Mr. Robertson and Mrs. Simcoe

kmabel6
Nov 6
7 min read

Toronto newspaperman John Ross Robertson presented Victorian and Edwardian Canadians with an image of Elizabeth Simcoe that endures to this day. Why? What purpose did his project serve then and now? In part one of a two-part posting, I ponder where our ideas about Mrs. Simcoe came from and how both their persistence and change tell us something about ourselves.

Born in Toronto in 1841, Roberston was the eldest child of Scottish immigrants who came to Canada to start their family. His father opened a dry goods store that immediately proved a considerable success. Before long, young Ross Robertson found himself in a fine new home built for “John Robertson, esq.” (complete with a red brick front) – and was enrolled at the elite Upper Canada College not far away. His career at the college was not a success. He withdrew after a year then returned three years later for another try. At the age of 16, he began what was allegedly the first Canadian school paper, narrowly avoiding expulsion from UCC by condemning (in the first issue) one of the school’s real estate deals.

The smell of printer’s ink and the power that accompanied it clearly appealed to Robertson. He worked in a variety of publishing positions before landing the job of city editor for George Brown’s Globe. During his brief tenure there, he caught the attention of another Toronto journalist who was hoping, as was he, to stir up the stodgy world of Toronto publishing. Robertson and James Beaty Cook founded the Daily Telegraph in 1866. It gained considerable attention when Robertson went to Red River to cover the uprising of 1869 and was promptly arrested by Louis Riel – providing the perfect platform for his sharp, visceral, personal reactions to those momentous events.

In 1876, Robertson founded the Evening Telegram explicitly to appeal to the working-class reader. It wasn’t quite the “yellow journalism” that would dominate in New York twenty years later, but its penchant for covering scandal and its cheap advertising rates soon gave it the largest circulation of the Toronto newspapers. And the Telegram made Robertson a wealth man.

The Evening Telegram building on Bay Street in 1904.

Source: Toronto Public Library

He put his money and apparently boundless energy into a variety of projects. He served a term in the House of Commons. He played a key role in supporting the Hospital for Sick Children. He built a magnificent nurses’ residence as a memorial to his wife. His contributions to the Ontario Hockey Association eventually earned him a place in the Hockey Hall of Fame. And he discovered History.

Robertson began modestly, collecting objects and images for the Masonic order (of which he was a leading member) and delivering lectures on Masonic history to his fellows across southern Ontario. He then branched out to the broader history of Canada, which he saw entirely as the history of Canada within the British Empire. His mania for collecting eventually produced some 15,000 items, of which over 500 were “pictures,” including engravings and watercolours both original and copied. He offered the J. Ross Robertson Prizes to the boys of Upper Canada College for “proficiency in Canadian history and geography.” Then in 1912, to considerable fanfare, he donated his massive collection of ephemera to the Toronto Public Library. A delighted chief librarian pronounced it “the largest collection of Canadian pictures gathered by any one person, and in many respects compares favorably with the great collection accumulated by Dr. Doughty, in the Dominion Archives of Canada.”[1]

Ever the entrepreneur, Robertson excelled at promotion. Here, he publicizes a display of his reproduction chairs at the CNE in 1904.

Robertson discovered the Simcoes in a vague way even before his collecting years. As a young man, he had lived on Simcoe Street. And when he flooded the back yard one winter, he organized a team that he named “The Simcoes.” Undoubtedly, his curiosity was piqued. Who was Simcoe, for whom the street had been named? At the time, John Graves Simcoe was little known in Canada.

In 1873, Toronto cleric Henry Scadding published Toronto of Old, in which he presented Lieutenant Governor Simcoe as the “founding father” of Upper Canada. Mrs. Simcoe was given a small note as the man’s “gifted consort” – small enough recognition for the woman who had paid for his university education in England and used her influence to get him an appointment in Canada. Robertson and Scadding began to spend considerable time together, comparing notes. Roberson resolved to write a full-length biography of John Graves Simcoe.

