The BHCARA Spring Newsletter's Featured BHC
Augustus Bridle
Adapted from the family story written by Alan Bridle with special permission of Augustus’s Grandson George Augustus Bridle
On 4 March 1868 in the village of Cann near Shaftesbury in the Blackmore Vale of North Dorset, Sarah Ann Bridle, unmarried, living on her own and a month shy of her twentieth birthday, gave birth to a boy, registered as Augustus John Bridewell. It is unclear why Augustus' birth record lists his surname as “Bridewell” – was this Sarah Ann's attempt to conceal her family name from the registrar, or just a loose use of phonetic spelling by the registrar? Other bearers of the Bridle surname were occasionally recorded as “Brydle”, “Bridell” or “Bridewell” in less official documents, so correct spelling of surnames may not have been a priority for everyone who was involved in record keeping at the time.
We do not know who else was present at Augustus Bridle's birth but there is much documentation of who was at his funeral service at 3 pm in Toronto on 23 December 1952. The honorary pallbearers included the renowned composer, conductor and educator Sir Ernest MacMillan; the painter, sculptor and businessman Ivor Rhys Lewis; the painters Fred H. Brigden and Fred S. Haines; G. D. Atkinson, music director and piano and organ teacher at the Ontario Ladies' College in Whitby, Ontario; the cellist Boris Hambourg; the muralist Fred S. Challener; and the journalist/author William R. Plewman. The brief, simple service featured the playing of the slow movement of a violin sonata composed by Dr Healey Willan, performed by Elie Spivak, a former concert master of the Toronto Symphony, with Willan at the piano. The attendance was emblematic of the broad reach of “Gus” Bridle's life in Canada, as was the place where the service was held: the Great Hall of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, which he had helped to found and to energize. It was a long and improbable path from Cann to Toronto, from the infant “Augustus Bridewell” to Augustus Bridle, arts and drama critic for the Toronto Daily Star, organizer of choirs and concerts, “Fellow Member Number One” and the “Father of the Arts and Letters Club”. The identity of Augustus's father remains a mystery, but we know a little about his mother. Sarah Ann Bridle was born on 4 April 1848 in East Orchard, Dorset. Her father Charles was a blacksmith, one of thirteen children of another blacksmith, George, who raised his large family in nearby East Stour. The “Bridle” name, unusual outside the western counties of England, is not unusual at all in Dorset (and George Bridle the blacksmith clearly did his part to make it even less unusual within the Blackmore Vale). Like many English surnames, it derives from a trade: “bridelsmyths” were workers in leather and metal who made bridles for horses. Augustus's name was spelt correctly on the record of his baptism on 26 April 1868. This second record of Augustus' presence on Earth lists Sarah Ann as a “single woman” and shows that he was baptized in Compton Abbas, a village about 3 miles south of Cann.
Augustus would soon be an orphan. His grandfather Charles Bridle died in December 1869 at age 46. On 6 October 1870 his mother Sarah Ann died of consumption at age 22. Just two and a half years into his life Augustus' closest Bridle ancestor was his then-78-year-old great grandfather George Bridle.
Letters written to Augustus in Canada, later in his life, offer glimpses of his plight on his mother's death in 1870. In a letter dated 22 July 1890, Henry Beeson, a Methodist minister in Allendale, Northumberland told him:
“Mr John Coombs of East Stower (now of Newbury House, Gillingham, Dorset) told me in 1870 of a young person being in consumption who was the grandchild of two aged members of his class. I went and found a tall nice looking young person in concern about her soul. Mr C, and I visited her regularly and had the satisfaction of knowing that she found salvation and died in peace. She was very anxious about her little boy and so were her grandparents. The winter being severe they feared they would not survive it.”
In another letter to Augustus dated 22 October 1890 Henry Beeson added:
“I remember your dear mother very distinctly because I visited her for a good many months. She was tall and very nice looking so that no wonder being an orphan and so young she was led astray. She lingered a long time in a very retired cottage and I question if any one ever visited her save Mr Coombs and myself.”
At the 1871 UK census, three-year-old Augustus was living with 79-year-old George Bridle in East Stour Common, along with George's second wife Eliza, then 56, and their 14-year-old son Joseph. I presume the venerable blacksmith and his second wife took Augustus temporarily into their care after Sarah Ann's death but they evidently sought to place him in an orphanage. That was not easy to arrange, according to Mr Beeson's July 1890 letter:
“I first tried Mr Muller's orphanage at Bristol, then Mr Spurgeon's in London but both in vain. The House for Little Boys in Kent would have taken you for 6 shillings per week but I could not pay that. Dr. S.'s House was new and small but I tried it and was encouraged. Then I asked the Guardians of the Poor to grant the cost of an outfit and to take you to London and they agreed. I went across the country invalided and knew no more of you save that one of our richest Methodists, Mr Mewburn , paid for your support.”
The “Dr S.'s House” who accepted Augustus, was the London orphanage founded by Methodist minister Thomas Bowman Stephenson in 1869. Originally known as “The Children's Home”, it later became the “National Children's Home” (and since September 2008 has been called “Action for Children”). Augustus Bridle's placement appears to have occurred in April 1872, about the time when Stephenson's began to house 24 boys and 4 girls at the Wheatsheaf Inn in rural Edgeworth, Lancashire. Before that, the Stephenson's children lived in a former factory of the Victoria Stone Company in Bonner Road, Bethnal Green, London. George the blacksmith died at age 84 in 1876, four years after Augustus went to the orphanage. The Bridle family in Canada has an unfinished three-page memoir by Augustus describing his early life. In it he states that “I went to school in England for about six years until I was ten. They shoved you through there, about ten hours a day. I lived at the school.” Those six years would have been from 1872 to 1878. After that, Augustus's life changed dramatically.
