Saskatchewan. There she “taught English, History, Science and Art in all collegiate grades and was principal of a 3-room High School and a 5-room Public School.”55 What a killing task! She also won a magazine prize for the “Best CANADA Poem.”56
The following year she moved to Brandon, Manitoba where she taught English at Brandon Collegiate, earning the money she needed to return to Victoria College to take her M.A. Once again, she excelled academically. Upon graduation she was offered a $350 scholarship from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to do post-graduate work there. She evidently declined on financial grounds, because they then wrote back with the offer of another half-scholarship,57 but she was still unable to accept the offer.
It must have been a considerable disappointment to her to have to decline such an honour. Doris Tucker wondered whether it was a matter of finances, noting that “Bryn Mawr was a pretty toney place. She probably couldn’t afford the clothes.” Emily Smith felt that True wouldn’t have liked going to teach in the United States because she was so attached to Canada. Clara Thomas suspects that True recognized the impossibility of a successful academic career for a woman in those days and knew that she should a better chance in business. It also may have been a matter of family obligations. Her father’s eyesight began to fail him in 1925 and he returned to Ontario.58 A later successful operation for cataract, then a very difficult medical procedure, restored his sight and he returned to work for a couple of years in 1938, but until then her parents were living in Toronto and needed her help. True returned to teaching, obtaining a post at Havergal Ladies’ Academy where she taught History until 1926. That year, she began her next career, joining the staff at J.M. Dent and Sons Limited, Publishers, as the first female publishing sales representative in Canada.
2
THE DENT YEARS
1926–1930
“Twenty Years a Warrior, Twenty Years a Chief, and Twenty Years an Elder of the Tribe”
Clara Thomas recalled hearing True use the above quotation in conversation with a young woman who was sitting next to her on a flight back to Toronto from Ottawa. With minor variations in wording, it became True’s favourite way of describing her lifetime of experiences.
True’s decision not to accept the scholarships from Bryn Mawr marked the beginning of her years as a warrior. They were to prove to be years of triumph, hard times, disappointment, inspiration and personal loss.
Although she taught at several periods in her career, had definite opinions about teaching and derived considerable satisfaction from inspiring her students, True never regarded herself as a teacher. Teaching was only a marketable skill that she used when unable to earn a living as a writer.1 Clara Thomas never heard her talk about teaching and noted that “I don’t even know how long she taught...” She continued, however, that she knew “she had been at Dents for awhile.” Doris Tucker similarly remembered little conversation about teaching, but did remember that “She always talked about Dents. She’d talk about her years there so I always felt that that was...a very important part of her working life.” True, herself, later noted that “although my interests did not at first lie in that direction, I have spent most of my life in business,”2 Hired in the summer of 1926 to sell books in the Toronto showroom and to screen all submitted manuscripts and decide which ones should be further reviewed by the firm’s Managing Director, Mr. Henry Button, True rapidly undertook many other responsibilities. By the time she left the company in 1930 she was “responsible for all display advertising, catalogues and circulars, special exhibits, entertainments and stunt publicity... supervision of manufacturing in Canada and much of the correspondence with our London headquarters regarding Canadian manufacturing... check[ing] copyrights, look[ing] up illustrations...considerable editorial work... read [ing] proof of authorized texts and other important books...bookkeeping...supervis[ing] our...record of stock in London, our two Vancouver depositories and our two Toronto depositories, solv[ing] stock and sales discrepancies which hinder the preparation of royalty reports, ...prepa[ring] the annual budget and annual report... act [ing] as office manager, selecting and training new staff, representing the Managing Director on occasion and, most importantly, selling...on the road, working up educational authorizations, from Charlottetown to Victoria.”3
A later interviewer wrote that “in those days, it was possible to publish books at a reasonable cost and have them authorized for certain grades for a certain number of years” and quoted True as saying,
This was big business and I was the first woman to be in it. It involved spending four to eight weeks in a province at a time and becoming acquainted with ministers of education, deputy ministers, and superintendents and principals of normal schools [Teacher Colleges], and people with the power to advise the department of education, the textbook committees. This sort of thing. It was a big job. I was terrified. I was not really a saleswoman. I had lots of confidence in my...teaching, but I had never done anything like this before. At first I used to go back to my hotel room after each visit and try to work my courage up before I’d go out to the next one.4
Terrified she may have been but she didn’t let it stop her. A copy of a letter sent to Mr. Button in 1927 by D. McIntyre, the Superintendent of Winnipeg Schools and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Province of Manitoba, praised her selling abilities.
I congratulate you on having so capable and tactful a representative as Miss Davidson. She made a very excellent impression on the people she met here. She pointed out to me most tactfully that the appearance of the name of your house on the book lists was not as frequent as the merit of your books would justify, a position that I felt could not well be denied.5
Drawing of the Dent office, Aldine House, in Toronto. Courtesy Reeta Wright
J.M. Dent and Sons was a British company, headquartered in London, dealing mainly in classics, encyclopedias, and school texts. The Canadian Branch Office was located in a converted house on Bloor Street in Toronto. True’s secretary from those days, Reeta Wright, remembers it as “a beautiful building...with a beautiful library... and a lovely overgrown back garden with a trellised path surrounded by rose bushes...[it was] the only place I ever worked, right out of Business College, [I] felt very lucky that I had such a lovely place to work.” The house stood somewhat alone “there wasn’t much along Bloor there” on the north side of Bloor Street, “just across the road from McMaster University [now the Royal Conservatory of Music] and the stadium was just at the corner.” The office had a small staff. Mrs. Wright remembers only “the Managing Director and his Secretary, True and me, the caretaker and that’s about all.” She also remembers it as a generally friendly, but not chummy, office. “Mr. Button called her [True] Davey all the time...he called me Tiny Tim...they treated me like family...indeed Mr. Button wrote me a letter advising me when I was getting married...telling me the problems I might face...I said he was talking to me like a father would and he said ‘I feel like that about you.” She said that True didn’t talk about her personal life at all, but neither did she, “it didn’t seem appropriate at the office.” She mainly remembered True being “wrapped up in her business world and her book sales...True and I got along alright. She’d tell me what she wanted and I’d just go and do it....I did as I was told. I guess I was kind of young and green then too...she was just herself and I was just myself...she was just my boss and I got along with her...those were happy years with True.” They didn’t take lunch together. Reeta often ate hers alone in the back garden and she couldn’t “ever recall True eating even.” She did remember True sending her a letter during one of her selling trips out West in which True had said “I bragged about you like a hen with one chick.” She couldn’t recall any of True’s family visiting her at work and certainly no male friends. They did a lot of correspondence