To find materials, he began regular visits to England. He staked out libraries and sought out Simcoe descendants. One day in the mid-1880s, at the King’s Library in the British Museum, he stumbled upon a set of thirty-two Canadian “scenes” drawn on birch-bark by Elizabeth Simcoe that had been presented to George III. The collection suited his agenda admirably. The images depicted Upper Canada at a time that no living person remembered. They also represented both the Englishness and ties to Empire that he valued. Besides, he crowed, “No-one seems to have dropped onto it.” The drawings “had sat in the library for nearly a century,” allegedly unnoticed. He later decided that the collection was his “greatest find,” both for his personal collection and his hoped-for reputation as a serious historian.[2]

Robertson immediately set off in search of Elizabeth Simcoe. He discovered from the family that she had kept notes during her sojourn in Upper Canada (1791-1796) and launched a charm offensive to liberate them from the family for publication. He discovered that Mrs. Simcoe had been a prolific artist so he commissioned a Miss Ward of Devon to make pen-and-ink sketches of artwork in the family’s possession, intending that some would complement his written account.

Back in Canada, he shared his discoveries with enthusiasts in Toronto and Niagara. Local historical societies were delighted. He offered regular lectures about the Simcoes (and his heroic searches for source materials). He appears to have donated some of what he had collected or copied to prominent members of these historical societies. His talks were lively, enthusiastic, entertaining, and deliberately self-promoting. At one presentation to the York Pioneers in 1905, he described Elizabeth Simcoe as “a woman of much ability, highly educated and an excellent wife, one who was thoroughly wrapped up in her husband’s work.” She was, he observed, “a most worthy woman.”[3]

That image dominated the publication that Robertson released in 1911 as The Diary of Mrs. Simcoe. As “the wife of” a central figure in Canadian history, Robertson celebrated her domestic role, her family pedigree, and her “simple recital” of “daily life in the pioneer days.” Ultimately, though, her personal life was of subordinate interest. The real value for Robertson was the artwork that provided “faithful pictures of places and scenes” of times that would otherwise have been forgotten. Without these images, his contemporary Canadians would not know how far they had come or celebrate that achievement. As he wrote in the preface:

We would not be able to contrast the quiet of the [Toronto] harbor

and its surroundings in 1793, when it was the home of the aborigine

and the haunt of the wild fowl, with the commercial activities of today.[4]

Elizabeth Simcoe was launched in a new career as a marker of “progress.”

Before and After

Elizabeth Simcoe’s 1796 “View from York Barracks” and the Toronto harbour in 1918.

Sources: Archives of Ontario Series F-47-11 (available Wikimedia) & City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 920.

One of Robertson’s primary motivations for historical collection was to find readily accessible, non-scholarly materials to educate the young and develop an appreciation for their heritage among young and old alike. In his day, Canadian historical study consisted largely of dense, learned tomes about constitutions and matters of state. Elizabeth Simcoe provided an entrée into the social life of early Canada. Skating and horseback gallops in old Toronto were far more interesting, he hoped, to boys. At the time, though, his audience seemed to prefer Mrs. Simcoe as a starting point for self-congratulation. In part two of this story, we shall see how Elizabeth Simcoe eventually gained a more dominant place as a contributor to Canadian social and cultural history.

John Ross Robertson was mightily pleased with his publication of The Diary, convinced that it would be sold out within a matter of months. Even though he had invested a significant amount of money in its production, he informed the Simcoe family that “I am not going to reprint it as I would prefer to have the book a scarce one.”[5] But the book was, in fact, reprinted – long after his death.

Capitalizing on the 1967 centennial celebrations that renewed an interest in all things Canadian, including Canadian history, several publishers began digging out old books for re-issue. Among them, Mel Hurtig introduced his “Canadiana Reprint Series” from Edmonton. In 1970, the Coles bookstore chain went one better, launching the Coles Canadiana Collection with the breathless assertion that these were “Exact duplicates of valuable old Canadian books!” As the Globe and Mail’s columnist William French observed, “These are facsimile editions, identical in every way to the originals. Coles have even used paper that is yellowing around the edges to give an appearance of antiquity.” He went on, “It’s also a shrewd way of using up old paper.”[6] J. Ross Robertson’s contribution to paper recycling was added to Coles' list in 1973.

Robertson never did manage to publish his biography of Mrs. Simcoe's husband. He worked on it briefly with Toronto judge William Renwick Riddell before Riddell took over the project entirely. It was published eight years after Robertson’s death with only Riddell listed as the author. Nevertheless, John Ross Robertson had well and truly put his stamp on the Simcoe brand.

In the next blog posting, I will consider how that image has persisted, how it has changed, and why that might be.