In Northern France, June 1915

Canadian officers in a photo taken by Ruby in northern France

Nursing Sister Ruby Peterkin’s first surviving letter from the War was addressed to her sister Irene in Toronto from Northern France,probably Rouen. She had been posted to France for 4 or 5 months to serve with the British Expeditionary Force. Ruby shares a tent with fellow nursing graduate Madge (Margaret) McCort, and refers in this letter to two other nursing sisters who were in the Toronto General Hospital class of 1911. Almost every letter includes a plea for family members to send her mail, with her niece Theresa Peterkin urged here to tell everybody to write.

No. 5 General Hospital
B.E.F.
June 20 15

Dear Rene ▬
We have been here a week now and it seems like a month. I sent you a card on Wednesday. Did you get it? I’ll try to tell all about everything. In the first place, our M.O. has promised to censor all my letters and those we receive are not censored, only these we send are liable to be opened at the base post-office at any time.

We are all in wooden huts and our rooms are very good-sized. Madge McCort and I are together. We get up at about 6.30 (or later) a Tommy comes and bangs on our doors. He also sweeps out the rooms later in the days and two of them wait on our table.

Madge McCort

We have breakfast and go on duty at about 7.30. There seems no hard and fast rule about this however. Then at 9 o’clock we come over to the sisters’ quarters again for ‘tidying up’. We usually get a clean apron on there and go into the dining room for tea and biscuits. Then go back on duty and lunch is at 12.15 and 1.15. We have ½ hour for tidying up and ¾ for lunch. Then we have three hours off in the afternoon either from 2 – 5 or 5 – 8. Tea is at 4.30 or 5 and dinner at 8.15. So you see we do not have any chance to reduce. But there is no drinking water. I have been drinking tea five times a day and my teeth are turning black. You can purchase soda-water cider and wine from the house-sister. I have tried them all, but they don’t touch the spot. We are going out on a still hunt for ginger-ale one of these days.

This is Sunday and I have last hours, so Miss Gamble and I came out to the woods, bringing rugs and cushions. On the way we picked up a sick-kids nurse so we are all here now. You see there are 40 of our units all around here — at No. 6 and No. 9 right next us and at 10, 11 & 12 quite near too. Then Daisy Dean, Neil Dow and Ted Fraser are at No. 8 away across at the other side of the town. We were out to see them last Tuesday for we did not go on duty until Wednesday.

It is not at all busy at any of the hospitals just now, and they were not at all glad to see us when we arrived. In fact I fear the Eng. sisters do not love us. You see we have two stars and they hadn’t, and although they spend a great deal of time in assuring us that they “rank as officers” it is not as convincing as those two stars. We just calmly survey their uniform which is hideous – a grey chambray apron like ours and a little grey cloth cape edged with scarlet about two inches. Then we as calmly glance at our own, which believe me looks pretty smart in these surroundings, and you can fairly see them turn green. They freeze us entirely, most of them, but it does not seem to have much effect for I think we have a better time than they do. The nursing is punk, in fact is not nursing at all. We were in the Gen. Hospital in Boulogne and the difference between it and this was very striking. The Tommys ask to be sent to the Can. hosps. every time.
We have not had much opportunity to go about to see things yet, but I hope to on our half day. You see we are in the valley of the Seine River and there are hills all around. The woods where we are are beautiful, all tall straight pines and it seems very extensive. They say Wm. the Conqueror used to hunt in them.

There are numerous camps of British in the neighborhood. Madge and I have decided we cannot get around without a car, so we are looking for a cheap Ford. The car into town is about a mile and a half away. We go into town to the Normandy on our hours off. This is a restaurant much frequented by British officers and sisters and we go whenever possible. There is no place else to go. We have to be in by eight every night.
I have not had any mail since the day before I left London. I hope it will find its way here next week.

My pen is on the blink. Tell Theresa and everybody to write to me. I have not heard fromany of them. Write and tell me where you went. I keep wondering if you are up north or where.

Yours ever,
Ruby

There is a bath-tub but only cold water.

Introducing Nursing Sister Ruby Gordon Peterkin

There was a close bond among Ernest, Irene and Ruby Gordon Peterkin, three of the four children of Charles and Theresa Peterkin who survived into adulthood.

Irene and Ruby in Europe in 1912.

