Monthly Archives: February 2025

Winter

16 Sunday Feb 2025

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Having spent the first fifty years of my life in the UK (except for three years in Belgium and Germany), I was a temperate man. That is temperatures lower than -4C and higher that +20C were somewhat of a novelty for me. I also had that English resistance to the damp, especially having spent fifteen years in the village of Blewbury, Oxfordshire, which was a mass of natural springs and chalk streams, and permanently moist. Then I moved from the coastal climes to Canada’s Great Lakes, and the continental weather systems that lurk there.

We’re sat here today, February 16th, watching the snow fall and having been experiencing sub-zero temperatures for weeks, probably six so far, I wasn’t counting. While this part of Southern Ontario doesn’t get hit with really cold weather, it did bring to mind a trip I made to Canada in 2008, when I was still living in England.

My intended had said, “Hey, come over for March Break”, for she was a school teacher, “We’ll rent an RV and have a drive around Quebec”. Now I may not be the sharpest knife in the box, but I looked at the calendar, and I looked at the prevailing weather in that fine Province, and realised that we were not going to experience fine, balmy, RV-friendly weather in March. We scotched the RV idea (a wise move as it turned out), and booked hotels in Montreal and in Quebec City instead. All very exciting.

But when my intended picked me up at Lester Pearson Airport in Toronto, with me just having flown over the frozen wastes of Quebec, the snow started to fall. My intended was driving, not her favourite pastime to be sure, and the weather started to get worse and worse. We were expecting to stay in downtown Montreal that night, but to be honest, we really should have stopped off on the way, but we didn’t. The run up the Ontario Highway 401, and the Autoroute du Souvenir, was 550 Km and should have taken about five and half hours. In the event, it took us nine hours, and we didn’t get into Montreal until at 1:30am. My driver was done in. Still, we did get there.

The following morning we ventured outside. I’d left London and it had been +12C, now in Montreal’s Old Town, it was -20C, and I could feel every one of those degrees below zero. The snow looked nice, and watching the skaters on the outdoor rink was lovely, but I wasn’t really prepared for that level of cold, especially given that the wind was wicked. While we had slept, the snow came in some more, and dumped on the city, making it look wonderful, but there was only so much snow I could take when feeling so, so cold. More snow fell, but we went out to a little restaurant that evening, walking between the shoulder-high mounds of snow, and I marvelled that the city seemed to be functioning well despite the white stuff, but then I realised that this was pretty normal for Montreal in winter. I made a mental note to never return to the city between the months of October and April!

The following day we drove along the St Lawrence River to Quebec City. Yet more snow had fallen and it was waist deep in parts of the old town. It was still seriously below zero as well, but I was starting to acclimatise. Quebec City, though, was a revelation. When we arrived the snow was deep, although paths had been cleared. But, by the following morning, the snow on the roads and sidewalks had gone, almost completely. No, we hadn’t experienced a sudden thaw, but the City Fathers had brought moving equipment in and trucked all the excess snow away. I asked the English speaking co-owner of the hotel what had happened, and he explained that the snow is carted off and dumped in a field on the edge of town. It can still be there in May, he said.

The run back to Southern Ontario was actually trouble free. We did it without an overnight, while sharing the driving, all 1075Kms. The weather had improved, and it was even a wee bit warmer, so my English bones were beginning to feel a bit happier. I learned a lot on that trip, not least that Quebec can be a very cold place in winter. I also learned that a short period of acclimatisation is a good idea if you’re coming straight from a temperate climate.

Fifteen years of living in Canada and I have become accustomed to the sharp winters, and the compensating warm summers of course. Indeed, trips back to the Old Country have had me making that most Canadian of observations about England, “Goodness, everything feels damp”. I reckon I have acclimatised now.

Oh Canada!

08 Saturday Feb 2025

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I was born and raised in England, and didn’t immigrate into Canada until I was fifty. As I have discovered, though, I’m not the first of my family to come here, not by a long shot.

On my dad’s side, originally from County Cork in Ireland, we had been generations Leeds, the centre of the industrial heartland of Yorkshire’s West Riding. In the early nineteenth century, a few of the Maynes had left England, one couple to the USA, and two couples to South Africa, but most remained in Leeds. A few generations later there was a small emigration to Alberta, Canada, of more than one couple, and into the twentieth century, Toronto, Ontario, was the destination for a Mayne or two.

But this movement pales into insignificance when compared to my mum’s side of the family, with the Baters and the Caters. Both families are from Devon, in the south west of England. The Caters were from south Devon, south of Dartmoor, and gravitated to the village of Kingskerswell, which lies between Newton Abbot and Torquay. The Caters married into the Hill Family, and the Hills married into the Bater family, but more of that later.

