Greek Letter

In the year that the twentieth century died, I was visiting Whitehead professor at the American School of Classical Studies  in Athens, Greece. I had retired from the University of British Columbia where I a professor of classics for a quarter century and the American School was a pleasant change. The article which is partially reprinted here was written at the suggestion of the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Staige Blackford, who died tragically shortly after it was published in an automobile accident. The complete article can be found published on the VQR web site, (autumn issue, 1999.)

The summer after I passed my preliminary examinations for the doctorate at Yale, I sailed for Greece. I had written the examination for the Seymour Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies  in Athens, and won it. The  year was 1954, I was 23, the Korean War  a state of suspended animation, the Vietnam War still lay in the future and I was making my first visit to Europe. Greece itself had emerged from civil war not quite four years earlier. Only one ship offered direct service between New York and Piraeus, the Greek Line’s Nea Hellas, an elderly vessel built for a defunct British shipping firm only a couple years after the Titanic sank, and she still possessed some Edwardian elegance in the first  class and some equally Edwardian squalor in third. Less than a year later the Greek Line replaced her on the New York Piraeus route with a new ship named the Olympia and the Home Line provided competition with the Queen Frederika , and the Queen Anna Maria,  named after the last queen of Greece who has somehow faded  out of the headlines without attracting media attention. In 1954, however, Paul and Frederika still lived in the royal palace behind the National Garden, and the recovery from the long period of war began in 1940 was well underway.

A few weeks ago, on my last visit to Greece, I discovered a copy of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi in an Athenian bookstore which advertised new and used books. I bought it quickly, thereby stripping myself of the drachmas I had intended to spend on a cappuccino, but the book is out-of-print and the store was about to close for a delayed siesta (it was 3 p.m.) Miller’s Greece was pre-WW2. He sailed from Marseilles to Piraeus only a  few months before Mussolini sent in his troops in 1940. His fellow passengers were Arabs, Turks, Lebanese, English, French, and Americans. Mine were American students, a few Maltese and Turks, and a party of English tourists. But most of the passengers were Greeks. One made friends quickly and forgot them. But since this my first trip abroad, I kept a journal. Faithfully then fitfully and in the end, not at all. But I recorded some encounters There was a   young Greek priest returning from studies in the United States, who told me sadly that the Fourth Crusade was one of the great criminal acts of history. There was a young Greek from Canada who was going home to find the bones of his brother, killed by the Communist E.L.A.S. ten years before. He also intended to find his brother’s killer. O got my first encounter with one of Greece’s great controversies when I retired to a deck chair with a textbook of modern Greek. An assemblage of Greeks, all eager to help, gathered round. But they soon quarreled.  What Greek should I learn? The argument was good-natured but vigorous. I listened carefully, trying to understand.  It seemed that each of my would-be tutors had strong opinions about correct grammar and vocabulary, but none of them agreed with anyone else. On one matter, however, there was complete consensus. My textbook was wrong.

 I reflected on Henry Miller again a few days ago when I was enclosed by a traffic jam at Dafni on then road between Athens and the sacred site of Eleusis. My little Fiat Uno was surrounded was surrounded by a battalion of larger cars: Hondas, Mercedes, BMWs, Rovers, and Peugeots, with a Jeep Cherokee almost scraping my left fender. “One should never race along the Sacred Way in a motor-car” Miller had written, “it is sacrilege. One should walk, walk as the men of old walker, and allow one’s whole being to become flooded with light”. Miller belonged to an age that is lost. The Sacred Way between Athens and the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the industrial suburb of Eleusis is now a four-lane highway. The 11th-cewntury monastery church at Dafni is hemmed in by an immense river of traffic. The marvelous atmospheric light which Miller admired is still there, but the omnipresent nefos has stolen its clarity. The nefos is the cloud of pollution which now hangs over Athens: a mixture of smudge from oil-burning furnaces and exhaust from internal combustion engines, and in the summer of 1998, forest fires from Mts. Hymettos and Pendeli outside the city added wood smoke to the mix.  The nefos sometimes recedes but never disappears, nor will it as long a Hellenic Petroleum provides the furnaces of Athens with low-grade fuel oil. But Hellenic Petroleum is not only a state monopoly, it is one of a small minority of state-owned enterprises in Greece that makes a profit and that shields it effectively from pressure to reform.

Henry Miller came to Greece on the eve of World War II. The country was still coping as best it could with the resettlement of a million Greek refugees driven from Turkey in the 1920s. The debacle of 1922 in Asia Minor is forgotten now in most of the world which has later incidents of ethnic cleansing to occupy its attention,  but not kin Greece or Turkey. The political stability of Greece was a victim of the first World War when the Allies, Britain and France, maneuvered the pro-German King Constantine I off the throne and replaced him with his second-eldest son, Alexander with, as his prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, one of the most brilliant statesmen of modern Greece. It was another example of Great Power interference in Greek affairs, but the times were desperate. The war was not going well for the Allies. The Gallipoli campaign, which was intended to yield them Constantinople, had turned into a mismanaged bloodbath. Bulgaria, Greece’s old enemy, had joined the Central Powers and attacked Serbia. Greek assistance was crucial: in fact, the nine Greek army divisions which Venizelos provided the Allied offensive in Macedonia in September of 1918 would hasten the German collapse on the Western Front the following November.   The Allies had reason to be grateful to Venizelos and to Greece when peace came, and the prize that Venizelos wanted was Smyrna, which Turkey was renamed Izmir, now that it has been swept clean of Greeks. On 15 May 1919, a Greek task force landed at Smyrna and took kit, killing or wounding some 350 Turks in the process, thus setting a spark to revived Turkish nationalism under Mustafa Kemal or Atatürk, to give him the surname that he took after he ordered Turks, as part of his reforms, to take family names.  Next year the Treaty of Sevres gave Greece the right to administer  the Smyrna region for five years, after witch Greece could annex it if the inhabitants wished. The League of Nations reserved the right t demand a referendum.  Then King Alexander was bitten by a pet monkey and died of blood poisoning; the next election brought the anti-Venizelists to power and a rigged plebiscite returned King Constantine to Athens. Not to be outdone by their political opponents the royalists launched their own offensive in Turkey. It went well at first; the Greek army almost reached Kemal’s stronghold of Ankara. But its supply lines were overstretched and its general was slightly lunatic, and although mental stability is not a sine qua non for a successful general, it is a desirable virtue. In late August, 1922, Kemal launched a counteroffensive and it was devastating. The Greek army fled, and Greeks and Armenians were driven from Smyrna; only the Jewish and Turkish quarters of the city were spared. Greece received a flood of refugees, among them some who would achieve distinction, such as the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos who found the royal Macedonian tombs at Vergina 1977, and the Nobel prize-winning poet, George Seferis whose papers are now in the Gennadius Library which is part of the American School  of Classical Studies in Athens.