Starting in 1873, Stephenson's orphanage operated a house on eight acres of land in Hamilton, Ontario that had been donated by local citizens as a place to receive and train British orphans who went on to supervised placements with families in the surrounding region (Wentworth County and its neighbors). At that time, orphaned British children were being shipped to the colonies by the hundreds, to earn their keep as farm or other manual laborers, artisans, or domestic servants. The businessman and philanthropist William Eli Sanford, treasurer for Stephenson's Canadian work, himself a former orphan, wrote that such children were the “most desirable immigrants” because they had “no established habits” and “with Canadian training and Canadian life they very rapidly assimilate and become the most reliable class of people.”
10-year-old Augustus left England on 13 July 1878 to cross the Atlantic to Quebec in a group of thirty-six children in steerage class aboard the Dominion Line's Borussia . They arrived in Quebec on 25 July 1878. Augustus took with him to Canada a small metal-clad cedar trunk that is now in the care of his grandchildren at a cottage on Whitefish Lake, near Rosseau, Ontario. Inside the lid of that trunk is a painting of hunting dogs in a brook running through a pasture. As Dorset's Blackmore Vale had been the backdrop for an almost-Dickensian start to Augustus's life, one wonders what memories the trunk-lid painting conjured up for him later in life. It may, however, have been a portent of sorts, as he would ultimately help to found a place where some of the most innovative and best-known painters of Canadian landscapes, the Group of Seven, would meet.
Augustus Bridle's first placement in Ontario was with a Mr Stuart, a shoemaker in Merlin (about 45 miles east of Windsor) where he stayed for about a year and a half. The 1881 census of Canada lists him as a “servant” in the household of an American-born farmer, Richard Smith, in Tilbury East, Kent County. Augustus' nationality is listed as “Scottish” and his age as 15 (he was 13). Two older Smiths, Jacob and Isabella, both aged 49, ran the farm next door, so the two farms may have been worked together as a family effort. The Smith farm has also been described as being near Dealtown (9 miles east of Merlin) and “comprising 100 acres with a large house and barn on it and considerable stock”. Augustus worked for Mr Smith until 1885 but his memoir of the time has only one sentence about the experience. His education appears to have been in abeyance while he was at the farm but that changed in 1886 when the 18-year-old Augustus was inspired by a young lady teacher with whom, the family suspects, he fell in love. He re-entered the school system with enthusiasm and his memoir recounts that in 1887:
“When spring came, I began to get an itch to get my boots and socks off and go barefoot in the fields. I had an idea that the land was the place to be and that some day I would acquire wealth through it, and I liked being out of doors. So in spite of the new things I was learning, I was anxious to go back to the farm.”
The lady teacher persuaded him instead to stay in school and to write exams that qualified him to enter high school in Chatham. He records that the following January he “packed my little trunk and put it on a sleigh and drove to town.” He must have thrived at Chatham Collegiate. “That first morning as I walked along the street to school with my tin pail, I felt all the exultation and sense of adventure I had felt when I left the farm. I said to myself – it's a good thing they've built this new school because I'm coming to it and this is the real opening day. I had my nerve about me alright.”, he wrote. Augustus won the school's gold medal for highest in general proficiency and a silver medal for highest marks at the second class teacher's exam. After the end of the school year in 1888, he attended the Model School where he obtained a Professional Certificate that allowed him to teach on third class qualifications. By 1889 he was teaching in his own school in Blenheim, Ontario and was elected President of the West Kent Teacher's Association. The 1891 census of Canada enumerated him (aged 23) in the household of James and Elizabeth Howell in Brant North, Brantford. Augustus went on to attend the University of Toronto, from which he graduated with a gold medal in classics. Soon after that, he headed to the Canadian west. He lived in Edmonton, Alberta in 1900 and 1901 and there began a career in journalism with articles for the Liberal-leaning Edmonton Bulletin. A letter written to him on 12 January 1915 by W.E.H.Stokes, who was then editor of the Regina Leader-Post, offers a glimpse of his time in the west. Replying to a note, in which Augustus must have told him about his marriage and the birth of his son Paul, Stokes says:
“I was always a great one for keeping green old memories and friendships, and there is no place where one can get to know a man better than on the trail or in the camp, as we did … I often sit back, smoking, and recall the incidents of our ever memorable journey down the old Saskatchewan [river]. Do you remember offering those Indians a drink out of the flat quart bottle of Irish, carefully keeping our scows far enough apart that they could not reach it, and taking a long, gurgling horn ourselves? That was a dirty trick! And our anxiety as we broke into the frying pan eleven eggs we found in a wild duck's nest? And poor old Jim, how he sat down with his tail in the calaboose fire on the scow, and how he streaked it overboard for the tall timber? Then the time when on seeking my couch at nine o'clock one morning at the mission I had to turn five fat Berkshire sows of old Matheson's out of my blankets? As these things come to my mind I often laugh outright, and my wife asks what I'm thinking of, and cannot make out why I'm longing to make the trip again in spite of the wet, the discomfort, the hard work and the semi-starvation. You can't make people understand.…..I feel quite sure of one thing, and that is that no one who saw us on the river would ever have suspected that the microbes of literature were lurking in our systems, and yet I've seen you referred to as one of Canada's best known publicity writers and here I am editing the only truthful journal in the country. To what base uses do we come at last. However, I'm determined to get my little modicum of fun out of life as I go along, although I fear that the future is scarcely likely to hold as much pleasure as the days of Auld Lang Syne.”
