Authors: Greg King
This very English ritual particularly appealed to
Lusitania
’s Canadian passengers. Most prided themselves on being more British than the British themselves. “The Empire is my country,” said one lady. “Canada is my home.”
(
4
)
They celebrated royal weddings, births, and jubilees with garden parties and balls; when the monarch died, they mourned as the bells of their churches tolled incessantly.
(
5
)
And now, with the British Empire, “the mainstay of freedom and civilization throughout the world,” as Mary Ryerson’s husband, George, so patriotically put it, at war, Canadians were determined to demonstrate their loyalty to the crown.
(
6
)
One particular group in
Lusitania
’s Lounge appreciated the nod to British tradition. All were from Montreal, where the rich, commented one historian, “enjoyed a prestige in that era that not even the rich deserved.”
(
7
)
They formed the city’s Anglo-Canadian elite, living along the southern base of Mount Royal in an area called the “Golden Square Mile.” Together, they controlled fully 70 percent of Canada’s wealth: most had grown up with each other, many had married into each other’s families, and they enjoyed the same dinners, balls, hunts, and winter carnivals that filled Montreal’s social season.
(
8
)
There was the imposing Frances Stephens, exchanging pleasantries with Dorothy Braithwaite; Frederick Orr-Lewis, president of the Canadian division of shipbuilding and armaments giant Vickers, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic on war business with his faithful valet, twenty-six-year-old George Slingsby; and William Robert Grattan Holt, the solidly built, fifteen-year-old son of Sir Herbert Samuel Holt.
(
9
)
A lot of baggage came with being Holt’s son: his father was not only the wealthiest man in Canada, controlling assets worth more than $2 billion, but he was also perhaps the most hated.
(
10
)
Herbert Holt had absolutely no sympathy for the workingman: he railed against providing employees with a living wage, insisting that this would strip them of initiative to work harder. “Nobody liked him personally,” was the usual verdict.
(
11
)
Eight months into the war, Holt decided that it was safe enough for William, who went by the name of Robert, to return to his school, Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and booked the young man passage aboard
Lusitania
.
No Canadian aboard
Lusitania,
though, was quite as prominent as Marguerite, Lady Allan. Privilege had surrounded Marguerite Ethel MacKenzie since her birth in 1873. Her father, Hector MacKenzie, not only served as director of the Hudson’s Bay Company and vice president of the Merchant’s Bank of Montreal, but he was also president of the Montreal Philharmonic Society. Lively and intelligent, Marguerite inherited her father’s passion for music and art; she also shared his taste for adventure and mischievous sense of humor. When his pretty, dark-haired daughter married Hugh Montague Allan on October 18, 1893, Hector decorated the windows of his French-inspired mansion on Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street with thousands of white marguerite blossoms in tribute.
(
12
)
Marguerite married into the very pinnacle of Montreal society. The Allans served as directors of banks they founded, represented the Montreal Board of Trade, and controlled mills, mines, telegraph companies, and real estate stretching from Liverpool to New York. But they were best known as owners of the Allan Shipping Line, Canada’s most successful passenger service crossing the Atlantic.
(
13
)
The money poured in: Marguerite’s new husband had inherited an estate valued at between $6 million and $10 million.
(
14
)
Conventional and proud of their place in Montreal society, the Allans expected much of themselves and of others. Marguerite learned that she had not merely married a man but also a very different way of life. She got an early taste of this shortly after moving into Ravenscrag, the massive mansion her husband’s late father had built. Marguerite had grown up passing by the imposing Italianate house, hidden behind its wrought iron fence on a hillside high above Montreal. What most appealed to Marguerite, though, was its velvety green lawn. She never forgot the day when her proper, sedate in-laws came to call on her shortly after her marriage. They found her turning somersaults, skirts flying in the air as she hurtled down the slope like an excited teenager. She took one look at their dour, disapproving faces and burst out laughing.
(
15
)
Yet Marguerite now found herself proud chatelaine of the largest house Montreal had ever seen. Ravenscrag stood in splendid isolation against the tree-clad slopes of Mount Royal, its rough granite walls pierced with rounded windows and broken by arcaded loggias and projecting bays. At the center, a seventy-five-foot-high tower offered sweeping views over Montreal to the St. Lawrence River, the Laurentians, and the Adirondacks to the distant Green Mountains of Vermont. The restrained masculinity of the exterior gave way to very feminine rooms adorned with ornate plaster reliefs picked out in gold, vibrantly colored frescoes, and sumptuous, gilded furniture. Marguerite presided over society teas in her rococo drawing room, a frothy space of gilded pilasters and cartouches of mythological scenes. During the winter social season, she could entertain up to four hundred in her immense ballroom, where crystal chandeliers swirled from a painted ceiling. Couples could dance across a floor inlaid with rare and contrasting woods, to music provided by an orchestra in wrought iron balconies above.
(
16
)
When they tired of dancing, they could stroll into the adjoining conservatory, “a dream of fragrance and beauty,” where colored lights illuminated palm trees and banks of exotic flowers.
(
17
)
Here, marveled one visitor, it was “easy, even in the depths of a Canadian winter, to imagine oneself in the tropics.”
(
18
)
An entire wing at Ravenscrag, along with rooms in the basement and attics, was needed to house the family’s domestic staff. “It’s like a hotel for servants!” Hugh Allan’s father once complained.
(
19
)
His son and daughter-in-law increased the size of their household to eighteen servants, most of whom lived in. Richard Chambers, the British butler, was the highest paid, earning $60 a month; there were two governesses; a lady’s maid; two footmen who wore specially designed livery; two housemaids; two laundresses; a scullery maid; a maid of all work; a coachman; three grooms; a gardener; and a man whose sole duty was to stoke the coal furnaces and lay fires in the fireplaces.
