The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
It happened to me So this is where Grandad started life anew...
Author David Reynolds heads to Manitoba to learn how the family outcast got back on his feet thanks to a railroad
On a stretch of empty road 200 miles north-west of Winnipeg, I stared at a green, North American road sign. Tangible proof – more real than a copperplate scrawl in an old letter, a mark on a map, or even my dad saying, “he went to a place called Swan River” – that the place existed.
It was still 100 miles away, but there was little else to signpost this far north in Manitoba. The land was flat; covered with the scruffy gold of dry grass that gave way to patches of deep green, the screaming yellow of oilseed rape, and a few old telegraph poles.
My father had been 10 when he last saw his father, Tom Reynolds, in 1902, walking out of his home in Dalston carrying two suitcases. “I’ll see you before long,” he had said. But “before long” became never.
Tom lived as a vagrant on the streets of London for four years until two good people stumped up £2 each to pay his passage from Liverpool to Winnipeg, where men were needed to build a railroad. Apparently, the Canadians didn’t care if a man was an alcoholic, had been sacked for stealing, or had been barred from the family home by his in-laws after years of chaos and violence, as long as he could work.
Gold filled the horizon as I drove along Main Street, thrilled, at last, to be in this remote place. Were any of these low, flat-roofed buildings there back then? As I passed an old wooden grain elevator, five storeys tall, standing beside a railway line, I wondered if my grandfather had laid the track.
Tom had given his address as Durban, Swan River, Manitoba, in letters home. He had walked 20 miles on a warm day in August 1906, and found a job on the railroad. “The life I am leading is awfully rough,” he wrote, “but the grub I get is, and has been, good and in quantity.” An important consideration for a man who had been close to starvation on the streets of London.
The next day, at the Swan Valley Museum, the helpful Ann opened drawers of old photographs and lent me a magnifying glass. I sifted through, searching for a man who resembled
Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata!, remembering that long ago, in the dark of a cinema, my father had whispered, “My father looked like him – huge moustache.” I found a picture of four men standing on a railway track; one had a dark, droopy moustache. Was that him? He had a hand in his pocket and a watch chain across his waistcoat.
Ann gave me a photocopy and I headed off to meet Stuart Harris, the author of a history of Durban. Tall and tanned, Harris invited me into his comfortable home, introduced me to his wife and led me to his basement den. He didn’t know of my grandfather – and was puzzled that he had said he was working on the railroad in 1906: the line to Durban and beyond was finished in 1905. “Someone called R W Glennie wrote to the family in London in 1910 to say that my grandfather had died,” I said when he asked if anyone else was mentioned in the letters.
“Have you got that one?” he asked. “Can I see it?” I handed him two sheets of paper. He read the first, glanced at the
second, gently slapped his knee, looked up and yelled: “Bob Glennie! Well, I’m damned! He was my neighbour for years. He moved to BC [British Columbia] in 1945.”
Harris himself had been born in Durban. The letter from Glennie, he said, told him a lot about my grandfather. “If he was a drinking man in London, he’d have gone on drinking here. It was sort of illegal, but a bunch of them met most evenings at the back of Honsinger’s Livery Stable. Glennie would have been there.”
Durban took off, he said, when the railroad arrived in 1905, with hotels, banks, shops, cafés, a church, a school, a grain elevator and a railway station; a train and streams of wagons pulled by teams of horses arrived every day. About 400 people lived in the town, which served the surrounding farms and homesteads. Like the homes of the many “bachelors”, my grandfather’s would have been about 18ft x 12ft, with a stove, a washstand – probably a plank on apple boxes – a board bed with a
straw mattress, nails to hang his clothes, and bare boards on the floor.
I visited Durban and found none of the shops, banks or hotels that Harris had told me of – just 10 or so inhabited houses, and about the same number of dilapidated, abandoned ones: the makings of a ghost town.
At The Swan Valley Star & Times
on
Main Street, I pored over weekly back issues from 1906 to 1910, including reports from the Durban correspondent. For two years, there was nothing. Then, on Aug 20 1908: “Mr Thomas Reynolds is about to open his boot-making establishment.” Two weeks later, equipment was installed and my grandfather was “ably assisted by Mr Frank White.”
Later, I stood on a bridge on a dirt road and gazed at the dome of the sky and the wooded mountains to the north and south. Tom had said the valley was “beautiful”, and his life “not all too bad”. He was right. The space and light, and the wild beauty of the mountains, were exhilarating – as too, I was realising, was the discovery that Tom had had friends and found a form of contentment.
I drove up into the mountains, stopped by a lake surrounded by pines and watched a pair of loons splash down on the still water. I knew that all of this was the beginning of a new understanding, not just of my grandfather, but of my father and myself.
Before I left, I met Harris one last
time. “About your grandfather working on the railroad in 1906,” he said over coffee in the breakfast room. “I remembered that when Frank White first came to Durban, he was employed to fence the railway line. The whole line, Swan River through Durban to Benito, a four-wire fence on both sides of the line – to keep animals, and people, off the track. It was a heck of a job. Four men did it, from summer 1906, through freeze up, and on into 1907. Frank was the foreman.” He raised his finger. “Your grandfather said he was working on the railroad in 1906. He was. He was fencing it.”
On the road back to Winnipeg, I passed a sign – a moose on a yellow diamond – and was reminded that my grandfather built a fence – a necessary fence. And found a new life.