarying north of England working class diet. She also made sure my sister and I got plenty of milk. She refused to buy bologna, in spite of my childish pleadings, stating fried bologna was the food of foreigners and the poor. For these decisions, I am now grateful.

My mother also made a dessert for almost every meal, usually bread or rice puddings but often pies appeared. Although working class English cuisine is usually ranked as one of the worst in the world, the baked goods are superb and the housewife prides herself on her cakes and pies. I loved these desserts and grabbed as much as I could. My mother justified her spendthrift ways with food by saying she sewed our clothes but she could not make shoes, sweaters, snow boots, bathing suits, snow suits and other items. We were rather shabbily dressed even if we received, from time to time, a new wool skirt. The truth was my mother did not like sewing very much. Perhaps her forced apprenticeship had soured her on the trade. Many working class people end up in jobs they do not particularly want or like but it would be bad form to complain because one was to feel lucky if one had a job or trade at all. It must have been annoying. My mother never learned another economic skill as far as I remember. A certain fatalism is always present in working class thought, but also a certain shyness based on class consciousness. My mother told me it took her years to enter the public library as she considered it “high class.” New economic opportunities come along rarely or rather the information for economic opportunities is often scarce. When, in the sixties, Lakehead University opened, she followed a few friends by taking in a student border but hated the extra housework involved.

After the economic hardship and, I imagine, the depletion of their savings to support six extra people for over a year, my parents, in 1938, were on their own again. Once more, they did not feel poor and in fact felt lucky compared to most of their friends. Meat has always been the standard of prosperity for working class English people. The more meat one is able to afford, the better off one is and so the unvarying diet of meat, boiled potatoes and boiled veg seemed prosperous fare. They were aware of people whose poverty meant a supper of boiled potatoes, with or without fried bologna, or potato sandwiches, catsup sandwiches, pickle sandwiches, boiled oatmeal or beans. They were proud they never ate such things. They were able to buy another car in 1938, a very unlucky car for it had to be put up on blocks in 1941 when gas rationing was introduced near the beginning of the war.

It was also in 1938 that my mother read in the newspaper about the formation of Central Mortgage and Housing, a government program to encourage home building by making mortgages more available. She wrote at once and in time was able to take out a mortgage, buy a piece of land on Van Norman Street and hire a builder to build a house. This step amazed and intrigued every one she knew and it was talked about for many years as an example of my mother’s cleverness. She threw herself into the home building project, meeting with the builder, designing a front door with a fan light and an ironing board cupboard which was cleverly built into the kitchen wall. At last she found a calling and I believe this was one of the happiest times of her life. She was a builder manqué. Later, over the years, she often spoke about innovations that she would have included if only there had been more money.

From the beginning, the mortgage payments were less than rent especially during the war when rents rose as the population of the twin cities increased as people surged in from the country looking for the war jobs. There was also a large influx of military people and their families all seeking housing. Later in the 1950’s, when inflation began to seriously diminish my father’s pay check, the low mortgage payments shielded them somewhat during a bad time economically.

The house was built just before the war shut down the building industry. The war years were economically good to the extended family. Both my grandfather and Uncle Joe had steady work with plenty of overtime at the Port Arthur Shipyard and Aunt Sissy’s teen age daughter, Ethel, who had been working as a clerk, now joined her father and grandfather and began to make big money as a riveter when the booming company hired and trained single women. Even though there was a labour shortage, married women were rarely considered for any job except the most menial: cleaning, laundry and kitchen work. At the same time government wage and price controls kept food and other essentials low. Inflation was zero. This alone gave a feeling of prosperity to my parents. Although some food stuffs from abroad, such as tea and sugar, were rationed, the rationing was not onerous and food was never scarce. However, like many other Thunder Bay families, the war brought tragedy. My cousin Watson, who had signed up with the Lake Superior Regiment when he was seventeen, was killed in Italy.

My father, 38 years old when the war started, was exempt from conscription because of his occupation. He was a man who seldom talked, especially to his children. He had few friends and seemed to desire none. His early years had scarred him to the extent that he only wished to come home and eat and rest. Although he loved my mother, he was steeped in male privilege, never helped in the house or took any interest in domestic affairs, never answered the phone or went into a shop. My sister and I would not dare to sit in his chair at the kitchen table or in his arm chair in the living room. He was a remote man, not interested in social life, but often a content and grateful man. He often commented how lucky he was to have a job and a house and this feeling of lucking out in a bitter world was what animated his inner life.

