Fine brick building were replacing wooden store fronts. Everywhere was growth and activity.
In the year they were married the Provincial Legislature was built. They tore down the old Fort Edmonton.
The logs were stored for decades before the old fort was reconstructed as a historical park in it's present position.
My Dad used to tell us how they would park locomotives on the low level bridge to weigh it down so it would not be swept away.
The flood of 1916 was particularly bad, but every year there was danger until the Brazeau Dam was completed.
The CP Rail had built it's castle on the hill the MacDonald Hotel.
Wilson had first come west to participate in a fall harvest excursion, farmers always needed huge numbers of extra hands for threshing, with his brother Frederick who was a teacher in Edmonton in 1905. He liked it so much he came back to Edmonton. There he met Margaret Kenny who was a seamstress. They got married in 1913. Frederick had wanted to branch out from teaching and was doing survey work up by West Prarie River in 1916 when he died in a swimming accident. Wilson named his first son Kenneth Frederick in his memory. Ken was born two months after the accident.
The Albert town of Boyle is named after him as is Boyle Street in downtown Edmonton. He built one of Edmonton's Heritage buildings, the Lambton Block.
Wilson became J.R.’s assistant and was responsible tor setting up school districts all over northern Alberta. He was known as “Mickey”. When prohibition was repealed he was also head of the Alberta Liquor Control Board. Wilson was J.R’s campaign manager for his last election campaign. Wilson was a very good looking man, who from the photos I have seen definitely knew how to play to the camera. Apparently he also knew how to play to the ladies too, John Mcbryan tells me. He was in the center of the high life in Alberta.
Wilson and his niece Gertrude Stein.Wilson and Margaret purchased four lots at the bottom of the 104th street hill on the Rossdale flats. They had a big garden, four cows, a bunch of chickens and a smart buggy with a fast little black horse to pull it. They were their generation's version of the young fast track professionals. They had six children in the first nine years of their marriage, Helen Margaurite in 1914, Kenneth Frederick in 1915, Alberta in 1918, Roderick Wilson in 1919, Jetta Christine in 1920 and John Henry in 1922.
Wilson, Margaret and Helen in Bonnie Doon
"The Great Depression
A worldwide reversal of economic fortune occurred when the stock market fell in October 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression, words that still conjure up dark memories for many people.
Life in Alberta during the Depression—also known as the dirty thirties—was characterized by social upheaval and the worst economic conditions the province had ever faced. Prices for agricultural products plunged, severe and prolonged drought struck the prairies,
and young men rode the rails across the country in search of work." Also.
Ken selling Liberty Magazine about 1929Photos from Edmonton City Archives ,Edmonton Library, andGlenbow Archives
Just as a note of interest, both the Glenbow Archives and the Edmonton City Archives appear to have locked up most Depression Era images of personal poverty and civil unrest. Key words such as "depression", "dirty thirties" etc all come up with a no items that fit that description field. I found these with just a general search Edmonton 1930. Mostly just photos of buildings and military photos. Wonder how these two sneaked by. Maybe both collections are just down for reorganization.
Wilson lost his patron when J. R. Boyle left his seat as leader of the fading Alberta Liberal Party, to became a Judge on the Alberta Supreme Court. Wilson was forty four years old in 1930, the glory days were over, he had hitched his wagon to a falling star. The years of drought and the rebellion of the rural community and labour were just the beginning of economic hard times. The business sector collapsed soon after in 1929 and all the relationships carefully nurtured over JR's almost two decades in public life came to naught. Wilson worked as a manager for Safeway for a while and for the railway, but things just kept getting worse. Wilson's mother Christine (Smith) McBryan died in 1935. J. R. Boyle died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1936. Some of Wilson's relatives had not approved of a good Orange boy marrying a Catholic in the first place. The Peace River/Grand Prairie relatives had their own hardships to deal with.
