110, 413 & 513 McRoberts Avenue

Benjamin Henry Sear was overseas serving in the First World War when Kate Sear and their two boys moved to McRoberts Avenue. When he arrived home from war, wounded, the family tried to get back to normal, but Benjamin was very ill, and his time on McRoberts was painfully short.

Army life was very hard on Private Benjamin Sears. He first joined the British Army in 1884 when was 16, following his older brother Frederick into the 1^st Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment. Frederick, who seems to have been an excellent administrator, was already a Sergeant and he vouched for Benjamin who signed on for “long service” – a term of 12 years.  Frederick Sear’s first rank was “Boy”, which was truly what he was – he stood just under 4-foot 11-inches tall when he attested. Even though (or perhaps, because) he had already worked for three years as a bricklayer’s assistant, he weighed just 74 pounds. Within a year in the infantry, he became a Private, his first and last promotion.

The Sear brothers, photographed in World War I and published in the Daily Star, July 6, 1918. Both brothers served with the 1st Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment of the British Army. In the First World War, Private Benjamin Sear, left, went to the front in France. Captain Frederick Sear, right, became Quartermaster for the Canadian Veterinary Corps.

Despite his slight physique, the medical notes in the UK, Royal Hospital Chelsea Pensioner Soldier Service Records show that Benjamin was a healthy young man until the 1^st Battalion was sent to India in 1889 to reinforce the demands of British Imperialism. There he suffered regular illnesses: “Ague, climate” noted the military doctor over and over again, “recommend Quinine.” He got measles, and dysentery.

Possibly worst of all, Benjamin got syphilis and gonorrhea, which were both extremely common in the British forces and barely treatable in the days before antibiotics. According to the article “Sexually transmitted diseases and the Raj” by J. Basu Roy published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections (1 February 1998, http://sti.bmj.com), over half of all British service men in India were being treated for STIs by 1895, a rate far higher than that found among local soldiers in India.

In 1895, the 1^st Battalion was sent to the northwest border territory of India as part of the force to break the siege of the Chitral Fort. It was April, and still winter in the region with deep snow, but the British Army succeeded in crossing the mountain pass, defeating the local forces and reclaiming British dominance in the area. Benjamin Sear apparently participated in the fighting – but soon after the Relief of Chitral he was hospitalized again in Chitral and finally discharged as medically unfit, diagnosed with infectious connective tissue disease. He was just short of his promised 12 years of service.

Returned to Britain, Benjamin seemed to regain his health. Living in London, he became strong enough to resume work as a labourer and, in 1901, to marry Kate Sear, daughter of a Battersea boat builder. She was 22 and had probably never known her sweetheart as a soldier. He was 33, also living in Battersea. They married on April 21, 1901 at St. Mary le Park Anglican church. His sister Laura and Kate’s father, Benjamin Taylor, were the witnesses.

Benjamin and Kate Sear were people who endured ongoing hardship, but they also seem to me like people who took action when things were tough. When their eldest son Benjamin Frederick Sear was born on January 27, 1905, his family lived at 55 Camera Square in Chelsea, according to the baptismal records of St. Luke Parish, Chelsea, London. Local history there records this area as a dreadful slum and in 1907 the Sears  decided to seek out something different for their family. Like other poor Londoners, they made a plan to emigrate, hopeful that they could build a new and better life in Canada.

The family of three arrived in St. John aboard the steamship Lake Erie. According to the Passenger List, they had $15 and were headed for Toronto. Benjamin was almost 40 and Kate almost 30, their baby just two years old. Benjamin found work as a labourer and they moved into a house at 2 Creemore Avenue in the Regent Park area, where there were only two houses listed in the 1908 Might’s Directory. After a few years, the family moved to 76 De Grassi Street, where Albert Harry Sear was born on November 12, 1912.

When war was declared in 1914, it seems like Benjamin Sear could have avoided further military service. But in 1915, he made himself a bit younger on his attestation papers, did not mention his medical discharge from the British Army, and was judged fit to serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. An experienced soldier, he soon found himself on the front lines in France. Participating in the Fighting for Mouquet Farm during the Battle of the Somme, he was wounded in the face by a shell on September 16, 1916.

Kate Sear, with sons Benjamin and Albert, pictured in the July 6, 1918 edition of the Toronto Daily Star.

Recovering from the loss of his eye in England, Private Sear was put on light duty. But by December 1917, he was quite sick. The army decided to send him home and he was discharged without a pension as both medically unfit and overage.

