by Carl Berger
University of Toronto
Manitoba History, Number 4, 1982
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It had to happen one day that the English would be treated in the social history of Canadian immigration as simply another ethnic strand. Patrick Dunae’s focus in this sprightly written study is upon a particular group—the ex-army officers who came after the Napoleonic and Crimean wars and especially the public school graduates who arrived in increasing numbers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Openings for them in the traditional professions either became less appealing, as was the case with the church, or more competitive and difficult, as in the army, law and medicine. Many of the old boys sought careers and high paying jobs in the colonies. Canada was close, social connections good, and it held out the promise of adventure and sport in the wilds. Of the estimated 45,000 of these elite emigrants who left Britain between 1875 and 1900 Canada received about 18%. They came in first class cabins, with letters providing entrees to the best society, and with fishing rods and shotguns in their baggage. Some preferred the older cities, others gravitated to places like Bracebridge; some homesteaded on the prairies or took up ranching in southwestern Alberta; they founded aristocratic settlements at Cannington Manor in Saskatchewan and flocked to the orchards of the Okanagan; and of course they imparted a special flavour to Victoria, Duncan and the Cowichan Valley on the Island.
The public schools had given them more than a familiarity with the classics and a love of athletics: they possessed a self-confidence that exceeded even the assurance of most Englishmen of late Victorian times. Captain Edward Pierce, the founder of Cannington Manor once asked a girl who had been born in Manitoba what nationality she was. She answered that she was a Canadian. “Canadian?!” he boomed. “You can’t be a Canadian! Where were your parents born?” “Scotland, sir;’ the girl replied. “Well, then, you are Scotch,’ Pierce declared. “If a man was born in a stable, would he be a horse?”
Cannington Manor fox hounds
Source: Saskatchewan Archives Board
These emigrants were in for some surprises. They complained of the “familiarity,” the lack of deference, in the new world; in time Canadians derided them as “dudes” or remittance men. To be an English gentleman emigrant was to be associated with gentlemanly manners, inefficiency, blundering along, and insufferable arrogance. Did you hear the one about the newly arrived Englishman who was convicted of selling liquor to an Indian and put in jail where he was kept busy cutting cordwood? “I don’t know how to thank you for your kindness to my son,” the father wrote to the magistrate. “I don’t know what cordwood is, but to get a government contract almost as soon as he arrived shows that he has some business ability. For young men able and willing to work, there are evidently openings in our colonies ...” Dunae has a good eye for anecdotes and tells so many of them so well that he encourages in this reader a skepticism about his subjects.
The trouble with this study is that its splendid parts do not come together to sustain the rather large conclusions ostensibly based upon them. The best sections of this readable and entertaining book are those that describe the experiences of individuals, or convey the local histories of Cannington, Walhachin, the ranching community, and Victoria. There is also a substantial and informative discussion of imperial organizations for emigration and schemes for training farm pupils. Dunae says that any assessment of the legacy of the gentlemen emigrants would require another study: in the meantime, however, he claims that they were of “seminal” importance in providing Canada with leaders in politics civil service and local government; they provided the major fillip for the arts in eastern Canada; they made the Canadian west different from the American. Nor is this all. “Gentlemen emigrants were largely responsible for clearing the backwoods of southern Ontario, for opening the Ottawa Valley, and for making the first assault on the muskegs of Muskoka ... They had opened new mines, chartered new railways, and provided capital for innumerable secondary industries. They had established literary and scientific institutions, theatrical guilds and athletic clubs from Halifax to Victoria; they had endowed churches. schools, universities, and philanthropic organizations. They had provided the Dominion with a corps of administrators, lawyers, doctors and militia officers ...” Now all this most definitely requires another study for adequate illustration and documentation. The evidence is not in this one. In fact Dunae has in some ways strengthened the very impression which he set out to overthrow by paying so much attention to failures—of individuals as well as communities like Cannington or Walhachin—and negative Canadian responses to the immigrants. There are, it is true, success stories; but these hardly sustain the rather large generalizations about the impact of this group upon Canada as a whole.
Page revised: 1 January 2011
