Letters from Canada
- Retracing a Father’s Footsteps -
Herald Contributor photo
Robert Pettigrew finds his dad's mining report in the
Fernie Archives
This summer I had the opportunity to meet an Australian by the name of Robert Pettigrew Jr., a man who had travelled half way round the world on a mission. It is the type of mission that we read and hear about a lot these days. A journey back into one’s past, a retracing, in this case, of his father’s footsteps from Coatbridge near Glasgow, Scotland to Canada and ultimately to the Pass where his father spent eight memorable years.
Robert Pettigrew, who goes by the same name as his father, realized that at age seventy if he didn’t make the trip soon to see what his father had seen and go where his father had gone he probably wouldn’t. So, armed with his father’s letters that had not been touched in 80 years and some remarkable Corbin photographs to go with them he headed for the Pass with his wife Vickie.
Once comfortably ensconced in the York Creek Bed and Breakfast here he reached out to the Crowsnest Museum and to people like myself for help in his quest. Ultimately he was able to visit most of the places that his father had been at in the time he spent here in Canada and left with some satisfaction having seen with his own eyes how it was on this “side of the pond”.
Robert Pettigrew was gracious enough to share his pictures and copies of his father’s letters with me and I thought it might be interesting to wander through them and share a few quotes and observations. According to Robert Jr. his father:” arrived in Canada in 1930 at the age of 27. He sailed from Glasgow on SS Melita and arrived in Quebec on 6th June. He made his way on the Canadian Pacific Railway, “Colonist Class”, via Montreal, Winnipeg and Medicine Hat to Calgary.” He landed smack dab in the middle of the great depression.
Robert’s observations were dutifully sent off in letters to his mother on a very regular basis and shortly after arriving in Calgary he noted in a June 22nd letter that: “Some people have made a fortune when oil was discovered, dollar shares rising as high as $160 I have heard, but quite a few lost money. However most people here have money in this oil and there are so many companies on the job now, some producing oil and some not, that the prosperity of the town depends on how the wells turn out.” Some irony here for sure. Here we are 82 years later and it is pretty much the same game now as it was back then!
He also mentioned that last year’s crop was still in the elevators and the price of wheat was desperately low. He wrote that you could get a government homestead for $2 for 160 acres and after three years if you have lived there for a given period and cultivated 30 of those acres the land was yours.
Robert Pettigrew Sr. had been a mine manager in Scotland and saved quite well while living at home so he was able to take some time to explore and get used to this country. He knew eventually he would have to find work and so by late July of that year he landed a job as a surveyor’s assistant with the help of his friend’s uncle Robert Bonar, who was the manager of the Michel Colliery at the time. Pettigrew went to work for the International Coke and Coal Company in Coleman and took up residence in none other than the Grand Union Hotel.
Of the Grand Union he writes to home on July 22nd that:”It is the best hotel in the place and that is saying something.
The food is more plentiful than any place I have yet stayed and you have hot and cold water in your bedroom besides a sitting room with piano etc and all the best people in town live there.”
Referring to the Grand Union lobby area he also indicates in a Sept 30th letter that: “...there is about twenty comfortable arm chairs and the drawing room is beautifully furnished with a chesterfield suite I think you call it and a piano and thick carpets and lovely pictures on the walls. Nearly every night there is a sing song there.” I can just here them singing old country tunes, can’t you?
Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1931 there was little work at the mines and Pettigrew studied to requalify himself to an Alberta mine surveyor’s standards. It was interesting to note that he claimed he had to stop skating on Crowsnest Lake in late January as the lake ice was melting and the winter had been quite warm! By late spring the mines were working fairly regularly and he had passed his fire boss exam but mentioned that: “Coleman full of long faces due to 10 percent pay cut.” Ouch!
On June 14th he writes that: “Last night I was at an open air dance at the lake (4 miles from here). They have put up a wooden dance floor and have two motor boats on the lake. Last night was the opening night and the people seemed to come from all over in their cars.” So there it is. A reference to the first dance ever held at the Lakes in what was to become a Saturday night tradition for over thirty years. I can picture this event clearly in my mind.
By late October Robert had started work at Corbin for $150 a month and by late November as was typical of the Flathead back then he writes that he was snowed in. Corbin was not a nice place in winter sometimes. At the end of January a letter states: “it is about 20 degrees below and the wind is howling, making it worse than 40 below zero without a wind.”
I was able to take Robert Jr. to the coal company archives in Fernie City Hall where we found a copy of the 1932 Ministry of Mines report in which the annual overview of the Corbin No. 3 Mine (referred to as the Big Showing) was recorded by none other than his father R. Pettigrew – Overman. It was a eureka moment for sure, a reaffirmation of the stories in his letters.
Robert Pettigrew’s retracing of his father’s time here involved a train trip to Toronto to fly back to Australia. Of this final step his son writes; “As we boarded the train in Edmonton for the three day journey across Canada to Toronto it was hard to leave behind the places my father had loved. We had a great time there too. In those places we had met some wonderful people and family that we weren’t expecting to meet. I can imagine how he had felt having to leave the people and the places that he loved so much and how long that journey back to Scotland would have seemed. I only hope that the reunion with his brother and sisters and the future with us, his own family that he hadn’t yet known about, was worth the sacrifice.”
