The Capital Builders: William Pittman Lett
To mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation, we’d like to introduce you to some of the people who have shaped and built the National Capital. Today: William Pittman Lett. William Pittman Lett was Ottawa’s longest-serving city clerk and was heavily invo
When Ottawa’s city clerk William Pittman Lett died in August 1893, he was given a fully paid public funeral. The cortège, including a hearse pulled by four horses, was one of the largest ever in the city. Pallbearers included Mayor Olivier Durocher, two former mayors, three ex-alderman and the city treasurer and engineer. Firefighters, police and public notables marched in the procession.
Chances are good you’ve never hear of Lett. But he left an indelible mark as city clerk for 36 years, through the terms of 19 mayors. More than that, he was the poetic chronicler of 19th-century Ottawa.
Bryan Cook, a former director of the Historical Society of Ottawa, found his interest piqued when the society was offered a cache of Lett’s poetry — in spidery Victorian longhand.
“He was the first true blogger of Ottawa,” says Cook, who published a book on Lett in 2015. “He didn’t write about landscapes and trees and fauna. He wrote about current events.”
Lett was 13 years old when the Rideau Canal opened. He saw the city evolve from a scruffy lumber town in which citizens who ventured out after dark on a rainy night had to be equipped with a lantern and tight-fitting boots — the loose variety were in danger of being left behind in the mud — to a thriving capital with paved roads, fire and police departments and even telephone service.
When Lett arrived in Canada from County Wexford, Ireland as a baby in 1820, the path Canada would take as a nation was far from clear. There was the very real possibility it would be annexed by the United States.
Educated in Bytown (later known as Ottawa), Lett had a nimble mind and a powerful pen, influenced by the fire and brimstone of the Methodist pulpit. He was a lifelong member of the Orange Order and a Freemason, which may have helped him put his foot on the first rung of power at city hall.
In his youth, he was a radical journalist who wrote vehemently anti-Catholic editorials. Lett may even have participated in the Stony Monday riots of 1849, says Cook.
Just a month after those riots, Lett eloped to the Methodist chapel in Huntley with Maria Hinton. Her father, Joseph, was warden of Carleton County, a Presbyterian not fond of Orangemen.
The elopement led to a rift between Maria and her family though all was eventually forgiven and Joseph paid for a well-appointed house for the growing family at 12 Dalhousie St.
The couple had nine children Lett referred to as his “young pledges of affection,” and he wrote typically sentimental Victorian poetry in his wife’s honour: “She called me dearest/O -how sweet!/The sound fell on my raptured ear/ It made my fondest hopes complete/And left me nought to sigh for here.”
Marriage and becoming a bureaucrat in 1855 — most Catholics were purged from city hall that year — appeared to moderate Lett’s views.
Cook considers Lett to be a “radical pragmatist.” He organized and presided over Ottawa’s first drama club, which held its performances in the Bytown Town Hall, where the National Arts Centre now stands. Lett supported abolition and temperance.
Although he was an avid hunter — the city gave him an engraved shotgun as a gift for 25 years’ service — Lett opposed concealed firearms. He once penned a long polemic against the U.S., and was a strong supporter of Canada’s British connection.
As clerk, Lett had a hand in almost everything that happened in the growing city. He managed elections and maintained custody of the city’s records, deeds, bylaws and contracts, registered births, marriages and deaths and once accompanied some prisoners to jail in Perth, in danger of being waylaid by the malefactors’ accomplices.
As CEO of the corporation of the city of Ottawa, Lett co-signed deeds, agreements and contracts with mayors — including the address petitioning Victoria to choose Ottawa as the capital.
On June 28, 1867, he issued the public announcement of the inauguration of the Dominion of Canada, an event that included a military review, the ringing of bells, a lacrosse game and canoe and boat races. Lett enjoyed refereeing competitions well into old age, and he even rescued a boy from drowning in the Ottawa River in 1881, when he was in his 60s.
Lett’s literary talents were also appreciated by Ottawa’s mayors.
“The city clerk has read extensively and was possessed of a memory reliable to the last degree. Give him the subject to be spoken of and in half-an-hour the document would be produced that would stand the test of the refined and educated,” noted the Ottawa Journal.
As time went on, the one-time firebrand became Mr. Safety. Lett was well aware that all it would take was a spark and the lumber town would ignite like a torch. So he saw to it that Ottawa was served by a fire engine company. He also hired the city’s first engineer in 1871 to design and improve city infrastructure.
Sir John A. Macdonald was a friend and neighbour, and Cook notes that Lett capitalized on the relationship, arranging to meet with the prime minister and committee to discuss issues such as land transfers and grants “for the improvement of the city.”
There are glimpses of Lett woven everywhere into the tapestry of 19th-century Ottawa. He lectured at the Field Naturalists’ Club, spoke at banquets, festivals and society weddings, and wrote political satire in the Citizen newspaper under a pseudonym.
Lett was “the civic constant throughout the 19th century,” says Cook. “He did an awful lot behind the scenes. He was Ottawa’s éminence grise.”
It spilled over into his poetry. Of the 222 poems Lett left behind, 16 were on the topic of the transformation from Bytown to Ottawa, and 45 were about Canada’s transformation from colony to nation.
Some of his clever verses would raise a smile, even in the 21st century. One poem is about a wealthy man who spends the night in jail after a night of drinking, and fears the papers will get wind of the bacchanal: “He cared little about the costs/The fine caused no distress/ He only feared his name might be/ Paraded in the press.”
Mind you, Lett was composing “in an age of Canadian poetic mediocrity,” says Cook. “Newspapers published many amateur poets with nauseatingly predictable and sentimental rhymes. He did not have to jump a high bar to be a star.”
Some critics were not so mild, even in Lett’s own time. When he published a collection of poems called Recollections, one wrote that Lett was a terrible poet, but he was to be forgiven because he was a man of “inoffensive ways and kindly aspirations.”
When Lett died, city council’s tribute said his conduct was “marked with the utmost consideration for the feelings and opinions of others, while at the same time he was ever frank and fearless in giving expression to ideas of what is right and true, while his natural kindliness of heart and generous impulses were ever ready to manifest themselves in the relief and assistance of individual suffering as well as every worthy cause.”
And yet, more than a century later, there are few obvious reminders that Lett lived in Ottawa: Lett Street in the LeBreton Flats, and a family plot in Beechwood Cemetery with an age-darkened headstone. His contributions to Ottawa should be recognized, says Cook. “I would like to see the new Ottawa Library named after him for his many contributions to Ottawa’s literary, theatrical and historical legacy.”
Lett’s great-grandson, William (Bill) Pittman Lett III, a respected Peterborough architect who is now retired, says he had not heard much about his namesake until recently. “The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.”