Glendenning Days

By Arnold Tweed and Dean Tweed

Glendenning Days is the story of a pioneer family, starting with their departure from the UK early in the 19th century, continuing with their trek across Canadian in search of land and ending with their final assembly as homesteaders in Manitoba. Now the fourth generation, including me, has dispersed again, even further afield. I desc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bellefield Publishing
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781999493066

Arnold Tweed

Arnold Tweed grew up on a farm in southern Manitoba, went to High School in Killarney, and studied science at Brandon College. His early ambition was to return to the farm, but he got side-tracked and graduated with an MD from the University of Manitoba in 1964. Since then his medical career has included general practice, emergency medicine, intensive care and anesthesiology as well as attempts at medical research, teaching and medical administration. Never having abandoned his early love of the carefree country life, he has traveled widely and worked in many countries: Canada, Denmark, Singapore, New Zealand, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Nepal. He claims that a search for adventure was the motivating force, and he has not been disappointed. This set of stories highlights some of the unusual patients and medical surprises he has encountered.

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Glendenning Days

Glendenning Days

The Legacy of the Pioneers

Arnold Tweed, MD

© Arnold Tweed, MD, 2021

All rights reserved. Glendenning Days was self-published by the author, Arnold Tweed, MD, and Bellefield Publishing. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information-storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN 978-1-9994930-2-8

Editor: Carol Dahlstrom

Cover design and illustrations: Dean Tweed

Text designer: Rachelle Painchaud-Nash

All photographs courtesy of the author.

Published in Canada by Bellefield Publishing, Toronto, ON.

www.arnoldtweed.com/bellefield

[e-mail]

This book is dedicated to my parents and grandparents – for letting me grow up on a farm. I am also indebted to the other farm kids of my generation – for the many things we have shared and learned together. We have a common bond that is impossible to wipe away – sticky, foul smelling, and hard to get off your boots perhaps, but it holds us together.

My companion in this adventure was my younger brother, Willard. In the summer of 2020 AD, after this book was written and before it was published, we scattered Willard’s ashes around the Glendenning School site. The school is gone, but the serene and lonely grandeur endures; Saskatoon bushes kneel entreatingly on the hillside offering their overripe clusters of purple fruit – but no one picks them now; the sorrowful voices of children hum softly in the whispering breezes; fond memories play in the hollows that mark the sites of the school and the barn. Soon, with none left to retell the stories, even these ephemeral reminders of days past will fade away. The ashes, the memories, and the earth will become one.

Contents

Introduction 3

Part I: The Pioneers’ Long Trek

Chapter 1: England to Upper Canada 7

Chapter 2: Upper Canada to Canada West 21

Chapter 3: The Northwest Territories 37

Chapter 4: Killarney – the Gathering Place 53

Part II: Following in their Footsteps

Chapter 5: School Days – Enterprise No. 701 63

Chapter 6: School Days – Glendenning No. 552 71

Chapter 7: Early Years on the Farm 85

Chapter 8: Country Medicine 103

Chapter 9: Small Town Saturday Night 113

Chapter 10: Farm Life at the Crossroads 125

Part III: Our Pioneer Legacy

Chapter 11: Indelible Imprints 139

Chapter 12: The Aftermath 157

Acknowledgements 169

Appendix 1: Some Portraits 171

Appendix 2: Background and Inspiration 181

Appendix 3: Supplemental Notes 187

Annotated Reference List 201

CONTENTS

Glendenning Days

The pioneers.

Introduction

Part I of this book, The Pioneers’ Long Trek, traces my family’s migrations from the time they left Europe in the early nineteenth century until I was born in 1939, a journey of roughly a hundred years. I have tried to make this a personal story, a story about real people, not just a list of names, dates, and places. It is based on their lives and times, at least on what I have been able to learn about their lives and times.

