Building strength: The Bermingham family
The Berminghams are a Hamilton family with deep roots not only in the building/engineering industry in this country but in the building and engineering of this country and its very sense of purpose.
The lasting material marks they’ve helped put down on the land (Soo canal/Locks, Crowsnest Pass project, other infrastructure milestones) are no less than the hard script in which much of our history is written.
“Foundations,” chronicling the early years of Bermingham Construction, is a new book compiled by Tim Bermingham. He’s a scion of the four-generation large-works building “dynasty,” if we can use that word, with brother Patrick being the last family CEO.
The company was founded in 1897 by William Bermingham and his wildly colourful partner, with the push-broom moustache, Stetson hat and love of tugboats — Big Bill Forrest; six-foot-six and 300 pounds. And a personality, as big and a half again, that was the truer measure of the man. “Big Bill was like a Canadian Paul Bunyan,” says Tim. “He was called that sometimes.” And a Canadian Goliath.
Big Bill, even more than William himself, modelled for young Spike Bermingham, William’s son, the kind of man he thought he should be — headstrong, fearlessly adventurous, yet scrupulously fair, companionable, a loyalty-inspiring leader.
Spike (Cornelius John), Tim and Patrick’s grandfather, turned out to be all those things, sometimes to a fault.
Such was the magnitude of his decisiveness, when the Second World War came around, he simply mothballed the by-then venerable company and enlisted. He was made colonel of the Royal Canadian Engineers, a role in which he oversaw the building of floating bridges across the Rhine.
Oversaw? “He was in there building with the men,” says Tim. One time, he was working atop a structure and Germans started firing at him; he kept working, like Captain Ahab, a man possessed.
Spike was so fiercely proud of the legacy of his father and Big Bill, he recorded it. “In 1967 he started dictating into one of those primitive old Dictaphones with the blue belts,” says Tim. And that’s where this book began.
“Our aunt (Barbara Barker nee Bermingham) transcribed the whole thing,” says Patrick. The result was enough text to fill several books.
It took years to organize and compile the material, much of the initial work falling to Bill Bermingham, Spike’s son, Tim and Patrick’s father. Tim took it up after Bill died in 2002, with enormous help from his sister Susan Jasper, with her background in publishing.
In classic Canadian fashion it starts with an immigration story, James Bermingham arriving from Galway, Ireland, in 1852, driven here by famine.
James’s son William, born 1867, true son of Canada, graduated from the Royal Military College and had a gift for engineering, which brought him into the sphere of Big Bill Forrest. They were a salutary contrast.
The effect of the narrative in “Foundations” is that of walking around a Greek vase (except its Canadian), admiring the frieze of heroic exploits curving along at a gallop, as the family saga coils through national events like the laying of the largest inland waterway ever built at the time (Soo Locks and canal). It is, in sum, Pierre Berton-esque in its sweep.
There is a draft horse falling through the ice and a crew of men hacking a way to shore all afternoon to save it. There is William’s pregnant wife riding a hand cart over the rail into town to give birth. There are Big Bill’s dramatic tugboat rescues and fits of passion, smashing up a hotel room after he thought he’d been had, then apologizing at checkout, saying, “Put it on my bill.”
There is William’s inventiveness, his ingenious solutions like the concrete crib dry docks. The book tells of politics, commerce, big characters, like Mike Haney, technical challenges. Mostly it’s a Canadian story of character, strength and swashbuckling resourcefulness against the cold, the hard and the wet.
To Tim’s credit, the book both preserves Spike’s voice yet varies it with Tim’s beautifully written dramatizations.
The book leaves us in 1939 but hints through antecedents at later family achievements.