Henry Miller described his visit to the Armenian refugee quarter of Athens just before war broke out. “I had heard that it was sordid and picturesque, but nothing about it had quite prepared me for the sight which greeted my eyes “  The refugees had been waiting for 20 years for new homes which the government has promised, and when Miller visited the quarter, the new homes were ready. They were “models in every sense of the word,” he wrote. “The contrast between these and the hovels in which the refugees have somehow managed to survive for a generation is fantastic, to say the least. From the rubbish heap a whole community provided shelter for itself and for its animals, its pets, its rodents, its lice, its bedbugs, its microbes.”  The refugees were at last being integrated into the fabric of Athens. Then came Mussolini’s invasion. In the early morning of 28 October, 1940, the Italian ambassador presented the Greek prime minister  or, perhaps to be more accurate, dictator- Iohannis Metaxas with an ultimatum. Metaxas said “No”. Thereupon Mussolini launched his attack which bogged down with embarrassing alacrity and had to be rescued next year by the German army. October 28th is still celebrated in Greece as “Ohi Day” or “No”Day, for Ohi is Greek for “No”.  However, the day is now a celebration of the spirit which brought Greece through a couple millennia of vicissitudes since it became a province of the Roman Empire in 146 BCE. Anti-Italian overtones have been eliminated. Greece and Italy are now members of the European Union, and relations are friendly, if occasionally wary. 

One other byproduct of the Smyrna debacle and the flood of refugees that followed was that the American School of Classical Studies was given the right to excavate the marketplace of  classical Athens: the “Agora” written with an upper case “A to distinguish it from many other agoras, for the label can be applied  to any emporium from a grocery store to a flea market.  Refugee resettlement put pressure on any land available for development in the city, and the Agora, the location of which was known, was a prime site. Greece lacked the money to save it. Sixty-five per cent pf her taxation revenue went to service the national debt. In 1924, a bill to expropriate the land failed to pass the Greek parliament. Thereupon the government turned to the American School and offered it the right to excavate if it found the money to buy out the buildings the site. John D. Rockefeller Jr. provided the funds, and in 1931 the digging started. By 1940, when war interrupted the work, 365 “undesirable buildings” (the description comes from the History of the American School of Classical Studies by a former director, Louis Lord) had been removed.

When I reached Greece in 1954, the American School was building a new museum in the Agora to house the artifacts discovered there. This was no ordinary museum. The Agora site was crowded with ruins of ancient structures and there was no room for a new building; so the School decided to rebuild an old one. The Stoa of Attalus was a great colonnaded portico with shops along the back wall which has been donated by King Attalus II of Pergamon in the mid-second century BCE. Pergamon was a wealthy realm in Asia Minor which followed policy of never opposing the Romans and reaping the rewards of a faithful satellite as a result, but its last king, reading the future accurately, willed his kingdom to Rome which made it a province and exploited it cruelly. But the donation of the Stoa belonged to Pergamon’s opulent period. It was preserved well enough that its plan could be recovered securely for both the first and second floor, and thus accurate restoration was possible. In 1954, stone masons were working on its great column drums using skills not much different from the ancient masons, though their chisels were made from modern steel. Forty years on, the startling whiteness of its new marble was becoming muted and even a little soiled in odd corners. The nefos was leaving its signature. But in 1954 the new pillars were rising and the stone masons were chiseling new column drums out of rough-hewn cylinders of marble from Mt. Pendeli which had supplied the marble for the Parthenon and the other great monuments of classical Athens.

The archaeological exploration of the Agora which had been interrupted by the war was underway again. The last season before the war had been in the year of the Italian invasion, 1940. The professor of archaeology at the American School, Eugene Vanderpool, one of the greatest American archaeologists to work in Greece, had opted to remain in Athens during the German occupation when Greece starved. Vanderpool had come in 1927 crossing the Albanian border into Greece on foot with a group of students, and he had no wish to leave. He bicycled regularly to the Agora until the Germans caught up with him and dispatched him to a concentration camp as an enemy alien. However, he contrived to take with him his copies of Herodotus and Thucydides, and with the help of these two old friends, he survived. 

He never talked about his experiences during the occupation, though there was a lively oral tradition which transmitted  Vanderpool legends. Th nearest he came to discussing contemporary politics was when he interpreted the painted graffiti on the whitewashed walls in the countryside. “Long live my party” in red paint was probably executed by a crypto-Communist. “Long live the king” appeared with suspicious frequency. We suspected some industrious monarchists at work. The Greek monarchy was a casualty of the Colonels’ coup in 1967 (there were, in fact, two army colonels and one brigadier behind it) though one should not discount the intense unpopularity of King Constantine II’s German mother Frederika, who must count as one of them most unwise queens of history. The glum, nationalist dictatorship of the Colonels was not Constantine’s responsibility; in fact he tried to unseat the Junta with a bungled coup of his own but as a young Greek student told me, even though the political impasse may not have been his fault, he did nothing to make the situation better. It was an open secret, admitted afterwards by the United States, that the Junta had American support. When constitutional government was restored in 1974, a referendum was held on the King’s return which the center and left parties vigorously opposed, and 70 percent of the votes were for a republic. Yet, last year, when I was in Athens as a Whitehead Professor, I saw a small furtive “Long live the King” graffito on a newly-painted wall on Queen Sophia boulevard, 24 years after the referendum which dispatched Constantine into exile in the United Kingdom where he became a successful businessman. Graffiti generally have a more contemporary import. One, a short distance from the French School of Archaeology, rad “Fascist bums go hang.” Another, painted on an immaculate white wall in front of the British Embassy read “NO to the Internet. “It is the Beast of the Apocalyse”. Microsoft, meet the Book of Revelation!

