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Vol. 59, No. 8 — August 1978 — Time and Sandford
Fleming
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He was one of the most remarkable
figures in the history of a remarkable nation. Yet we tend
to forget all he did, perhaps because the benefits of his
work are so commonplace today. Here, an appreciation of the
legacy of Sir Sandford Fleming, Renaissance Man and Canadian.
The first in an occasional series on great people in Canada's
past...
Sir Sandford Fleming is not totally unsung, but considering
what Canadians owe him 63 years after his death, it is odd
that we so rarely celebrate his fantastic achievements. In
his own way, he did as much as Sir John A. Macdonald or Sir
Wilfrid Laurier to strap the country together. Yet if you
were to ask a hundred assorted Canadians to identify Sandford
Fleming, most of them would probably say that he was a senator
from New Brunswick or a one-time defenceman for the Boston
Bruins.
Words memorialize statesmen - words in speeches, words in
print. But Fleming was an engineer, and as he said himself,
"engineers must plod on in a distinct sphere of their own,
dealing less with words than with deeds, less with men than
with matter". Though Fleming was in fact one of the more verbose
engineers of a verbose age, the truth remains that his legacy
lies in what he did and not what he said and others said about
him. The benefits of his acts are so familiar today that we
scarcely spare them a thought.
Thanks to Fleming, the world runs on standard time. He was
both a professional railwayman and an amateur steamship authority.
As such he saw that, although trains and ships got faster
and faster, the chaos in time-keeping threatened to cancel
every gain they made. International schedules were a railway
clerk's nightmare, a traveller's parallel to Babel. Even within
the borders of one country, confusion reigned. At noon in
Toronto in 1880, it was 11.58 in Hamilton, 12.08 in Belleville,
12.25 in Montreal. Railroads in the United States used one
hundred different time standards. Stations displayed rows
of clocks telling the time at different points along the railway.
Veteran travellers carried watches with as many as six dials.
It was to bring sweet reason to this time-keeping madness
that Fleming invented the system of 24 time zones based on
a prime meridian of longitude at Greenwich, England. Scientific
societies initially treated the scheme as a crackpot's dream,
but he doggedly flogged it for 20 years. Earl Grey, the Governor
General who gave the Grey Cup to Canadian football, once said
Fleming had "the missionary fervour of St. Paul". In the matter
of standard time, the big, bearded, Canadian engineer slowly
made the world give in. By 1890, North America, Great Britain,
Sweden, most of Europe and Japan had all adopted the system.
Sandford Fleming is the reason why anyone today can open an
atlas, look at a clock, and calculate the time on the far
side of the earth.
His influence on where Canadians go in their own country
will survive as long as railway trains clatter from coast
to coast. Why does The Ocean Limited, Montreal-bound
from Halifax, penetrate this particular forest, rattle westward
beside that particular river? Who was it that, in 1862, gave
the Canadian government the first practical plan, worked out
to the last cross-tie and dollar, for a railway to the Pacific?
Who said, "The Pacific Railway would surpass in every element
of magnitude and cost any work ever undertaken by man" - and
who, a dozen years later, became chief engineer of this same,
stupendous construction job? Who led historic and death-defying
forays into the Rocky Mountains to survey not only the CPR's
route through Kicking Horse Pass but also what would one day
be CNR's route through Yellowhead Pass? The answer, in every
case, is Sandford Fleming.
Fleming was well over six feet tall. His beard had turned
white by November of 1885 when, at Craigellachie, B.C., a
hunchbacked Winnipegger named Ross took the most famous photograph
in Canadian history. It shows a bunch of navvies and dignitaries
in the mountain mist. They are wearing dark, rumpled clothes,
bowlers and caps, and they surround CPR director Donald Smith
as he drives the last spike for the railway Fleming had first
planned 23 years before. Behind Smith, wearing a stove-pipe
hat and almost dominating the photograph, looms Fleming himself.
The bottom of his beard looks like the edge of a shovel. He
appears as solid and impassive as a totem-pole, but the moment
moves him deeply. Later, he would write:
Most of the engineers, with hundreds
of workmen of all nationalities, who had been engaged
in the mountains, were present... The blows on the spike
were repeated until it was driven home. The silence, however,
continued unbroken... It seemed as if the act now performed
had worked a spell on all present. Each one appeared absorbed
in his own reflections ... Suddenly a cheer spontaneously
burst forth, and it was no ordinary cheer. The subdued
enthusiasm, the pent-up feelings of men familiar with
hard work, now found vent. Cheer upon cheer followed...