Times had became very tough for the McBryan household by 1933. They always had enough to eat my father told us. There was the cow for milk and a calf every year, chickens in the coop and big potato and vegetable plots. My grandmother told us that the kids picked gallon after gallon of saskatoon berries from the thick stands of bushes along the river bank. These were dried and stored in pillow cases for the winter. They picked rosehips for vitamin C rich rosehip jam and high bush cranberries and chokecherries for tart jellies. It was my uncle John's job to run up town to pick up day old loaves of bread that Granny kept in a big copper boiler in the uninsulated back porch. Fuel to heat the house was a problem. Uncle John told us that he would put on his brother Ken's good warm fleece coat and go down to the railroad tracks that passed near the house to scour the track side for lumps of coal that might have fallen off passing coal cars every morning. He had to get back in time to give Kenny back his coat to go to school. Roddy had the job of draining all the water out of Wison’s delivery truck every evening, vehicals did not have anti freeze then, and filling it back up in the morning. Money was impossible. Wilson earned a pittance delivering blocks of ice to household ice boxes for Artic Ice. Every cent they could scrounge up Wilson spent on booze. Then he would treat wife and children in an abusive manner while he was in his cups. Meanwhile the family home was also in jeopardy because of unpaid property taxes.
Finally the situation became intolerable. Margaret sued for and got a legal separation sometime around 1933. (She was Catholic so she couldn't get a divorce. That was the year Wilson transfered the house morgage into her name.) The McBryan children never saw or heard from their father again because the judge refused his request for visiting rights. He vanished from their history. The only thing our father ever told us about him was that he was an alcoholic.
I talked to John McBryan from Leduc, one of the Peace River McBryan's who has always kept a close eye on the Wilson family because his youngest brother Harry was fostered out to them when his mother Violet died two weeks after his birth. Wilson told his family back East and in Northern Alberta very little of what was happening with his family in Edmonton. Apparently this started very early on in the relationship and he was characteristically terse when it ended. This is what I learned in correspondence with Maxine McBryan in Eastern Canada:“I'll tell you what my father told me about Wilson. Wilson married a Catholic. Dad's family was very Orange. His father, Smitty, wasn't an Orangemen, but Dad's grandparents were very strong Orange. Your (grand)mother was probably a very nice, lovely lady, but marrying a Catholic was taboo. There was a fall out within the family. Not all of the family disowned Wilson, but some unfortunately did. Wilson's father had died in 1910, so he wasn't around to make any judgment. I got the impression from Dad (David Harry McBryan, middle son of Smith, Wilson's nephew),that his father didn't have any bad feelings towards Wilson, my Dad certainly didn't and Hugh's family (Hugh Allingham, Peace River) didn't either. At least, none that I heard of. Why Wilson withdrew from the family, only he can tell, but someone must have said something to him. I can only guess it was because of the marriage to a Catholic.”
Photograph of Wilson courtesy of Maxine McBryan.
The Irish in my extended family appear to have hung on to the religious/political fusing of Orange/Protestant, Green/Catholic for at least a hundred years after all these allegiances had become moot because they were no longer living in and participating in politics in Ireland. It offers a possible explanation as to why Wilson identified himself as a Scot. Elsewhere in our correspondence Maxine and I spoke about this and since none of the other families were doing it, it appears to be Wilson's own idea. The Scots had never fused religion and politics the way the Irish did and Wilson may have realized from his mother Christine, who was Scottish, that this might be a good idea. However, for the girl he married, religion was still a political statement.
“I guess Wilson wanted to marry Margaret but not become Catholic. That led to a separation and finally, his disappearance. Margaret probably harped on him to change religions. He got tired of it and left. Margaret stayed in contact with Hugh McBryan,(John Allan's father) though, and our great Uncle Bill sent her money (William Henry, oldest son of Henry and Christine, Wilson's oldest brother, wealthy Eastern Buisnessman, probably inherited Henry's share of the Insurance business) when she needed it even though she did pay him back. I guess that means that some of his brothers weren't judgmental about who he married. Although Uncle Edward was, but he was a very judgmental person from what I've heard about him. Margaret was also included in Uncle Bill's will. Uncle Hugh,....in his little write up......just mentioned that he (Wilson) abandoned the family, and disappeared when Margaret wanted him to send more money than he was sending.”
Margaret Kenny y came from a family of ten children in from somewhere in Eastern Canada, one of whom was a priest. She was baptized in Newburg Ontario.The only evidence in her papers or oral history that any of them had any connection with the couple either was a letter from a sister in Montreal who wrote when Ken visited during his Air Force Training in 1940 to tell her that one of her brother’s had died five years previously, so I suspect it's fair to surmise her family also was not too approving of her marrying a Protestant either. In a way, they were a very early version of today's standard nuclear family.
