In one man’s lifetime

My father was born on Jan. 13, 1876, in the 39th year of the reign of Queen Victoria, 15 years after the death of the royal consort, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.

Prior to the 19th century, windmills and waterwheels provided power for industry in Britain and canals and a network of coach roads formed the horse-powered transportation system.

Whale oil lamps were still in use and the poor had tallow candles while the well-to-do, including the royal household, had superior candles made from beeswax. Wood was the principal source of heat. Then came the Victorian Age, a time of accelerating technological change fuelled by the energy of coal. Railways began to spread across Britain, transporting goods and passenger in trains hauled by coal-fired steam locomotives.

Long distance messaging was optical, using smoke signals and semaphores, until audible telegraphy came into use in 1837, the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1859 what was then the largest passenger ship in the world, S.S. Great Eastern, was launched at the Isle of Dogs along the Thames River. It was an iron steamship powered by engines driving side-wheel paddles and a screw propeller and had masts for sails. When its employment as a passenger ship proved unprofitable, it was converted to a cable ship. The first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866, 10 years before my father was born.

The telephone, voice transmission by wire, was invented one year before my father’s birth and the phonograph when he was one year old. For most of the 19th century processions of colliers travelled in coastal water bringing coal from Yorkshire mines to London. Coal was not only used for heating, it was processed to produce both illuminating gas and coke for blast furnaces.

By 1890, gas from coal provided light for streets and buildings in most cities in Britain. The supremacy of illuminating gas was then challenged by electricity and the incandescent lamp bulb.

When my father was still in England, he was familiar with a polluted Thames River and the poisonous fogs that stained the city of London. When he was nine years old, he could read newspaper accounts of the North West Rebellion in Canada. He was 24 when he began to read about the Second Boer War (1899-1902).

When he sailed to Canada in 1905, the British Empire was at the peak of its wealth and power and King Edward VII was on the throne. The year after he left the land of his birth, the Royal Navy took possession of HMS Dreadnaught, the first turbine-driven, all big gun battleship. This ship started an arms race. Almost every maritime state that could afford to build their own big gun battleships entered the completion.

To protect the big ships from steam-powered torpedo boats, a new class of ships called destroyers was developed. My father would have read about these vessels in the newspapers. He would also have read about the development of submarines designed to go to war and about the first successful airline called Delag that began operations in Germany in 1909. The airline used dirigibles in which lift was provided by hydrogen-filled gasbags with a rigid skeleton of metal. In the First World War these machines were used for destruction as were airplanes, which were born as the Wright brothers’ primitive Flyer in 1903.

My father filed on a homestead on July 7, 1905 near Humboldt in the District of Assiniboia, which was swallowed by the new province of Saskatchewan on Sept. 1 of that same year. The threshing machines, binders, and steam-powered tractors he saw in Canada were all invented during his lifetime. So were automobiles with internal combustion engines and the assembly lines which built them. For a time, he owned a Model T Ford.

He was in the one-year-old settlement of Vonda in 1908. There, he filed on another homestead and encountered the people known as Galicians. For five years, his partner in a general store was a widow of Polish extraction. He was in England when war clouds gathered. He sailed back to Canada in August of 1914, as the first shots of the Great War were fired. He learned about the new instruments of war from newspapers – tanks, poison gas aircraft.

In 1918 he was in Saskatoon, working in what was then called a “motor livery” and learning to be an automobile mechanic. In 1920, he was in the new Canadian Northern Railway divisional point that became Eatonia , where he remained for the rest of his life. He learned of the larger world from newspapers – The Toronto Star, The Saskatoon StarPhoenix and the now defunct Free Press, Prairie Farmer and the Family Herald.

 Late in the Second World War, he had a second-hand radio and followed the accounts of the war correspondents. He cried when the bells of London rang again and was horrified when atomic bombs ended the war with Japan. In 1955, he heard of the building of nuclear power plants. Then he died. He was tardy in his acceptance of gramophone and radio and he never had a telephone. The pace of change overwhelmed him.