Such a scene is conceivable on the field of hard-fought
battle at the moment when victory is assured... As the
shouts subsided, a voice was heard in the most prosaic
tones, as of constant daily occurrence: "All aboard for
the Pacific." The notice was quickly acted upon, and in
a few minutes the train was in motion. It passed over
the newly-laid rail and, amid renewed cheers, sped on
its way westward. Sir Andrew MacPhail, professor of medical history at McGill
University and sometime author, said it was just possible
Fleming was not the greatest engineer who ever lived; he was
merely "the greatest man who ever concerned himself with engineering".
Fleming concerned himself with much more. He designed Canada's
first postage stamp in 1851. He founded a society of professional
men, called it The Canadian Institute, and lived to celebrate
its 50th anniversary. On September 5, 1883, at 4,600 feet
above sea level in the Selkirk Mountains, he also helped found
the Canadian Alpine Club and became its first president. (That
was the day he and his party named Rogers Pass and, before
plunging forward on an expedition that almost cost them their
lives, had a wild, mountain-top game of leap-frog. Fleming
was 56.)
Making way for nationhood with oysters
and champagne
He was the first lithographer in Canada, and printed the
country's first real town maps. He drew up an elaborate plan
for Toronto Harbour, where he took out a row-boat and did
all the soundings himself. He wrote articles on ocean navigation,
steamboats, historical pictures, postage stamps and colour-blindness.
(He was colour-blind; once he unintentionally alarmed his
future wife by courting her in a pink suit that clashed with
his red beard.)
He wrote a book of Short Daily Prayers for Busy Households,
invested so shrewdly that he was wealthy by his mid-thirties,
and, at the time of the historic Charlottetown conference
of 1864, dreamed up and successfully promoted post-conference
trips by the Canadian delegates to Halifax and Saint John.
He believed that "there is nothing like the brotherhood of
knife and fork"; and as his own lusty parties in Ottawa and
Halifax had already proved, his was also a brotherhood of
oysters and champagne. After the Maritime parties in 1864,
the Saint John Morning Telegraph patted its editorial
tummy and allowed: "The Canadians are good fellows and a jolly
set, and we are sorry to part with them." Fleming had made
the ground for the planting of Confederation softer than before.
Fleming had a knack of showing up at places where Canadian
history could breathe on him. In 1849, he travelled from Toronto
to Montreal to get a surveyor's license, and walked right
into a riot. A street mob had pelted the Governor's carriage
with rotten eggs and stones and the throng swept Fleming to
the doors of the burning Parliament Buildings. He was then
22, and only four years out of his home in Kirkcaldy, Scotland.
He promptly organized a small party to rescue a massive painting
of Queen Victoria. A lifelong lover of the British Empire,
Fleming would later celebrate supreme moments, such as crossing
the Great Divide in the Rockies, by drinking a toast to Queen
Victoria in the sparkling water of an alpine brook.
Around the world and back again via
Fleming's cable
Having welded Canada together by rail, Fleming decided to
weld the Empire together with cables. The massive missing
link in the imperial communications system lay between Canada
and Australia. In 1879 he wrote his first letter to propose
a Pacific cable. After a campaign which, for tenacity and
dipping into his own ample pocket, put even his promotion
of standard time to shame, he at last saw the cable go into
service on October 31, 1902. The Prime Minister of New Zealand
sent a wire to congratulate him. To mark the occasion Fleming
sent westbound and eastbound messages around the world and
back again.
Even in an age that regarded work as holy, Fleming's work-addiction
was spectacular. As a boy in Scotland, he had copied the following
from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack: "But
dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is
the stuff life is made of. How much more than is necessary
do we spend in sleep, forgetting that the sleeping fox catches
no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the
grave. Sloth maketh all things difficult, but industry all
easy." Fleming spent his whole life, all 88 years of it, refusing
to squander time.
It was a tribute not only to his reputation as an engineer
but also to his lust for work, and more work, that at one
time he held down no fewer than three of the biggest railway
jobs in the country. He was chief engineer for the Intercolonial
Railway, under construction between Halifax and Quebec; chief
engineer for the CPR, for which he was to survey the route
to the Pacific; and chief engineer of the survey for what
would one day be the Newfoundland Railway. "No man without
his extraordinary mental and physical vigour could have borne
the tremendous strain," his friend and biographer, L.J. Burpee,
wrote. "The task was Herculean." Fleming was the quintessential
hard-working Scot in the New World.
But if Fleming was a Scot he was also a super-Canadian.
It is a cliché of our history that the challenge of
conquering distance to achieve unity has forced Canadians
to master solutions to problems of communication and transportation.
Fleming's passions included railways, telegraph systems, steamships,
ocean navigation, postal communication and cables to girdle
the globe.