The river expedition described by Mr Stokes may have had a journalistic purpose. The George Gwynne Mann Family Fonds at the Saskatchewan Archives Board contains two parts of a series of articles about Augustus Bridle's experiences in Cree country 150 miles east of Edmonton while boating down the North Saskatchewan River with at least one other journalist. Augustus returned to Stratford, Ontario in 1901 (the Edmonton Bulletin noted that he received a “lucrative offer”) and began to write for the Stratford Herald and later the Toronto News. From 1908 to 1916 he was associate editor of the weekly Canadian Courier, then from 1916 to 1920 he was its editor. In 1910 he published his first book, “A Backwoods Christmas”, a homely sketch of how Christmas was observed in Ontario in earlier times. In 1919 he was briefly the editor of Musical Canada, which published from 1907 to 1933. Writing was his source of income throughout his life, but his greatest passion was for music and the arts. He sang for several years in the bass section of the 200-voice Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, founded in 1894 by A.S.Vogt. In his 1963 memoir “What's Past is Prologue”, Vincent Massey, the lawyer, diplomat and patron of the arts who became Canada's eighteenth (and first native born) Governor General in 1952, wrote of Augustus' role in the Arts and Letters Club of which he held the position of Chairman: "I spent many happy and refreshing hours at the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto. It had, and still has vitality and personality ... The presiding genius of the Club for many years was Augustus Bridle, who fully embodied its spirit. One of his greatest contributions was to lose its constitution so that we were not duly concerned with machinery. The constitution did survive in musical form, having been set to plainsong by Healey Willan." After the First World War the Arts and Letters Club became a regular gathering place for members interested in literature, architecture, music, painting, sculpture, photography and the stage. Among those who met there regularly were a group of eight landscape artists seeking a new direction for Canadian art – Tom Thomson, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston, A.Y.Jackson, Lawren Harris and Franklin Carmichael. Thomson drowned under mysterious circumstances in Algonquin Park in 1917 but the others, known as the “Group of Seven”, became the most important Canadian artists of the first decades of the twentieth century.
In September 1910, Augustus made his second voyage across the ocean to England. This time he travelled first class; the exact nature of his trip is unknown. Was this brief return to England a way to over-write memories of crossing on the tiny Borussia with a more pleasing experience? Was it motivated by a wish to see his country of origin, however briefly; or to learn more about his patrons at the orphanage? Or did he simply take in the English arts scene while enjoying a first-class two-week holiday there and back? Ironically, in 1911 cousins of his emigrated to Canada and settled in Hamilton! It is unlikely the relatives knew of each other’s locations, it is left to speculation if the family in Hamilton wondered about their possible connection to the the increasingly well-known Augustus Bridle in Toronto.
On 8 November 1913, aged 45, Augustus married 27-year-old Martha Emily Scroggie, daughter of George Edward Scroggie and Margaret Thompson, in Toronto. Their first son Paul Augustus Bridle was born on 15 October 1914, their second son George Emerson Bridle was born in 1917, and their daughter Margaret Florence Bridle was born on 4 May 1921. In 1916 Augustus published a book “Sons of Canada”, thirty-four biographical sketches of prominent men in Canada; including accounts of Prime Ministers Robert Borden and Wilfrid Laurier, of mounted policeman and soldier Sam Steele and of portrait artist Edmund Wyly Grier (whose own drawing of Augustus Bridle c.1910 is shown in this article) In 1921, Augustus followed “Sons of Canada” with “The Masques of Ottawa”, written under the pseudonym “Domino”.
In 1922 Augustus Bridle began a 30-year association with the Toronto Daily Star as an arts, music, drama and film critic, and book reviewer. He also became an active supporter and promoter of the arts in and around Toronto. Under the auspices of the Star, he organized over a hundred free 'Good Music' concerts (later known as the 'Star Fresh Air Fund' concerts) and several free ' famous music' and carol concerts. He participated in the creation of the Canadian National Exhibition Chorus, a mixed choir of about 2000 members which may have been the largest choir in North America at the time. He may also have been Canada's first radio talk show host. According to John B.Withrow writing in the March/April 1993 edition of the periodical Bravo, the Star opened it’s first radio station in 1922 at the Canadian National Exhibition. Augustus interviewed important visitors to Toronto in this early, if not the first, radio talk show.
In 1924 Augustus published “Hansen”, a novel about the Canadianization of a Norwegian immigrant whose life clearly follows Augustus's own from the mid-1880's until his marriage in 1913. The “Olaf Hansen” of the book works on an Ontario farm, falls in love with a young teacher, acquires an education that includes a degree from the University of Toronto, then has adventures among the Cree on the Saskatchewan River. The book's preface relates that “It contains many characters, all but two or three of whom are taken from life, and some of whom reappear at various intervals over a canvas purposely made large, because Canada itself with nine millions of people and ten parliaments is itself a vast sketch in the picture gallery of nations.” “Hansen” is a vivid kaleidoscope of the dialects and communities of its time. Parts of the narrative may be jarring to ears attuned to modern political correctness, but it is a time capsule of Canada as seen through an enthusiastic immigrant's eyes two turns of century ago. Midway through the book, the fictitious Hansen, whose formal education began in his late teens in rural Ontario just as Augustus Bridle's had, seeks admission to the University of Toronto on the basis of passing his “Class C” certificate exams. He takes his case for admission to the Bursar of the university:
“Having had experience with a Grand Trunk conductor telling him he was on the wrong train, he was much impressed to find the Bursar a rajah of still greater official solemnity. With the meticulous brevity of a timetable he was informed that his First Class 'C' certificate was invalid for matriculant registration. The Bursar seemed to feel that the said certificate with its red seal of the Department of Education, was a very amateur, if not offensive, document.