The remainder of this article can be read on the Virginia Quarterly Review, 75/4, Autumn, 1999. 

 

The Palazzo Agrippina Murders

 BENITO MUSSOLINI IN RETROSPECT.

 

The following is an excerpt from a novel I am writing titled The Palazzo Agrippina Murders. Marcia Mellon, a writer of detective novels and TV scripts, is researching the fallout from the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, the “Vatican’s Bank”, and her research takes her to the mystery of the death of the bank’s director who was found hanging on Black Friars bridge in London. The choice of bridge is significant. The Black Friars were Dominicans who served as the Vatican’s hitmen. The Communist threat made them unlikely allies of the Freemasons. Here Marcia is grilling DeSilva, a Freemason with Underworld contacts.

  

‘What a load of horseshit,’ said Miriam Kuntz. ‘I need a rye to clear my head.’

So do I, thought Marcia, but business first. She waylaid DeSilva before he reached the door.

‘Thank you for your great lecture,’ she said. ‘It was enlightening.’ DeSilva beamed. ‘I’m Marcia Mellon, the detective story writer. The creator of the detective, Aristide Blanchard and his parrot Willoughby.’

‘Never heard of him,’ said Silva, ‘but I do like detective stories. Aren’t you the person who asked about the Banco Ambrosiano scandal? Do you want your Aristide Blanchard to get his teeth into it?’

‘I’m always on the lookout for new material.’

‘Well, then, when you deal with the Freemasons and Propaganda Due, don’t be judgmental. You’re too young to remember what Italy was like after the War. You have heard about Benito Mussolini? I never met him but I know a lot about him. He was a big man. He wanted to make Italy great again, and what’s wrong with that? Il Duce, we called him. When he was our leader, the mafia was held in check. The garbage was collected and the trains ran on time. We knew our property would be protected and we didn’t fear any communists. It was his ally who destroyed him.

‘Hitler, you mean?’

‘Yes, Il Duce followed Hitler into the world war. He thought he was a winner and who can blame him? Hitler’s army cut through the French defences like a knife through butter. Your ambassador in London, Kennedy, President Kennedy’s father, thought Britain was next. Everyone supports a winner. Even the Jew Menachem Begin who was later become Israel’s prime minister wanted to work with Hitler. Then Hitler threw his advantage away. Timing is everything and Hitler’s was bad.’

‘Bad timing?,

‘Yes, bad timing. He should first have won the Battle of the Atlantic and starved out Britain. He was almost there. The Canadians were fighting hard to keep the shipping lanes open but they were losing. Then he could have attacked Russia though he should have waited until he was ready for the Russian winter. He should never have declared war on the United States when he did.  He was the architect of the alliance against him, and the upshot was that we had Americans and British and Canadians and even Indians – Sikhs – on Italian soil, fighting 0n our soil. The Americans revived the mafia for they wanted its help against Mussolini, and they didn’t recognize until too late where the real danger was. But the Vatican did.’

‘The Vatican was playing with a weak, hand I think’

‘So it looked for allies against the godless Communists. The Vatican and the Freemasons are not natural allies –anything but –  but they had a common enemy in the Cold War. I was—am -- a Freemason  -- inactive now –but I can tell you we needed the Freemasons during the Cold War and they did good work. My own lodge, P2 split from the Freemasons back in 1976, and we reinvented ourselves. . Under our leader Licio Gelli, we took over a newspaper in Milan with money from the Vatican Bank and corrected its political outlook. P2 had powerful members, like Michele Sindona the banker they used to call the ‘Shark’, and Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister. Even Vittorio Emmanuele, the claimant to the Italian throne. Now we all have mani pulliti, -- ‘clean hands,’ but they used to be just a little soiled and maybe still are.’

‘I think you could tell me a lot. What is your interest here? Do P2’s tentacles stretch as far as Naples?’

Da Silva laughed.

‘I’m looking after our interests. However, this isn’t our turf. The big society here is the Cammora. You know. Garbage collection, smuggling, some prostitution. Helping poor Africans come to Italy to work. . Not our thing.’

‘People smuggling?’

‘There’s money in it. The Camorra smells money. But my hands are clean’.

‘I’d like to pump you for information, Commendatore. At least, my detective, Aristide Blanchard does’

DeSilva acknowledged the honorific with a good-natured smile.

‘Ah, Miss Mellon, you must remember that the salient characteristic of a secret society is that it is secret.  We don’t give interviews.  However, are you going to Rome after your summer school is over? Yes? Then I shall be at the Hotel Majestic on the Via Veneto for a couple of weeks. I might have red meat that your Sig. Blanchard can use.’

‘Grazia tanto. I’ll remember that. We’ll see each other in Rome.’

In the garden just outside the door were Luigi and Conradin, speaking to each other, Luigi in broken English and Conradin in his school-boy Italian. Luigi was to take DaSilva to the Albergo Felice where he would spend the night. DaSilva nodded to him, and Luigi obediently hoisted DaSilva’s heavy suitcase onto his shoulder and led the way along the garden path to the hotel.

 

The Road to Crieff

This essay appeared first in the Idler (vol. 15, 1990), a distinguished bimonthly that is now defunct. When I last visited Puslinch, the gravel pits have multiplied and the township has acquired a Swiss cheese aspect. But there was an effort going on to rehabilitate Puslinch Lake, which is the largest kettle lake in the world. Puslinch is now part of the Greater Toronto Area which is expanding alarmingly.