Jetta and Cousin Ralph
Roddy left to work on a military project in Aklavic at 17 years of age in 1936.
Roddy in Aklavic
Helen had run off and married a Protestant, Mervyn Huston, greatly to her mother's displeasure in 1938. Alberta was her hardworking right hand (wo)man.
Ken Working on the railwayMy father who had taken up much parental responsibility in Wilson's absence. worked for the NAR railway and then signed up for for the Air Force in 1940. Harry, the fosterling from up north was the baby of the family, ten years younger than her youngest son John, at six or seven years old.
My father brought back a wife from down east after the war and moved out and all the other children grew up and moved on into their own lives.
Granny kept her boarders. After the war when the oil boom opened up with the Leduc strike and rental space was in such demand she sometimes "hot sheeted" beds. She would rent out a room for the daytime for someone who worked nights and for the nightime to another who worked days. She fed them all enormous amounts of food and was cooking all the time.
She kept her boarding house going right into the seventies although eventually she had to go to just renting rooms, the cooking chores got to be too much. Her boarders also provided her with all the social life she wanted or needed. By the time I met her she never left her house or yard except to go to church and even eventually stopped doing that. My father did her weekly shopping every Thursday evening after work as soon as he had acquired a car. Anything else she might need the kid with the bicycle could run up from the corner store for her. I never saw anyone who was not a child, grandchild or a boarder in her house.
Come afternoon, after her nap I would return from my forays into the neighborhood with my socks dragging about my ankles full of burdock, my dress dusty if not muddy, usually bleeding from dirt encrusted scrapes. And those brightly colored ribbons? Well they must be hanging on a branch somewhere because they were not in my hair anymore. Her daily complaints as she bandaged me up became an expected and familiar part of our relationship.
It was still a lot of fun being there. Every morning she gave me a quarter to go all the way down the block to the store on the corner to buy a loaf of bread and a jug of homo. That cost 23 cents. The other two cents I could have. It took me far longer to pick out my two cents worth of candy than to ask for the bread and milk. Then there was her refrigerator. She made two deserts every night for her boarders and they hardly ever ate all of them. Eat what you want, it will be going to the chickens. And it did. The chickens were fun too. She kept a flock of chickens in her back coop long after the area was zoned residential and bylaws enacted prohibiting the keeping of farm livestock within city limits. She argued with city hall and they let her keep them because her chickens had been there before the bylaw. I liked her chickens better than the ones at home because they were tame and stayed in their coop. She didn't have an attack rooster patrolling the yard the way we did out in Jasper Place. The best part of a visit at Granny Mac's was her stories. She had a million tales about how her and her kids made it through the Depression and the War. I was enthralled, I could listen to her for hours.
That year I started going to the "Little Flower School" of St Theresa's Parish down on the flats in the fall. I was almost six. There were no schools open yet near where we lived in Jasper Place so my father enrolled me down there. He worked at Imperial Oil just up on the river bank above. He would drive me in and drop me off when he went to work. I would walk down the steps on 104th street and stay with Granny till it was time to go to school and do the reverse after school on my way back. It was a really neat little school. It had three grade in one room. I went there for one term until a school was built out in JP. My Dad was always mad at how long it took me to get up the steps on 104th street. (Hey, there was neat stuff under those steps that needed investigating!) One day he drove off and left me. I didn't even think about going back down the hill to face my grandmother's anger. I trudged all the way in the dark down Stoney Plain road out to near where Mayfield Common is now, crying all the way.
The next year I came down for the summer was a special treat. My cousin Joey from Hay River was there. Joey was amazing, he knew so much. He was two years older than me. He led me much farther afield than I would have had the nerve to go myself. He took me off to the old victory gardens up above River Road where the IBM Building is now and we stole vegetables and ate carrots out of the ground. He took me uptown and taught me how to shoplift in the department and variety stores up there, he showed me the imported nudist magazines he had got off the boarders with bare naked people in them he had hidden in the old woodshed behind the house. He showed me the house where the witches lived, took me around back to show me that there were long johns hanging on their clothes line, that proved they were witches. I believed every word that came out of his mouth. We only got caught once when a boarder found him trying to teach me how to smoke out behind the cars. It was a very good summer. I guess people call him Buffalo Joe now, but he was more of a Monkey Joe back then, quick, lithe and clever.