In 1912 Ruby and Irene joined a two-month tour with the Rosedale Travel club to England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy Switzerland and France. There is no record of whether they had an opportunity to visit their father’s old haunts in Woodside, Aberdeen.

While Ruby was a Nursing Sister in the Great War she gave her permanent address as the home of her brother Ernest and his wife Minnie. Towards the end of the war when Ernest had moved to 161 Inglewood Drive her future husband Dr. Hugh Alexander McKay lived there briefly, as did Irene.

Ernest Peterkin and a friend proudly displaying a catch of fish.

Irene at her Georgian Bay cottage

Between the wars, Irene, a kindergarten teacher, spent the summers at her cottage which Ernest built on an island in Georgian Bay near Honey Harbour. Ernest loved to fish there. Ruby bought a property on Bone Island less than a mile away.

In their later years the three siblings joined forces to live in a new house at 14 Market St. in Georgetown. Ruby had earlier suffered a severe car accident and after a couple of years in Georgetown had to be transferred to a nursing home in Wychwood Park in Toronto where she died in 1961.

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From now on the Peterkin blog will be devoted to Ruby and the close to four years she served as a Nursing Sister from 1915 to 1918 in France, Greece and England. Ruby wrote

An envelope with a censor’s stamp.

regularly to her relatives and friends, but was restrained by the censors to not disclose details of the undoubted horrors that she had witnessed inside and outside the hospital. Thus the reader is left with the impression that apart from having to be up for night duty and having her tent swept out by a British “Tommy”, life was a continuous happy round of tea and tennis and excursions with the officers and fellow nursing sisters.

A motoring incident during an excursion of the officers and nursing sisters to Salonika, Greece.

Ten of Ruby’s letters survive, nine of them addressed to “Rene” (her sister Irene) who would have shared them with other members of the family with the hope that they would be returned to her. Ruby sends greetings to her brothers, sister-in-law and nieces, many of whom have written to her. But oddly there is never a mention of her father Charles although all the early letters are addressed to Irene at their father’s house at 34 Oakmount. One letter is a “round robin”, intended to be widely circulated. That anyone would expect her to repeat to a long list of correspondents the details of the unfamiliar – even exotic — life she was leading was simply unthinkable.

As it was, Ruby survived the war but in 1918 was hospitalized in England, diagnosed as suffering from bronchitis, bronchial pneumonia and pleurisy, and finally pulmonary tuberculosis, but luckily free of dysentery and malaria. It was recorded that “The climate of the East was very hard on her.” The medical officers in Buxton, England, invalided her out back home in 1918 as “medically unfit”, and once home she was sent for the cure to Calydor Sanitarium near Gravenhurst, Ontario, until 1920.

Nursing Sister Ruby Peterkin seen writing in her tent in Greece.

“Diphtheria is causing a great deal of anxiety in Toronto”

“[They] pointed out that the Toronto Bay was becoming more or less a cesspool from the excremental and other filth hourly flowing into it. Until the last few years comparatively little sewage found its way into the bay, as the water-carriage system had not been generally adopted. The pollution of the soil from privy pits has led recently to the construction of a large number of water closets, and the number must steadily increase, not only by substituting the water closet for privy, but from the rapid increase of population by growth and annexation.” William Canniff, Toronto Medical Officer of Health, (The Globe, Sept. 28, 1886).

Two of the Peterkin infants who died of diphtheria

In 1879 and 1886 five of Charles Peterkin’s children were felled by a much-feared medical scourge of the time: diphtheria. Diphtheria is characterized by fever, swelling of the throat and difficulty breathing. While the disease was associated with poor sanitary conditions and with neighbourhoods where privy pits were situated too near to houses, doctors reported that it had managed to penetrate the homes of Toronto’s well-known citizens, perhaps because of badly installed drains and waste-pipes.

Stuart Settle Peterkin was 16-years old when he died on March 2, 1886.

According to widely-reported statistics the great majority of patients recovered their health. Mostly children caught the disease and doctors insisted that they should be isolated. However, May Munro and Norman Joseph died in August of 1879 at 177 University Avenue, a one-storey cottage, and Stuart Settle, Lena Emma and Herbert Bruce all died within three weeks of each other in 1886 at the cottage on Bellevue Place (now Wales Ave.). It is likely that all were living in close proximity to each other. Their deaths occurred within 3 to 19 days of diagnosis.

