1955, the London Free Press ran a fiftieth anniversary issue, and harking back to school matters in 1905, reprinted an excerpt:
“A new venture in public relations was undertaken in 1905 by Inspector Edwards and the public school staff. This was an elaborate exhibit of work done by the pupils. It was held in the City Hall and was open to the public for a week. At the invitation of the trustees, the Minister of Education was invited as their guest. On Friday, the concluding day, the teachers from Chatham attended in a body. The undertaking proved to be an unqualified success and netted a profit of $235, which was divided among the schools for library books.
The trustees at this time had a very resourceful truant officer in the person of George Weir. His monthly reports to the board indicate that truancy was probably a more serious problem than it is now. Mr. Weir, however, had no intention of being thwarted in the successful performance of his duty by any mere boys. In handling persistent cases he made use of detention rooms in the Children’s Shelter. On one occasion, with the consent of the parents, three unusually troublesome lads got a taste of solitary confinement. Whether Mr. Weir ever taught school is not known. He appears, however, to have been a man who would try anything once, for in one of his reports he tells of Substituting for two weeks for one of the teachers in the school on Colborne Street south, a two room building that for many years had a heavy enrolment of primary children. Undoubtedly Mr. Weir had a busy, if not pleasant, two weeks.”
George Harrison born 1885. The photo was taken 1905 when he was 19 years old, the year prior to his death of typhoid fever in Winnipeg.
Ted’s sister, Ruth had left school with a leaving certificate and had gone to work in the classified advertisement section of the farmers’ Advocate. Harry soon followed and found work as a monotype operator with The London Free Press. He seems to have had considerable skill in draughtsmanship and in composing a picture with a camera. Ruth took every opportunity to see something more of the world than London offered. With her friends from the office she went on overnight trips, sending postcards to her mother from Toronto and Buffalo. She sailed on the Turbinia from Hamilton, round trip $2.39. “This boat belongs to Eaton’s,” she wrote. Paul’s postcard from Buffalo came with the message, “Yesterday we went through coontown and you never saw so many blackberries in your life,” a statement reflecting the racism of the time.
In the summer Harry was transferred to the Winnipeg office as a monotype operator. He took delight in photographing the city and made up some of his best views as postcards, probably with the idea of making a sideline business for himself. The examples show a keen eye for ‘taking a good shot.’ By wintertime his mother was concerned lest he not have enough warm clothing. Early in 1906, she hastened out to Winnipeg with an overcoat for him. He had contracted typhus and, by the time she arrived, he was hospitalized with typhoid fever and died shortly afterward. Sarah was heartbroken. It was said of her that “she never got over her son’s death at the age of eighteen.” Sarah kept the cards and letters she received from church members. One sad note starts, “We hope Mr. Weir is better,” and goes on to discuss church meetings with a strong note of complacent piety, but by the time the letter was delivered Sarah was on her way back to London and Harry was dead.
Ruth was doing very well and had risen to be head stenographer at Canadian Woman, a subsidiary of Farmers’ Advocate and, in her summer vacation of 1906, went west to Oxbow to visit her Aunt Susannah Weir Burnett. In the same summer in the continuing saga of misfortune that seemed to shadow the Weirs, Ted was involved as a catcher in a baseball game and, having discarded his mask, caught a hardball on his forehead. He was knocked unconscious for a short period, probably about half an hour. Later in life he would blame his eye troubles on that game of baseball. The pitcher was a student minister and somehow that seemed to make everything all right in his parents’ eyes.
Sarah’s health deteriorated slowly but steadily. There is a continuing sense of hopelessness in her letters, a few that have survived, a bending to what God has ordained for her with yet an attempt to keep her pride intact. The following year, in 1907, George was ready to take the Council examinations. He had been at a medical school which belonged to a company, Eckels and Moorhouse, with Dr. Hugh McCollum as his mentor. Having studied on a part-time basis and obtained his medical degree at the University of Western Ontario in the first medical convocation, class of 1907, George was then named Medical Officer of Health for the Middlesex Board of Education, London School District. Again their father’s new position did not help the boys get along with their peers. Part of Dr. George Weir’s responsibilities was to vaccinate each student. It is entirely possible that the new M.O.H. was not particularly gentle with the obstreperous.
Ted was now nine years of age, and while life was a little easier financially, George Sutton was still a stern and strict Father in the God fearing manner of the times. Ted joined the work force as a carrier boy delivering the Farmers’ Advocate. Hating the circumstances of the impoverished family, he was determined to work his way out of the situation, a determination that never left him.
George’s brother, James Weir, the newspaper columnist from British Columbia, came through town in the summer of 1907 and, seeing how very keen Ted was to play baseball, took the boy downtown and outfitted him with a mitt, grander than anything Ted had dreamed of possessing, along with a good bat. Ted was ecstatic. However, after James left town, the shop sent George the bill. Perhaps it was James’ way of letting George know he had been hard on his children. “You can imagine what effect this had on my father’s temper,” Ted wrote to a relative years later.
Ruth was learning to get along in the business world. She was twenty-one, popular with a group of friends and, sensing the repressed atmosphere in the family, tried to ameliorate it in various small ways. She mailed cards to Ted and Paul for Easter, knowing how pleased they would be to receive their own mail, even though posted locally from London. By Christmas, the cards were posted from New York City, the message to Paul, a typical older sister admonition, “Don’t eat too much candy.” To Teddie she asked, “What will Santa bring you?” Ted’s answer, written the day after Christmas was that he and Paul “…got rubber boots from Santa and that there had been a Christmas tea party with a great many cousins.”
In early springtime of 1907 Paul had come down with mumps, but Martha and Ted apparently escaped. About the same time of the year, Ruth had noticed an advertisement in the Farmers’ Advocate offering positions to train young ladies as nurses in the Roosevelt Hospital in New York. Ruth left home on September 12, 1907 and, although she faithfully wrote letters to her mother at least once a week, Sarah felt her absence keenly. George’s father, Robert Weir, died the same year. Sarah had cared for him faithfully in his blindness for all the years he had made his home with them.
That Ruth found the regimen at Roosevelt Hospital arduous goes without saying. Sarah kept her many letters and they tell of long hours, the many cases of typhoid fever and her excitement at witnessing a transfusion, “a very rare operation,” she writes. When bats got into her ward, she told her women patients that they were sparrows. The incident apparently went off without panic. From her inquiries about the health of her family, it seems that George’s face had been a concern for some months, apparently a rash. As well, Ruth was disturbed about Sarah’s pain in her head and ears. “If your ears bother you, you should have them looked after. I lost a patient last week from septic meningitis induced by ear trouble.”
Sarah kept the invitation addressed to Dr. and Mrs. G.S. Weir to be present at Ruth’s graduation on Friday May 7, 1908, but either they could not afford the trip or George was reluctant to spend the money. Ruth continued to nurse at Roosevelt Hospital and on December 23, she sent a card to Martha, “How does the medal look?” Martha, now fourteen, had graduated with distinction from public school.
On September 12, 1908 Ruth wrote, “A year ago tonight, I was in Buffalo at this