  

Highway Six leads from Hamilton to Guelph, and if you have the time for it, you may continue north to Owen Sound.  In Puslinch Township, the Guelph­-Hamilton stretch is still called the Brock Road, and there is a Puslinch tradition that connects it with Sir Isaac Brock, who died at the battle of Queenston Heights more that fifteen years before Puslinch was surveyed.  The name rests on a mistake common in oral history; the Brock Road probably took its label from a surveyor who never got as far north as Puslinch, and the connection with Sir Isaac is romantic embroidery.  Nineteenth century surveys called it the Aboukir Road, but I have never heard the name used.  When I was a boy in Puslinch, I called it the Brock Road, and so did every­body except strangers who went by road maps, and the Brock Road it remains. 

I passed the road sign marking the Puslinch town line, crossed the CPR Toronto-Chicago rail line, where passenger trains once stopped at Puslinch station, and turned left off the Brock Road on to the Puslinch first concession.  It was an early June day, more than two years ago.  A conference at McMaster University had brought me from Vancouver to Hamilton, and after lunch I set forth on a pilgrimage in a Budget rental car.  A farmer on his tractor in the field to my right raised an arm in greeting.  I was vaguely startled.  In Vancouver, we did not wave to complete strangers.  But I had been away too long; when I was a boy in a similar field, I waved to cars that passed.  They were emissaries from the outside world; once upon a time, when my grandfather worked those fields, they might have stopped to chat a moment, passing on news as they let their horses rest.  Now strangers hurried past in a whirl of dust, but farmers waved anyway.

 

I reached Crieff at the first crossroads.  It is a tiny place; a plain brick church with its churchyard, and a few houses.  According to the Annals of Puslinch, a local history published in 1950, Crieff reached “the zenith of its historical achievement” about one hundred and twenty years ago.  It had two smithies then, two stores, a hotel licensed to sell liquor, a shoemaker, a church with a manse for its minister, and sundry dwellings.  There were some fifty youngsters to be educated.  In 1874, Crieff built a new stone school for them, selling their old one to the Sons of Temperance who moved it close to the hotel which catered to the CPR navvies who were building the railway to Chicago.  Four years later, the hotel burned down and took the Temperance Lodge with it.  The church’s first minister, Rev. Andrew McLean, had died in 1873, and it was almost two years before Crieff found a replacement.  By the end of the decade, the manse was empty; Crieff was sharing a minister with a larger Presbyterian congregation with a fine stone edifice called Duff’s Church on the Brock Road.  The long decline of Crieff had begun.

 

But Crieff in 1987 did not look shabby and neglected.  The Rev. Andrew McLean had spent barely sixteen years at Knox Church, Crieff, before his death, but his older son was Col. John Bayne Maclean, who founded the Maclean-Hunter Publishing Company, and his younger one, Hugh, started the Hugh C. Maclean Publishing Company, which became the nucleus of Southam Business Publications.  Floyd Chalmers, in his biography of Col. Maclean, “Gentleman of the Press”, describes how the colonel returned to Crieff in 1916 to bury his mother in the churchyard alongside her husband, and was shocked at the neglect he saw.  He engaged Olmsted Brothers, North America’s leading landscape architects of the time, to change all that.  The citizens of Crieff were grateful and overwhelmed.  The manse where Col. Maclean was born was empty, and the Knox Church congregation presented it to him as a gift.  Painted and remodelled, it became his country home.  From then until his death in 1950, the colonel was a familiar figure in Crieff.

 

But at the Crieff crossroads, I turned my car north to the second concession, Lot 23, rear half.  The stone house which my grandfather had built, had the look of neglect, and the barn was in disrepair.  The back fields had become a gravel pit.  The eastern boundary of the great Artemisia gravel belt runs from Caledon Township to the centre of Puslinch.  The stony farms around Crieff are finding a new use.  They are providing aggregate for the reinforced concrete that is changing the face of Hamilton and Toronto.  “Puslinch Township”, concludes a survey done in 1982 for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, “has significant possible resources of sand and gravel and should be able to meet local requirements for many years.”  The future of Puslinch as a gravel pit seems assured.

 

William Stewart took up rear half of lot 23 in 1835, and made his first payment on it in that year.  I still have his receipt and memorandum of sale from the Commissioner for Crown Lands in Toronto, dated to January 9th.  “Received from William Stewart the sum of seven pounds ten shillings, being the first Instalment on the rear half of Lot No. Twenty three in the First Concession in the Township of Puslinch in the Gore District, a Clergy Reserve, containing one hundred acres etc.” The remainder was due in nine further annual instalments.  In fact, William failed to pay on schedule: the receipt for the second instalment is dated to 1848, the last three payments were made in a lump sum on February 27, 1855, and the crown deed, with its Great Seal, was issued on January 7th, 1856. “Victoria, by the Grace of God, etc. to all to whom these presents shall come... greeting.  Whereas William Stewart of the Township of Puslinch in the County of Wellington, yeoman, hath contracted and agreed to and with Our Commissioner for the Sale of Our Crown Lands, duly authorized by Us in this behalf, for the absolute purchase at and for the price and sum of seventy-five pounds of lawful money of Our Province ... etc.”  The farm was his at last.

 

He is almost a complete stranger to me, though he was my great-grandfather.  I have only a few family traditions and some brittle documents with fading ink with which to piece together his history.  His tombstone dates his birth to 1800, and tradition puts his birthplace at the foot of the highest mountain in Britain, Ben Nevis. He was a Gaelic-speaking Scot: when his son Angus started school, he could speak only Gaelic, and was soundly whipped by his teacher for this misdemeanour.  Yet, when William sailed to Canada, he brought with him at least two of his school books.  One was An Introduc­tion to Arithmetic, by James Gray, master of the English School of Peebles, (late of Dundee), published in Edinburgh in 1810.  On the flyleaf, in a bold hand, is written, “William Stewart his James Gray in the year 1817...”  The other was a little book of conversion tables, much used, with various jottings on the back pages.  One, badly faded, reads: “Wednesday, the 19th Sept., 1832, died, my mother at 5 minutes before 1 o’clock, p.m.” She was a early victim of cholera epidemic.