Privates in the Army received low wages and perhaps to make ends meet, Kate had moved her boys from their home at 50 Clinton in Deer Park, to 110 McRoberts Avenue, probably renting rooms from the Huggett family who lived there for many years. When Benjamin arrived back in Canada, partially blinded and still ill, he was fortunate enough to get a job inspecting shells at Canada Foundry. The couple moved north on the street, going up to Fairbank where they took a small wood-frame house at 413 McRoberts Avenue.

However, by the summer of 1918, Benjamin was even more seriously ill and had to be hospitalized. Everything they had worked for was now at risk, but Kate Sear was clearly a resourceful person. As her husband worsened in hospital, without publicly funded medicine to help him and no recognition from the military, Kate got a job at a munitions factory to keep body and soul together. Then she started a campaign of her own for what she knew was fair and right.

She appealed to the newly formed Great War Veterans Association (GWVA) for assistance and found sympathy and, even better, concrete help from the Earlscourt GWVA and community leader Charles T. Lacey. The Association provided some immediate cash relief for the family and Lacey successfully advocated for Benjamin Sear to be transferred to the care of the provincial Invalided Soldiers’ Commission, where he could be treated at the Base Hospital while receiving pay.

Benjamin Sear’s kidneys were failing, and the Toronto Daily Star also took up the cause, with headlines reporting on his condition, his family’s plight and any sign of a shift in bureaucratic policy. Everyone involved could see that a solider who had been good enough to fight and suffer wounds at the front was good enough to received a pension. But the army and the government were not ready to help.

It was a problem the GWVA was fighting on a national scale. Writing on behalf of the organization in the May 1, 1919 issue of Maclean’s Magazine, journalist and war veteran George Pearson commented, “We do not believe a man should draw a pension merely because he was overseas. That is graft.

“But, however much we may deprecate any raid on the public treasury for ourselves, even those of us who want nothing from the Canadian Government or people for ourselves, are insistent that men who have been badly disabled and dependants who really need assistance, should receive something that is less a pension than a salary. The blind for instance. Or consider the case of the men made insane by war. Are they to be exposed to the brutalities of the average civilian or military institution? Or the soldier’s widow struggling to bring up her little brood? Is the pittance of a pension that would force her to work and keep her children from school justice to her dead soldier? Nothing less than an income sufficient for her to remain at home and send her children to school would be plain elemental justice in such a case.”

There apparently was no “elemental justice” for Kate Sear. At the beginning of August, Benjamin Sear died in hospital, which also ended his invalid soldier pay. The Toronto Star reported on his funeral on August 10, 1918. A long procession of veterans, friends and family went to his grave site in Prospect Cemetery, where the man who had given so much of his life to military service was laid to rest at 3 p.m., with full military honours.

“The long funeral procession, including a large representation from the Earlscourt Great War Veterans, a unit from the 2^nd Battalion Canadian Garrison Regiment, as well as the firing party of thirteen and six pall-bearers from the same unit, led by an officer representing headquarters, wound through Earlscourt to the strains of the funeral march, rendered by the Royal Air Forces band, to Prospect Cemetery, where the Last Post was sounded and the volleys over the grave announced the entrance of another “happy warrior” into the “Homeland.””

When their father was buried in 1918, Benjamin Sear Jr. was 13 and Albert Sear was only 5. Kate moved her boys again, to 513 McRoberts Avenue. The 1921 Census lists them renting four rooms in a house that was shared with a couple named William and Sarah Stevenson. Sixteen-year-old Benjamin’s $500 per year income was supporting the family. He did not – as the Maclean’s writer thought was only right – have the opportunity to complete more schooling than his father had. However, he did learn a skilled trade as a steam-pipe fitter, and later Albert followed him into plumbing work. By the late 1920s, the family was able to move to a house of their own at 103 Blackthorn Avenue. It was surely a small victory for them. They had not been overseas, but they were also the survivors of war.

123 and 127 McRoberts Avenue

Spring came early to Earlscourt in 1914. In the March 5 edition, the Daily Star reported that blackbirds had been spotted several times, “the harbingers of an early spring.” For the Sherbut and Hay families of McRoberts Avenue, spring also meant that the family trips they had planned back to England were fast approaching. The same edition of the Star, under the headline “To-day’s Best News Items from the Suburbs of Toronto,” said that “Mr. and Mrs. Sherbut and family and Mrs. Hay and daughter, all of McRoberts Ave., will sail on the Royal Edward to Bristol.”

