catechisms: the very detailed Larger Catechism and the less formidable manual of instruction, the Shorter Catechism (“for such as are of weaker capacity”). Coming as they did from a staunch Presbyterian home, Cairine and her siblings were instructed in the Shorter Catechism, which has 107 questions and answers, the first of which reads: “What is man’s chief end? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Luxury for the Mackay children was therefore tempered not only by a very strict upbringing but also by the teachings of their church. Perhaps because of this, the boys, with the notable exception of the painfully shy and abstemious Edward, earned a reputation for being rather wild in their youth. In fact, one of their chief delights was to down a few drinks and then career around the top of Mount Royal on horseback.
Young Cairine, however, never rebelled overtly against her puritanical upbringing or against the earnest self-denial and self-discipline that Scots Calvinism implies. Nevertheless, all these influences made for a very shy, reserved woman who found it difficult to express emotion and who was seldom demonstrative, even with members of her own family and friends. Those who came to know her well, though, would discover that beneath the reserve was an abundance of warmth and compassion, qualities that perhaps were inherited from her mother and then nurtured by circumstances. Much more obvious were superb organizing skills and her talent for righting misunderstandings with tact and diplomacy. These were developed as early as the age of twelve when her mother began saying, in the event of any domestic difficulty, “Cairine will settle it.”27
For those privileged to live in Montreal’s large ornate houses in the late Victorian period, life had a lot to offer. Still, the early childhood years that Cairine spent at Kildonan were not particularly happy ones. As her mother was frequently ill and Kildonan was a large household, she had a lot of responsibility thrust on her shoulders, including the care of her younger brother, Edward, to whom she was very close before her marriage. Far removed from her daily orbit, because of their age differences, were her older brothers, Angus, George and Hugh. Yet Cairine greatly admired the eldest, Angus, perhaps because he was more widely read than the others and she had developed a taste for books and learning. She had to do most of her admiring from afar, however, because Angus went off to Boston to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and after his graduation, in 1894, settled in North Dakota where he supervised some of his father’s mining interests. George, the second eldest, also left Montreal, to attend MIT briefly and then, after a short stint as a bank clerk in Montreal, to serve in the Boer War. After the conclusion of hostilities, in 1902, he struck out west, and put down roots in Alberta, eventually becoming one of Lethbridge’s best known and most publicspirited citizens. Hugh remained in Montreal, where he graduated in law from McGill University in 1900 and went on to become one of the city’s most prominent corporation lawyers and company directors.
In her early childhood years, Cairine would have seen more of Edward and her three sisters, Euphemia (Effie), Isabel and Anna than her older brothers. For this reason the early deaths of the older sisters, Euphemia and Isabel, were especially poignant. Both succumbed to that great scourge of Victorian times, tuberculosis, Isabel dying in 1894 when she was sixteen, and Effie in 1897 at age twenty-one. Isabel’s illness and subsequent death perhaps accounts, in part at least, for the sad expression that is so evident in an undated photograph of Cairine. Taken when she was around eight or nine years of age, it shows a very solemn youngster clasping a singlestemmed rose as she poses in a white dress. What is most striking is not the dress, the long, gently flowing, dark hair, or the somewhat heavy features, but the eyes. Deep set and widely spaced, they have an inescapable look of sadness.
The Montreal that Cairine came to know between 1890 and 1909, when she married and went to live in Rockland, Ontario, was only a fraction of the city — indeed, only a portion of the district inhabited by English-speaking Montrealers, who, for the most part, lived west of St. Lawrence Boulevard. Geographically it encompassed the area bounded by University Street to the east, Guy Street and Côtedes Neiges to the west, Dorchester Street to the south and Cedar and Pine Avenues to the north. Here, in what would later be labelled “the Square Mile,” flourished an English-speaking society that boasted some of Canada’s wealthiest tycoons, many of them self-made men, who, for the first time in their lives, had money to squander. And, in imitation of the great fur trading barons at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, many of them did.
The streets of the Square Mile were filled with the residences of magnates: Sir Hugh Allan (shipping), Lord Strathcona (CPR), Lord Mount Stephen (CPR), Lord Atholstan (Montreal Star), Sir William Collis Meredith (law and banking), Sir William Van Home (CPR), Sir William Macdonald (tobacco), Greenshields (law, wholesale dry goods and stockbroking), Dawes (brewing), Birks (jewellery), Morgan (department store), Ogilvie (flour), and Molson (brewing), to name but a few.28 But although every street in the Square Mile was considered fashionable (and in actual fact some of the most impressive homes, those belonging to Lords Strathcona and Shaughnessy, were located on Dorchester west of Guy) not one was more fashionable than the mile-length section of Sherbrooke Street that ran between University and Guy.
An elegant residential stretch, rivalled only by Dorchester Street, it abounded in mansions built of handsome limestone obtained from local quarries. The architecture of these varied greatly, some being formal and rather austere like Kildonan, others Scotch baronial like the “grandly artistic house” built by Sir George Drummond at the southeast corner of Sherbrooke and Metcalfe Streets. No matter what its architecture, though, every house invariably had three dining rooms: the main dining room, the children’s, and the servants’ hall. There was also a formal drawing room and a spacious conservatory, often supported by a large greenhouse which grew not only an abundance of flowers, but sometimes fruits, such as nectarines, grapes and peaches.29 Most households had a staff comprising a coachman, groom, chauffeur (after the advent of the automobile), butler, cook, kitchen maid, housemaid, tablemaid and a permanent charwoman. A few establishments had many more than nine servants.
Sherbrooke Street was the aristocratic street of Montreal before commercialization began to make itself felt in the late 1920s. Indeed, this artery of success created such an awesome impression on late Victorian observers that the authors of an article on Montreal in 1882 stated emphatically, “Sherbrooke Street is scarcely surpassed by the Fifth Avenue of New York in the magnificence of its buildings.”30
Four or five blocks east of Kildonan, on Sherbrooke Street, was one of these magnificent edifices, the massive stone residence of Sir William Van Home, a friend and business associate of Cairine’s father. In this impressive, 52-room home could be found one of the largest collections of Japanese porcelain in North America as well as a mammoth art collection, both assembled with the same spirit and energy that this huge Renaissance man had brought to the laying of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s tracks when he was in charge of the railway’s construction.
Across from the Van Home mansion, on the south side of the street, just west of Peel, at number 916, was the “young ladies’ school” where Cairine Mackay obtained her early education, for, unlike children from many other wealthy families, she was not educated by a governess and tutor at home. Known by the delightfully old world name of “Misses Symmers and Smith’s,” it frequently enjoined its pupils — who were always referred to as “young ladies” — to cultivate that most desirable of attributes, the soft, low voice of woman. It also appears that Miss Smith was fond of quoting the verse in Ecclesiastes that reads, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” This, at any rate, was the injunction that above all others made a deep impression on Cairine Mackay because in later life whenever she was tempted to skimp on a job, she would recall these words and then strive to do her best.31
Her final school years, 1899-1902, were spent at Trafalgar Institute, which opened in 1887 in a red sandstone house on Upper Simpson Street, just a short walk from Kildonan. At this most exclusive of ladies’ finishing schools, Cairine Mackay was deeply influenced by the headmistress, Grace Fairley, a remarkable woman, who demonstrated by word and deed her
