Podcast

Peter Handley:
Hi there and good day! Welcome to North Bay's heritage diary. Listen up, and we shall weave for you tales of days and times gone by which can inform today and show the way to tomorrow. This municipal Heritage Committee podcast looks at our town, our people, and our stories. This time we open our diary of voices from the past for a conversation with now retired Dr. Francoise Noel, recorded in 2014 when she taught history at Nipissing University. This was part of the Cogeco Cable series “Life Is.” Noel from Manitoba, taught in several places before being recruited by Bob Surtees for Nipissing. She taught at Nipissing for around three decades before retiring. Among the topics discussed are her reprinting of Ansen Guard’s 1909 book, “Gateway to Silver land,” her social history, “Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario: the Interwar Years,” published in 2009 and dedicated to Surtees, “On Nipissing: Historic Waterway Wilderness Playground” published in 2015. Please excuse any dated references.

Peter Handley:
You got an MA and a PhD? What was your dissertation about?

Francoise Noel:
My dissertation was actually on a settlement in the Upper Rishi Valley, so south of Montreal, in an area that had been owned by an English Senior, Gabriel Christi. And I was looking at deeds of concessions. So the idea was partly to look at how an English Senior affected this whole, you know, French way of holding land. And it was sort of commercialized to some extent with more monopolies and things like that. So sort of a 19th century settlement.

Peter Handley:
What was it different from other parts of Quebec?

Francoise Noel:
Probably primarily in the survey, because the, everybody's familiar with along lots along the river and things like that. But in his secondaries, Christi surveyed ahead of time, unlike the French who had simply you need a new law to put another stake in the ground, 30 feet over and that's the next farm. He actually surveyed in much as the British did with pre-planned pieces of property. And they were 28 RPA, but that's it actually comes out to make more sense in miles than in RPA. And it was more rectangular, a little bit less long lots, there was still a tendency towards long lots, but it was a little bit more rectangular. And so it was more a British way of looking at land.

Peter Handley:
When did he do all this?

Francoise Noel:
Just after the conquest. So between then and the eight—Well, his family basically owned those secondaries right through, his descendants, right through until the commutation of senior tenure in 1854.

Peter Handley:
So he only got the land after Wolf?

Francoise Noel:
Yes. So he was one of the generals who basically came in, he was an army general-- well he made it too General after the war, I think. So he was a military officer. And there were many military officers who bought sanctuaries, because they were going, what would you call it a basement sale? You know, they were being sold off at really cheap rates, because the French officers who owned them, or the French elite, were thinking of going back to France, and they were worried that the British would take away the rights.

Peter Handley:
Okay, so he bought it, they didn't just waltz in and say "no, off the land."

Francoise Noel:
No no, they bought them, but they bought them at bargain price.

Peter Handley:
Is that still a key story for you to tell, just as much as the work you're doing today? Is that a more interest to you, or just as much or?

Francoise Noel:
No, I've moved on. But I, because I did the deeds of concession in an area that would be about the size of a small county. And I had the list of names of everyone who was given a grant in that time period. And I refer to that as an appendix in my book that I wrote from the thesis. I up until last year, I think, or maybe the year before, I still occasionally get emails, and I've had to put the list of names up on a website. And so the genealogist still goes looking. And so people, who are interested in the local history of that area, are still looking at the book.

Peter Handley:
Has someone else or have other historians done other areas of Quebec the same way.

Francoise Noel:
There's been less work done on the seniorial system in the British period, but there are a few, so two or three other studies that would include the British period.

Peter Handley:
Okay, what brought you to Nip? It was NipU that brought you here.

Francoise Noel:
Yes.

Peter Handley:
Did NipU you bring you to Ontario?

Francoise Noel:
I had finished my PhD and I spent five years on basically one year contracts. But, when I was still at McGill finishing, I had been desperate enough to come and teach in French one summer at Nipissing, which, in 1983, because I was totally out of money. And Bob Surtees was teaching a spring session that year, so he met me. And he kind of, I thought jokingly said, "Well, you know, when we ever get a job in the history department, you know, I think we should hire you." And of course, several years later, I just assumed that that was never going to happen if you know what I mean. I was in Newfoundland, and I was on a tenure stream job which normally you don't give up. But it wasn't working out as well as I'd like to. It was one of the few places I've lived where I really didn't enjoy it all that much. And so I got a phone call from Bob saying "you didn't apply for our job." And I said, "I didn't see a job in Canadian History." He said, "Well, it's not advertised as Canadian, but apply in anyway." So I did. So I actually left a tenure track job in Newfoundland to come to Nipissing for a two year contract.

Peter Handley:
Was that the biggest gamble you've taken in your life? Would you say?

