the Presbyterian College of Montreal, which opened in 1867, and serving for a number of years on its board of managers. While travelling on business in the provinces, he kept “his eyes open to the spiritual state of those with whom he came in contact” and when he detected a need for additional Presbyterian ministers, he arranged for Scottish clergymen to come to this country. All told, he brought out ten to twelve ministers of the Free Church of Scotland at his own expense.13 Following his retirement from business, he became interested in the missionary work of the church and whenever he travelled in Canada or overseas, he made a point of visiting missionaries.14
Joseph Mackay died in 1881, but not before sending a last message to his minister. Asked if he had anything he wanted to convey to this pious gentleman, Joseph pondered and then said, “Just this: ‘Do good as you have opportunity.”15 Two years later Edward died, still a bachelor. By now, however, the flourishing drygoods business had been turned over to the brothers’ three nephews, Hugh, James and Robert, sons of their sister Euphemia and her husband, Angus Mackay, of Lybster, Caithness and nearby Roster.
The youngest of the brothers was Robert, Cairine’s father. Born in Lybster, Caithness, he had followed Hugh and James to Montreal in 1855 when he was only sixteen. Once arrived in Canada, he had demonstrated his Scots faith in education by taking up bookkeeping and commercial studies. In a letter to a friend in Scotland, written in 1858, he noted that he had begun bookkeeping. Then he went on to observe, “for a time at least I intend to follow commercial pursuits and, if successful, I ultimately hope to return to the land of my fathers and settle down in rural life as a quiet useful farmer.”16 But not alone it seems. In the draft of a letter intended for his cherished friend Catherine Macdonald he enlarges upon this dream, voicing sentiments that hint at some of the qualities that helped to shape his remarkable career:
I was also glad, for certain reasons, to hear that some of the folk in Newlands have not yet got married as it permits me to hope, that, should my plans for the future be crowned by a kind Providence with success — should I by honest persevering industry and prudent economy gather enough of this world’s gear to buy me a snug little farm in dear auld Scotia and enable me to settle down in quiet independence with the beloved object of my fond affection, I might win her consent to share it with me.17
Robert never realized his youthful dream to marry his beloved and to settle down in Scotland as “a quiet useful farmer.” But he did fulfill his ambition to succeed in the field of commerce. Shrewd, able and industrious, he personified those traits that enabled the Scots-Canadians of his and his uncles’ generations to become the dominant group in the commercial life of Montreal, indeed of Canada. His climb up the ladder of business success was aided, however, by substantial legacies. Along with his brothers Hugh and James, Robert received an equal share of the residue of his Uncle Edward’s estate. Then, when James died unmarried in 1889, he inherited, along with Hugh, the remainder of James’s estate. Finally, on the death of bachelor Hugh, in 1890, Robert became the sole legatee of that merchant’s estate and the proprietor of all the residue of Edward Mackay’s succession.
Robert could have frittered away his inheritance, but since he possessed a sound business sense and a marked distaste for frivolity, he invested his legacies providently in an impressive range of stocks, bonds and real estate properties. An editorial that appeared in the Lethbridge Herald after the death of his son George illustrates the Senator’s prudence (Robert was elevated to the Senate in 1901) and aptitude for business, two qualities that he passed on to his daughter, Cairine, who would have made an excellent businesswoman had she embarked on a business career.
When the old Senator made a disbursement for the advancement of the business, he was wont to ask George for a memorandum of the requirements, which he would carefully put away, saying, “There should be a record of this for those that come after.”
This methodical manner was an ever-present ideal with the uncles and the fathers in the conduct of their affairs in the important merchandising business that they founded in Montreal and in all their transactions that led to the foundation of a considerable fortune.18
In 1893, twenty-six years after becoming a partner in the family firm, and three years after becoming its head, Robert Mackay retired from the drygoods business to devote more time to managing the enormous Mackay estates and to meeting the demands of his wide assortment of business commitments. These multiplied so rapidly that before his death in 1916 he was a director of sixteen companies, including such illustrious institutions as the Bank of Montreal, the City and District Savings Bank, the Dominion Textile Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway. Given his formidable list of directorships and his active participation in the affairs of such companies as the Bell Telephone Company, which he served as vice-president, it is not surprising that he earned the reputation of being the most sought after man in Canada for directorships. In fact, the Montreal Standard placed him among the twenty-three titans who were preeminent in the Canadian financial firmament in the opening years of this century.19
Hon. Robert Mackay, father of Cairine Wilson.
When one contemplates the daunting number of directorships and company offices Robert Mackay held, one might conclude that he had little time for anything else. But such was not the case. As befitted a leading member of Montreal’s business community, he joined the Board of Trade, becoming president of it in 1900. He was also a member of the Board of Harbour Commissioners, which he served as president from 1896 to 1907. In tribute to his farsighted leadership, a stretch of wharves was named after him as was the tug, “the Robert Mackay.” Decades after his death this squat boat could still be seen plying the waters of Montreal harbour, not far from the Harbour Commissioners building and the richly furnished third-floor boardroom where the Senator and his fellow commissioners met weekly to manage the port and plan its future. Cairine Wilson’s father also played a leading role in preserving the traditions of his native Scotland, serving at one time as president of the local St. Andrew’s Society and as honorary lieutenant colonel of the 5th Regiment, Royal Highlanders of Canada. His abiding love of tradition and history would be inherited by his daughter, Cairine, who, in her adult years, would amass scrapbooks crowded with clippings relating to her family and things Scottish.
When it came to business acumen and moral earnestness, Robert Mackay resembled Joseph and Edward. But unlike his “kindly uncles,” as he once referred to them, and his brothers, Hugh and James, he abandoned celibacy for marriage and the role of paterfamilias. On 10 May 1871, at the home of the bride’s father, in Trois Rivières, Quebec, which in those days was called Three Rivers, he married Jane, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of George and Isabella Baptist.
A self-made lumber baron, George Baptist had begun his career as a sawmill employee in Dorchester County, Quebec in the 1830s. From these humble beginnings he had gone on to become a member of the “brotherhood of the Saint-Maurice barons,” a group of powerful logging entrepreneurs that exploited the enormous timber wealth of the Saint-Maurice region of Quebec. By the time that Robert Mackay became his son-in-law, this transplanted Scot had created an industrial empire that produced between 25 to 30 million feet of lumber each year. He had also succeeded in becoming an outstanding member of Trois-Rivières' growing bourgeoisie. Of his eight children, five were daughters, Jane, or Jeannie, as she signed herself in her letters to her husband, being the youngest. Like Jane, the older girls all married businessmen. Phyllis married James Dean, a Quebec City merchant; the other daughters married local men: Isabella, George Baillie Houliston, a lawyer, banker and broker; Margaret, William Charles Pentland, an accountant; and Helen, Thomas McDougall, a metallurgist.20
Robert, the up-and-coming merchant and financier, was thirty-two when he married Jane Baptist in her family home in Trois Rivifcres. From a Notman photograph taken in 1878, we can see that the young Mrs Mackay was, if not exactly pretty, at least tall and handsome, with a high forehead and fair hair that was parted