 

It was on July 12th of 1832 that the first case of cholera in Hamilton was reported. Hamilton’s only lawyer, Allan MacNab, not yet a knight (that honour came in 1838) and not yet the laird of Dundurn Castle, which was to be restored as Hamilton’s Centennial Project in 1967, bailed out all the inmates of the debtors’ prison, and other prisoners were released, except one under death sentence.  Otherwise it was certain that they would die of cholera; as it was, both the jailer and his wife did die.  The pestilence had spread up the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes with the immigrant ships: Quebec and Montreal were already stricken.  A painting in the Ottawa National Gallery by Joseph Legare expresses the horror of the plague year better than words.  It shows the carts taking away the dead in Quebec at night, under the uncertain light of the moon, to be buried under a layer of lime.  Smudge pots burn around the city square.  One body lifts an arm in supplication. It was not only the dead but the near-dead too who were taken for burial.

 

Hamilton in 1832 was still mostly swampy land covered with coarse Indian grass and infested with the now-extinct Niagara rattlesnakes.  There were no immigrant sheds in the harbour for new arrivals, but early that year, an old War of 1812 barrack was fitted out to give them temporary shelter.  By midsummer, the barrack had become a pest house.  It was probably there that William Stewart watched his mother sicken and die.  She was buried in a common grave for cholera victims near the foot of Hamilton Mountain.  Years later, William was to point out the site to his son Angus.

 

Why had he come to Hamilton that year, accompanied only by his mother, whose name is lost?  Was he a dispossessed crofter?  And what did he do in the two years that elapsed between his mother’s death and his purchase of a parcel of land from the Puslinch Clergy Reserve?  He may have spent it in Hamilton: in spite of the cholera, the settlement was growing.  In 1833, it was incorporated as a town.  The member of Parliament for Wentworth, Allan MacNab, showed his faith in the future--in his case, a heavily mortgaged one--by purchasing a property on Burlington Heights overlooking the lake, a little more than a year after William Stewart watched his mother die.  There he began his new mansion, Dundurn, to the plans of local master builder and architect Robert Wetherell.

 

It may have been MacNab himself who fathered the romantic notion that Dundurn Castle was modelled after the MacNab family seat on Loch Earne in Scotland.  It fitted the persona of an ambitious member of the Family Compact, and it hinted at a close connection with the chief of the clan, The MacNab himself, who had visited Toronto a few years earlier, when Allan MacNab was young and impressionable.  The MacNab had travelled in style: he came with a personal piper and a pair of bards.  But that is was the family seat on Loch Earne that provided the model for Dundurn seems to be a myth.  At least, no one has ever found it.  But Wetherell’s design for Dundurn has a special importance for art historians. It is the earliest example of the Italianate style in North American domestic architecture.  And in the upstairs hall, someone chose to decorate the walls with Pompeian First-Style wall painting. Some ten years before, the largest dwelling in Pompeii, the House of the Faun, had been excavated, and though its wallpaintings are faded now after exposure to the weather for more than a century and a half, when found, they presented a magnificent example of what archaeologists call “First Style”: stucco painted to look like coloured marble panelling.  The design of MacNab’s castle was on the cutting edge of the future.

 

A dispossessed crofter did not move in MacNab’s circles.  But it is certain that William Stewart met and came to admire the thorn in MacNab’s flesh, William Lyon MacKenzie, who resented the privileged Church and schools of the Family Compact, all of them represented by MacNab, who fitted so smoothly into the ruling class.  After the rebellion of December, 1837, and MacKenzie’s defeat at Montgomery’s Tavern, MacKenzie’s lieutenant, Samuel Lount, fled westwards, through Puslinch and spent a night sheltered by William Stewart.  At least, so one of William’s neighbours claimed later.  William himself seems to have said as little as possible, and his Gaelic ­speaking neighbours were loyal.  Lount was captured before he got much further, brought back to Toronto and hanged in the square before St. Jame’s Cathedral, the seat of the Family Compact’s high priest, Bishop John Strachan.  There is some irony to the fact that William Stewart’s down payment on his homestead went to endow the Anglican clergy and its schools, for Puslinch was Clergy Reserve; in fact, it was the first such Reserve land in the province to be sold.  The Clergy reserves were abolished in 1854, and it was the following year that William made the long-postponed final three payments on his land in a lump sum.  It may not have been only shortage of ready cash that caused the delay.

 

The land required faith or desperation, or a bit of both.  The forest was hostile: an enemy to be overcome.  The corpus of pioneer tales includes stories of settlers lost in it and found by friendly Indians, men walking miles through it with sacks of grain on their backs to the nearest mill to have it ground, men killed by trees falling vengefully upon the creatures who would topple them.  Winter was unrelenting, when food grew monotonous and travel dangerous.  One Puslinch settler, a black named Ben Bowlen, possibly an escaped slave who reached Canada by the Underground Railway, froze to death in the early 1840’s as he hauled his wheat by sleigh and oxen from his farm to Preston (now Cambridge).  But it was wolves that roused the deepest and the most primeval terrors.  A reader that was in use in Ontario schools early in this century related a typical fearful tale.  He quickly unhitched the oxen, mounted the near ox and whipped the team into a gallop.  They made it to the safety of their barnyard just as the pack leader reached the oxen’s heels. For the settler, death by mishap or disease was never far away.