Francoise Noel:
It certainly was one that most people wouldn't do? Yeah, it was a pretty big gamble. Because they could have just after two years said, "Okay, it's not working out." There's no funds, there's no, whatever. And I'd already been on the road for five years. And then when you know, so if then I've done two years there, I would have been starting to reach that point, there's a kind of a point at which faculty started having trouble getting hired, because they've been unattached for a bit too long.

Peter Handley:
You mentioned one year contracts. What's that, like, for an academic?

Francoise Noel:
Well, it's difficult because you're always getting readjusted, there were years, I didn't even unpack everything I owned. So you don't quite have time to make yourself a home and to meet people and make friends. And, yes, you have colleagues, you know, who are good to you, so to speak, you know, you get invited to dinner and things like that. But it wasn't until I'd been in North Bay for several years that I realized that in the one year, you don't really have time to get to know people; it takes longer than that to make true friends and to really settle in.

Peter Handley:
So you were rootless pretty well.

Francoise Noel:
Well, the academic community is National. So you know, you go to the annual conference, you see the same people, you have some ties to that. And so it's, it's not, you know, you're not completely at loose ends. But yes, it's a little bit disruptive.

Peter Handley:
Did you at that time, teach in French as well as English?

Francoise Noel:
No, that was the only time I ever taught in French was—

Peter Handley:
Could you teach in French today?

Francoise Noel:
I interviewed at the University of Ottawa. And from the results I got, I sort of think, no, because I did an interview for a job that was where I would have done a good card of French teaching. My French probably would improve to the point where I could if I was in the job, but it was never quite at that level, to get the job.

Peter Handley:
Do you feel a loss? I mean, you grew up in, I'm assuming in your Alberta community was a bilingual community or was it more Francophone community?

Francoise Noel:
It was very much bilingual. I was bilingual by the time I was six.

Peter Handley:
Okay. Do you feel any loss that you're not fluent?

Peter Handley:
Well, I recognize now that if we had had a different school system that allowed us to learn our French better that I would be fluently bilingual the way some of the people I interviewed were. In North Bay, the people who went through from North Bay to say Haileybury for college or from North Bay to Sudbury, you know, in the French Catholic community. Those people are totally fluently bilingual. And I think that would be a real plus. And I'm not.

Peter Handley:
You've started researching this particular area now, too.

Francoise Noel:
Yes.

Peter Handley:
And one thing that impressed my wife, Pam was a curator at the North Bay Heritage Museum, and she had a copy of the original Ansan Guard book. What possessed you to take on, basically an unknown book, because people didn't know about it? They knew about the Kennedy book, and they knew the chap from Kirkland had done some stuff, so and so forth. But nobody knew about this "Gateway to Silverland," and you took it, and you republished it?

Francoise Noel:
Well, when I first started doing research on North Bay, I found that almost all of the information came from the 1925 old Home Week souvenir book.

Peter Handley:
Isn't that a marvelous book?

Francoise Noel:
It’s marvelous. And I believe in the end from Kennedy, and there didn't seem to be a lot of other information. And we did have a copy of the original book in the library, the Ansan Guard at the Nipissing Library, but it was falling apart. And, you know, it wasn't in good shape. And as you say, it wasn't circulating and well known or anything like that. And yet, when I read it, I realized that it had more firsthand accounts and stories in it than anywhere else. And the other big plus about Anson Guard is that when he came, he had access to both newspapers. That has now all disappeared. So he used the Times, and I can't remember the name of the other one. But there were two newspapers in town at the time. And he went to those records, as well as talking to people. Now he didn't talk to everyone. He talked to the English; he didn't really talk to any of the other communities. And the biographical section, I think is excellent. So it gives us a bit of an idea of what North Bay was like, at that time, that just doesn't exist anywhere else.

Peter Handley:
It's a valuable historical document. But he wrote it as almost a Chamber of Commerce puff piece wasn't it?

Francoise Noel:
That or a travel piece, trying to encourage people to come. Because he did some books in the Ottawa Valley as well.

Peter Handley:
Yeah. And were you happy with the way it came out?

Francoise Noel:
No, there's one thing that I wasn't happy with. And that was that I was not aware about screening for the pictures. They were not screened. And so they didn't come out, right. And in my proofs, they looked fine. And when they went through the press, the screening kind of deteriorated the pictures. But other than that, I was happy with the way it came out.

Peter Handley:
It's a great, great historical document. Now, your areas of interest are more was social history. Could you use that term?

Francoise Noel:
Yes, absolutely. That's basically what I've always done is social history.