'But the papers set were identical to those of the Senior Matric., sir, and I got seventy-five percent.'
'With the important difference that one is headed Education Department of Ontario and the other University of Toronto.'
'But that's only a label, isn't it?'
The Bursar gave him a sub-arctic look.
'A label which cancels the pro tanto,' he said. 'In any case, to enter First Year lectures in January is --- officially impossible.'
'But I intend to plug like sin.'
'In what department do you seek registration?'
'Classics and Political Science --- both.'
The Bursar rose like the little cloud that Elijah saw before a big rain.
'Absolutely unprecedented! Abysmally absurd!'
'Then what do you advise me to do?'
'Write off your senior matric, next June.'
'Is there any bar to my writing on First Year, without lectures if I pay my fees for the full term?'
'My dear sir, you may write a check for one million dollars made out to the University and the Bursar thereof may return it to you just as often, if you include postage. So far as this University is concerned, until you have written the senior matriculation examination, you do not personally exist.'
'Cogito ergo sum', murmured Hansen. Thank you. Well, at least I may pursue my studies of the works specified for First Year in those departments, without paying copyright to the University. May I have a copy of the curriculum?'
The Bursar heaved a sigh and gave him a copy.”
Could this tell the story of Augustus's own admission to the University of Toronto, given the reference to that institution in his 1922 “Who's Who” biography?
In 1927 Augustus staged a symbolic pageant "Heart of The World" at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto for an international meeting of the World Federation of Teachers. His article “Who Writes Our Music?” in the 15 December 1929 issue of Maclean's magazine was the first comprehensive survey of contemporary Canadian musical composition. In 1940 Augustus formed the Coliseum Chorus, again with the backing of the Star. The chorus gave its first concert on 29 Aug 1940 at the CNE accompanied by the (Edward Franko) Goldman Band of New York. Later that year the chorus sang at Maple Leaf Gardens with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under Sir Ernest MacMillan. It gave six concerts to raise money for war charities before it disbanded in 1942, due to increasing involvement of Canada in war work.
In a note published in the Star on January 5 1952, Augustus mused on the Christmas season that had just passed:
“One week after Christmas is no time for pessimism about ourselves. One trouble with 10 days after Santa Claus becomes a plain citizen again – we often forget what gave Christmas supreme magic. It'll be worse in 1952, so 10 days after the biggest benevolence-event in history isn't a bit too early to recall the incredible ecstasy of Christmas. In America, we've spent [the] best part of a billion dollars in celebration of the event. We began weeks ago to say: 'Oh, Christmas always costs more this year than last. 1951 may be pink. 1952 will be crimson. Anyway, Toronto never knew quite such a Christmas rush as last year. Most of this was for other folks' children. The very-younglings seem to enjoy Santa so – they don't care how many speed laws he breaks getting down so many millions of chimneys ... let alone the flats that don't even have a stovepipe. Well, Christmas … in any carol's language … is the greatest benevolence-event of all the other-folk celebrations. Something about the Yuletide spirit that's more abysmally significant than what it costs anybody or either the First or the Fourth of July, or the time of shortest days … No, it's the Holy Time when we forget all about what it costs – because we remember the light that dawned in any child's eyes a week before the Santa Claus Parade in November made time seem such a luxury … because every day brought Christmas nearer.”
That Christmas of 1951 was his last. On 19 November 1952 he was struck by a motor vehicle (some reports say a car, others a bus, others a truck) near Bloor and Sherbourne streets in Toronto, and was taken to hospital for treatment. Contemporary accounts say that no bones were broken, but the 84-year-old was in shock. He returned home but died on 21 December. His funeral service was held at the Arts and Letters Club two days later. Augustus is buried in the Park Lawn Cemetery in Toronto. The Arts and Letters Club newsletter of January 1953 reported that:
“The death of Augustus Bridle, 'Gus' or 'Dear old Gus' to so many leaves a gap in the Arts and Letters Club that can never be filled … Gus possessed [a] great driving force and the power of kindling and fanning the flames of enthusiasm in others, causing them to do great things with few tools. Members of the Club who in the early years got busy and grey-washed the walls at Court Street, cleaned the windows and hung up the cheesecloth curtains, carried up the firewood and cleaned their hands under difficulties, and afterwards carried out musical and dramatic efforts with spontaneity and zest, found 'Gus' always in the midst or at the head of things … His interests outside of the Club in Art, Music and Literature were many and the numerous tributes in the press from all classes of writers testify to the inherent sanity of his artistic judgments and the value of his critical advice to generations of workers in the arts.”
Augustus left a lasting legacy through the Arts and Letters Club which continues to this day as an important gathering place for arts professionals and arts lovers in Toronto. Another part of his legacy is his family. Paul Augustus Bridle, Augustus’s first son, was educated at the University of Toronto, receiving his BA in 1937. He then taught briefly at Upper Canada College before joining the Canadian Navy in World War II. Paul Augustus Bridle joined the Canadian diplomatic service and served in several senior capacities in the Canadian High Commission to Newfoundland at the time when Newfoundland became part of Canada. In that role he played a significant part in the negotiations with Joey Smallwood over the detailed terms of Newfoundland's entry into Confederation. Augustus' first sight of land in North America as a 10-year-old aboard the 'Borussia' was probably the coast of Newfoundland (if the children were able to look out at all on those voyages). It adds to the pathos of his tale that if that 10-year old with the little trunk did glimpse the Newfoundland coast on that voyage, how inexplicable it would have seemed to him that his own son might grow up to play an important role in making that very coastline one day part of Canada. That 10-year-old boy was destined to be, in a sense, a latter-day Grandfather of Confederation! "Hansen" is really a story about realizing Canadian aspirations both personally and for a young country. In the transition from Augustus' humble birth to Paul's diplomacy, real life even exceeded the fictional story.