Epidemics of diphtheria were raging in Russia and several European countries at this time, but other diseases, among them smallpox, measles, cholera infantum and typhoid fever, appear to have taken an even greater toll in Toronto.

William Canniff, Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, wrote that “There need be no surprise that there are frequent outbreaks of diphtheria, fevers, and kindred diseases, in view of the inefficient plumbing so often existing in our city. Homes that present a most attractive exterior have the germs of deadly poison concealed from view in closets and drain-pipes. Nothing needs closer attention than these, and yet nothing is more neglected. “ (The Globe, Sept. 1, 1886)

Of the  eleven children fathered by Charles Peterkin with his wife Theresa Bywater, only five reached adulthood, and of these only one, Charles Robert jr., gave his parents grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

My great-great-grandfather was a huckster!

Entry in the Aberdeen Bon-Accord directory for James’ grocery and spirits shop

In the 1840s and early 1850s Charles’ father James Peterkin had been a grocery and spirits dealer in Woodside, Aberdeen. He also owned a second grocery shop not far away in the big city itself. According to Charles in his memoir, two years after the family arrived in Toronto his “father took a small grocery store on Richmond Street north side just east of York St. in which for nearly a whole year I was shut up and father would not let me go out neither in daytime nor evening and that did not suit me after the life I lived outdoors so long.”

The 1855 Assessment Roll for Toronto showing the properties on Richmond St. W. just east of York St., and James Peterkin “Huckster”.

It turns out that the “small grocery store” would have been little more than a stall with a bookbinder and a waiter as neighbours. According to the City of Toronto Assessment Rolls James Peterkin was at that location in 1855 for one year, occupation “Huckster”! Fortunately the meaning of “huckster” at that time did not imply that James was working on the edges of the law, as it does today. The OED defines the word as “a retailer of small goods, in a petty shop or booth, or at a stall; a pedlar, a hawker.” Ontario sources suggest that a huckster was an unlicensed trader, required to pay a special duty or tax. Several hucksters operated stalls in the St. Lawrence Market on Front St. For customers James may well have relied on law students at Osgoode Hall a block away at the top of York St.

James Peterkin (1797-1876) in a photo now in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The north-east corner of York and Richmond Sts. today, now occupied by the Sheraton Hotel. At the left can be seen the trees fronting Osgoode Hall.

All his worldly goods

This gallery contains 5 photos.

It may seem odd that Charles Peterkin didn’t provide an eternal resting place for his second wife Annie Josephine Mollon Peterkin in his plot in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Annie was sixteen years younger than Charles, and when she died in … Continue reading →

The Peterkins’ brush with celebrity

Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Peterkin

In the early 1860s, living with his father and brothers at 177 University Ave., Charles Peterkin was much taken with the young woman next door at no.179. Theresa Bywater could be seen shepherding her younger siblings in and out. For Charles it was a no-brainer — he would  make Theresa his wife, and It was no surprise when the two were married in 1866.

Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart” in 1914

If Charles had been several decades younger he might have been equally taken with the girl next door, this time at no.175. Gladys Louise Mary Smith, the future Hollywood starlet Mary Pickford, was born there on April 8, 1892.

Toronto city directory for 1892 with Smith house at 175 University Ave. and James F. Peterkin at no.179.

In 1867 Charles and Theresa moved to 181 University Ave. and later to Wales Ave. Charles’ brother James Frederick Peterkin continued to live at 177 University Ave. until the year before Mary Pickford was born next door, purchasing the Bywater house at no.179 in 1891. I like to think that he and/or his children were friends with the Smith family. By the time Miss Pickford had achieved celebrity James would have told one and all about ALMOST living next door to “America’s sweetheart”!

In this photograph from the early1900s the Peterkin family home (until 1864), also James’ home (until 1891), is the cottage at no.177. Next door to the right in the centre of the photo is the Smith (Mary Pickford) house at no.175. The row of houses was torn down in 1943 to make way for the Sick Children’s Hospital.