My travel guides, listed in Appendix 2 – Sources and Inspiration – include the public record (memoirs and histories; archived newspapers; and parish, census, and land records), bits of oral history, and some scraps of family literature that have survived. Using all these and a modicum of reasonable conjecture, I have tried to retrace their steps, share their expectations, and relive their experiences. What were the hopes or fears that drove them relentlessly westward, an epic journey that led them to Manitoba, where I was born and raised?

Part II, Following in their Footsteps, is my story, the story of my childhood. Imagine life without the internet, without email, cell phones, texting, Facebook. I can, because I grew up in that deprived world. But to us it was not a deprived world; it was full of mystery, excitement, adventure, and the challenges of childhood. Growing up on a farm was a unique experience, shared by only a few generations of kids, most of whom have been too busy to record their stories. In Part II of this book, I attempt to preserve some of the magic of that time before it vanishes.

Part III, Our Pioneer Legacy, is a postscript. In it, I attempt to bridge the gap between the end of Part II and the conception of this book, to show that the pioneer legacy still lives. Some of that legacy is worthy and worn with pride, some has been swept away by the ferocious pace of progress, and some has been misappropriated for purposes that I am sure would not meet the approval of the pioneers. You may differ with my choices, but I believe you will be forced to admit that we still live in their shadow.

Finally, I compare the challenges they faced with those that confront us in the twenty-first century. They struggled with epidemics of communicable disease, social upheaval, and adaptation to new technologies. We face similar threats, only in different guises. Our solutions are different, but their imprint still guides us.

introduction

part I:

The Pioneers’ long trek

Chapter 1:

England to Upper Canada

George Bids Farewell to Alkborough

George Tweed was born in 1811 in the parish of Alkborough, into a family of agricultural labourers (App 3, Note 1). It was an inauspicious event, and his first twenty years are recorded only by a baptismal certificate. No record exists of his schooling, departure for Upper Canada, or any milestones that normally mark the life of an enterprising young man.

Reconstructing the life story of someone who died 160 years ago – who left no will, no letters, no diaries – is a challenge. It is even more difficult when that person was neither famous nor infamous, left no statues adorning town squares, no civic applause or notorious scandals. We are looking at a simple immigrant who tried to forge a better life for himself.

George was my sentinel ancestor, but his life story is documented only by the bare facts of baptism (Church of England), marriage, one census, a few land records, and one notation in a local history. Fortunately, although we start with a blank page for George’s early life, we know something of the family he left behind, and piecing together their story helps us understand why he left.

First, I will try to give him an identity and a voice. Great-grandfather is an awkward way to speak of a man of twenty, especially if the one speaking is an octogenarian, so I will simply refer to him as George. Since George neglected to leave us much evidence of his early life, I will insert myself as his virtual travel companion and biographer. Although I cannot follow his steps in real time, I (or other family members) will revisit some of the places where he lived and worked and try to see them as he might have seen them.

We start in Alkborough, a rustic civic parish in County Lincolnshire, northeastern England, located near the point where the Ouse and Trent rivers embrace to form the Humber Estuary. As we approach Alkborough from the river side, our eyes are drawn to the medieval Anglican church with its square Saxon tower and late Gothic nave, which dominates the skyline above us. This is the church in which George was baptized in 1812 and looks just as imposing now as it did then.

The rest of the village, all two streets of it, is strung along a ridge that slopes down to the Trent, with several small farms bordering a marshy lowland, now partly restored as a wetlands sanctuary, home to thousands of happy, noisy birds.

The tidy houses and well-tended gardens exude an aura of modest rural prosperity, a distinctly modern touch. In the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries, it was marginal farmland that supported a relatively poor agricultural economy, one in which the farm labourers (my family included) were at the bottom of the economic ladder.

During the English manorial period, however, poverty was reserved for the working class. Despite its marginal yields, the economy in the seventeenth century had generated enough wealth to build an estate manor, Walcot Old Hall. The Hall still stands; it is second only to the church in the magnificence of its architecture and oversees the secular life of the parish from its twenty-two acres of parkland in the hamlet of Walcot, a mile south of the village. Now, with a Grade 2 listing as a Georgian country house, it operates as a bed-and-breakfast. My son Douglas stayed there in the summer of 2018 and was charmed by its slightly jaded grandeur, a reminder of its former elegance.