From BHCARA: Of the hundreds of British Home Children stories the BHCARA has researched, written about, reviewed or heard of, Augustus was certainly one of the most, if not the most, accomplished and influential BHC to Canadian history. It is our honour to have been chosen to share his incredible story.
We do not know who else was present at Augustus Bridle's birth but there is much documentation of who was at his funeral service at 3 pm in Toronto on 23 December 1952. The honorary pallbearers included the renowned composer, conductor and educator Sir Ernest MacMillan; the painter, sculptor and businessman Ivor Rhys Lewis; the painters Fred H. Brigden and Fred S. Haines; G. D. Atkinson, music director and piano and organ teacher at the Ontario Ladies' College in Whitby, Ontario; the cellist Boris Hambourg; the muralist Fred S. Challener; and the journalist/author William R. Plewman. The brief, simple service featured the playing of the slow movement of a violin sonata composed by Dr Healey Willan, performed by Elie Spivak, a former concert master of the Toronto Symphony, with Willan at the piano. The attendance was emblematic of the broad reach of “Gus” Bridle's life in Canada, as was the place where the service was held: the Great Hall of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, which he had helped to found and to energize. It was a long and improbable path from Cann to Toronto, from the infant “Augustus Bridewell” to Augustus Bridle, arts and drama critic for the Toronto Daily Star, organizer of choirs and concerts, “Fellow Member Number One” and the “Father of the Arts and Letters Club”. The identity of Augustus's father remains a mystery, but we know a little about his mother. Sarah Ann Bridle was born on 4 April 1848 in East Orchard, Dorset. Her father Charles was a blacksmith, one of thirteen children of another blacksmith, George, who raised his large family in nearby East Stour. The “Bridle” name, unusual outside the western counties of England, is not unusual at all in Dorset (and George Bridle the blacksmith clearly did his part to make it even less unusual within the Blackmore Vale). Like many English surnames, it derives from a trade: “bridelsmyths” were workers in leather and metal who made bridles for horses. Augustus's name was spelt correctly on the record of his baptism on 26 April 1868. This second record of Augustus' presence on Earth lists Sarah Ann as a “single woman” and shows that he was baptized in Compton Abbas, a village about 3 miles south of Cann.
Augustus would soon be an orphan. His grandfather Charles Bridle died in December 1869 at age 46. On 6 October 1870 his mother Sarah Ann died of consumption at age 22. Just two and a half years into his life Augustus' closest Bridle ancestor was his then-78-year-old great grandfather George Bridle.
Letters written to Augustus in Canada, later in his life, offer glimpses of his plight on his mother's death in 1870. In a letter dated 22 July 1890, Henry Beeson, a Methodist minister in Allendale, Northumberland told him:
“Mr John Coombs of East Stower (now of Newbury House, Gillingham, Dorset) told me in 1870 of a young person being in consumption who was the grandchild of two aged members of his class. I went and found a tall nice looking young person in concern about her soul. Mr C, and I visited her regularly and had the satisfaction of knowing that she found salvation and died in peace. She was very anxious about her little boy and so were her grandparents. The winter being severe they feared they would not survive it.”
In another letter to Augustus dated 22 October 1890 Henry Beeson added:
“I remember your dear mother very distinctly because I visited her for a good many months. She was tall and very nice looking so that no wonder being an orphan and so young she was led astray. She lingered a long time in a very retired cottage and I question if any one ever visited her save Mr Coombs and myself.”
At the 1871 UK census, three-year-old Augustus was living with 79-year-old George Bridle in East Stour Common, along with George's second wife Eliza, then 56, and their 14-year-old son Joseph. I presume the venerable blacksmith and his second wife took Augustus temporarily into their care after Sarah Ann's death but they evidently sought to place him in an orphanage. That was not easy to arrange, according to Mr Beeson's July 1890 letter:
“I first tried Mr Muller's orphanage at Bristol, then Mr Spurgeon's in London but both in vain. The House for Little Boys in Kent would have taken you for 6 shillings per week but I could not pay that. Dr. S.'s House was new and small but I tried it and was encouraged. Then I asked the Guardians of the Poor to grant the cost of an outfit and to take you to London and they agreed. I went across the country invalided and knew no more of you save that one of our richest Methodists, Mr Mewburn , paid for your support.”
The “Dr S.'s House” who accepted Augustus, was the London orphanage founded by Methodist minister Thomas Bowman Stephenson in 1869. Originally known as “The Children's Home”, it later became the “National Children's Home” (and since September 2008 has been called “Action for Children”). Augustus Bridle's placement appears to have occurred in April 1872, about the time when Stephenson's began to house 24 boys and 4 girls at the Wheatsheaf Inn in rural Edgeworth, Lancashire. Before that, the Stephenson's children lived in a former factory of the Victoria Stone Company in Bonner Road, Bethnal Green, London. George the blacksmith died at age 84 in 1876, four years after Augustus went to the orphanage. The Bridle family in Canada has an unfinished three-page memoir by Augustus describing his early life. In it he states that “I went to school in England for about six years until I was ten. They shoved you through there, about ten hours a day. I lived at the school.” Those six years would have been from 1872 to 1878. After that, Augustus's life changed dramatically.
