The British, Woodsworth protested, were dumping the effluvium of their slums on the prairie. A case in point, certainly, was Bert Smith’s father, Archie. A child of Brixton’s Cold Harbour Lane, apprenticed to a butcher at the age of twelve, he married Nancy, the dim daughter of a neighbouring greengrocer ten years later, and then in 1901 had the misfortune to attend a free lecture by the Reverend Ishmael Horn. Short of stature, this obviously worthy greybeard with the hot black eyes was a compelling figure, eloquent as well, extolling the virtues of Gloriana, his projected all-British colony in the Canadian west. To begin with, however, the Reverend Horn ridiculed the wretched circumstances under which his audience lived now. “Look at you,” he said, “packed like sardines in stinking hovels, enduring the rich man’s contumely, your bairns prey to pulmonary consumption and rickets.” His voice soaring, he told them about the fertile land with the invigorating climate that awaited them; a land where they could sow wheat and grow apple and pear trees; a veritable parkland rich in game of all kinds; a land of sweet grass and sparkling streams and brooks filled with leaping trout. Two hundred acres of their own choosing were there for the asking, he said. A manner of homestead that only the toffs could afford on this blighted island.
So Archie and Nancy Smith joined the queue, filling out the necessary forms for the Reverend Horn’s secretary, the fetching Miss Olivia Litton, whom some would later remark had reeked suspiciously of spirituous liquors at the time. They signed the forms and pledged to pay a deposit against passage money within the week.
Some months before, the Reverend Horn had been to see an official of the Canadian Immigration Department in Ottawa.
“Sir, I cannot tell you how it grieves me to see the pristine prairie, the fine British province of Saskatchewan, polluted by dirty, ignorant Slavs in their lice-ridden sheepskin coats, and by the mad followers of Prince Kropotkin and Count Leo Tolstoy, the latter a novelist who celebrates adultery. Why are we welcoming these peasants when stout British yeomen, men of valour who held the thin red line against the Dervishes at Omdurman and marched through the Transvaal with Kitchener, are crying out for land?”
The Reverend Horn promised to deliver four thousand skilled farmers, the flower of the sceptr’d isle, to the prairie at five dollars a head. In exchange he was granted an option on homesteads in twelve townships in Northern Saskatchewan, the wilderness where he was to establish the all-British colony of Gloriana. He was also provided with a Boer War troopship, the Dominion Line’s Excelsior, at Liverpool dock. The Excelsior, later to be dubbed the Excrement by its discontented passengers, was originally built to accommodate seven hundred cavalrymen and their horses. But on March 10, 1902, some two thousand emigrants were caught in the scrimmage on the gangway, the first of the settlers bound for the promised land of Gloriana. Among them was a terrified Archie with Nancy bearing her budgerigar in a cage. There were scrofulous Cockneys, Welsh miners spitting coal dust, and navvies from the Gorbals already staggering drunk. There were women with howling babes in their arms and children scurrying here, there, and everywhere, out to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. There were parrots and canaries and yelping dogs and a pet goat that would be roasted long before they reached Halifax.
Standing on the dock, acknowledging cheers, the Reverend Horn called out, “We are bound for the land of milk and honey,” and then disappeared into his cabin, Miss Litton following after.
The settlers were far out to sea, sliding in vomit, before they grasped that there was no bread and that the potatoes were rotten and the meat crawling with maggots and the walls of the hold they were crammed into thick with manure, the pitching deck awash with overflow from the bilges, rats everywhere.
In two weeks at sea the Reverend Horn, secure in his cabin, was seen below decks only twice. On the fourth day out a miner had his arm broken in a drunken brawl and it was the Reverend Horn who set the bone and fixed it with a splint. He was seen again after another fight, this one with knives, come to stitch the men’s wounds. But a certain Mrs. Bishop swore she had seen him striding up and down the bridge the night of the gale, the puny Excelsior scaling twenty-foot waves before plunging into a trough, sliding trunks smashing into walls, splinters flying, the ship’s fracturing surely imminent. Barechested he was, drunken, howling into the lashing wind and rain. “Face to face, I want to see you face to face just once.”
Finally they docked at Halifax and were promptly bundled into a train for the endless journey to Saskatoon, from where they were supposed to trek by ox-cart a hundred and fifty miles to Gloriana. Saskatoon, a smudge on the prairie, had no common or shade trees or hedgerows or high street or vicarage or public house. Instead there were mosquitoes and mud, rude shacks, two hotels, a general store, a grain elevator, and a railroad station.
The Reverend Horn had promised them that all manner of necessities would be waiting for them at the station: oxen and wagons, tents, farming tools, seed bags, and provisions. They saw little enough of that and beyond, not a knoll, not a tree, but a flat empty land extending to the horizon. The women sat down on their scattered belongings, kitbags eaten by salt water, trunks split and leaking cutlery, and wept for the warrens they had left behind. The men, armed with clubs and knives, a few of them with shotguns, demanded an audience with the Reverend Horn. And when he appeared, mounting an ox-cart and calling for silence, they surged forward, jeering, shaking their fists. The Reverend Horn, unconcerned, paced up and down the ox-cart, searching the skies, some sort of sad clacking noise, an inhuman call, coming from the back of his throat. A raven flew out of the clouds, swooped, and lighted on his shoulder, which silenced the mob. The Reverend Horn, his eyes hot, reminded them of the ingratitude the children of Israel had shown Moses, their deliverer, rebelling against him. “‘Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat down by the flesh pots and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’” Then the reverend said, “If any of you are so fainthearted as to want to turn back after all you have endured, board the train. I will stand your return fare to England. But rest assured that those who stay with me are visionaries, the first of the millions who will settle these rich fertile plains. I cannot provide you with manna. But within the hour those among you who are bound with me for Gloriana will be served hot soup and freshly baked bread. There will also be a keg of rum to celebrate our safe passage over stormy seas. Then it’s westward ho to Gloriana, my good fellows!”
The Smiths survived but one year in Gloriana, fighting grass fires in the heat of summer and the bitter cold in winter, their only commercial crop buffalo bones for which they were paid six dollars a ton.
Following their flight from the colony, the Smiths moved back to Saskatoon, a town prone to drought and grasshopper plagues and early frost, founded by a group of liquor-hating Methodists out of Ontario intent on establishing a settlement where temperance would be the unbroken rule. Then the Smiths retreated to an even smaller railroad town. Archie found employment in a butchershop, stuffing sausages for a Galician; and Nancy as a dishwasher in McGraw’s Queen Victoria Hotel, until she discovered exactly what was going on there and fled, taking another job, this one as a waitress in Mrs. Kukulowicz’s Regal Perogie House.
Bert, born in 1903, had a strict upbringing. When he wet his bed, his father clipped a clothespin to his penis, and Bert was soon cured of that habit. His mother, horrified to discover that he was left-handed, tied the offending arm behind his back at mealtimes until he learned to behave properly. If she caught him reading a cowboy novel or daydreaming on the sofa, she immediately set him to doing chores. “Every day, every hour,” she reminded him on his twelfth birthday, “you are drawing closer to the grave and the final judgement. See to it that sloth is not numbered among the sins you must answer for.”