Walcot Hall was built for Thomas Goulton, and the families of Goulton/ Constable had owned most of the surrounding land, in several parishes, for more than 200 years; they were finally forced to sell in 1927 by the vexatious taxation of postwar Labour governments. Thomas Goulton and his successors were in the social class called landed gentry – not nobility but, rather, wealthy landowners whose estate holdings were hereditary and whose income was derived primarily from rental of land. They were reputed to be significant patrons of the village.

The Tweed family, though on a much different social plane, had also lived there for generations. They were not landowners, not landed gentry, not even yeomen (small landowners). They earned their living by working the land as peasant farmers and farm labourers. It was a precarious existence, but they had persevered and raised large families; some had even learned to read and write. At a time when agriculture was labour intensive, they were essential cogs in the wheel of the rural economy.

The social and economic structure of the English countryside was based on the manorial system of land tenure. The lord of the manor held the legal and economic power, owned most of the land (his fief), and collected rents (corvée) from the tenants. Tenants were peasants or tenant farmers who had obligations to provide services, goods, or rent to the owner. But they also had rights dating back to the Magna Carta, which provided them with some security. For instance, they had a hereditary right of tenure, of residence, of use of the cropland (the open-field system), and use of common land (forests).

The open-field system typified the communal nature of the manors. Each manor had two or three large fields (several hundred acres) divided into strips, which were allocated on a rotational basis to peasant farmers. Only a few wealthy peasants (yeomen) could claim outright ownership of land, but communal rights were entrenched in common practice.

The Industrial Revolution swept all that away; by the late eighteenth century, it was clear that communal land use was incompatible with the emerging market economy. The market economy required a product that could be sold at a profit; the open-field style of land use did not produce a marketable product or a profit.

Between 1760 and 1835, the Enclosure Acts completely eradicated the old rural structure and further impoverished the already marginalized agricultural workers. The Enclosure Acts were acts of Parliament that consolidated the commons and open fields, and extinguished the hereditary peasant rights. The new holdings were enclosed by fences or hedgerows, hence the term enclosure. Alkborough was the first in the area to be enclosed in 1768, and most of the new ownership was assumed by Thomas Goulton, lord of the manor. There were, of course, provisions to compensate the tenants, but not enough to provide a living, and most of the village males were forced into servile labour.

Since the main purpose of enclosure was to convert the farms to sheep raising, to serve the woollen mills and produce a cash flow, there were fewer farm jobs. Rural poverty soared to a level that shamed even the landed gentry and parliamentarians, and their solutions were spelled out in the New Poor Laws. The intent of these laws was not to provide relief for the poor but, rather, to put them to work in organized workhouses, and the workhouses shaped the image of rural England for the next 200 years.

While industrialists and landowners grew rich, the working poor slid into deepening poverty. The Old Poor Laws, which dated back to the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, had made parishes responsible for the poor and allowed them to collect a poor-rate tax from property owners to pay poor relief. The rising taxes annoyed the landowners, many of whom believed (or claimed to believe) that this form of poor relief simply gave the able poor an incentive to avoid working. The obvious solution was to replace relief payments with workhouses, which would provide work and the supervision to ensure that the unemployed worked for their keep. But a workhouse was too expensive for a small parish to build and maintain, and in 1834 consolidation of parishes into poor-law unions (the New Poor Law) made workhouses larger, more efficient, and more ubiquitous. By 1850 there were several hundred union workhouses throughout England.

The workhouses served multiple needs. They were the only public domicile for paupers, the aged and infirm, orphans, unwed mothers, and the mentally and physically ill. They were certainly not models of social enlightenment; only the desperate would accept such repugnant conditions. Proponents viewed them as an effective way to discourage idleness; opponents viewed them as the ultimate degradation of human dignity. The commonly quoted workhouse test justified their meanness: Anyone prepared to accept relief in the repellent conditions of the workhouse must be lacking the moral determination to survive outside it (Higginbotham 2020).