Starting in 1873, Stephenson's orphanage operated a house on eight acres of land in Hamilton, Ontario that had been donated by local citizens as a place to receive and train British orphans who went on to supervised placements with families in the surrounding region (Wentworth County and its neighbors). At that time, orphaned British children were being shipped to the colonies by the hundreds, to earn their keep as farm or other manual laborers, artisans, or domestic servants. The businessman and philanthropist William Eli Sanford, treasurer for Stephenson's Canadian work, himself a former orphan, wrote that such children were the “most desirable immigrants” because they had “no established habits” and “with Canadian training and Canadian life they very rapidly assimilate and become the most reliable class of people.”
10-year-old Augustus left England on 13 July 1878 to cross the Atlantic to Quebec in a group of thirty-six children in steerage class aboard the Dominion Line's Borussia . They arrived in Quebec on 25 July 1878. Augustus took with him to Canada a small metal-clad cedar trunk that is now in the care of his grandchildren at a cottage on Whitefish Lake, near Rosseau, Ontario. Inside the lid of that trunk is a painting of hunting dogs in a brook running through a pasture. As Dorset's Blackmore Vale had been the backdrop for an almost-Dickensian start to Augustus's life, one wonders what memories the trunk-lid painting conjured up for him later in life. It may, however, have been a portent of sorts, as he would ultimately help to found a place where some of the most innovative and best-known painters of Canadian landscapes, the Group of Seven, would meet.
Augustus Bridle's first placement in Ontario was with a Mr Stuart, a shoemaker in Merlin (about 45 miles east of Windsor) where he stayed for about a year and a half. The 1881 census of Canada lists him as a “servant” in the household of an American-born farmer, Richard Smith, in Tilbury East, Kent County. Augustus' nationality is listed as “Scottish” and his age as 15 (he was 13). Two older Smiths, Jacob and Isabella, both aged 49, ran the farm next door, so the two farms may have been worked together as a family effort. The Smith farm has also been described as being near Dealtown (9 miles east of Merlin) and “comprising 100 acres with a large house and barn on it and considerable stock”. Augustus worked for Mr Smith until 1885 but his memoir of the time has only one sentence about the experience. His education appears to have been in abeyance while he was at the farm but that changed in 1886 when the 18-year-old Augustus was inspired by a young lady teacher with whom, the family suspects, he fell in love. He re-entered the school system with enthusiasm and his memoir recounts that in 1887:
“When spring came, I began to get an itch to get my boots and socks off and go barefoot in the fields. I had an idea that the land was the place to be and that some day I would acquire wealth through it, and I liked being out of doors. So in spite of the new things I was learning, I was anxious to go back to the farm.”
The lady teacher persuaded him instead to stay in school and to write exams that qualified him to enter high school in Chatham. He records that the following January he “packed my little trunk and put it on a sleigh and drove to town.” He must have thrived at Chatham Collegiate. “That first morning as I walked along the street to school with my tin pail, I felt all the exultation and sense of adventure I had felt when I left the farm. I said to myself – it's a good thing they've built this new school because I'm coming to it and this is the real opening day. I had my nerve about me alright.”, he wrote. Augustus won the school's gold medal for highest in general proficiency and a silver medal for highest marks at the second class teacher's exam. After the end of the school year in 1888, he attended the Model School where he obtained a Professional Certificate that allowed him to teach on third class qualifications. By 1889 he was teaching in his own school in Blenheim, Ontario and was elected President of the West Kent Teacher's Association. The 1891 census of Canada enumerated him (aged 23) in the household of James and Elizabeth Howell in Brant North, Brantford. Augustus went on to attend the University of Toronto, from which he graduated with a gold medal in classics. Soon after that, he headed to the Canadian west. He lived in Edmonton, Alberta in 1900 and 1901 and there began a career in journalism with articles for the Liberal-leaning Edmonton Bulletin. A letter written to him on 12 January 1915 by W.E.H.Stokes, who was then editor of the Regina Leader-Post, offers a glimpse of his time in the west. Replying to a note, in which Augustus must have told him about his marriage and the birth of his son Paul, Stokes says:
“I was always a great one for keeping green old memories and friendships, and there is no place where one can get to know a man better than on the trail or in the camp, as we did … I often sit back, smoking, and recall the incidents of our ever memorable journey down the old Saskatchewan [river]. Do you remember offering those Indians a drink out of the flat quart bottle of Irish, carefully keeping our scows far enough apart that they could not reach it, and taking a long, gurgling horn ourselves? That was a dirty trick! And our anxiety as we broke into the frying pan eleven eggs we found in a wild duck's nest? And poor old Jim, how he sat down with his tail in the calaboose fire on the scow, and how he streaked it overboard for the tall timber? Then the time when on seeking my couch at nine o'clock one morning at the mission I had to turn five fat Berkshire sows of old Matheson's out of my blankets? As these things come to my mind I often laugh outright, and my wife asks what I'm thinking of, and cannot make out why I'm longing to make the trip again in spite of the wet, the discomfort, the hard work and the semi-starvation. You can't make people understand.…..I feel quite sure of one thing, and that is that no one who saw us on the river would ever have suspected that the microbes of literature were lurking in our systems, and yet I've seen you referred to as one of Canada's best known publicity writers and here I am editing the only truthful journal in the country. To what base uses do we come at last. However, I'm determined to get my little modicum of fun out of life as I go along, although I fear that the future is scarcely likely to hold as much pleasure as the days of Auld Lang Syne.”
