Interview with Charles Anderson, 101-year-old who arrived in 1911 at age of 10

What did your parents do there [in Scotland]?

My father owned a store.


What kind of store?

Green grocer.


How many children were in that family?

Three.


Where were you in that family?

Top one and I'm the only one left. I have two sisters.


What were their names?

One was Margaret and the other was Helen


What brought your family to Canada?

In 1909, my grandmother on my father's side died of cancer. My father had several sisters and one brother, and all the family converged at Paisley for the funeral. One of the family, Mrs. Kenneth Fraser, was married to the Scottish civil servant who had obtained a position as postmaster in Bloomfontaine, South Africa. My uncle Kenneth had an itchy foot and when he was in Paisley there were large billboards advertising coming to western Canada to take up a homestead. This naturally interested my uncle and he decided to follow and take up a homestead. As he and my father were great friends, of course my father would also do likewise. My mother was not, shall we say, enthused and she managed to resist at that time. Later, in 1911, after considerable correspondence with my father [...] also to take up a homestead at Edgerton, Alberta, East of Wainwright, some of the worst soil in Alberta, dry and sandy. He again aroused the interest of my father.


He might have exaggerated a bit in his letters about how good things were?

Exactly. He had to start from scratch and build his own sod house and everything before he built a regular house. My mother agreed to my father going to Edgerton in April 1911.


He went by himself?

Yes, that was part of the story. But she informed him that she did not care to go until the children were through school. As a consequence, my mother started out for Edgerton in September 1911. She immediately decided on arrival at Edgerton that this was no place to raise her family, as my uncle met us with a farm wagon and a team of oxen. We stayed with my aunt and uncle at their quarter section 9 miles southeast of Edgerton. It took the oxen all day to take us from the station to their place.


Now, you would have been a boy then, but do you remember the trip?

Oh yes. I remember the trip quite well. I was almost 10 years of age A young man by that time.


Do you remember whether you were excited to come to Canada, or were you sad to leave?

No, no, I really remember when my mother decided. Or she didn't tell me. I can remember there was something going on, but I really wasn't informed very much about the details. Except that my father had persuaded her to come to Edgerton. I do not know what happened [? unclear] in the latter part of 1911, my father, after being in touch with his brother Bill in Seattle Washington where we also had been from 1903 to 1906.


That Bill had been there?

No, we had been there. My father had a wanderlust too.


I bet! So he took you from Scotland, in 1903 to 1906, when you were just a little boy, and he took you over there [Seattle] to visit and everything, but you ended up going back to Scotland?

Yes. My father realized that my mother was homesick. That was the reason for going back to Scotland, which she denied to me. However, arrangements were made for us to go to Seattle in one week before Christmas in 1911. And we started out one week before Christmas exactly, December 18, 1911 on the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway from Edgerton. Edgerton was just, let me see, 10 or 15 miles east of Wainwright. We arrived in Edmonton the night of, I think, December 18, 1911. Maybe a Monday.


[Laughter] We can check that out for you!

On arrival, at [Edmonton] the night of December 18, we of course did not have any prearranged reservations. Unless you had a lot of money in those days you would never do that. My father searched the downtown area of Edmonton and could not locate a place for us to sleep until he stumbled on a new rooming house - two stories - with a [? unclear] on the ground floor and some rooms on the second floor on the block which is now north of 102 A Ave on 101 St. They weren't known by those names in that day, they were all named.


Real names, like Kinistino Street.

Namao Ave was 97 th Street, Kinistino was 96 th Street and [...] was 95 th street. All the avenues west of 100 th Street were named such as Athabasca Avenue, which is down 102 nd Ave, Peace Ave for 103 rd Ave, and so on.


I wish they'd kept those names, I love those names.

Well the trouble with that is if you go to Victoria you'd know why you shouldn't keep those. This is the best system I've ever known.


Yes, that's true, you are transportation expert.

I go to a lot of these new areas and it's a disaster.


Yes that's true, you can't find your way, you are right. So he found this boarding house, then what happened?

Originally we had [? unclear] the reason we had to stay overnight in Edmonton was that we had to transfer our baggage from the Grand Trunk Pacific in the location where the CN station used to be on 101 st St. and you had to arrange it yourself which was done through John McNeil's Twincity transfer at the southwest corner of 104 th Ave and 101 st St.


Your memory is stunning. I can't believe this! It's an amazing memory you have. It's a gift!

[Roma: He never forgets anything. How did they get the stuff across the river?]


Well that's a story too, as I recall. I know how they had to do it, which was they loaded baggage onto a dray pulled by a team of horses and travelled south on 101 st St. to the riverbank and there was an escalator there which loaded horses and wagons and took hem down to an area just south of the Low Level Bridge, and this to Strathcona as it was named in those days.