Brother Stuart goes AWOL

Stuart (Stewart) Munro Peterkin, Charles’ younger brother who trails after him in the memoir, followed in his brothers’ footsteps in Toronto as a carver and wood-turner. Through the 1870s he partnered as a picture framer with his older brother James Frederick Peterkin at 71 Queen St. W.  A sign of the disaffection that he was feeling may be detected in his leaving his brother Charles’ house and moving in with his much older half-brother William Matthews Peterkin at 231 University Ave. Then around 1885 he disappeared, and unknown to his family sailed to South Africa following a supposed business trip to New York.

Years later Stuart reappeared in British Columbia. In the 1901 census he was working as a printer in Rossland, a mining town in the Kootenays where a gold rush in 1897 caused the population to explode.

In 1911 Charles received word that Stuart had been admitted to Vancouver General Hospital on April 8. He boarded the train west and soon received a telegram that Stuart had died on of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 19th. Arriving in Vancouver Charles immediately took charge of his brother’s funeral and burial arrangements which included $75 for the casket, $15 for 3 carriages, and $10 for “preserving.”

Back east the family suspected that Stuart had grown rich in the gold mines of South Africa and that his landlord at 449 E. Pender Street had been after the money, but there was no evidence of either.                                                                                           

Charles Peterkin (left) with his brother Stuart in the early 1860s

 

An Unsurpassed Teacher

The Woodside School where Charles was a student.

Early in the 1850s Charlie Peterkin attended the Woodside Public School. In his memoir A Boyhood Journey he expresses admiration for his teacher Mr. Michie. Michie is admired in the Annals of Woodside & Newhills, published in 1886, where it is written “About the year 1837 a large school was opened, built by subscription … Mr. Alexander Michie was the first teacher appointed, and his style of teaching created a new era in the history of Woodside. The school became a great blessing to the place. Mr. Michie could not be surpassed as a teacher of the young. He resigned in 1852” (p.94). By the 1870s the school had been turned into the Woodside Burgh Hall.

When I visited Woodside in 1984 the building still served as the Burgh Hall.

             

 Alas, when I visited in 2013 it was apparent that the Burgh Hall has been abandoned. The core of the stone building remained but was surrounded by paper refuse.             

The former Burgh Hall, abandoned in 2013

The Charles Peterkin story starts here

Back in the summer of 1953 I visited Scotland for the first time. On my own I joined a Thomas Cook bus tour and was thrilled to learn that we would spend a night at Huntly Castle Hotel which we were told had been built in the 1700s by George, Duke of Gordon, of stones retrieved from the old ruined Castle nearby. And lucky me I had the chance to spend the night in a murdered Duchess’ four-poster canopy bed.

The main reason for my delight was that my mother’s aunts had endlessly repeated the (mythical?) story that a Peterkin ancestor had run off with a daughter of a Duke of Gordon. One great-aunt took pride in “Gordon” as her middle name. But as I found out much later every family conjures up aristocratic ancestors. In fact my 3Xgreat grandmother was an Ann Gordon of mysterious, but probably modest, ancestry.

What I didn’t know in 1953 was that exactly 100 years earlier my great grandfather Charles Robert Peterkin, along with his father and six brothers and sisters, had left Scotland for a new life in Canada, arriving in Toronto on June 9, 1853.

Charles R. Peterkin age 18 in 1859

My next Peterkin discovery came in the late 1960s when I was made aware that at age 84 Charles Peterkin had written a memoir of his boyhood years. Reading his “Recollections” I was taken back in my mind and imagination to a far distant time when life for an ambitious young lad could be hard, but at the same time joyous. I was convinced that his story deserved to be oohed and aahed over by a much wider audience than the Peterkin family for whom it was intended. Lucille Campey, whose preface fronts the text of the published memoir, sees Charles as “an extraordinary, ordinary man,” and I hope that readers of A Boyhood Journey will feel the same.

Charles Peterkin at age 89

The boy Charles is only 15 when the memoir ends in 1856. Digging into family lore and documents, and hundreds of family photographs together with culling newspapers, I have been able to put together the later life story of Charles Robert Peterkin. Those years are in their own way extraordinary, given that this immigrant achieved financial success and enjoyed the rewards of a hard-working life in Toronto.

This is the first of a series of posts which will begin when A Boyhood Journey: Scotland to Canada in 1853 is published in June of 2015. The illustrated posts will expand on the life and times of the Peterkin family through the years up to 1932 when Charles Peterkin died.