Anyways, he was gone next summer, his father wanted him back up north where he could keep an eye on him. Too much monkey business for Granny to handle. Only cousin I ever spent any time with. Last time I saw him he was about ten. His father had flown him down to school. His eyes were shining, that was the best experience he had ever had. He was going to fly airplanes. And he did. (Audio)
The next couple of years were sort of dreary. There were few kids in the neighborhood, mostly old retired people like my grandmother. I couldn't go down to my playground near Renfrew Stadium anymore because some preteen girls had made it their summer headquarters and chased the little kids away. I could go uptown, but I didn't like that as much because I got turned around and lost pretty easy. That left the river bank over across the fifth street bridge. Spent a lot of time over on the river bank. But I was bored and lonely and the altercations with my grandmother had become almost constant. I hated coming back to the house to the now familiar litany of complaints and the dreaded pile of supper dishes to be washed. I began to commit that cardinal of childhood offenses. "Talking back". That damp shroud of depression that I have had to struggle with my entire life was beginning to wrap itself around me. She complained about my attitude to my father and he decided that it was Pat's turn to go down to Grannies. He didn't last too long. He tested the keenness of his new pocket knife on the taut plastic hide of her newly reupholstered dining room chairs and that was it for him. Mike never went down to live, though he did accompany Dad on Saturdays to cultivate Grannies garden. We had moved into the city by now and had kids and activities in our own neighborhoods, a bigger house. Things had changed.
Granny had ambivalent attitudes to her children's spouses. Helen married Mervyn Huston. All anybody ever told me about him was that he was a band leader. I learned much later that Helen eloped with him because Granny would not give her blessing to a marriage with a Protestant. Helen was banished from her mother's household. Strange behavior on Granny Mac's part, because Wilson had been a Protestant who converted to Catholicism to marry her. Imagine my surprise when I found Mervyn's obituary and found out he had practically built the U of A Pharmacy Program. Sure he played, to pay for university. We never met Helen, Mervyn or their two children. Helen died in 1991 and Mervyn in 2002.
My mother didn't fare much better. As far as Granny was concerned, my other grandmother, Granny Case, Grace Lillian Casey, origially High Church Anglican and loyal Orangewoman, was little better than English. And English were the scum of the earth. Mr. McBryan might be Scottish, but Margaret Kenny was Irish to the core. She felt my mother was not nearly as helpful as a young bride could and should be around her mother-in-law's house. For her part, my mother felt Granny treated her like a servant. Margaret Casey was a spirited lass who did not take well to peremptory commands. Granny had hoped Ken would be the son who entered the priesthood. There were times our mother wished that he had.
Alberta's husband Pete Whitton was OK, but Granny suspected he might not be all that reliable. Alberta and him had five or six kids but we never met any of them. They lived out of town out toward Leduc.
Roddy was Grannies pride and joy. He had left Edmonton as a young man to go off to do something in Acklavic up on the Arctic Circle and had returned as far south as the Alberta boarder to Hay River where he was some kind of big shot. This was before he became Mayor. I think Granny was a bit nonplussed that he had married a woman of blended racial heritage. She gamely told everybody, because Bertha Watts was only one eighth not white that was just as good as being all white. Granny just loved the two of Roddy's kids who stayed with her while they went to school. Mary was so helpful and hardworking. Joey was a handful but that was only because he was so smart. Roddy and Bertha had seven children but other than that summer hanging out with Joey, the only time any of us saw them was once when they had to take a kid into Edmonton for medical care they came over to our house. He wore such beautiful beaded moccasins.
Jetta's husband Frank Forran had Grannies enthusiastic approval. He was a successful business man, (haven't found his obit yet, don't know what kind of business). They later divorced. Jetta came to visit us a couple of times, but we never met Frank or their one daughter Sally. Granny approved of Sally too. She was the perfect little girl, always neatly groomed, poised and totally respectful to her elders. I got real tired of hearing what a paragon Sally was!
With John's wife, the dynamic and charismatic Eva Merrick, (think blonde, think bombshell) even the outspoken and opinionated Margaret Kenny may have realized that discretion is sometimes the better part of valor. She never had anything to say about Eva, good or bad. Around me in any case. Eva and my mother became close lifelong friends. We saw lots of Aunt Eva and Uncle John. They had no kids and liked to travel. John was an aerospace engineer. Worked on the hydraulic brakes of the Avro Arrow among other contracts.