A link between the boardrooms and the
wilderness all about
He was also that peculiarly Canadian type, a gentleman of
the wilderness. He was a scholar, a scientist, an unswerving
churchman, a man of public affairs. Yet he was as hard as
an axe-blade, second only to the Indian at scratching a living
out of the wilds. He hob-nobbed with princes and trappers,
governors and Métis, prime ministers and Indians, lords
and frontier horse traders. The Renaissance Man of the Wilderness
was the link between hinterland and the boardrooms, bureaucracies
and universities. Fleming flourished in both worlds.
He crossed Canada by foot, snow-shoe, dog team, canoe, wagon,
raft and dug-out. But he cruised Venice in a gondola and went
up in a balloon in Paris as well. He once drove a sleigh from
Shediac, N.B., to Rimouski, Que., a journey of more than 300
miles in five days of ferocious winter weather. He also visited
five continents by steamship and revelled in that supreme
luxury, a private railway car.
Out on the prairie, he met a Sioux chief with a bear-claw
necklace, skunk's fur at his ankles and hawk's feathers in
his hair; in Paris, he met the Prince of Wales and joined
him in the royal box at an opera. On the trail of a future
railroad, he pulled a wolfskin over his head and joined a
gang of dancing Indians. In London he ran into Sir John A.
Macdonald. The two and their wives spent a couple of days
together, shopping and sightseeing in high style along the
banks of the Thames.
"What made them elect a man who has
never been to college?"
He spent the night of his 24th birthday sleeping on the
banks of Lake Huron in three feet of snow and a wind that
pushed the temperature down to -14F. He spent other birthday
nights on feather mattresses in the four-posters of the most
sumptuous hotels in Europe. Once, with an umbrella, he routed
a large bear that blocked his path in a desolate part of Ontario.
There were times when he ate bear, moose lips, snipe, loon,
yellowlegs and, of course, roast buffalo. He could happily
eat lunch under an upturned canoe during a rainstorm, or at
the best Parisian restaurants.
Sometimes his wilderness world and his society world converged.
In 1864, for instance, the Governor of New Brunswick insisted
he come to dinner. Fleming had no choice but to arrive in
the clothes he had been wearing for weeks on end in the deep
forest: a red flannel shirt, homespun trousers, rough boots.
"You can imagine the sensation I made when I entered the drawing
room at Government House, filled with ladies in wonderful
toilets and officers in full dress uniform," he wrote. "However,
I was given a charming companion to take in to dinner, and
enjoyed myself immensely."
He knew the Premier of Australia, the Queen of Hawaii, and,
according to Sir Andrew MacPhail, "every personage of note
in the Empire". He got to know at least some of these personages
in the wilderness. In July, 1880, for instance, he went salmon-fishing
on the Matapedia River in Quebec. In only five days there,
he dined separately with George Stephen (the future Lord Mount
Stephen), Donald A. Smith ("last-spike" Smith, the future
Lord Strathcona), Lord Elphinstone, and the Duke of Beaufort.
He also found time to share "a splendid bonfire" with his
old friend George M. Grant, the principal of Queen's University,
and Princess Louise and Prince Leopold. They were both children
of Queen Victoria, and Louise was the wife of Lord Lorne,
Governor General of Canada. At the end of this gruelling backwoods
social schedule, Fleming reported that his son had caught
a 25-pound salmon, and that "I lost one in gaffing - almost
hooked another - finally landed two - very tired." He was
only 53. He could not slow down yet. There would be sleeping
enough in the grave.
That was the year he became chancellor of Queen's University
and happily confided to his diary, "This is the strangest
thing of my life. What made them elect a man to the highest
position, who has never been in his life at college?" He had
first seen Queen's only a few days after his arrival in Canada
in 1845. The 35 years since then had given him a lot to be
thankful for. He had a loving wife, a place called "The Lodge"
on the Northwest Arm in Halifax, a family mansion called "Winterholme"
in Ottawa, a tract of salmon-fishing territory in northern
New Brunswick, the right to travel free on some of the world's
best trains, independent wealth, general respect and, in the
university appointment, prestige.
Not long before he died on July 22, 1915, Fleming reflected
on "my great good fortune to have my lot cast in this goodly
land". He added, "I have often thought how grateful I am for
my birth into this marvellous world." Others, too, might occasionally
consider being grateful for his birth into this land and this
world. A good place to consider Sandford Fleming
is aboard a train on the CN main line as it chugs up to Montreal
from the Atlantic Ocean, or the CP line as it arrows across
the Prairies, zooms into the mountains and rampages down to
the western sea. A good time to pay him a silent
tribute is the moment you cross from one time zone to another,
anywhere the world over, and adjust your watch.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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