William Henry Raised on Father's Farm

John and Elizabeth Cudmore had seven children. Everard John, William Henry, George James, Amelia Louise, John Albert, Charles Thomas, and Ernest Albert. The second of these, my father, William Henry, was born in 1867 and raised on his father's farm. It is said that as a young boy he helped to build the big house, hauling limestone blocks from the quarry by horse and stone-boat, and also helped at the pottery. He later attended business college in Toronto. He met my mother, Rebecca Elizabeth Clary, when she was teaching at nearby Todmorden.

About Bess and her Family

Bess, as Dad always called her, was born in Thornhill in 1870, daughter of James and Margaret Clary. James was an Irish Catholic labourer from County Tiperary, Ireland, and Margaret a dour Presbyterian from Paisley, Scotland. She was the former Margaret Haig, hence the claim that we distant cousins of Field Marshall Haig of World War I fame. Grandmother had a sister, Eliza Haig, the legendary Aunt 'Liza, a seamstress. From her our mother inherited the apparently bottomless Aunt 'Liza's Chest full of material and accessories. For years, when any of us needed a dress or costume, the cry went up, let's look in Aunt 'Liza's chest, and usually it yielded something which Mother's clever fingers made into a presentable outfit. Ready-made clothes or even new material were relatively scarce in those days. Our mother had one brother, John Clary. The parents had a marriage agreement that sons were to be raised as Catholics and daughters as Protestants; thus our mother was raised strict Presbyterian and her brother Roman Catholic. But the father's religion was not so strong; as the mother's, and besides, he had a tendency to drink a little too much and mistreat the boy when "in his cups", and father and son did not get along very well. So John abandoned the Catholic faith and took his mother's as soon as he came of age. Due largely, I suspect, to the determination of the mother, who for some time took in boarders, both children received good educations, John to be a lawyer and Bess a teacher. John was an interesting, flamboyant character, who became a K C, in Sudbury, On his visits to us while at Osgoode Hall with mine claim cases and the like, he had many colourful tales to tell us of his experiences in the lively north country. He smoked a pipe, but mostly matches, as he couldn't stop talking long enough to keep the tobacco lit. I was enthralled by him and had a great yen to be a lawyer. On, his death at age 73 his career was written up in the Toronto papers. He had taught school for a number of years before being called to the bar in 1897 and starting practice in Sudbury in 1898. By 1907 he was one of the leading lawyers in the Nickel Belt country and when the judicial district of Sudbury was formed in that year he was appointed its first Crown Attorney. He resigned that position in 1912 when his private practice became too onerous, He and his wife, the former Florence Orr of Cooksville, Quebec, had two sons. They were Leslie, who attended Queen's Medical School with my brother Bill and later became a quite successful ear nose and throat specialist in New York; and Harold, a railway employee in Sudbury, in his earlier years at any rate.

Clary Grandparents

Grandfather and Grandmother Clary moved to Bronte in later life, to the "cottage", a small house adjacent to our farm just within the limits of the village of Bronte. I think I was told that Dad and Mother had it built so that Mother could have her parents near in their old age. At any rate, Dad must have owned it at some time, because I understand it was on the basis of this that he was able to vote in Bronte and to hold office on the village council. They must have died in about 1912 or 1913, grandfather by drowning in the Bronte Creek, as I was to young to have any recollection of them, a fact which made Mother feel sad, as they were so good to me. Evelyn is said to have disgraced herself by having hysterics and giggling at Grandfather's funeral. Will and Bess, my parents, were married on February 4, 1890. They moved to a farm in Trafalgar Township a little north west of the tiny village of Palermo, from where Mother sometimes made the gruelling trip by horse and buggy to visit her parents in Thornhill. Though Dad's background was Baptist and Mother's Presbyterian, they joined the Methodist church, as that was what was available. Their close association with the church there and later in the Bronte Methodist Church, and still later the Walton Memorial United Church, was to set the pattern for a dominant factor in our lives, for all of us spent many hours involved in the Church and its various activities. It is appropriate that one of my very earliest recollections is of being taken to a big evening gathering in the new church - the one now in use - for its dedication in January 1914, when I was just four. In May 1899 our parents moved with four of their children to the farm on the shore of Lake Ontario, touching on the western boundary of the village of Bronte and the Bronte Cemetery.