After a couple of years in the new house I could take the bus down to see Granny on my own. Our relationship was much more relaxed now that she did not have any responsibility to straighten out Ken's problem child. I suspect she might have forgotten I was a problem. Alzheimer's was beginning to set in. But her memories of those days of a house full of growing children were still fresh and vibrant, and she could still spin a tale like nobodies business. I was still enthralled. I even got a kick out of her endless grouching about the Jealous's, the mild and harmless English couple who lived next door.
The Mystery of Harry
One name kept coming up in her tales that puzzled me for a long time.
Tales of Harry the scamp, Harry the wreaker of household disaster. Harry who had taken a carving knife from the kitchen and climbed up into the attic and viscously stabbed each of the hundred pound sacks of sugar that Granny had prudently stored away before the coming war in expectations of rationing. Harry who had come to a bad end and ended up in jail.
Who the hell was Harry? I knew all her kids names and Harry wasn't one of them. She explained that Harry was a cousin from somewhere. For a long time I thought he was one of the McBryan's living on the coast. It was only recently in talking to John Allan McBryan, lately of Millet, now in Leduc that I found he was John's brother, one of the Peace River McBryan's.
Harry in Korea
Margaret McBryan adopted Harry as a six week old infant when Violet (Clemens) McBryan died shortly after childbirth. Margaret raised him with her own, ten years younger than her youngest John. She had thought he was a little girl who could help her with her housework. Harry had a very hard life, serving in the armed forces, occasionally ending up in jail, escaping once by jumping off a twelve foot high wall. He eventually committed suicide shortly before Christmas 1985. John found out when a letter he had sent to him came back with the word "Deceased" scrawled across the front.
Margaret Kenny's last years were harsh. The last time I saw her I was in my twenties, she couldn't seem to sort me out from my sister. She was very deaf by now and in advanced Alzheimer's. My mother and father wanted to retire to the coast. Dad asked her to consider entering a care facility. She refused to even think of the idea. Dad explained that if he was on the coast there would be no-one to do her grocery shopping for her every Thursday the way he had done for thirty years. She was unconcerned. "My little friend will help me". "My little friend" was my mother who went down to see her every noon hour on her lunch break. Granny didn't know Margaret as Ken's wife and couldn't understand why she would be gone also. Meanwhile, Granny had long since stopped offering board to her lodgers, she didn't have the strength any more. Her boarding house had degenerated to an inner city flophouse. Luckily there wasn't any crack around yet but Mom and Dad still worried about her security. She had one tenant, a young single mother who sometimes helped her out with personal care and housework, but it wasn't enough. Eventually the inevitable happened. She fell in her uninsulated back porch and couldn't get up. No one knows how long she had been lying there before one of her tenants came home and found her. She was rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. She died the next day on April first, 1974. The death certificate noted cause of death as dehydration and starvation.
I'm proud to call this woman my ancestor. Margaret Kenny was never charming, although she could be kind. She was plain spoken and opinionated, full of the prejudices of her time. She had the fortitude to make a hard decision in a hard time. She was willing to fight for her children like a tigress. I am proud of her fighting spirit. This was what divorce was all about in the thirties, forties and fifties. It didn't just break families, it atomized them. It broke the bonds between brothers and sisters and sent all off in separate directions to live among people who need not know that they had been raised by a grass widow. My second son Colin Kenny McBryan is named in memory of her.
Thank God for the sixties.
The children of Wilson and Margaret McBryan
Ken McBryan passed on March 25th 2005
Jetta Forran and John McBryan
Roddy McBryan
Links
Alberta Teachers Association
Alberta Online Encyclopedia
John R. Boyle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Boyle
Edmonton's Story - Chapter 5. War and Depression, 1913-1939
Lambton Block
by Lawrence Herzog
It's Our Heritage | Vol. 20 No. 31 | August 01, 2002
Passion for Life-Mervin Huston
One Man Against the Tide
Hay River’s Red McBryan – former mayor, road builder and community icon – patrols the riverbanks in a face-off against the flood. By Jessa Sinclair
Tomorrow's Wright Brothers - A DC-3 flies the Northern Skies
Tomorrow's Wright Brothers -World’s secondhand fleet still soars
Special Delivery: "The DeHavilland Single Otter," Part Four - September 28, 2007
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