EDITOR’S NOTE—Beginning this week, The Expositor will regularly mine the paper’s archives to re-tell Manitoulin Island’s response to and involvement in the First World War following Great Britain’s declaration of war against Germany a century ago this coming Monday, August 4. (Canada, 100 years ago, was a colony of Great Britain and a declaration of war by the mother country automatically obligated our nation’s participation). World news at that time, as well as local news, was received through the local paper virtually exclusively as these were the days well before radio, television and, most certainly, the Internet.
by Expositor staff, past and present.
MANITOULIN—A century ago, J.F. Snowden was the editor and publisher of The Manitoulin Expositor and, although a Liberal politically, Mr. Snowden was also a very keen temperance advocate and so the news and opinion columns of the papers just before (and after as well) the announcement of Britain’s entry into the war in Europe in the Thursday, August 6 edition had much to do with an effort to dump Manitoulin’s Liberal member to the Ontario legislature, R.R. Gamey, in favour of a temperance candidate, Rev. W.E. Wilson (who had at one time served as a Methodist minister on Manitoulin Island) on the grounds that Mr. Gamey had promised the temperance faction that he would push for strong controls on the distribution of alcohol while, at the same time, committing to the hotel (and hence bar) owners in the riding that he would do anything in his power to ensure that they stayed in business, licences intact. (While ‘temperance’ implies the temperate, moderate or controlled use of alcohol, in fact most members of the Temperance Movement felt strongly that alcoholic drinks should be outlawed completely).
This, then, was the big local story when editor Snowden wrote, as the lead in his General Observations column two days after August 4, 1914 when Great Britain and Germany were officially at war the seemingly flippant prediction that, “Germany goes into war like maidens into marriage, in haste to repent at leisure” and he follows this with a labored pun, attributing his observation to the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, “Sir Edward Grey says Germany is Hungary for war and he will Servi-a full measure”.
These comments in what we would now think of as The Expositor’s Page 4 editorial would have been many, if not most, Manitoulin Island residents’ first notice that there would be a war going on in Europe and that Great Britain (and hence Canada) would now be involved in it.
Clearly, there was no prescience of the scope of that conflict that would last more than four full years and alter Canadians’ perspective on world events enormously, impacting most families in the process.
This was certainly not the paper’s first reference to conflicts building in Europe. The previous month, in the June 11 issue, the paper reprinted an opinion piece from the New York Sun that declared, “Statesmen do not need to be convinced that a great war in Europe would be ruinous; they want none of it as was shown by their tenderness in dealing with the parties to the Balkan war, but there is not a statesmen in Europe who knows how to federate Europe for the general welfare.” Another article, also in June of 1914, reported on Germany’s rapid expansion of her naval strength, particularly warships.
Since the paper had already reported on the prelude to hostilities that would involve Canadians and certainly the men and women of Manitoulin Island, it would appear that editor Snowden, in his offhand observations, may well have been somewhat whistling in the dark, fingers crossed all the while, because the same paper is also up-to-date on the news of the earliest European skirmishes involving Great Britain.
In a serious news story that follows in the same column after Mr. Snowden’s wry observations, the editor gets down to business and reports under an all-caps, 36 point headline that says simply WAR, “Apparently in a way never before seen in history, the saying that ‘war is hell’ is to be proven. Germany, to an outsider, is insane to engage in war with three powerful nations on the north, east and west of her: Russia has an enormous wealth of men, England has the wealth of finance and the largest navy in the world and France has both men and a good fleet.”
“Germany has for years been ‘spoiling for a fight’ and she is likely to get all she wants before she is out of this trouble. No one should glory in war. It is a fearful thing, even for the victor but being in, there is no doubt England will bear her share that the foe will be wary of her in the future.”
Anticipating Canada’s support for Mother England, editor Snowden writes apocryphally that, “It is somewhat unfortunate that Canada dismantled her two warships last year and has only a few men in training but no doubt the call will bring the men and Canada will do her duty.”
No doubt.
The same paper goes on to report on early war news that it must have received that week through the newly-installed telegraph system that had come to Manitoulin, as far as Little Current, the previous year when the Algoma Eastern Railway completed the final part of its connection between McKerrow on the North Shore and the Island: the swing bridge and the railway station and telegraph office also built at that time near the present-day beer store. This new link to the outside world a century ago would have been, for The Expositor, akin to the current paper’s editorial staff’s connections through the World Wide Web.
Under a headline, ‘British Fleet Engage’ The Expositor writes on August 6, 1914 that, “It is reported that the German and British fleets have clashed in the North Sea and, according to cable messages (editor’s note: the new-to-Manitoulin telegraph system) two British ships were sunk and five German boats were sent to the bottom. It is reported that a number of German boats were also captured.”
“Reports of a naval fight on the Baltic between German and Russian fleets are prevalent and that the Russian fleet was driven back, taking refuge in the Gulf of Finland where they still are.”
Another large font headline in the same paper declares ‘Germany Declares War’ and the story beneath it reports the gist of the allegiances in Europe that, ultimately, brought Canada into the fray: “Austria and Servia (sic) declared war last week. This week Germany declared war on Russia and France who are supporting Servia which was under the protection of Russia. This meant that England would at once support Russia and France, her allies.”
The article observes that “England exhausted every effort to maintain peace, but failed.”
These are the bones of how much of Manitoulin’s citizenry would have learned of this new event that history would soon declare was catastrophic for the European nations involved in terms of the costs of both lives lost and the unanticipated financial burden it left them to carry on to the next generation. This burden, particularly in Germany’s case, was directly linked to the political upheaval in that country that made the Second World War, in hindsight, inevitable just over 20 years following the peace agreed to on Armistice Day, 1918.
In rural Canada, in places like Manitoulin Island, a war in Europe in its early stages did not change local habits and so Manitoulin citizens of a century ago were to wait two weeks before being again caught up on news of the conflict.
That was because in the tradition of this paper (until it ended in 1968, and an August week off that year was much enjoyed by someone who remains a senior member of The Expositor’s staff) and virtually every other rural paper, there was a missed publishing week each summer so that the printing and publishing staff could enjoy a week’s summer holidays. That week, in 1914, was the issue of Thursday, August 13 so the next dispatch in this series will be drawn from the August 20, 1914 edition.
(By the way, there are still some country newspapers in Canada, only a few, that continue to honour this tradition of a week’s summer holidays for staff and no paper published that week. In Ontario, the Ayr News in Southwestern Ontario that has been published by the same family since before the beginning of the First World War is among the few papers whose staff still enjoys this “summer shutdown week.”)
For your information, the details from the August 6, 1914 issue of The Expositor were gleaned from the microfilm archives maintained at the Little Current Public Library and are available for public access.