Bronte Cudmores are Established

It is here that they spent the rest of their lives, and from this that they became distinguished from other branches of the Cudmore family as the Bronte Cudmores. The white board-and-batten farm house fronted on the lake, with a lawn bordered by a row of majestic maple trees, a dirt road (the old Lakeshore road), and a steep, high bank-between it and our beloved Lake Ontario. It is this proximity to the Lake that accounts for the passion for water, boats and swimming that seems to be a large part of the family character. I think Mother was always afraid of the lake, and taught us a healthy respect for common sense safety rules. We had a much-loved rowboat which gave us many hours of pleasure. I remember once when I was very young having the thrill of being rowed far out to where the steamships travelled between Hamilton and Toronto. Just west of our house, the road dipped down to a tiny creek called Crabbe's Creek because it flowed through the property of Samuel Crabbe, who owned the farm adjacent to ours. It made a great natural rink, and that is where I learned to skate, and the little hill was good for sleigh riding. Perhaps more importantly, the spring run provided, and still does, the sport of sucker-fishing and great heaps of fish. It was on this farm, purchased from Mr. Crabbe, that the celebrated Mazo de la Roche (actually Mazel Roche) lived for a few years with her uncle and aunt, I don't remember her, but the older ones liked to tell the story of the time a goat butted her over the fence, damaging her dignity and various other parts. All I remember is that her uncle, W .R. Roche, was very corpulent and I have a fleeting mind's-eye view of his huge belly protruding from the water as he floated in the lake for hours at a time. We called him W, R, Boat, According to an interview with Mike in the Roche biography, Mike said he floated with a book open on his belly and we called him W. R, Book, I remember Boat. Take your pick!

Similar Families

This farm, together with ours to the east and the huge Osler estate and residence to the west, was the setting for her early novel, POSSESSION, published in 1923 and, of course, required reading for Cudmores. There can be little doubt that the Chard family of the novel is modelled on ours. Here is a sample from page 22:

"I an your next-door neighbour", he said, '"H. P. Chard... I'm pleased to welcome you to the neighbourhood..." "I don't know what church you belong to, but we all go together to the Methodist church at Mistwell (Likely Bronte, and we surely did!). "Are those your boys?"

"Yes, I've four boys and four girls. And they all look alike." (He did, and we did)

Derek, (Derek Vale, protagonist of the novel) observing the dingy towheads of the youngsters, and their broad, pasty faces, of which the nostrils seemed the only noticeable feature, thought it a pity." This unflattering, almost hostile, attitude seems to permeate the book, maybe induced by the unfortunate before-mentioned episode with the goat, and possibly other unhappy encounters. Older members of the family seemed to feel that the Roches tended to put on airs and look down their noses at us as the local yokels. Dad was depicted as a shrewd, hard-driving, rather mean-spirited man - an assessment far from the truth - and Mother as his "fat wife". Mother was never fat or big-bosomed as pictured.

The picture of the annual summer residence of Indian families living in shacks on the farms for berry-picking is quite truly drawn. This custom stopped before I was old enough to recall much of it. But I dimly remember that my earliest playmate was a little Indian girl, also called Marjorie, and that our family was in a constant state of frustration, because the first and best of the fruit and vegetables had a way of vanishing during the night, to appear on the Indians' tables rather than ours. Later, the Indians were replaced as pickers by villagers, among them a black woman, Mrs. Johnson, who often equalled the record of four hundred quarts of strawberries a day mentioned in the novel. In fact, I think my sister Amy did too. She was a whiz!