Peter Handley:
Do you have any interest in the big names? I mean, big names, were talking around here if you're doing a history of North Bay, involving the mayors and involving people like Jack Garland and all those people. Like in the “Gateway to Silver land,” the bio with the picture's. Those are all the big wheelers and dealers.

Francoise Noel:
Yes, I am. I mean, I'm not disinterested in them, but I see them as being that elite. And I think it's also always interesting to see them in relationship to what else is going on. So it depends. I mean, so I'm not saying that I'm not interested. But it just happens that the kind of history I've done has been more towards family and community. So it's, it's a different approach.

You've got a book, Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario in the interwar years. That is between 1918 and 1939, right?

Francoise Noel:
Yes.

Peter Handley:
Okay. 20/21 years?

Francoise Noel:
Yes.

Peter Handley:
Give me three salient things that stood out in that area of and this is family life in Northeast Ontario. We're talking Franco. We're talking Anglo, we're talking Italian. On the Sudbury we would be talking Ukrainian, Polish, and the Sioux Sainte Marie would be...

Francoise Noel:
yes, I didn't do the whole region. I did call it Northeastern in the title, but it's really the area between Mattawa and North Bay. So it's much more specialized in this area. But I didn't want to use North Bay in the title either because it wasn't just about North Bay.

Peter Handley:
So we'd have we'd have English, French and Italian—

Francoise Noel:
--And Greek, and Jewish, and Chinese. And I did not get any information on the Ukrainian community but there was a small one, I think. And of course, the Aboriginal community is around, but it wasn't actually present so much in a visible way in the area that I actually geographically ended up doing. And so I don't really have a lot of information on the Aboriginal community.

Peter Handley:
What again are three salient things that stuck out in your mind from time you did most of your research and talking to people, did you not?

Francoise Noel:
It was a combination; it was about 50 oral history interviews, and all of 1925 and all of 1935 from the Nugget which was put on a database. Which I could then pull information out in a consistent fashion and that made a big difference for the community part.

Peter Handley:
So you didn't have to go in those?

Francoise Noel:
The students did. I had research, this was a funded project. And so there was money for research assistants. And so that's where the money went, it went to dealing with the oral history interviews, after they were done. I did them myself, but then you have to process them. And the money also went to the Nugget database.

Peter Handley:
Okay, how did you get that database from, I mean normally, you have to view stuff from the Nugget and those

Francoise Noel:
lots and lots of hours to two different students. One did 1935 one did 1925. The 35 took all summer. And she worked pretty much six hour days. And she cranked microfilm and every time she came to, like all 1935, every article on North Bay, she put in the title, the proper bibliographical reference, like all the information so you could find it again, keywords, quick summary of the article, and anything that she thought if it was an important article, some quotes from the paper. And so basically enough information that I could use it possibly even use the quote without going back to the original article, but with some indication, if it was a very, very long article of how important it was so that I would know whether or not it was worth going to. And for clubs, for example, they would all be just little announcements, the Canadian Club. One of the things that comes up in 1935 is the Canadian Club had Nellie McClung speak to 200 people in 1935. And they were at the Masonic Hall. And I had actually, before the Canadian Club talk, I actually went back and I did my little search for Canadian Club, and I had all of the titles of all of the talks they had in 1935, more or less. So but it took a whole summer. So you know, in terms of—

Peter Handley:
But before computers, you you'd have had to done that by hand and scribble it out on.

Francoise Noel:
You couldn't do it. I mean, you know, it would be too much time to do to the extent that it got done.

Peter Handley:
Is Sports a part of social history, in your estimation?

Francoise Noel:
Yes. I have a chapter on sports because it's part of community. It's part of how community is built, it’s part of what communities do. It’s part of community pride, it's part of community identity.

Peter Handley:
Do you have that all broken down with everything else? The sports part of it, too,

Francoise Noel:
It’s a separate chapter. And it also comes up in the community celebration, because the sports were a really big part of the old home week celebrations. They played lacrosse. Yeah, they had the old timers come in to play lacrosse. They had baseball games they had, you know, all kinds of things actually. And, and also special events like, well, at the Old Home Week because they're trying to bring in big names, they brought in a swimmer.

Peter Handley:
That was when long distance swimming, was starting to get

Francoise Noel:
It was at the same time period that they were doing things like swimming in Lake Ontario at the end of competition. And they brought someone in called Marvin Nelson, I think was his name.