The river expedition described by Mr Stokes may have had a journalistic purpose. The George Gwynne Mann Family Fonds at the Saskatchewan Archives Board contains two parts of a series of articles about Augustus Bridle's experiences in Cree country 150 miles east of Edmonton while boating down the North Saskatchewan River with at least one other journalist. Augustus returned to Stratford, Ontario in 1901 (the Edmonton Bulletin noted that he received a “lucrative offer”) and began to write for the Stratford Herald and later the Toronto News. From 1908 to 1916 he was associate editor of the weekly Canadian Courier, then from 1916 to 1920 he was its editor. In 1910 he published his first book, “A Backwoods Christmas”, a homely sketch of how Christmas was observed in Ontario in earlier times. In 1919 he was briefly the editor of Musical Canada, which published from 1907 to 1933. Writing was his source of income throughout his life, but his greatest passion was for music and the arts. He sang for several years in the bass section of the 200-voice Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, founded in 1894 by A.S.Vogt. In his 1963 memoir “What's Past is Prologue”, Vincent Massey, the lawyer, diplomat and patron of the arts who became Canada's eighteenth (and first native born) Governor General in 1952, wrote of Augustus' role in the Arts and Letters Club of which he held the position of Chairman: "I spent many happy and refreshing hours at the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto. It had, and still has vitality and personality ... The presiding genius of the Club for many years was Augustus Bridle, who fully embodied its spirit. One of his greatest contributions was to lose its constitution so that we were not duly concerned with machinery. The constitution did survive in musical form, having been set to plainsong by Healey Willan." After the First World War the Arts and Letters Club became a regular gathering place for members interested in literature, architecture, music, painting, sculpture, photography and the stage. Among those who met there regularly were a group of eight landscape artists seeking a new direction for Canadian art – Tom Thomson, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston, A.Y.Jackson, Lawren Harris and Franklin Carmichael. Thomson drowned under mysterious circumstances in Algonquin Park in 1917 but the others, known as the “Group of Seven”, became the most important Canadian artists of the first decades of the twentieth century.
In September 1910, Augustus made his second voyage across the ocean to England. This time he travelled first class; the exact nature of his trip is unknown. Was this brief return to England a way to over-write memories of crossing on the tiny Borussia with a more pleasing experience? Was it motivated by a wish to see his country of origin, however briefly; or to learn more about his patrons at the orphanage? Or did he simply take in the English arts scene while enjoying a first-class two-week holiday there and back? Ironically, in 1911 cousins of his emigrated to Canada and settled in Hamilton! It is unlikely the relatives knew of each other’s locations, it is left to speculation if the family in Hamilton wondered about their possible connection to the the increasingly well-known Augustus Bridle in Toronto.
On 8 November 1913, aged 45, Augustus married 27-year-old Martha Emily Scroggie, daughter of George Edward Scroggie and Margaret Thompson, in Toronto. Their first son Paul Augustus Bridle was born on 15 October 1914, their second son George Emerson Bridle was born in 1917, and their daughter Margaret Florence Bridle was born on 4 May 1921. In 1916 Augustus published a book “Sons of Canada”, thirty-four biographical sketches of prominent men in Canada; including accounts of Prime Ministers Robert Borden and Wilfrid Laurier, of mounted policeman and soldier Sam Steele and of portrait artist Edmund Wyly Grier (whose own drawing of Augustus Bridle c.1910 is shown in this article) In 1921, Augustus followed “Sons of Canada” with “The Masques of Ottawa”, written under the pseudonym “Domino”.
In 1922 Augustus Bridle began a 30-year association with the Toronto Daily Star as an arts, music, drama and film critic, and book reviewer. He also became an active supporter and promoter of the arts in and around Toronto. Under the auspices of the Star, he organized over a hundred free 'Good Music' concerts (later known as the 'Star Fresh Air Fund' concerts) and several free ' famous music' and carol concerts. He participated in the creation of the Canadian National Exhibition Chorus, a mixed choir of about 2000 members which may have been the largest choir in North America at the time. He may also have been Canada's first radio talk show host. According to John B.Withrow writing in the March/April 1993 edition of the periodical Bravo, the Star opened it’s first radio station in 1922 at the Canadian National Exhibition. Augustus interviewed important visitors to Toronto in this early, if not the first, radio talk show.
In 1924 Augustus published “Hansen”, a novel about the Canadianization of a Norwegian immigrant whose life clearly follows Augustus's own from the mid-1880's until his marriage in 1913. The “Olaf Hansen” of the book works on an Ontario farm, falls in love with a young teacher, acquires an education that includes a degree from the University of Toronto, then has adventures among the Cree on the Saskatchewan River. The book's preface relates that “It contains many characters, all but two or three of whom are taken from life, and some of whom reappear at various intervals over a canvas purposely made large, because Canada itself with nine millions of people and ten parliaments is itself a vast sketch in the picture gallery of nations.” “Hansen” is a vivid kaleidoscope of the dialects and communities of its time. Parts of the narrative may be jarring to ears attuned to modern political correctness, but it is a time capsule of Canada as seen through an enthusiastic immigrant's eyes two turns of century ago. Midway through the book, the fictitious Hansen, whose formal education began in his late teens in rural Ontario just as Augustus Bridle's had, seeks admission to the University of Toronto on the basis of passing his “Class C” certificate exams. He takes his case for admission to the Bursar of the university:
“Having had experience with a Grand Trunk conductor telling him he was on the wrong train, he was much impressed to find the Bursar a rajah of still greater official solemnity. With the meticulous brevity of a timetable he was informed that his First Class 'C' certificate was invalid for matriculant registration. The Bursar seemed to feel that the said certificate with its red seal of the Department of Education, was a very amateur, if not offensive, document.
'But the papers set were identical to those of the Senior Matric., sir, and I got seventy-five percent.'
'With the important difference that one is headed Education Department of Ontario and the other University of Toronto.'
'But that's only a label, isn't it?'
The Bursar gave him a sub-arctic look.
'A label which cancels the pro tanto,' he said. 'In any case, to enter First Year lectures in January is --- officially impossible.'
'But I intend to plug like sin.'
