no punishment.” Climie’s medium was his newspaper, The Canadian Statesman, which he had assumed from his father, John, a Congregationalist minister. Climie and Cubitt’s disdain for each other, more pronounced by the likelihood of almost daily encounter in this town of a few thousand residents, reflected their backgrounds and public philosophies.
Cubitt was among the early English arrivals in the fledgling town. His father, Woolmer Richard Cubitt MD, a graduate of Edinburgh University in 1823, had been the owner of a large estate, Erpingham, in Norfolk. Formal records show that he married Mary Churchill and had three sons, Richard, Fleetwood and Frederick. Curiously Squair’s history says, “There was also, probably, a son John Churchill . . .” and leaves it at that.3 They came to Darlington Township in 1833 and, just four years later , eighteen year old Frederick had a life changing experience as a volunteer with the Militia force that marched to Toronto to confront the rebel forces of William Lyon MacKenzie. It would forever confirm him as, what Fairbairn called, a Conservative dyed in the wool.4 It began as well a lifetime association with the military which saw him rise to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel of the 45th Battalion.
The Cubitts, however, were more than defenders of the Family Compact which controlled the political affairs and much of the province’s best land. They liked to entertain, they drank and they may even have been somewhat the playboys of the western world. Of the three sons, Doctor Richard was described by Fairbairn as “. . . a great favourite with his acquaintances; he was very sociable and friendly. They kept bachelors’ hall at the mill and I have been told, led a right jolly life.”5
The Climies, on the other hand, were profoundly, though progressively, religious, noted teetotallers and proponents of the temperance movement. John Climie was a leader in the Congregationalist Church with its cultured and progressive mandate. He came to Bowmanville sometime around 1848 to assume the pastorship of the church, established locally at least as early as 1840. He purchased a local newspaper, The Messenger, and in the mid 1850s (sources conflict as to whether it was 1854 or 1855) brought out the first issue of The Canadian Statesman.6 It was a name full of pomp and ceremony but also civic responsibility, signifying that even a small community played a major role in the national territory that only became a country in 1867. Over the past century and a half Bowmanville and The Canadian Statesman have become synonymous. We might say, fairly, that Bowmanville is The Canadian Statesman and it would be hard to imagine the town without the independent-minded journal.
John Climie’s son, William Roaf, was born in Simcoe County in 1839 and thus had no experience of the Upper Canada Rebellion, but he would not escape its impact. Congregationalists were one of the few denominations associated with the insurgents though this was as much due to their espousal of religious tolerance and education reforms as to any actual support. Years later William Climie would say, “William Lyon MacKenzie was an extreme man; had he not taken the stand he did we might still be under the iron heel of the family compact, Who can imagine the condition of society of the present day had these men not been sterling patriots.”7
The Climies were devoted to reform, but on one issue they tolerated no backsliding. Alcohol was a scourge. It was cheap, plentiful and seemingly everywhere. It destroyed families and the culture of violence in the mid 19th century could be laid at its door.
Climie’s own paper, suspect only because of its owner’s point of view, spoke of numerous tragedies. James Borland was shot in the face by his brother, thinking he was a cat committing depredations near the barn.8 In 1868, “A farmer by the name of John Cotter was shot dead at the door of his brother-in-law, a farmer named John Gay, by the discharge of a gun. He had drunk liquor shortly before at the station hotel of the Grand Trunk Railway.”9
And in the same year, “Ladies cannot come home from church on Sunday evenings without being jostled against by low blackguards that congregate at the various corners on King Street. Well dressed, well paid street rowdies are allowed to collect at corners and make use of their vile language before passing ladies without fear of interruption.”10
Vulgar behaviour, however, was not solely the result of excessive drink. It represented an extreme occurrence in a more open society akin perhaps to that of the late 20th century—a world either to be feared or fully joined. In the remaining decades of the 19th century it would gradually be replaced by that of a more closed society of conventions and restrictions on social behaviour, which has become the prevailing image of the Victorian era. We can look at these two protagonists and conclude that Colonel Cubitt was a guardian, though from a life of privilege, of the open world and Mr. Climie, aware of its excesses, a proponent of a more closed and safer world.
As far as William Climie was concerned the fault lay at the feet of “. . . too many public men who fear the enmity of rum lovers and shrink from opposing the curse and cowardly submit to the wishes of the dispensers of the stuff”.11
Significant among those, of course, was Frederick Cubitt, a man not inclined to long-winded diatribes or philosophical musings unless they could assist his political allies. He was foremost a man of action as never better illustrated in his service to Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, on his appearance in town at an election rally in September 1867, two months after the new country’s genesis. Macdonald, a Conservative, wanted to follow his Liberal counterpart, George Brown, and neither man would budge in their desire to speak last.
Train coming into the Grand Trunk Railway Station circa 1910.
The Globe reported that Macdonald’s friend, “Cubitts [sic] rose and attempted to speak against time. The uproar and calls for the premier became so great that Mr. Cubitts was unheard, but so long as the time of the meeting was frittered away Mr. Cubitts purpose and the Premier’s was answered. . . . so when Cubitts became tired of gesticulating, hat in hand he took a hearty laugh at the fun of the affair.”12 In frustration Brown finally took the podium so Macdonald’s purpose was served.
The hearty laugh reveals the real Cubitt. In his youth he played for the renowned Darlington Cricket Club. In the 1840s and 50s this team became the most visible symbol of the area’s evolution from an almost accidental stopping-off point on the way to somewhere else, to an intentional community in which pride of place was celebrated in the fortunes of a sports team. Cubitt’s teammates included T.C. Sutton and St. John Hutcheson, his fellow worshippers at St. John’s Anglican Church—notable for its continuing receipt of an endowment provided by clergy reserve funds a hundred years after the Rebellion fought to end this excess of the Family Compact.13 This team played urban representatives from Cobourg in the east and Toronto in the west, though they shared a similar social background.
Mr. Climie was also a sportsman. He had an interest in baseball, a game connected to America from which also emanated those ideas favouring more liberal forms of representative government, educational opportunity and freedom of religion. Mark Twain said that baseball represented the spirit of the 19th century. But for Climie his respect for the frivolousness of games was tempered by the needs of his society. He attended the Great Reform Convention held in Toronto in 1867 and expressed his philosophy bluntly through his paper.
“A man may be born,” he said, “grow up, pass through life, and die in a place, and yet that place never receives one particle of benefit from his existence. He might as well have never lived. A turnip or a cabbage would exert just as favourable an influence on the public mind as he does. . . . Genuine original men are scarce. . . . One can conceive what a place would be if entirely controlled by such men—a Sleepy Hollow kind of paradise. . . . It is the duty men owe to themselves and their fellow men to encourage a liberal public spirit.”14
So the climate was set for their rivalry and it testifies to the arrival of Bowmanville as a distinct