Peter Handley:
The three things

Francoise Noel:
Okay. One of the things I was interested in was the transition in terms of family rituals, to what extent was there a transition? To what extent was it traditional? So, in other words, how do you celebrate Christmas? What are the days that you celebrate? And how do you celebrate them, and so on and so forth. So with the French getting community, it's a little bit easier because I'm perhaps a little bit more familiar with it, but also because there's also a lot of material on what was the tradition and how, you know, what you would expect if it was still very traditional, and where are they at kind of thing. And so in that group, I found that they were definitely in transition, in that they were beginning to move away from Christmas being simply religious, to New Year's being the celebration. And that was when the gifts were given, to starting to celebrate Christmas. And there was one traditional feast or way of celebrating that was still current in the Astorville area called a Gangalay. And I had to look that up to try to find out how to spell it, that it was in the interviews, and I wasn't sure exactly what it was. But it was a collection of material for the poor. That was done by going house to house by sleigh with pots and pans banging together, making noise at the end of the sleigh. And, you basically collected extra food extra, you know, things that people might have. And then that was recirculated to the poor. And so this was a traditional, from Quebec, you know, French Canadian ritual, if you will. And that was still present in the probably in the 20s, maybe into the 30s, but mostly in the 20s that some of the older people could remember.

Peter Handley:
I bet if you, I'll let you go to the other two, but I'm just thinking, you're between the wars ending and you finish basically ended in 39. I bet you if you didn't want from 45 to 65, you find you'd find major, major changes in in the just the sort of thing you were talking about?

Francoise Noel:
Yes. What my impression was I originally thought I would do or through until after the war. So I was you know, the interviews included the war period and after. It didn't work out, partly because I had enough material for the earlier period. And also because the interviews that people interviewed, all went different directions during the war. So it was hard to talk about this area from that. But the thing that obviously changed things, at least in the rural countryside was electrification and busing for schools. And so when you start having slightly more regional schools, and you have if you have busing for schools, you also have to maintain the roads. And so the automobile and electricity basically started the transformation of the countryside. And that's not until the 50s.

Peter Handley:
You're happy with this book?

Francoise Noel:
Yes.

Peter Handley:
We’ve done one; do you have two other quick ones?

Francoise Noel:
Well, I think my conclusion about communities is kind of interesting. I think, at the Canadian Club, there were some people that maybe weren't quite sure about that. But what I found is that the communities in North Bay got along. And I defined community as the group that has boundaries, where essentially using the like, will you use the intermarriage test? You know, do you marry in between these communities? Or don't you? So, in North Bay, in the 30s, there were still very distinct religious/ethnic groups. So the, even in the Catholics, there were three groups; there were the Italians, the French and the English. And within the Protestants, the denominational divisions were not as strong, but they still had communities, the Baptist Church had its own community that Anglican has, you know, and so on. And there were very few things that brought people together across those boundaries. But people didn't have overt conflicts. And I think it was because so much of life was still based in the community. So if you were going to do something social, it was mostly going to be a church function, or a Orange Order function, or a Masonic Lodge function, or something. And because those groups, the people who join those groups tend to be similar. You know, you don't have conflicts within the group. And then between the groups, you don't tend to interact too much. So you keep social harmony, essentially, by not interacting. And the English of course, dominated civic government. And nobody was challenging. And they didn't challenge that at that point. Like, neither the Italians nor the French Canadians would have challenged that.

Peter Handley:
And the French Canadians still don't challenge the political department here.

Francoise Noel:
Yeah, I don't want to make conclusions about today. But to me, it seems like those three groups are still very much present as individual communities rather than there's not a lot that over arches,

Peter Handley:
Do you like doing the interviews talking with people?

Francoise Noel:
Yes, it was a fascinating!

Peter Handley:
You've got this on a disk to the some of these memories.

Francoise Noel:
That was what I ended up doing with them. I did not do the transcripts. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe not, I’m not sure. It means that if I want to quote an interview, now I still have to go back and do the transcript which is time consuming. On the other hand, I have these lovely DVDs and I can go and listen to the right section.

Peter Handley:
Another project coming up, something similar?

Francoise Noel:
Tourism.

Peter Handley:
Ah. Oh, from when to when?

Francoise Noel:
More or less 1870 to 1955 from Mattawa to Georgian Bay.

Peter Handley:
This edition of our heritage diary voices from the past with retired Dr. Francoise Noel was originally recorded in 2014. For the Cogeco cable TV production, “Life Is,” and is rebroadcast in this format through the courtesy of Cogeco Your TV. Thank you for spending some time with us and listening to our stories. These productions are put together by the North Bay Municipal Heritage Committee, not only to retell old tales, but hopefully to kindle interest in area history. Local lore is important to any community. We shouldn't let it go unremarked and unremembered. Views expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of the corporation of the city of North Bay, or its employees. Join us next time, when we flip another page of the diary of our shared past. You can reach us at Peter.Carello@cityofnorthbay.ca. Production – Casey Monkelbaan and Peter Carello. Pete Handley speaking.