The death of the Indian chief and his funeral was a major episode in the book. The family version of the same episode is that the old chief, knowing he had not long to live, and determined to see his daughter one more time, walked to our place from the Brantford Reserve, and on seeing his daughter, collapsed and died. He was buried in the adjacent cemetery, or graveyard as it was called then. The Gates Ajar, a floral arrangement, made by Mrs. Chard was actually a black skirt Mother made for the daughter on the morning of the funeral, I don't remember any of this, but I do recall the annual Christmas parties given by Major Osler (Mr. Jerrold in the novel) for the natives of the village and the surrounding area.

This seems a good point at which to describe the present face of the properties which made the setting for POSSESSION. The Crabbe farm, the one on which the Roche family - and Derek Vale of the novel - lived has been occupied for several years by the Craddock family. They are still living in the house, and have altered the course of the little creek to make more extensive lawns. It now enters the lake a little farther west, but one of the cement abutments of the former little bridge is still there, jutting out into the lake. The big oil refineries and Shell Park and the Loading dock now cover the former Osler - Jerrold of the novel - Estate. The Cudmore - Chard of the novel - home was torn down in the summer of 1981, and the property, occupied in recent years by a nursery, is in the process of being made into a prestigious residential development with homes in the three hundred thousand dollar price bracket. The former Cudmore farm lane is now Cudmore Road and the new street through the development is Sandy Lane. The pier from which we used to fish and dive is gone, except for a few of the stones, and is replaced by a new one a short distance east, along with other structures for shorline protection both east and west. The old dirt Lakeshore Road is long since gone and some years ago the village of Bronte - Mistwell in the novel - was absorbed into the town of Oakville, which now meets the town of Burlington at the Trafalger-Nelson Town Line, just west of the refineries. The Oakville council has crested a parkland along the lakefront, and the old steep bank has given way to a gentle slope, terraced down to the water.

Rebecca is Energetic

We can now return to the mainstream of my story of my parents. Dad and Mother were both strongly civic-minded. Dad was an Elder in the United Church, a member of the Bronte Village Council, secretary of the local School Board. He was a fanatical worker in the Liberal party, except for one aberration, when he worked and voted for E. C, Drury of the U. F. O. (United Farmers of Ontario). The list of services Mother performed for the church and community is staggering, She was president of the Ladies' Aid, as the United Church Women was then called, for thirty-five years, and I think president of the Women's Missionary Society for a number of years. She also taught the Young Ladies' Sunday School class for a number of years. She was an active member of the Women's Institute in both her Palermo and Bronte years. An outstanding contribution to the field of education was as organizer and president for many years of the Bronte Home and School Club. In fact, the Bronte club was the first rural one founded, as Mother was a member of the Provincial executive and official organizer, associated with Mrs. R. S. McLaughlin of Oshawa when the latter was Provincial president. In this connection, Mother also drew up the constitution for the first county musical festivals, which were sponsored by the Home and School Clubs, and was responsible for the institution of hot lunches and the serving of milk in the schools.

World War I soon had her working tirelessly for the Red Cross, in various fund-raising activities as well as making two pairs of grey flanelette pajamas a week. My first knitting was on the five-stitches-wide cotton draw-strings for these. Guess who organized-the first Bronte Public Library, in the basement of the then new school on Triller Street, and was its librarian for a number of years, seven to nine on Saturday evenings, for an honorarium of ten dollars a year. I helped with this on many occasions and witnessed the joy it brought to many local residents. Small wonder that when someone was

needed to unite the whole community into the effort of putting on the day-long Field days and baseball tournaments which were frequent in those days, only Mrs, Cudmore could do the job.