This March 12, 1914 newspaper ad for Canadian Northern Steamships may be promoting the voyage taken by the Sherbut and Hey families to visit their families back in England.

The Royal Edward was one of two steamships owned by the Canadian Northern Railway. It had purchased the ships from a bankrupt Egyptian mail ship company, renamed them the Royal Edward and the Royal George, and had completely refit them by 1911 for trans-Atlantic travel. Their promotional material boasts of many up-to-the minute amenities, including the elegant décor, recreation facilities, and even an electric elevator to carry passengers between decks. In 1914, the company also held the speed record for travel between Canada and England – five days, one way. The Sherbut and Hay (spelled Hey in later records) families were travelling in style.

The two families were next-door neighbours on McRoberts. Clifford Hey, a machinist, lived at 123 McRoberts Avenue, according to the 1914 Might’s Directory. James J. Sherbut, who was a foreman at Swift Canadian Company in the Stockyards, owned the next house up — at 127 McRoberts. Both were wood-frame houses and at that time there were no buildings between them. I imagine Emma Sherbut and Ruth Hey, who were both young mothers, taking a break from their endless daily chores to meet up and talk about plans for their upcoming trip. In 1914, Ruth had only been in Canada for four years but Emma was a few years older and a bit more of a veteran, having arrived in 1906. They had been neighbours for about two years.

Ruth Naylor and Clifford Hey had married in Toronto on May 11, 1911. They were both 25 and living at 110 Greenlaw Avenue at the time, which was close to Clifford’s job at the foundry on Lansdowne Avenue. Before coming to McRoberts, they had moved to 1362 St. Clair Avenue West, near Harvie, where their son Kingsley was born in 1912.

Emma and James Sherbut emigrated together from Devon aboard the Empress of Britain, sailing third class from Liverpool to Quebec October 5, 1906. They had their three-year-old, James John Jr. and infant Fred with them. Little Fred did not survive for very long in Canada; he died on July 23, 1907 and his parents laid him to rest in a child’s grave at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

The Sherbuts first appear at 127 McRoberts Avenue in the 1911 Census (misspelled as the “Shubuts”). I could not find them in the 1910 Might’s Directory. In the Census, James was 42 and working as a “hidesman,” while Emma was 32 and at home. James Jr. was 8, and they had a toddler named Elsie, who was 2. In the 1913 Might’s Directory, James was described as a butcher, but by 1914 he had been promoted to foreman at the Swift Canadian Company. (There is an amazing photo of the Swift Canadian Company taken in the 1940s here.) Perhaps it was this new boost in income and status that gave the Sherbuts the opportunity to take a family vacation back home. Certainly, James would have needed to take a chunk of time off work to make the voyage.

The Star article says that Ruth Hey was going to travel with her daughter. I have not been able to figure that out. Either the reporter made a mistake and meant her son Kingsley,  or she had another baby who I have not been able to find. In the 1921 Census, Clifford and Ruth Hey had two children living with them: Kingsley, and a five-year-old daughter named Almond.  I think she would have wanted her family in England to meet her Canadian born son, though.

To travel on the Royal Edward, they would have purchased tickets at the Canadian Northern Railway Offices King Street, across from the King Edward Hotel. Having all travelled by ship before, they may have especially appreciated the steamship line’s promotion of an improved standard for second and third class travel. The Royal Edward’s literature spoke of better ventilation and even a roofed promenade deck for the second-class passengers. The menus on board provided solid English fare at breakfast, dinner, and tea with a light supper served in the evening. If Ruth and Emma and their families weren’t suffering from illness on board it must have felt so luxurious to get a break from cooking and cleaning for the better part of a week.

An image of a spring, 1911 menu for Third Class passengers on the Royal Edward.

The first leg of the journey was by train to New Brunswick, where the ship embarked from Saint John, sailing out through the Bay of Fundy and on across the Atlantic to Bristol. At that time of year, icebergs were both a sight to behold at sea, and a danger. On a return trip from England that May, the Royal Edward grazed one in a fog, damaging her hull, although fortunately not with the disastrous consequences of the Titanic.