And did it go across on the ferry? Or the bridge was there already?

No, no, the bridge was there.


And then back of course to where you would pick up the train go south...

We didn't take it over, we didn't go with the wagons, McNeil's transferred...


But tell us the story, it was so cold that night, I'm imagining you arrived in the city...

It was, as I remember, it was about plus 5 Fahrenheit, which was colder than Celsius. Now the next part: on the morning on which we went to arrange transfer of the baggage with McNeil's outfit, when we entered the store or office that they used on 101 st St. my mother and we three children stayed back while my father approached the counter about 40 feet away and as he did so, a man who then appeared to be quite elderly (probably about 30) [ laughter ] said to my father, "Good God John! What brings you here?" John McNeil had been an egg merchant in Glasgow and had done business with my father in Paisley, selling him eggs. As a result of this, my father explained to Mr. McNeil that we were on our way to Seattle. Mr. McNeil started to convince my father that he should stay in Edmonton and advised him that if he did so he would put us up (if I can use that language) in his home - this is now an historic designation on the 112 block on 97 St a large brick house. And that he had a job for him, through a friend who owned a small department store (that is in the grocery department of it) at Kirkness St and Norwood Blvd (now, 95 th St and 111 th Ave)


Great location even now!

On the northeast corner.


Do you remember the name of that store?

Sturrock's.


So your father accepted that offer?

Oh yes. After discussing it with my mother.


What was your mother's first name?

Helen, they called her.


So she probably liked the idea of staying in the city? Except it wasn't much of a city then, just a little town.

There were 50,000 people in Edmonton.


Oh were there at that point? Oh! It was booming at that point, in 1911 too.

1912 was the big boom year.


Could I ask you to go back in the story just a little bit? Remember you told me that you found that rooming house that night? Had you slept overnight in that rooming house?

It had been unopened and upstairs there was one bed in this unopened room, and all five of us slept in the one double bed. There were no dressers or anything else, just the double bed there.


Oh boy! That must have been tight. In these years, how old would your parents have been, in their 30s or so? 40s? Do you know what year your Mom or Dad were born? Would they have been older people, or young, in their 20s?

No, no. They would have been about 30.


What an adventure for a young family! Where did you live once your father started to work in the grocery store?

That's a story too. We rented a house in what is now the 116 th block on 97 th St., which had been an old home, renovated and moved on to a basement with no furnace and the only heat being a heater in the living room.


An electric heater?

A gas heater... no, no, no, coal heater, gas didn't come in until 1922 here. In the morning, my mother's hair would have frost on it.


Did you ever discuss going back to Scotland?

No, no, we just decided to stay. You see, my father had been manager, he'd worked in a large grocery store in Seattle, on 3 rd Ave and they had informed him that if he every came back there would always be a job for him. He was a marvellous man in the grocery business. He ended up here as a manager of the national food company on 103 rd St. There is some more of that, he retired in 1939 and went to Victoria BC on account of the situation at the National Food Company got into, and arranged with him to come back and manage the company during those war years.


They were short of younger men I bet.

They weren't short. They'd got into such a mess with the management. They flew him each weekend from Victoria to Edmonton. He went home for the weekend to Victoria, and they were so desperate to get him, that he had made arrangements that they would fly him. And they'd pay for it.


Do you remember in Edmonton the 1918 flu, with all the people getting sick?

Very well.


Could you tell us about that?

Yes. In the winter of 1918 (November) when the flu epidemic swept the world I went on a skating party to Borden Park, which was just a slough that they fixed up for skating in the wintertime. There was a bathroom there and it was free. There were several people in that party, girls and boys, and my recollection is that two of the boys caught the flu there that night and died. Two others, including myself, got very light attacks of it. One of the girls of the party also died. My mother caught a very severe attack of it and we summoned the family doctor - he came to houses in those days - and he advised us of the cure he was using which was to pour 26 ounces of Scotch whiskey into the patient over a very short period of time. And he had found that the poison from the overdose of liquor counteracted the flu. He informed us at about 10 o'clock at night, that my mother would have a crisis at about 3 o'clock in the morning, after which she would either live or die. Sure enough, the crisis came and my mother lived.


Did she drink the alcohol?

We just poured it into her.


Was she a teetotaller?

Oh yes, she never. My father drank, but my mother didn't. They poisoned one with an overdose of liquor, which you can be poisoned of. He was using that to counteract the flu, and it worked in her case - he said it doesn't work in every case, but it worked in my mother's case... They were dying like flies around here. The undertakers couldn't keep up with it.