The Poor Laws, both old and new, expressed the changing official attitudes toward poverty and especially toward the unemployed poor. The Old Poor Law vested authority in the parishes, and distributions were managed by the vestry, the parish overseers. This practice was based on a Christian view of poverty as sometimes inevitable and the recipient of aid as a victim of circumstances. One could quote the authority of the bible: For the poor ye shall always have with you (Matthew 26:11; Deuteronomy 15:11). The alleviation of poverty was therefore a Christian duty, and no stigma should be attached to being poor.

The New Poor Laws, which were organized around poor-law unions and workhouses, reflected a different view of poverty. Poverty was attributed to the moral failings of the workers rather than because of economic and social conditions. It was self-imposed and best managed by incentives to seek work, not charity. Charity encouraged moral decay; for example, providing comfortable accommodation to unwed mothers only encouraged immorality. As expected, the New Poor Laws were managed not by the parish but by a lay body, the Poor Law Commission.

Several generations of my forebears were early victims of the enclosures and the workhouses (App 3, Note 2). The earliest records that my cousin Lorne and I can verify locate a fourth great-grandfather, James Tweed, in the Frodingham Workhouse (later part of the Glandford Brigg Union) in 1770, just two years after the enclosures were established. He was not alone; his whole family – wife and children – were with him. When the employable parent went to the workhouse, the rest of the family had no choice, they had to go along.

His grandson, John Tweed (my second great-grandfather and father of George) and two of his sons are listed in the 1841 census as agricultural labourers (Ag/Lab). John ended his days miserably in the Glandford Brigg Union Workhouse just ten years later; cause of death was recorded as fistula- in-ano and debility. Fistula-in-ano, untreated, forms peri-anal abscesses – chronic, painful, and disabling. Progressive debility due to chronic infection, malnutrition, and squalor were probably his lot during his last months. His wife, Dinah, had died under similar circumstances two years earlier; cause was listed as inflammatory bowel disease, equally debilitating. Several other Tweeds can also be found in the workhouse records and likely fared no better (personal correspondence from Lorne W. Tweed).

George could have had no illusions about his prospects had he stayed in England. He was the first, driven by either courage or desperation, to make the break. He departed from Alkborough about 1832, bound for Upper Canada, and probably boarded ship in Hull, the third-largest docks in England, favourably located on the north side of the Humber estuary and only a few miles from home.

At the age of twenty and unmarried, the third child (but eldest surviving son at the time) of John and Dinah, George was leaving his entire family behind. As he mounted the gangway of the sailing ship that was to be his transport, he must have experienced a turmoil of emotions. His lingering gaze on the slow and placid Humber, a river he had lived beside all his life, would probably be his last. The family and friends waving from the dock, attempting to hide their tears, and their fears, would not be seen again. Was there a young woman among them unable to stifle her sobs, or mask her despair? If so, her anguish was well founded.

But there were also the expectations of travel, adventure, and new prospects – a new start in a new world. And some things were best left behind – particularly the grim prospects for a labourer, and especially an agricultural labourer, in the English countryside.

I can sense both his anguish and excitement; he and the others of his generation faced gut-wrenching choices. To leave meant cutting all ties with family and community – a decision they surely knew was irreversible – to emigrate to a land about which they knew almost nothing. Their families had lived in the same parish for generations, stretching back to Roman times, and had rarely travelled beyond those parish borders. Yet, on little more than hope and a prayer, they embarked on a no-return journey to another continent.

They had marketable talents to offer – useful trades, skills, willingness to work – but few prospects of employment. The capitalist economy of industrial England valued labour only if it could make a profit for the employer. The market for farm labourers had shrunk, and the rigid class system left them only one option: a marginal existence labouring in the mines or mills. They were redundant – economic refugees.