 

But however frightened or homesick these Highland Scots settlers might be, for most of them there was no return possible, and they set about taming their environment.  “Until about the year 1830, the Township of Puslinch was almost unbroken forest,” begins Presbyterianism in Puslinch, a little volume published in 1899 to mark Puslinch Presbyterianism’s Diamond Jubilee, for Queen Victoria had just made diamond jubilees popular.  Five years after 1830, the Presbyterians petitioned the Crown Lands Department for a land grant to use for religious and educational uses.  William Stewart walked to Toronto to present the petition.  Clergy Reserves had been granted to support the Protestant Clergy, which the powers-that-were, not without reluctance, took to include clergy of the Church of Scotland as well as the Church of England.  The Presbyterians got their land and built their church.  What remains of the crown grant may still be seen where Highway 401 inter­sects Highway 6; turn north towards Guelph, and on the right is the “Crown Cemetery”, where William Stewart is buried with his wife Catherine McPherson.  But except for his long walk to Toronto, William had little to do with the Presbyterian congregatiyoyjr west of themon that petitioned for the grant for in 1840, the Presbyterian congregation adjoining them to the west built its own log church at Crieff, much closer to the Stewart farm, and sixteen years later, they were prosperous enough to afford a minister of their own, who expounded the faith in long Gaelic sermons, followed by a short service in English for those whose Gaelic was insecure.

 

Donald Dhu McPherson, a widower with ten children, reached the Crieff area five years after William Stewart bought his lot.  He seems to have been part of a McPherson tidal flow, for across the road from Donald Dhu lived Dune Bann McPherson, three of whose daughters married sons of Donald Dhu.  But Donald's eldest daughter, Catherine, married William Stewart.  She was only three years his junior, though she outlived him by fourteen years.

I know her only from a faded photograph of a very old woman looking, unsmiling, out of an ornate frame.  There is one other scrap of evidence, William’s account book, where he jotted down his expenses year by year, in English pounds until the end of 1859, and then in dollars and cents, passed on to his son Angus.   In the 1880’s, one expenditure appears regularly at two month intervals, in Angus’ handwriting; “For mother: 1 Gal. gin, $1.50.” The draft that Catherine drank at bedtime to keep her aged heart beating during the night was not the local whisky, though in the great days of Crieff, one Duncan Cameron Lohiel had brewed a liquor known as Kilrae which was esteemed even beyond Puslinch’s borders. William Stewart was probably a customer, for his account book shows a regular payment for a gallon of whiskey, a more suitable drink than gin for a man. The gallon of the gin that Catherine consumed every two months was worth a hired man’s wages for a week.  And it worked.  She lived to ninety-two and died only then when she started a fire by dropping a lamp and suffocated in the smoke.

 

In 1906, the Historical Atlas Publishing Co. of Toronto published an atlas of Wellington County.  It was a commercial venture; subscribers paid to have potted biographies of their families included, and consequently the Puslinch Scots were not well represented.  But the paid biographies that do appear betray a quiet pride.  These were success stories; the failures had disappeared.  The township maps showed neat rows of lots, each with the name of an owner.  Angus Stewart’s name now appeared on his father’s farm; his brother Donald had the next lot west.  The townships had a surplus population.  William Stewart’s two daughters emigrated to Michigan and sundry McPhersons and McNaughtons left the Crieff area for Manitoba.  The church in Crieff where Andrew McLean had preached his Gaelic sermons had been replaced by a smaller brick building, and Gaelic had given way to English, although a Gaelic service continued to be held in the vestry for a few of the older generation until close to the end of the century.  In the 1870’s stumping machines were introduced, which finally removed the red pine stumps which would not decay or burn, and the roots were upended along the borders of the fields to form stump fences.  The first settlers had cut their grain with a cradle, le, and thrashed it with a flail, tossing it into the wind to blow away the chaff: the method had not changed greatly since the days of the Roman Empire but now threshing outfits appeared, powered first by horses and then by great steam engines that devoured wood and water.  But the true badge of achievement was the farm house built to replace the settler’s log cabin.  Substantial, resplendent with barge board or fret work on the eaves with grounds carefully tended by the farm wife, it announced that the infrastructure of civilized society was now in place and the days of the pioneer were past.  Scots liked stone houses.  Stone was substantial, it lent a manorial air to a family seat, and in Puslinch, it was singularly plentiful.

 

Yet, the ambience of success that the Historical Atlas purveys is an incomplete story. The settler who purchased his lot could only guess what sort of land he would have when he cleared the trees from it.  The Pennsylvania Dutch, who were more experienced than the European immigrants, looked for land where the black walnut tree grew, for it liked good soil.  The Scots settlers felt more at home with rocks.  But stony soil made indifferent farms.  Scattered along the concession roads of Puslinch one may still see a lilac bush grown wild, or perhaps a clump of rhubarb or hops vines, and occasionally a stone chimney, all that remains to mark a settler’s cabin.  The settler failed, sold out and moved away.

Why?  Bad luck?  A husband who drank?  There was plenty of opportunity; in 1863, there were nineteen licensed taverns in Puslinch.  A wife who died in childbirth?  One farmer on the third concession road came upon the skeleton of a woman and child as he was digging a post hole.  All that was left to identify her was her red hair.  Or was the land which the settler hacked out of the forest too poor to support a family?  The countryside keeps its secrets and the Historical Atlas of Wellington did not dwell on failures.

 

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But the map of the township does show a diverse group of settlers.  The Highland Scots were in the southeast, though among them was a pocket of German Protestants.  To the west were Pennsylvania Dutch, separated from the Scots by an English group, and in the north were the Irish, both Protestant and Catholic.  There was a Danish family and another from Alsace.  They came for various reasons: the Dane had been press ganged aboard ship in Copenhagen, and had managed to escape while he was in an American port.  A woman from Ulster had married inappropriately, and her family had dispatched her to Canada along with her unsuitable bridegroom.  But living together on the frontier rapidly rubbed off the ethnic differences, and within a few years the settlers passed the ultimate test of toleration; they were inter­marrying.  The exception was the Irish, where the enmity between Protestant and Catholic went deep.