They Heys and the Sherbuts were among the last commercial passengers to sail on the Royal Edward. When war was declared a few months later, in August 1914, the ship was one of many merchant ships to be commandeered for service, her civilian crew adapting and transforming their shipboard routines to provide passage for troops. They travelled in large convoys, always wary of German U-Boats hiding beneath the cold, grey waters of the Atlantic. Just a year later, the Royal Edward was lost, torpedoed in the Mediterranean. The loss of life was heavy. Almost one thousand men died as the ship was at maximum capacity with soldiers being sent to reinforce the British army at Gallipoli. A moving tribute site vividly describes her last voyage.

Clifford Hey and James Sherbut both spent the war years here in Toronto, most likely because their jobs were critical to wartime production. By 1915, the Heys had moved around the corner to 20 Norman Avenue, and another British machinist (at Alsop Process Company of Canada) named George Foxall had moved in at 123 McRoberts. James and Ruth Sherbut remained at 127 McRoberts until 1921, when they bought a brand new, brick home. For the rest of their lives, they would live at 13 McRoberts Avenue, the house that I believe was constructed by their neighbour Walter Griffin of the Griffin Contracting Co.  The new owners of the woodframe house at Number 127 were the Worsley family, who would settle there for several years.

2, 4 & 8 McRoberts Avenue

It seems that there has never been a Number 6 on McRoberts Avenue. But one family lived at all the other numbers on the West side of the street that is closest to St. Clair Avenue: 2, 4 and 8. Today, there is just a 4 and an 8. But in July 1907, when little baby Albert Drury came into the world, it was at 2 McRoberts.

The Drurys were a Roman Catholic family, which was quite unusual on McRoberts in those days. Albert was the third son I can find born to Henry and Ada Drury. The year before, the couple’s baby Alfred was born, but the lack of further records for him suggest that he died in infancy. Albert, the first Drury known to be born on McRoberts, had three older sisters – Mary, Edith and Alice – and an older brother named Henry. Alice was the first child born in Canada and she was baptized at St. Helen’s Church near Lansdowne and Dundas in 1905.

The Drurys had moved up to McRoberts around that time, having first lived on Farley Avenue (renamed Richmond Street West in 1910), where they had lived next door to Thomas Drury who I believe was Henry’s brother. Both Henry and Thomas were listed in the Toronto directories as labourers. Conditions in the Victorian workers’ houses on Farley were probably reminiscent of the crowded two-up two-down row housing the family had come from in Bradford, Manchester, in the north of England. They joined the other pioneering families of Prospect Park in the chance to own their own piece of land on McRoberts and build their own house.

A typical progression for the early settlers of McRoberts and surrounding streets described in histories of the area would be to live at first in a makeshift dwelling – a tarpaper shack or a tented foundation – while working to pay off the land. Once the title to the land was clear, a mortgage could be obtained to help finance further construction, or a family could continue to build as they were able to afford materials. Workers like Henry Drury would complete a ten-hour shift, six days a week, and then come home and build their houses by lantern-light, with the whole family pitching in, working into the night.

This 1910 William James photo shows Lansdowne Avenue by the Canada Foundry Buildings. Courtesy City of Toronto Archives.

Like most of the men on McRoberts, Henry Drury had an extraordinarily hard work day. He was a moulder at Canada Foundry, where skilled tradesmen used packed sand to cast molten iron into any number of useful objects. Canada Foundry was not known as an organization that was kind to its workers. On the 1911 Census, the Drurys reported that they had arrived in 1903, and so Henry may have been among the English metal workers recruited that year to come to Canada – unaware that in order to work, they would be expected to cross the picket line of foundry workers fighting for a nine-hour work day. The working conditions and the labour movements of the time are described in a study by Wayne Roberts published in Labour/Le Travail  “Toronto Metal Workers and the Second Industrial Revolution 1889-1914“.

There is a film in the General Electric archives held by the miSci Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, NY. “The Moulder” was made in 1924, the year after GE bought the Canada Foundry. The operation shown in the film is more mechanized and modern than it would have been at Canada Foundry, but it demonstrates some of the physical conditions of the moulder’s work. It also shows the reduced skill level required for the moulder’s craft that Wayne Roberts argues eroded the value of the worker as efficiency, quality control and automation were introduced.

The Canada Foundry’s relocation to Lansdowne between Dupont and Davenport by 1905 had helped spur development along McRoberts. According to Wayne Roberts’s article, it was the second largest employer in the city at the time, after Massey Harris. However, just as the workers and their families were getting established, economic depression and another big strike at the Foundry hit them hard in 1907. Conditions in the neighbourhood were truly desperate at that time, starvation and hypothermia from a lack of coal for heat were reported regularly. The local churches and aid workers in the area did what they could for the people in the area, who were struggling for survival.