George was trapped by the fetters of his birth, but his situation would have taught him an important lesson. For those of his station (the working poor), personal qualities alone – strength, skill, determination, energy – would not guarantee a livelihood; it was only the landowners who were economically secure.

Land was the key: it promised both social status and security, and the landed gentry had both. Even a yeoman, who owned only a few acres, could grow his own food, keep his own garden and chickens, and would never starve and never be forced into a workhouse. George could not aspire to be a landed gentry, or even a yeoman, but he understood that land was the ticket to a better life. It was a dream he could never achieve in England. This simple, but deeply intuitive, conclusion was the driving force for the next three generations of the Tweed family.

If George was uneasy when he took those last steps up the gangway, he had good reason; his path forward was fraught with uncertainty. He faced the dangers of a long sea voyage by sailing ship, an unknown welcome on arrival, the challenge of finding work, and the expectations of his family left behind. George left home with few resources except ambition and determination. He would need these and more.

An Uncertain Welcome Awaits George

We have no record of George’s sea voyage to Canada or his welcome on arrival. However, we do have an eloquent account of a similar journey, written by Susanna Moodie, who made the passage in 1832, probably the same year as George. In her book Roughing It in the Bush, she vividly describes emigration from the perspective of an educated and observant British gentlewoman. She and the more numerous steerage passengers on her ship were thrust together only because they shared a common motivation. She unapologetically explains that emigration, in most cases – and ours was no exception to the rule – is a matter of necessity, not of choice. . . . In 1830 Canada became the great land-mark for the rich in hope and poor in purse (1871, 1).

In the absence of any objections from George, I will quote extensively from Susanna Moodie’s account, though she travelled cabin class, and he would certainly have been in steerage. Her transport, the brig The Anne, departed from the Port of Leith in Scotland in June and did not make landfall off Grosse Isle (the quarantine station in Quebec) until 30 August. The nine weeks’ voyage stretched the limits of both their supplies and patience.

The Anne was a small sailing ship; it was not luxurious, but it boasted four cabins and accommodated seventy-two steerage passengers. The Moodies of course occupied one of the cabins, while the steerage passengers were thrust together below decks. Larger ships, three-masted schooners, regularly carried 300 or more steerage passengers, but in steerage, no matter the size of the vessel, all passengers shared the same space, the same air and the hard, wooden benches that served for both sitting and sleeping.

Cabin-class passengers inhabited a privileged world; Susanna and her family were treated as English gentry, minor and of reduced means, perhaps, but still gentry. Their accommodation was private, above deck, and favoured by sea breezes and fresh air, and they were well fed from the ship’s larder – often dining with the captain. But even cabin-class passengers were unable to wash their clothes and bedding until after they had made landfall in Quebec; in those days, personal toilette was not a priority for either passengers or crew.

Steerage passengers, confined to the crowded and fetid common area below decks, were expected to provide their own food and bedding and avoid the upper decks. On The Anne’s long voyage, they were on the verge of starvation and had to be sustained from the ship’s dwindling stores.

Susanna reacted very differently from her fellow travellers in steerage to their first taste of Canada. She was awed by the majestic grandeur of

Quebec City and its surroundings, and her poetic rhapsodies are preserved in her biography. Her steerage companions, mainly peasants escaping from the Emerald Isle, expressed no interest in the scenery but, rather, congregated en masse on Grosse Isle (the quarantine station), singing and dancing boisterously as they did their laundry, celebrating the euphoria of release from two months of virtual imprisonment below decks. This kind of exuberance did not meet with Susanna’s approval; she was shocked by their brazen behaviour. George kept his own counsel; we have no record of his first impressions.

Susanna also had some scathing comments, certainly worth repeating, of the officials who met the incoming ships. She viewed the medical doctors – the quarantine enforcers – as officious and arbitrary in their behaviour and the customs officials as simply extortionists, demanding bribes of liquor and tobacco before they would consider the business of customs clearance (Moodie 1871, 25). Complaints of greed, fraud, and misappropriation have surfaced in many of my sources,