It is hard to believe that all of this activity was just a sideline in the real mission of her - life, to be wife, mother and homemaker. In addition to cooking for husband, hired hands and huge family and nursing most of us through serious illnesses, she sewed, usually far into the night, making most of the clothes for the whole family, including the boys, and a professional looking job she made of it, we could be as noisy as we liked, except when she was cutting out a garment, a job that required expert engineering, for she said if she had a piece left larger than the palm of her hand, she had been extravagant and bought too much material. Most of her patterns she made herself, cut out of newspaper. I could make a sketch of an expensive dress in Eaton's and she could copy it! I remember especially my lovely graduation dress and Grads' Ball gown which were developed this way. I recall also several times when Amy and I were being sewn into our new dresses while our swains waited impatiently downstairs, to take us to a dance.

Animals, Yes... Barns, No!

As a farm wife, Mother worked many hours outside the house, usually in the berry patches as overseer. But she adamantly drew the line at working in the barn. She never milked a cow, contrary to the custom of the day. I don't think she was fond of animals, though she did tolerate puppies and kittens in the house for us to play with, and sometimes even to be taken to bed with us, to be collected after we were asleep. Somewhere there is a charming picture of Dad on his way from the barn with an armful of collie puppies for me to play with while the other kids were at school, She even tolerated the pet turtle whose favourite resting place was on the edge of her long skirt as she sat at the kitchen table, and the nest of squirrels that made great pets till one sad day they found their way into the oven and were roasted. We didn't eat them. For some reason I couldn't understand she rejected the nest of darling baby field mice I lovingly presented one day, but if I keep digressing like this, I'11 never get this history finished!

Another of Mother's farm projects was raising chickens, I remember that she had the incubator in the big all-purpose room at the head of the stairs, where I stood for hours, a fascinated little girl watching the slimy raw creatures emerge from the shells and then turn into enchanting balls of fluff, I think one of the earliest writings she had published was her article in a farm magazine on the raising of chickens and urging farm wives to help with the finances with such projects. This was accompanied by a picture of herself feeding her chickens.

Fulfilling a Dream

This brings me to mother's cherished dream - to become a writer. She even went so far as to take a correspondence course in short story writing, She did have a few stories published in Sunday School magazines. But she was too pure a person to be a success in the broader field, She couldn't portray all of life, which includes the "seamy side" and bitchy people. So she settled for considerable success in newspaper correspondence, beginning in the 1920's. She wrote for the Oakville Star, I think it was called then, the Hamilton Spectator, and the Toronto Star, I remember gathering around for a big celebration when the mail came with her first cheque, But she cashed instead of the traditional framing, as it was a much appreciated addition to the family exchequer. The elegant mahogany Victrola which made us popular with the younger set was part of a settlement in lieu of cash when Gerald Mitchell, owner of the Oakville Star, went bankrupt. I gradually took over the newspaper work during the year Mother was ill with leukaemia, and continued it for about ten years after her death on Tuesday evening, March 5 - Evelyn's and Bert's birthdays - 1935.

Getting in on the ground floor of the tourist business of the late 20's and early 30's was another of Mother's schemes for keeping the ship afloat. A big house on a main highway was a natural, before the era of the motel, when lodging and breakfast and sometimes dinner, in private homes, now becoming popular again as "B+B", because they're cheaper, was the big thing. I was Mother's main helper, with Amy pitching in when she finished teaching in June. We had eleven beds in operation, clearing up to a thousand dollars a summer for a number of years, and this went a long way towards paying for my education. But, with all the accomplishments I have outlined, you must still, of course, realize that Mother's biggest project, with Dad's eager help, was the production of ten babies. Consider: ninety months, approximately seven and a half years, about one-eighth of her entire sixty-five years, pregnant! Whether by design or accident, they were neatly spaced at two years, with the exception of the "twins, Bill and Amy, at only fifteen months, and Mike and me, three years. Of this brood, they made what we like to think was an excellent job of raising eight. I will now proceed, one at a time, in the order of their birth, to give some details of the lives of these eight and their spouses and progeny to the present time. That is what you wanted, isn't it?