It was into this world that Albert Drury was born. Henry’s employment status at the time is not evident, but he must have done something to keep his family alive and keep their land. The family did not have another baby recorded until 1909, when Ernest was born on February 20 at 2 McRoberts, again with the faithful local doctor Dr. McNamara in attendance. Sadly, Ernest was premature and only survived for three days.

The first change of address recorded for the Drurys was 2 years later, on Feb 25, 1911 when Joseph Bernard Drury was born at 4 McRoberts Avenue. Joseph survived to adulthood, and later that spring, when the 1911 census was taken, he was three months old. In the Census, Mary was 12, Edith was 10, Henry and Alice, born close together, were both 6, and Albert was 3. Ada was 32 and keeping house. One benefit of being at the corner in the early days is that it was close to the local water supply before water and sewer infrastructure was installed. Henry, at the age of 34 was working at the Foundry for 55 hours each week, making $20 a week. The family had also been joined by Ada’s 21 year-old brother, Albert Haslam, who had come over from England the year before and was also working at the Foundry, making $18 a week.

The family’s shift from number 2 to number 4 is a bit puzzling and would require sifting through land records to try to figure out. It is tempting to think that the tidy big house on the corner used to illustrate this blog was their original home. It was photographed at the end of August, 1911 by city photographer James Salmon when assessments were being done for the widening of St. Clair West. The photo is labelled as being on the Northeast corner of McRoberts and St. Clair, but unless the image has been flipped, it is oriented as a house on the Northwest corner would be. Goad’s Atlas of 1910 shows wooden buildings both at that location and next door, with a row of deep empty lots along St Clair. Perhaps the houses were just renumbered and 2 became 4. [A correction: I was wrong about all of this… This is not the Drury’s house – it is on the Northeast corner and it is actually 1478 St. Clair West!]

James Salmon took this picture for the City in August 1911 when assessments were being done for the widening of St Clair West. It is tempting to think this is the Drury’s house at Number 2 [Correction: It is not number 2 – see paragraph above in the post]. Courtesy City of Toronto Archives.

Ten years later, in the 1921 Census, the family was still all together at 4 McRoberts. The war years and the Spanish Influenza behind them, and the boys having been too young to fight overseas, the next generation took up work in the textile industry that had made their birthplace of Bradford in England infamous. Henry was a cap maker at the “Cap Factory” and Mary and Edith were both “Nitters.” The local census enumerator that year was not great at spelling and had terrible handwriting, so although Alice’s work at age 16 looks like Pianist, it is very hard to tell if that is what she was actually doing. The other children were at school, and had been joined by Frances, age 6, making the family four boys and four girls.

Edith was the first of the family to marry, and although she gave her religion as Roman Catholic, she married an Anglican in the Anglican church. She had met Leonard Stanley William Turner, age 20, who was a Sheet Metal Worker who grew up in The Ward. By now, the family had moved next door to 8 McRoberts where they continued to live. The move may have been an economic necessity. On May 20, 1919, the Toronto Daily Star reported that residents of McRoberts had been polled on whether they favoured the extension of the city’s “brick limits” up to Innes Avenue and they were divided on the issue. If a large wooden house needed to be bricked in, it would be quite costly.

It may also have been a move as a result of Henry’s health. In 1924, Henry Drury, age 48, died at Toronto General Hospital of Chronic Pneumonia. Lung disease from silicosis is an occupational hazard for moulders and years of inhaling particles from the sand killed Henry and left Ada a widow at the age of 46. A Card of Thanks was published in the Toronto Star on September 20, 1924: “The family of the late Henry Drury, 8 McRoberts Avenue, wish to thank their many friends and neighbors for their kind sympathetic expressions and beautiful floral tributes extended them in their recent bereavement.”

Ada’s children grew and most married, and like their sister did so outside of the Catholic Church, part of a pattern that was alarming Catholic Church leaders at the time. According to voter’s lists from the 1940s, Mary continued in her textile work as a knitter and stayed home, supporting her mother. Ada passed away in 1958. For years afterward, memorial ads in the Star remembered Ada and the love her children had for her, a testament to the hard work and care she had given to them here on McRoberts Avenue.