(
20
)
Marguerite was like Edwardian Montreal itself, “conscious of a proper and clearly defined pride,” as one chronicler wrote, but effortlessly charming and vigorous in enjoying life.
(
21
)
She had, said one newspaper, the “gift for doing the right thing, always in the right way.”
(
22
)
Marguerite was careful to bring up her four children in the right way: Marguerite, called Martha, was born in 1895, followed by Hugh in 1897, Anna in 1898, and Gwendolyn, called Gwen, in 1900. Martha went off to finishing school in Paris, while Hugh was sent to Eton; Anna and Gwen remained in Montreal, where they could often be seen riding in their own elaborate carriage pulled by a smart pony from their father’s extensive stables.
(
23
)
Marguerite was also devoted to her little white Pekingese dog called Peek-a-Boo. To avoid having him quarantined on her travels, she usually drugged him and slipped him into a bag. She hated the idea of putting him in a kennel. “I left him to their tender mercies once before,” Marguerite explained, “and the poor darling almost starved to death. He wouldn’t eat a thing because he was parted from me.”
(
24
)
And, as expected of a lady of her position, Marguerite immersed herself in charitable work, serving on the Local Council of Women of Montreal and the Central Council of the Victoria League, and acting as honorary president of the Daughters of the British Empire in Montreal.
(
25
)
But Marguerite’s principal role was that of social leader: it came with being H. Montague’s wife and mistress of Ravenscrag. She welcomed dignitaries and diplomats, governors and princes to her house. In 1906, it was Prince Arthur of Connaught, whose stay she marked with a ball for three hundred; a year later, Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, the Mikado’s brother, enjoyed the Allan hospitality. And there were royal rewards. In 1904, King Edward VII created Marguerite’s husband a Knight Bachelor in the Order of the British Empire; the new Lady Allan was presented at Buckingham Palace in 1906, and a year later the king named Sir Hugh Montague Allan a Commander in the Royal Victorian Order.
(
26
)
From late September to the middle of February, Ravenscrag was the center of the Montreal social world. An invitation from the Allans was regarded as little short of a royal command. “Recipients who did not ‘accept with pleasure,’” noted one journalist, “were only debarred from doing so by unavoidable causes.”
(
27
)
Once, when a gentleman was unable to escort his wife to a Ravenscrag ball, he could only alleviate her great disappointment by presenting her with a magnificent pearl necklace that had cost thousands of dollars.
(
28
)
Frosty Saturday mornings found the driveway filled with stomping, snorting horses as the Montreal Hunt gathered to ride with its Master of Foxhounds. “The Union Jack flew from Ravenscrag,” recalled a member, “the hounds bayed joyfully in front of the house; the hour for breakfast was ten, but members showed such a disregard for time that it was nearly eleven before the majority moved off.”
(
29
)
On other nights, the Montreal Snow Shoe Club met at Ravenscrag for nighttime expeditions up Mount Royal. Wrapped in heavy white coats and red caps and deemed “very picturesque and very Canadian” by a visiting Marchioness of Dufferin, the crowd left the house and set out along the snowy paths circling to the park above, making a “fiery serpent winding among the trees” with their flaming torches. At the end of their invigorating adventure, they returned to Ravenscrag for a buffet supper.
(
30
)
When summer came, the Allans—along with servants and dozens of steamer trunks—fled Montreal’s stifling heat and humidity, decamping to the scenic Charlevoix region along the shores of the St. Lawrence River. Here, at Saint-Georges-de-Cacouna, they built a large Colonial Revival–style house called Montrose, a comfortable place of porches and chintz-hung rooms on a bluff high above the river.
(
31
)
There was riding, boating, and lawn tennis; sometimes, Marguerite found the pace too relaxed. When bored, she crossed the river to La Malbaie (Murray Bay), to enjoy the band playing on the Manoir Richelieu Hotel’s wide veranda, join friendly games of bridge, and play golf with future American president William Howard Taft.
(
32
)
It seemed a pleasant annual routine of social obligations, parties, and relaxation as the Edwardian Era lingered on in the great houses of the Golden Square Mile. The momentous summer of 1914 forever shattered this world: suddenly the Royal Dominion of Canada found itself at war. In the city’s exclusive clubs, Montreal’s leading figures puffed away at cigars, assuring themselves that the conflict “would not last more than six months, because business would not allow it.”
(
33
)
At the beginning, the streets of Montreal were filled with parades of “brave, earnest young faces” as men marched off amid flags and handkerchiefs unwittingly waving them to the slaughter. “Be Christian!” they were urged. “Be British!”
(
34
)
Marguerite threw herself into the war effort. As honorary president of the Daughters of the British Empire in Montreal, she organized collection drives, solicited funds to buy soldiers care packages, and presided over knitting parties to produce socks, mufflers, and caps to be sent to the front. She established a convalescent home for wounded Canadian soldiers, and opened the doors of exclusive Ravenscrag to a curious public, hosting charity teas and bridge parties to raise funds for relief efforts.
(
35
)
Her eldest daughter, Martha, most like her in independent spirit, trained as a Red Cross nurse, bought several ambulances, and followed them to France, where she worked along the front lines, driving the vehicles and rescuing wounded soldiers.
(
36
)
And Marguerite’s only son, Hugh, joined the Black Watch Regiment of Canada and went to England; later, he transferred to the Royal Naval Air Service and earned his wings as a flight lieutenant, trained to fly runs over occupied Belgium.
(
37
)