He was embarrassed about his poor education and spent a lot of time studying every book on police procedure that came into the station. He brought them home and kept them, probably the only thing he pilfered in a strictly honest life. He memorized the criminal code. He read the daily newspaper from start to finish. He also dropped into the law court whenever he could to listen to the trials. But I think he learned the most from the true crime magazines which he bought and studied carefully. I also read these from an early age, attracted by the lurid pictures. The articles were long and detailed, laying out every aspect of the investigation and the trial of the accused. He bought a typewriter and taught himself to use it two finger style, often studying the dictionary to find the correct spelling. He set up a firing range in the basement to improve his marksmanship. Luckily the house was at a distance from the neighbours and so no one complained about the sound of gun shots. All this self-education was worked out alone without help or advice from any one and also, I think, without much hope that it would prove useful. He never expressed any ambitions to rise in the force and probably never expected to move up from constable. The belief that he would always work at a lower rank sprang from English working class experience where those of higher classes got the promotions. He simply went doggedly ahead with the self improvement schemes. But, in the thirties, he was promoted to corporeal and then to sergeant. I think he was taken by surprise. I also think these promotions accounted for his intense Canadian patriotism and his disparaging remarks about the “Old Country.”

After the war he was made detective, a proud moment for a man born in the slums who had only a grade four education. When I think about his constant private education schemes, going to the library for true crime books, or noting down new words in a notebook, I am reminded of the many accounts of English working-class self-improvement organizations which were started in Victorian times. I wonder if some childhood experience with these movements influenced him.

As the war went on and my sister and I started school, my mother became more and more dissatisfied. She hated motherhood, housework, cooking and the lonely daily grind that is the working class house wife’s lot. She was a social person but she was stuck at home with two noisy kids who she had to keep quiet while her husband was sleeping during the day when he was on night shift. She was able to get the social life she craved only from talking on the telephone every day to her sister, her mother and other friends. She spent a lot of energy convincing my father to have visitors or go to a movie but he always, after a bit of grumbling, went along. If she had been in any other situation she might have displayed more often the merry and friendly side of her character, but the unending sameness of her life turned her into a dissatisfied and critical person. I generally avoided her as much as possible by playing outside or, in winter, going to the library which became my refuge.

After the war, in 1946, we bought another car and my mother learned to drive. Her life changed dramatically for the better. Not only were her children getting old enough to leave alone, but she could get to the meetings of the St. John’s Anglican Women’s Auxiliary, or visit her sister and her many friends. My sister was taking figure skating lessons and my mother became involved with the planning and the design of costumes of the annual carnival. My sister and I even talked my parents into renting a cottage at Loon Lake for an entire month in the summer of 1947. My mother went into the experience grudgingly. Neither parent could not see the point of reverting to outhouses and oil lamps, both items familiar from the childhood they were glad to have left behind.

In 1949, when wage and price controls were ended, prices soared. Wages did not. Year after year, wages for government employees remained stagnant while expenses increased. My mother was distraught that somehow she could not “manage.” The cost of repairs rose and a broken fridge or a car repair was a family disaster that brought her close to tears. The dental bills for my many cavities brought bitter comments and complaints. My parents also gave my grandfather money to pay the heavy debts occasioned by my grandmother’s cancer operations, hospital stays and, eventually, the funeral. The house needed painting and even though my father did the work himself during his vacation, the cost of paint had increased. The purchase of the year’s coal was an economic black spot every October. The conversion from coal furnace to oil furnace was done after a lot of figuring and fussing but it was a significant household improvement, probably one of the most important for the average householder of the time. It meant a big saving in labour mainly for my father who stoked the furnace every day in winter, chopping kindling and shovelling in the coal, removing the ashes and carrying them outside. My mother also had to deal with the furnace at least once a day in winter.

My Aunt Sissy was in a worse straits than we, because Uncle Joe kept losing jobs or drinking when he had money. She had had a second late child, my cousin Jeannie. Her rental place was run down and in a poor neighbourhood and only Ethel’s salary, much reduced after she was let go from the ship yards at the end of the war along with all the female workers, helped a lot but even so there were many weeks when the tab for groceries at Maltese’s Store could not be met. My mother slipped her a few dollars when she could and often sent her groceries or baked goods which I delivered after school.

