Family
Background
I
have recorded below some reminiscences my parents shared with
me
about their family background. My father came from the Sturgis
side of the family and my mother from the Davidsons.
Alice
Sturgis 1906-1967, my father's mother
My
Dad remembers his mother very fondly and her strong belief in
the
value of hard work comes across in his descriptions...
“Even
when I was a young baby she went out teaching. My mother
worked probably up until the war time then she
had a
lot of things to do in the house but when the war was over she started
up teaching again, music teaching. She would go around the small
local, rural schools and teach the children singing and music appreciation.
So she did that all through her life pretty well. In terms of working
mother, she was in advance of her times.
"She
was very definitely a woman who championed her husband and
she would
see herself as being a defender of the interest of her husband
and the family name. She was a champion of her husband and
her husband’s
work but she was not a meek character. She was a fighter but knew
when to retreat and not to attack unwisely. I think people
liked
my Mother more than they liked my Father. She was always known
as
“Mrs S” and she had a lot of admirers. She ran a choir
and put on Gilbert and Sullivan programmes and she would order
all
these important men about.
"When
she met my Father, it was a bit of a whirlwind romance that
upset
everybody’s plans and two possible marriages. Music was what
they had in common and that’s when they were happiest together.
I remember them being at the piano and they would be trying to
work
out how a particular passage worked but the further they got away
from the piano the less happy they were…
"My
Mother had tremendous energy and drive. She would always make
sure
that we had odd jobs to do, along with play you also had to work
and to learn the intrinsic value that there was in working.”
Harold
Sturgis 1903-2000, my father's father
In
July 1994 my Father interviewed his Father, Harold Sturgis who
at
the time was age 91. Here follows some excerpts from this interview
in which he describes his childhood and his struggle to become
a
teacher.
“I
took my first music lessons when I was around 9 I was taken
into
Woodstock.. by horse and buggy.. my mother considered learning
music was part of my equipment for life. I was more or less
immersed in
music right from the beginning. I played at playing the piano on
the chair.
I
didn’t like hard work and that’s what the farm signified
for me. I thought there must be an easier way. Money was very scarce
and in order to go to high school I had to pick wild raspberries
in the summer and picked up apples and took them to market so that
I could get money to go to school. I lost a good deal of schooling
through farmwork during the busy season in the spring my parents
would take me out of school. It was during the early days of the
war and my father couldn’t get hired help on the farm and
in those days you were allowed to leave school in the latter part
of April, early May. Getting to school was a real struggle which
only made me more determined than ever that I was going to get
there.
Harold
did finish his studies and indeed became the headmaster of the local
high school. My father has admiration for this determination and
rise from humble beginnings to an educated man with a profession:
“My
father was a self-made individual who got his education gradually
and turned himself into a teacher. He was an authoritative
person
and therefore suitable to head a school. No-one would take liberties
with him. He was not an easy man to contradict though as a
parent
he was a bit distant.”
Hugh
Davidson 1909-1983, my mother's father
My
Mother rememembers her father as an intellectual man whose involvement
in the Presbyterian church had a big influence on their family life.
Like my father's father he bettered himself through education...
"My
Father was brilliantly clever. He went to a one- room school
house
and was the brilliant young farmer's son and he was a very, very
able individual and his mother thought there was no better
person
in the world. His mother used to tell me how he used to sit in
a little chair in the kitchen and spell things when he was
two years
old.
"They
lived in a duplex in Toronto in 1937 and my Father was
doing a Masters
in Hebrew at the the University of Toronto because he had won a
Hebrew prize and rather than go straight into a Presbyterian
church
somewhere he was encouraged to stay on and do this postgraduate
course.
"During
the war, he volunteered to join the Royal Canadian Airforce
as a
padre. He was wildly excited about it all because it was a huge
adventure and it was the big adventure of his life, there's
no doubt
about it, Canadian country boy goes off to Europe.
"In
the 1950's Dad was always going to Toronto for church
meetings,
he was already quite involved in central church committees and
eventually he had a full time career in the church office
and he became very
influential.
"He
was a very, very intellectual man and not like a born again,
emotional
Christian."
Margeret
Davidson, 1913-1996, my mother's mother
My
mother's mother received a university education, unusual for a woman
of her time...
“My
mother went to University, to Victoria college and the university
of Toronto which gave free tuition to clergymen’s children.
She did a degree in English and history and then wanted to be
a
librarian but this was during the depression and her family did
not have enough money to put her through further training so she
just had to stay home for a year. As a result, she was lifelong
opposed to, not opposed to education but she believed that you
should
have some training because without training you couldn’t
necessarily get employment.
"She
wanted to be a librarian. I can’t imagine that she would
have liked it if she had done it because she was much more
vigorous than
I can imagine you would be as a librarian. She was very, very sharp
financially and ended her life as a whizzo investor
with a limited amount of money. But she was very astute and
had she lived today
she would have been the director of a company or something like
that.
"She
met my father at University and married a year after she
graduated.
I found a little of diary of hers recently where she described
meeting my father and said somethng like "Hugh's a
real peach."
They were a very well matched couple in many ways but she was impatient
of his rather lavish, extravagant ways. She was very careful because
she ran the budget and he would always give everybody huge slabs
of roast beef at Sunday lunch and she used to say "Hugh,
don't give everybody more than they can eat". But they were
a well matched couple because they came from similar backgrounds
and saw
life the same way."
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