 

Until 1880, Patrick Downey presided over the school in section three, in the heart of the Irish settlement, and even the Protestants agreed he was a great teacher.  His enrolment reached as high as 104 pupils at one point.  He had once studied for the priesthood, but the temptations of the flesh intervened.  He married and had a large family which he raised in the teacherage on the school grounds.  A rumour with a Protestant source had it that he would slip across the road to the nearby tavern during the noon hour recess, but his pedagogy seemed not to suffer.  There was another rumour that when the Fenians raided across the border in 1865, and a call went out for volunteers, Downey tossed his hat into the air and said he would happily wade knee-deep in Protestant blood.  In 1880, the Protestants decided to have their own school.  Twenty-one years later, the school inspector condemned both the Protestant and Catholic school buildings, and economics proved stronger than bigotry: both varieties of Irish joined to build a new structure which continued to be known as Downey’s School as long as it was used.  It had one other distinction too.  It was red brick. It was the only little red school house in Puslinch.  All the other sections, S.S. Nos. 1 to 12, had stone schools.

 

William Stewart’s son Angus, born when his father was already 48, came to School Section No. 3 for his wife: a McWilliams whose family came from Ulster, and she knew not a word of Gaelic.

 

The gobbet on the McWilliams family in the Historical Atlas concluded, “As will be seen, the McWilliams family are (sic) connected by marriage or otherwise, with some of the best families in the county.”  The generation of McWilliams women who were still alive when I was a boy spoke with genteel accents that I thought were unique, until I overheard the same accents at a high tea in the Beresford Arms Hotel, Armagh City, in a troubled part of northern Ireland.  Sarah Denny McWilliams had purchased land in Puslinch at the age of 63.  Her husband had succumbed upon arrival to illness or old age, and was interred in a burial plot in Guelph, where eventually a skating rink was built over his bones.  His praenomen was probably Richard but it was barely remembered, much less the reason why, at an age when most men plan retirement, he chose the life of a pioneer in Upper Canada, but one family memory has it that he had committed the ultimate social faux pas: he had lost his money.  The widow’s son, Charles, carried on.

 

He is a more tangible figure.  In 1842, he returned to Ireland for a visit and kept a diary of his voyage, where he put down what he considered important. The captain of the ship, was a godly man with a fine voice, who held a daily divine service where everyone sang hymns lustily, especially the captain.  One day, a lady on board was thrown against the rail as the ship lurched through a heavy sea, and expressed herself in unladylike terms, whereupon an ordinary jack-tar rebuked her for her language.  Charles overheard and approved.  When he reached Ireland, he went to morning prayer at his old church in Aughnacloy, where he noted with satisfaction that an elderly parishioner heard a new voice raised during the singing of the hymns, and remarked, “Charles McWilliams must be home from Canada!”  Also, he noted that he gave some apples he had brought from Puslinch to the rector, who exclaimed that these were truly the golden apples from the Hesperides.

 

But it seems that Charles’ trip was for business as well as pleasure.  He seems to have had an eye on some livestock. While he was viewing a particularly fine pig, his literary inspiration left him.  He broke off the diary and wrote no more.

 

It was Charles’ second youngest child, Mary Ann, whom Angus married and took with him to Crieff, a long buggy ride from her home.  I still have one of their wedding presents: a kerosene lamp with an enamelled base, badly worn.  And I have the piano that once stood in their parlour, made by the Bell Piano and Organ Company of Guelph, Ontario.  But both of them died before I was born, and I know them only from faded sepia snapshots.  The stone house that Angus built was solid and respectable, not large by the standards of its day, but with an air of permanence in a universe of assured values.

 

Perhaps the pictures deceive a little. This was also a society of limited opportunity. Farmers’ sons with no farm to inherit worked as hired men, saving their wages and hoping to put a down payment on a farm, if a farm was to be had.  The township was becoming a land of emigrants.  Women had one proper career only: marriage.  If their fathers could afford to board them in a city, they might get enough schooling to become teachers, and then would flit from one school section to another, contending with the recalcitrance of their pupils and the prejudices of the school trustees.  But the final goal was still marriage. The woman who got neither a husband nor any training might stay at home, looking after the old folks, and after their death living on in a few rooms reserved for her in the farmhouse by the terms of her father’s will.  She might do housekeeping, or practical nursing.  Sometimes she developed “bad nerves”, an indefinable but quite respectable ailment for spinsters past forty.

 

The Historical Atlas concluded its little essay on Puslinch with a brief reference to Puslinch Lake, and a four-line poem in its honour by the principal of the Rockwood Academy.  There are, in fact, two lakes, a few kilometres west of Crieff; the larger one, a “kettle lake” gouged out by the glacier in the Ice Age,  covers about 260 hectares and has an island in the centre, where a monastery complete with a monk was built about mid-century.  But the lake proved unsuitable for the ascetic life or vice versa; in any case, Puslinch’s solitary holy man moved away, and the monastery fell into ruins.  The hotels and taverns around the lake fared better, though only one has survived. Yet the Historical Atlas predicted bravely, “As soon as electric railways are in operation, it will undoubtedly become a resort from Hamilton and Guelph.”

 

A radial line to Puslinch Lake was actually surveyed just north of Angus Stewart’s farm.  Just about the time the Historical Atlas made its brave prediction, Angus and his youngest daughter crossed the road one summer evening to take a look at the surveyors’ stakes.  As they examined this promise of a new technological marvel, they heard a great rumble in the distance, and as they watched, a motor car rushed by in a cloud of dust and stink.  It was the first car either of them had seen on the concession road.  The radial line to Puslinch Lake was never built, and within fifty years the motor cars had terminated the light electric railways, and the rails were being torn up.  Another twenty-five years on, and we were to regret their demise, but by then, it was too late.

 

Yet, at first, the automobile was a smelly, noisy contraption, very destructive to the hats of those venturesome ladies who rode in them.  Only farmers who were prosperous and very progressive bought them.  A little filler that appeared in the local newspaper celebrated the motor car’s capacity to assault the olfactory nerves.

 

Two little skunks by the roadside stood

As an automobile rushed by.

And one skunk watched with a mournful gaze,

And a tear stood in its eye.

“0, why do you weep?” asked the other skunk,

“And why do you quiver and shake?”

“Because that smell,” said the first little skunk,

“Is like mother used to make!”

