The mayors between the wars
On Sept. 26th 1918, the first Ottawa victim of the terrible Spanish Flu epidemic died. (The Spanish label was a misnomer; it started in China as a transmitted bird-flu.) The air-borne virus arrived at the city’s train stations, in the company of the returning young soldiers from the war in Europe, where the Spanish fighting men had first suffered from it. It spread out from the stations and the victims of this germ bomb were mostly young, working class, Irish or French Catholic men. The death toll reported in the newspapers by the end of October 1918 was 440.
The mayor at the time of this deadly month was Harold Fisher, and he realized that Ottawa needed another hospital to cope with the next, inevitable epidemic. Despite some pushback, the mayor made it come to pass, in the form of the Ottawa Civic, with five hundred new beds for the region. It opened in 1924, when Fisher was no longer mayor, and the siting of it, out on agricultural land, was not much appreciated at the time. Fisher died at the young age of 51, as it happened of pneumonia.
The story of the next three mayors is a liquid one. Mayor Frank Plant, as well as having a swimming facility named after him, introduced the idea of having two platoons of firefighters that would work a 12-hour shift each, instead of the single 24-hour slog they had been on before.
The next mayor was actually called Henry Watters, a pharmacist, and he had been in office less than a year when, on his way to open the Plant Bath, he died of a heart attack.
Napoléon Champagne, who had been mayor way back in 1908, and who would also have a pool named after him, stepped in for the next few months, and died of a heart attack the following year.
Ottawa in its dress-up role as the capital, celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation in July 1927, and the day took off when Charles Lindbergh arrived in the Spirit of St. Louis and was greeted by Mayor John Balharrie, who had made his fortune in real estate. Lindbergh landed on the Hunt Club Field (promptly renamed Lindbergh field) and in addition to the mayor was welcomed by 60,000 cheering locals.
A mini-dynasty was established when the next mayor moved into city hall in 1928, which handsome building was then about where the NAC is now.
Arthur Ellis was the son of James Ellis, who had been mayor twice, and Arthur followed the classic civic route from school board to alderman to board of control (as we had then) to mayor to member of the legislature. Later in life, Arthur had trouble driving straight. He killed a pedestrian in 1936 and four years later was charged with and did a month in the caboose for driving while drunk, after hitting first a traffic cop’s motorcycle and then a parked car.
The Depression had taken firm hold when John Allen became mayor in 1931, the year the city hall burnt down and temporary council offices were taken up in the Transportation Building, now and still at the west end of the Rideau Centre. By 1930, a year after the financial greed-crash, there were 10,000 men on relief, and that doubled in two years. Temporary barracks went up in Brewer Park and on Rockcliffe airport, and make-work projects became vital economic medicine. In response to the crisis, Allen set some of the unemployed to work overhauling the sewer system. Paddy Nolan, who was actually born on St. Patrick’s Day, was the next mayor, owner of several movie houses in town, and he continued the workfare.
When I announced last time that I would be writing about mayors one more time, I got an email from Dave, the grandson of our longest serving mayor so far, Stanley Lewis, who followed Paddy in 1936 and remained there through Second World War until 1948. Dave informed me that his grandfather had been a Dominion Champion war canoeist and an all round athlete. During his tenure some WWII vets occupied a building to complain about the lack of housing and the following year, 1947, he greeted the world figure skating champion Barbara Ann Scott, a fact that seems to loom large in Ottawa history, as well as the fact that Scott refused the free car she was offered by the city so she could hold on to her amateur status. The planet was a different place then.
Owner of an ice and coal company, Eddie Bourque, the next in line, was only mayor for a couple of years but they were crucial ones. The Gréber Plan, an overhaul of the city landscape and railways that saw the greenbelt come into existence, was unveiled on Bourque’s watch, and a whole heap more of Nepean and Gloucester was annexed. Bourque was handily defeated in the next election in December 1950 but the victor, with the appropriate name of Grenville Goodwin, an optometrist by trade, did not get to see the end of the year. He too died of heart failure only a few months into his term. Council appointed another mayor right away.
Which brings us to the point many have been waiting for, the arrival on the scene of Charlotte Whitton, Canada’s first female mayor of a major city.
History has stuck the adjective colourful to Whitton, which she was, from black moods to blue humour, and she was many things besides. She was an advocate of social housing, happier telling men what to do than being told, and a constant generator of headlines.
Near the end of Whitton’s first term (1951-56), she turned the first sod on the construction site on Green Island that would become City Hall, and Ottawa would begin what I’ll call the modern era of mayoralties. Which era we shall fly over next time.