available the town constable — Tom Blain or Jim Marrin or Jimmy Carson — was very conservative about allowing anyone on until it was perfectly safe, though they might be assured, “That ice is strong enough to hold a herd of elephants. When are you going to let us on?”
If everyone would content himself or herself with decorous straight-away skating everything would be satisfactory, but it would require the Arctic Ocean to give safe room for the scooting kids in a game of tag, and a bunch of girls doing a combined figure eight, while some fellow cut a swath the whole width of the pond with his outside edge, or spread-eagle, scissors or smoothing iron; and did you ever see a couple doing the double grapevine who turned out of their course for anyone?
But the most disastrous skating menace was the scorcher with humped shoulders who raced ahead until he met some struggling couple or an earnest exponent of some of the above stunts when there would be a heap of ruins.
Winter, however, was only a minor hindrance to daily employment in the industrial city. Work was no longer necessarily in one’s own neighbourhood and usually required travelling on crowded streetcars, or, if one was more fortunate, a poorly insulated private car. City streets required one’s personal labour to be cleared of snow, while icy hazards had to be avoided by wary pedestrians, such as broken bones from falls. Winter, in short, was increasingly a nuisance and not something to be embraced. Indeed for these early city “pioneers” there was likely less engagement in winter sports then for later generations of city dwellers.
This photo of John Campbell of Parry Sound, circa 1895, recalls an era when winter was king.
Part of this was due to “blue laws” emerging from the Sabbatarian movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. They restricted Sunday activities in many cities so that by 1912 tobogganing was banned in places like Toronto’s High Park on the one day that most people might have the leisure time to enjoy it.
Urban poverty, long working hours, and then two wars and a depression ensured that a return to the glory of winter activity similar to that of the countryside past would have to await more affluent lifestyles of the post–Second World War period.
If anything, city dwellers relied on watching others take part in activities they had once participated in themselves. Professional hockey as a modern commercial entertainment played in indoor hockey palaces was perfectly suited to the needs of these city residents. Cities like Montreal and Toronto differentiated themselves from neighbouring pretenders like Ottawa and Hamilton by building increasingly larger arenas, culminating, in the case of Toronto, in the opening of Maple Leaf Gardens in 1931.
So while in bigger cities like Toronto or Montreal, and particularly the newer ones of Calgary and Edmonton, the countryside remained almost within a reasonable walking distance away, it was a place increasingly removed from most city dwellers’ daily experience.
Alongside this, the expectation of convenience associated with life in the city suggested to many that even a semblance of discomfort, such as that associated with outdoor winter activity, was something to be abandoned as a remnant of the past.
In Toronto, there would be one last winter to remember the season’s pleasures and its challenges before war and urbanization’s other demands consigned to memory this older, almost naive pleasure of the season. It occurred even as the seeds were being planted for winter’s eventual transition to its modern form as a commodity whose pleasure would increasingly be purchased either in the form of hockey equipment from CCM and Eaton’s, or weekend skiing getaways, at first to little hills north of the city, but gradually to more remote and expensive resorts.
A hockey club from Elmvale, Ontario, undated.
For CCM, or the Canada Cycle and Motor Company, winter was its corporate salvation.
Formed in the late nineteenth century as a conglomerate of smaller bicycle-making companies to compete with big American importers, the bottom had almost immediately dropped out of the cycling market. Cleverly, its Canadian managers opted for a year-round strategy of producing and selling bikes and accessories in the summer and skates and hockey equipment in the winter.
The irony in CCM’s case was that as bankruptcy overtook the company by the 1970s, its most valuable commodity was its logo and brand name, which survives today on hockey sweaters and helmets, and no doubt mystifies users as to its origin.
To our contemporary senses the long-ago winter of 1912 was as miserable as could be — so cold that by the end of February, Lake Ontario had frozen over and citizens wandered kilometres out into the lake to catch a glimpse of Rochester. Temperatures fell below -10°C on 56 days, while snowfall at 1.43 metres was nearly double the normal.
Trees and ice on the lake exploded in the cold with a sound like gunfire, the airbrakes of streetcars froze, and natural gas lines were clogged in a solid mass that had to be continually pumped. One simply bundled up against its worst sting and school went on despite the need to wear one’s outdoor clothing in rooms often no more than 18°C.
But the ice sailing in Toronto harbour was brilliant, and the early challenges of artificial ice were forgotten for at least one winter.
If he hadn’t moved west by this time Fred Grant might have joined the festivities, as he recalled his own youth in Barrie:
There used to be some pretty fine sport, too, in ice-boating on the bay, in which Levi Carley and Ike Boon were the most prominent and had the fastest and largest boats. It was fun enough when you were out skating to jump on and have a ride, but far better to hang onto the frame and slide on your skates, and when it came to the boat making a sharp turn, why “crack-the-whip” wasn’t in it with the flip you’d get, and it was entirely your own affair whether you slid away on your skates or on the back of your neck.
Of course, you remember the old slide you had sprinkled and then polished up until it was just about the slipperiest spot in town — and usually right in the path of the greatest pedestrian traffic (and if it had a slant, so much the better, as it was easier to keep going once you got started) and then some old curmudgeon would come along with a can of ashes and spoil the whole shooting-match, with the curt admonition, “What’s the matter with you kids; do you want to break your bloomin’ necks?” And who never paid any attention to your very pertinent rejoinder, “We wasn’t hurtin’ anything; guess they are our own necks, ain’t they?”
Some activities like ice boating eventually did disappear while others like tobogganing became the property only of children. The hardships of the winter of 1912 were quickly forgotten as people got on with life in the big cities of the land.
In a few short years young men would be off to a war from which many would never return, and for survivors those lost years were in many cases made up by finally turning their backs on that residue of memory of seasonal discomfort that their parents, grandparents, and themselves as children had once embraced.
Fred Grant recalled what had been lost:
Those old sleighing parties provided many an evening’s happy enjoyment. Their objective was usually out into the country to some farmer’s home, where part of the evening would be spent in a social dance, or “parlour games” in the case of younger people making up the party, and to “thawing out” before taking the couple of hours return trip.