'In what department do you seek registration?'
'Classics and Political Science --- both.'
The Bursar rose like the little cloud that Elijah saw before a big rain.
'Absolutely unprecedented! Abysmally absurd!'
'Then what do you advise me to do?'
'Write off your senior matric, next June.'
'Is there any bar to my writing on First Year, without lectures if I pay my fees for the full term?'
'My dear sir, you may write a check for one million dollars made out to the University and the Bursar thereof may return it to you just as often, if you include postage. So far as this University is concerned, until you have written the senior matriculation examination, you do not personally exist.'
'Cogito ergo sum', murmured Hansen. Thank you. Well, at least I may pursue my studies of the works specified for First Year in those departments, without paying copyright to the University. May I have a copy of the curriculum?'
The Bursar heaved a sigh and gave him a copy.”
Could this tell the story of Augustus's own admission to the University of Toronto, given the reference to that institution in his 1922 “Who's Who” biography?
In 1927 Augustus staged a symbolic pageant "Heart of The World" at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto for an international meeting of the World Federation of Teachers. His article “Who Writes Our Music?” in the 15 December 1929 issue of Maclean's magazine was the first comprehensive survey of contemporary Canadian musical composition. In 1940 Augustus formed the Coliseum Chorus, again with the backing of the Star. The chorus gave its first concert on 29 Aug 1940 at the CNE accompanied by the (Edward Franko) Goldman Band of New York. Later that year the chorus sang at Maple Leaf Gardens with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under Sir Ernest MacMillan. It gave six concerts to raise money for war charities before it disbanded in 1942, due to increasing involvement of Canada in war work.
In a note published in the Star on January 5 1952, Augustus mused on the Christmas season that had just passed:
“One week after Christmas is no time for pessimism about ourselves. One trouble with 10 days after Santa Claus becomes a plain citizen again – we often forget what gave Christmas supreme magic. It'll be worse in 1952, so 10 days after the biggest benevolence-event in history isn't a bit too early to recall the incredible ecstasy of Christmas. In America, we've spent [the] best part of a billion dollars in celebration of the event. We began weeks ago to say: 'Oh, Christmas always costs more this year than last. 1951 may be pink. 1952 will be crimson. Anyway, Toronto never knew quite such a Christmas rush as last year. Most of this was for other folks' children. The very-younglings seem to enjoy Santa so – they don't care how many speed laws he breaks getting down so many millions of chimneys ... let alone the flats that don't even have a stovepipe. Well, Christmas … in any carol's language … is the greatest benevolence-event of all the other-folk celebrations. Something about the Yuletide spirit that's more abysmally significant than what it costs anybody or either the First or the Fourth of July, or the time of shortest days … No, it's the Holy Time when we forget all about what it costs – because we remember the light that dawned in any child's eyes a week before the Santa Claus Parade in November made time seem such a luxury … because every day brought Christmas nearer.”
That Christmas of 1951 was his last. On 19 November 1952 he was struck by a motor vehicle (some reports say a car, others a bus, others a truck) near Bloor and Sherbourne streets in Toronto, and was taken to hospital for treatment. Contemporary accounts say that no bones were broken, but the 84-year-old was in shock. He returned home but died on 21 December. His funeral service was held at the Arts and Letters Club two days later. Augustus is buried in the Park Lawn Cemetery in Toronto. The Arts and Letters Club newsletter of January 1953 reported that:
“The death of Augustus Bridle, 'Gus' or 'Dear old Gus' to so many leaves a gap in the Arts and Letters Club that can never be filled … Gus possessed [a] great driving force and the power of kindling and fanning the flames of enthusiasm in others, causing them to do great things with few tools. Members of the Club who in the early years got busy and grey-washed the walls at Court Street, cleaned the windows and hung up the cheesecloth curtains, carried up the firewood and cleaned their hands under difficulties, and afterwards carried out musical and dramatic efforts with spontaneity and zest, found 'Gus' always in the midst or at the head of things … His interests outside of the Club in Art, Music and Literature were many and the numerous tributes in the press from all classes of writers testify to the inherent sanity of his artistic judgments and the value of his critical advice to generations of workers in the arts.”
Augustus left a lasting legacy through the Arts and Letters Club which continues to this day as an important gathering place for arts professionals and arts lovers in Toronto. Another part of his legacy is his family. Paul Augustus Bridle, Augustus’s first son, was educated at the University of Toronto, receiving his BA in 1937. He then taught briefly at Upper Canada College before joining the Canadian Navy in World War II. Paul Augustus Bridle joined the Canadian diplomatic service and served in several senior capacities in the Canadian High Commission to Newfoundland at the time when Newfoundland became part of Canada. In that role he played a significant part in the negotiations with Joey Smallwood over the detailed terms of Newfoundland's entry into Confederation. Augustus' first sight of land in North America as a 10-year-old aboard the 'Borussia' was probably the coast of Newfoundland (if the children were able to look out at all on those voyages). It adds to the pathos of his tale that if that 10-year old with the little trunk did glimpse the Newfoundland coast on that voyage, how inexplicable it would have seemed to him that his own son might grow up to play an important role in making that very coastline one day part of Canada. That 10-year-old boy was destined to be, in a sense, a latter-day Grandfather of Confederation! "Hansen" is really a story about realizing Canadian aspirations both personally and for a young country. In the transition from Augustus' humble birth to Paul's diplomacy, real life even exceeded the fictional story.
From BHCARA: Of the hundreds of British Home Children stories the BHCARA has researched, written about, reviewed or heard of, Augustus was certainly one of the most, if not the most, accomplished and influential BHC to Canadian history. It is our honour to have been chosen to share his incredible story.