John Cater, born in Kingskerswell, took himself off at some point in the mid 1850s and settled in St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland. He married a local girl, Anne Murphy in 1857, and that started a most extensive dynasty of Caters around that great island. Successive generations lived and died as “Newfies”, but also migrated out into Ontario and into the USA. I’ve recently been in contact with a modern day member of the original John Cater clan, still living in Ontario.

Then there was the Bater family. The Baters come from North Devon, in and around the River Torridge area. To a man, they were all farm workers; some farm owners, some farm workers, but farming was their only profession. In the late nineteenth century there appears to have been a paucity of work for farm labourers, and quite a few of the young men, some with their wives and children, upped sticks and sailed from Appledore in North Devon, to Quebec City in the French-speaking province of Quebec. From there they made their way on the newly laid train network, to Guelph, a community to the west of Toronto. This wasn’t one or two people, it was many, and the period they emigrated stretched from 1870 to 1910. They all seemed to have headed for Guelph, but from there spread out to the farms of Bruce and Middlesex counties, and the industry of Galt, Cambridge and London (Ontario).

Using the number of deaths recorded for family members as a constant for those arriving but never leaving, and that is Caters and Baters, I have 197 in Ontario and 128 in Newfoundland. Of course many have moved on, largely to the USA, but also to other Canadian Provinces. There are many still alive, naturally, and populating modern Canada, but they’re harder to track down.

There was another emigration route from the fields of North Devon, and that was to Peoria in Illinois, USA. It looks like having crossed the Atlantic and arrived at Quebec City, these settlers have embarked on a second vessel (possibly from Toronto, avoiding the St Lawrence River and its shallows), and made the trip through the Great Lakes, Ontario, Huron and Michigan, to Chicago. Then they made their way up the Illinois River to Peoria, and the rich farmlands that were opening up there. Further migration took them down into Kansas and Missouri.

Quebec City Harbour at the end of the nineteenth century

All of this goes to show that I really am a latecomer to the Canadian party. The ease of my move, in a few hours by air, contrasts starkly with the sea voyage undertaken by my ancestors, many of who never made the trip back to England during their lives. These were brave people, setting our for a new life, and pretty much making a success of things, given that I can’t find a Cater or Bater who ever gave up and went back to Devon. I may be a latecomer, but I am in very good company.

The Seven Stars Inn in Kingskerswell

To finish, the link between the Caters and the Baters was facilitated by the Hill family of Kingskerswell. My maternal grandmother was a Hill, descended from the Caters of Kingskerswell. Her father married a Bater from Dolton, North Devon, and there the link was made. Families, all over the world.

It’s a New Year

07 Friday Feb 2025

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I’ve not written anything for ages, so, as it’s well into the new year, I thought I should knuckle down. The trouble is that there’s so much “noise” out and about, what with Trump, Musk, et al. Still, life goes on and I can always look away from the awfulness unfolding around me.

Someone posted a photograph on Facebook of an old railway station at Alexandra Palace in North London (UK). It was built right into the main structure of the Palace, too, which caught my eye, not least because I didn’t know there had been a railway there. I have no great connection with Alexandra Palace beyond my living in North London myself for a few years, but I did travel past the place every day when I was commuting from Stevenage in Hertfordshire into London every day in the early 1980s.

Alexandra Palace isn’t a palace in the royal sense, but a palace of entertainment and sports. It’s known affectionately as “Ally Pally”, and because it sits atop a big hill, you can see it for miles around, even in the suburban jungle of North London. It was opened in 1873 and has gone through many iterations in its lifetime, most notably perhaps as the BBC’s first home for a regular television service, starting in 1936. Ally Pally is still functioning, too, as concert, exhibition, and community venue. Curiously, though, despite having seen it every day for years, and lived relatively close by, I’ve never been inside.

But I digress. The station was the terminal point for a broad loop of line coming out from the London to Edinburgh Eastern main line. It must have been quite a slog up the hill with a full load, because it’s some climb up to the Palace. The branch was opened in 1873, along with the venue, but closed in 1954. The track bed is still in use, only now as walking trail, known as the Parkland Walk (North), and still utilises some of the old railway infrastructure to traverse the now busy roads.

I write all of this as a way of both highlighting my total ignorance of the history of North London and it’s many esteemed buildings and infrastructure, and the fact that my trips past Ally Pally were now over forty years ago. Where on earth did the time go? Indeed, this realisation of time past manifested itself on a trip to the UK in 2023. We were on a train going from Hackney Downs into Liverpool Street and I was remarking to the good lady wife that the trains were somewhat improved compared to the ones I’d used on that route in, wait for it, 1981! I hadn’t even begun to consider the passage of time, beyond a decade or two, but four decades and counting? It was no wonder things had changed.

Anyway, enjoy the photographs of Ally Pally station, and check out the links below, while I go away and consider how time passes so darned quickly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Palace_railway_station_(1873%E2%80%931954)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Palace