 

But automobiles were the future, and they soon became common sights on the concession roads.  They were stupid contraptions, utterly incapable of the training that even the balkiest horse understood.  One Puslinch farmer who was using his bank barn as a garage, drove his new automobile on to the threshing floor, shouted "Whoa!", and emphasized the command by tramping hard on the accelerator.  The car lunged forward through the front wall of the barn and down on to the manure pile directly below.  Angus Stewart was always careful to drive his Model T Ford with his arms stiff.  If it developed any notions of steering itself in unauthorized directions, he was prepared to wrestle it back into obedience.

 

But it was not only the automobile that ended the society which the settlers had built.  Even more responsible was World War I, or the “Great War” as it was known until World War II came along. Every township has a grey monument to the dead, with a long “honour roll”.  Puslinch’s monument, close by the township hall at Aberfoyle on the Brock Road, shows a soldier standing quietly at attention, with his rifle by his side.  Canada, a country of some 8 million in 1914, put 625,000 men into uniform and lost 61,000 dead.  One hundred and forty-seven came from Puslinch and twenty-three of them died.

 

It was not unadulterated patriotism that attracted the volunteers; in 1914, a soldier’s wages seemed not bad to an able-bodied hired man in Puslinch, and there was the promise of adventure thrown in!  Still, in the one-room schools of Puslinch, George V and Queen Mary looked down on the pupils from a framed lithograph on the front wall, and since there was some reluctance to throw out pictures of dead monarchs, King Edward and Queen Alexandra might still look down from a side wall, and on the back wall there might be Victoria, leaning on one elbow and looking with heavy-­lidded eyes into the distance.  The Empire still mattered and in some vague way, Puslinch felt a part of it.  It needed Puslinch’s support.

 

As the war dragged on, the enthusiasm may have become more restrained, but by then, it was bad form to say so.  Yet I was told of one man who decided to volunteer in the last year of the war, for although he had not been conscripted, his brother had been, and he thought he would keep him company.  A white-haired militia colonel was at the recruiting desk in the Guelph Armouries.  “Have you been called up yet?” he asked.  The young recruit said not yet.  “Well, go home and wait till you are,” said the colonel. “I’m sick and tired of sending young men over there and having them blown to pieces.”  The would-be recruit went home.  A few months later, the carnage was over.

 

At least the Great War produced unanimity among the Puslinch Presbyterians.  The next trial did not.  The United Church of Canada arose in the mid-­twenties from the coalescence of Methodists, Congregationalists and such Presbyterians as were willing to join.  It is the only uniquely Canadian church, with roots in Canadian soil and a theology for all seasons.  The Puslinch Presbyterians voted on union in early January, 1925.  The vote must have had some of the qualities of the 1980 referendum in Quebec on sovereignty-association.  The Centennial History of the Puslinch church notes that for the month before the vote, over the Christmas season, “community prayer and social meetings” were held in various places, and they were “conducive of much good”.  A large portion of the congregation abstained from voting.  Of those that did, only some twenty percent opted for union, though among them was the minister which the Crieff church shared with Duff’s Church on the Brock Road.

 

Crieff weathered the schism well.  The year before the vote, on Thanksgiv­ing Day, there had been a special dedication service at the church; Col. John Bayne Maclean’s landscaping project was complete and people gathered to admire it.  The church where his father had preached had been replaced in 1882, but his grave and that of his wife were in the church­yard, marked now by a slab of grey granite.  The following year, having voted against union, the Crieff congregation gave the colonel the old manse and its half-acre lot. Was there a trace of canniness in their gift, as they looked forward to an uncertain future, with a new minister?  Perhaps so.  The old manse was empty and falling into decay.  The colonel made it his country home, and his interest in Crieff continued until his death.

 

In the late summer of 1989, I returned once again to Crieff.  The fields were dry, and the goldenrod bloomed yellow in the fence corners.  The churchyard is still well-kept by the standards of country churches, though it has declined greatly from the days of Col. Maclean.  A sign outside the plain brick building announces “Rev. M. Anne Yee-Church Service, 9:45, Sunday School, 10:45.”  The granite slab that marks the graves of Rev. Andrew McLean (now spelled Maclean) and his wife also mentions the deaths of their sons, Col. John Bayne, in 1950, and his younger brother, Major Hugh Cameron, the year before, though both are buried in Toronto.  The manse which Maclean restored and enlarged had the flag of Denmark waving lazily in the breeze, and a sign announces: “Sunset Villa Club: Danish Association.”  And on the nearby hill to the west, the Crieff school still has a marker in the gable fronting the road, declaring that this is School Section No. 6, built 1874, but it is now “Maclean Hall” and is part of the “Crieff Hills Community Conference Centre”.  Facing it across the road, in front of a decaying stump fence, stood a sign announcing a new subdivision: “Grandmark Homes”.  And behind “Maclean Hall”, where the rolling hills disappear into a tract of pine reforested a generation ago, another sign proclaimed the site of a new conference centre.

 

I turned north and drove to the second concession, to the homestead where William Stewart settled in 1835.  The barn and the stone house had both disappeared; only the untidy remains of a cedar hedge marked where they had once been.  A diminutive board nailed to a tree read “Warren Bitulithic”.

 

I continued westward along the concession roads, where Highway 401 cuts ruthlessly through the old homesteads.  Puslinch Lake seemed shrunken; the water level had receded a couple of feet from the shoreline.  The summer was dry, new developments are emptying the swamps and ponds in the township and covering them over with landfill, and new drilled wells are tapping the water table.  If the springs that feed Puslinch Lake fail, that little body of water is doomed.  The middle-aged man behind the counter in the old Lakeview lodge, the last remnant of the clutch of nineteenth-century hotels and taverns at the lake, talked wistfully of the changes.  “We just piss away our water. We won’t live to reap the consequences, but I hate to think what will happen to our children.”

 

I turned back, across the overpass that spanned Highway 401, and left at the old Accommodation Road.  A cricket was trilling his love call by the roadside, somewhere among the dry milkweed.  I had not heard a song of a cricket for years.  Will there be room for crickets, and butterflies and milkweed in the new southern Ontario of superhighways and sprawling suburbia?

 

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