successful camouflage of its real power which lay in Montreal among its more significant investors. These included sixteen Québec patrons owning more than one hundred and twenty-five shares as against only five investors in Bowmanville, three from Oshawa and one from Whitby. Nevertheless, the myth of Bowmanville’s supremacy in the new bank continued for many years. Farmers had more confidence in an institution whose directors were visible on local streets. According to Leo Johnson, “So concerned were the shareholders of the Ontario Bank that it appear as a local enterprise, that in the first twenty years of its existence (while its head office was in Bowmanville) it was never admitted in public that the bank was controlled from Montreal. It was always referred to in the local press as Our Bank.”2
This image was powerful enough to imbue the small town with the kind of prestige and glory which could attract and support other business enterprises. Bowmanville had every reason to believe that it was on its way to becoming a major centre in Ontario. After all, it was about the same distance to Toronto as Hamilton was in the west.
What has been described as “the most beautiful commercial building in Bowmanville”, and which no longer exists—the Ontario Bank building—which stood on the north side of King Street, just west of Temperance. This picture dates back to circa 1910.
The Bank continued to grow by supporting new branches in other centres which locally included Whitby, Oshawa, Port Hope, Port Perry and Lindsay, and more distantly but perhaps importantly, Montreal. In 1869 the owners attempted to move the bank’s headquarters to Toronto, a much larger centre with better financial prospects, but the merchants and farmers of Bowmanville and area still held some influence and power. The head office remained in Bowmanville for another five years.
As glorious as this brief history was, it reflected the behind the scenes reality of Bowmanville’s loss of urban fortune to Toronto and its failure to establish a regional prowess. Some minor form, however, was recognized by the beautiful bank building constructed in 1866 which should have remained a community symbol forever. Eventually, the Ontario Bank did relocate to Toronto. In 1882 Alexander Fisher, brother of David who built the house that eventually became the Bowmanville Museum, blew his brains out after realizing that the money he had embezzled for friends and relatives abroad had been discovered. Then, in 1890 Roily Moffat, accountant in the Toronto branch and an investor in the Toronto Baseball Club was found to have directed significant bank dollars to Chicago stocks. He would serve several years in the Kingston Pen and then leave the country.
By 1906 the bank had invested heavily in speculative stocks to restore previous losses, at least partially the result of embezzled dollars. The bank sank deeply into debt, in a manner similar to the contemporary disaster that befell Barings Bank in Britain in the 1990s. Finally, the Ontario Bank collapsed and its assets were assumed by the very institution Simpson had fled, the Bank of Montreal.
Until then folks in Bowmanville might have wondered why so much of their local capital invested in the bank failed to resurface in community initiatives. Now they knew it had always been redirected to the majority interest in Montreal. From now on they could at least be certain that their profits and investment would reside in the Québec city.
John Simpson’s legacy, however, continues to this day. His son, D. Burke Simpson, spent time in a New York sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis, but he survived to become a prominent local lawyer with provincial and national connections. His accomplishments included attendance at a meeting in 1890 at which the Ontario Hockey Association, the precursor for all later hockey organizations, was formed.3 When he died, his law practice was assumed by a young lawyer from Perth, Ontario, W. Ross Strike, who later became chairman of Ontario Hydro. He passed his firm on to his son, Al, who in the 1990s was joined by his own sons.
Notes
1 Much of the information in this chapter is derived from The Belvedere (Quarterly Journal of the Bowmanville Museum) No. 3. (Bowmanville Museum:1990).
2 Leo Johnson, History of the County of Ontario 1615-1875, pp. 248-249.
3 Scott Young, 100 Years of Dropping the Puck: The Story of the OHA. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), p. 14.
Chapter Six
Genuine Original Men are Scarce
“Bowmanville made excellent liquor and its citizens consumed it at alarming rates.”
– Shane Peacock, The Great Farini
“. . . we are nursing a viper in our midst which is stinging our very vitals.”
– The Canadian Statesman, 29 April 1869
Winter was, in many ways, a more pleasant experience in the 19th century. In the absence of snow plows, salting machines and sophisticated central heating, the only response was a grudging acceptance.
Nothing better symbolized this than the sport of curling. Near Vanstone Mill and south of the bridge carrying the Kingston Road, two of Bowmanville’s first curling pads flanked a skating rink. By 1877 a shed protected curlers from the harsher elements of the season, but it had no heating nor could the rinks be protected from January thaws. Still the rink site was covered with six inches of clay and thoroughly padded to ensure that the eventual sheet of ice was firm and lasting.
In January 1869 Colonel Frederick Cubitt and William Roaf Climie were teammates on Bowmanville’s number three rink against Orono.1 As well they partnered for the married men (invariably dubbed the Benedicts in reference to Shakespeare’s confirmed bachelor who is deceived into marriage) in their competition with the town’s single men. In the cold and fraternity of play they shared and, in their way, created the atmosphere for town life and identity. Bowmanville was no longer an anonymous location on the planet, but a defined place which people called home and defended with pride when away.
What made the curlers real people, however, rather than the antique cliches of small town friendship, was the intense rivalry which often exploded into public anger and even hate between messieurs Climie and Cubitt. These two men in many ways symbolize the vitality of Bowmanville life in the last century, when its citizens could believe that they were the centre of the universe and its newspaper could proclaim itself The Canadian Statesman and not earn snickers for pompous overreach.
Who were these two men who could encompass so much of the life of their town and in turn define its meaning for their fellow citizens?
In late November of 1872 an Indian was brought before the magistrate’s court proceeded over by Colonel Cubitt, the Mayor of Bowmanville. By this time the only remnant native population in the area, never large in number, had lost any sense of the independence that the first European arrivals had encountered. The nameless aboriginal brought before Cubitt’s court was a scarred figure found drunk in a public place and fined three dollars. No action was taken against the whiskey salesman “. . . although the law in some places will put an individual six months in a chain gang who sells whiskey to an Indian”.2
Six 19th century Bowmanville mayors.
William Climie, Bowmanville’s original “Statesman” and his successor Moses James.
William Climie was furious and mocked