My mother attempted to take in sewing and set up the machine in the downstairs room, formerly our play room. But many women in town were setting up as dressmakers; they were a dime a dozen and the amount charged had to be kept low due to the stiff competition. My mother complained that some of them had no training in the trade as she had, but dressmaking was one of the few ways that married women could make money. My mother calculated she was making pennies an hour. In the booming economy of the 1950’s, the strictures on married women working were loosening and so, for a few months, my mother went back to Bryans but she was not physically able to keep it up along with the cooking and housework. My father did no domestic work and we girls avoided it as much as possible. My mother also complained that the cost of street car fare and work clothes ate up her tiny salary and it was not worth the effort. At this time she was in her mid forties.

I was now in high school and constantly nagging her for new clothes. My sister needed money for her skating lessons. I think she was royally sick of us. It was at this time that certain foods appeared on our table when my father was working over the supper hour. Creamed peas or onions on toast, sausage sandwiches and other remembrances of Jarrow hard times appeared. Sometimes supper was an apple sandwiche or pancakes or eggs. Except for the creamed stuff, I enjoyed all this food but ate sparingly because I too had started smoking and it was dulling my appetite. When my father was home, we always got meat. Later when I was married and had no money, I remembered these cheap meals and was glad to make a dinner of hot dogs or beans on toast.

I started babysitting when I was twelve and I also sold greeting cards for a couple of years. I got my first Saturday job at Eaton’s when I was thirteen and had jobs until I finished high school. During grade 12 and 13, I worked every day except Sunday at a local movie theatre as a candy girl. My girl friends, all from working class backgrounds, also had part time jobs. These jobs gave me spending money, cigarettes and a few items of clothing and looking back now, I see I helped the situation a tiny bit.

My father’s solution was to start a police union. The idea had been around for some time but was now resurrected. After he was promoted to detective, he had to spend countless hours in court and these hours were unpaid. There were also the usual demands for wages and longer vacations. The police force was run like a military unit and, during the organizing period, which lasted two years, a gripping anxiety held my parents because they knew if the leaders were discovered, they would be fired, my father among them. My father was suspected but he was not fired. He was given, as punishment, a year on the night shirt and a demotion but, eventually, the union prevailed and conditions improved but slowly.

These years from 1949 when I was fourteen to 1953 when I graduated from high school took a toll on both my parents. This was a time when they had expected to improve their finances but instead they were slipping behind, even going into debt from time to time. In fact, they never attained their former prosperity in spite of the slow rise in wages. Inflation always seemed to be ahead of them. They both would be astounded to learn what police officers make today.

They did not get another car until 1953 and it was in this year also that I remember certain house improvements that my mother had dreamed of finally being realized. She got my dad to build bookcases in the living room, valences around a couple of windows and, in 1954, new kitchen cabinets. This was the year I started teaching in Port Arthur and handed over close to half my wages to my parents as board. So things were looking up economically but my mother became depressed. I believe she was just fed up with her straightened economic circumstances which brought one shock after another. Also the selling of the car in 1949 must have been a blow as she loved the freedom it gave her to get out of the house. She spent a lot of time in a chair behind the living room door with the cat on her lap, just smoking and staring into space. She and I had some fierce fights over clothes and she was just sick of me and glad when I went off for a year to teachers’ college in North Bay, the proud recipient of a bursary which paid my tuition but not my room and board, another heavy expense for my parents. My sister went to North Bay two years later.

It was the application for this bursary that gave me a shock and taught me the reality behind my parents’ malaise. I had to state my father’s annual salary on the form which I was filling out at high school. That morning my mother had written the figure on a piece of paper and unfortunately I do not now remember what it was but when I wrote down the amount, the teacher looked at it and said, “Are you sure this amount is correct. It’s very low.” I saw a look of concern cross her face. I checked my slip of paper and saw my notation was correct. At that minute I realized I had learned an important truth about my parents’ lives.

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Joan Baril has written on immigrant and women’s issues as a columnist. She has appeared in Other Voices,Canadian Forum, Room, Herizons, NorthernWomen’s Journal, Off Our Backs, Status of Women News, CopperfieldReview, Canadian Stories, and an anthology, Thunder on the Bay. In 2009, she placed second in the Ten Stories High contest of Canadian Authors Association, Niagara Branch. Her blog, Literary Thunder Bay (http://www.literarythunderbay.blogspot.com) publishes northern writers. For many years she was a history professor at the local college.