Issue: 16 July 2021
Title: A journey through the past, with the help of the Montreal Gazette archives
Web Link: link
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Publication: Montreal Gazette
Issue: 16 July 2021
Title: A journey through the past, with the help of the Montreal Gazette archives
Web Link: link
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A journey through the past, with the help of the Montreal Gazette archives With his company marking its centenary, Guy M. Tombs set out to discover more about his family?s personal and professional history in Montreal. Author of the article:Guy M. Tombs ? Special to Montreal Gazette Publishing date:Jul 16, 2021 Our company, Guy Tombs Limited, is celebrating 100 years in Montreal, and I have been reflecting on and researching our connections with this city. Many of the connections have been found in the pages of the Montreal Gazette. Visiting the Gazette?s online archive via newspapers.com, together with going through documents from my own collection, has helped me better understand long-ago events and effects of the passage of time. Guy Tombs Limited, an international freight forwarder, was founded by my grandfather, Guy Tombs, in 1921. Prior to forming the company, he worked for the railways. I have found many references to him in the Gazette archive, the earliest being from 1901. He wrote an evocative guidebook in 1907 called Moose and Caribou ? promoting hunting and fishing in remote regions of Quebec, from Shawinigan up into the Lac St-Jean area ? for the Canadian Northern Quebec Railway. It was promoted over several weeks in the pages of the Gazette. I have a copy of this how-to guidebook, with vivid details of long days canoeing, camping and hunting with very experienced First Nations guides. Let us further explore the archive. In late 1939 Adélard Godbout won the Quebec election, defeating Maurice Duplessis. Godbout had promised to give women the vote provincially (they won the right to vote federally in 1918). There was a picture of my great-grandmother Helen Walker Tombs in the Aug. 20, 1940 issue of the Gazette, registering to vote from her bed with a Miss Dodds of the Women?s Volunteer Reserve Corps. My great-grandmother was then 95 and living with my grandfather, her son, on Mount Pleasant Ave. in Westmount. She died the next month. Her grandson and my father, Laurence C. Tombs, was the English speech writer for Godbout from 1942 to 1944, and there was an article about his appointment in the Gazette on May 12, 1942. I delivered the Gazette door to door in my neighbourhood, from the age of 12. I remember the thick bundle of papers, wrapped in wire, tossed onto our driveway on the South Shore at about 5 a.m. each morning in the dead of winter. Within an hour or so the newspapers would dry out and I would set off on my rounds, well before breakfast and departing for school. Guy Tombs was born near Lachute in November 1877. His family was Scottish Presbyterian at heart. They sailed to Lachine from Carillon in 1881, quite possibly on the Princess under the command of Capt. R.W. Shepherd, who advertised regularly in the paper. They would have then taken the train from Lachine to Bonaventure Station. They moved into a modest basement flat on Richmond Square. My grandfather?s earliest memory of the harbour was of walking down to see a huge ice shove. This might have been when he was 14, in early April 1892; the Gazette reported much flooding that month. The port?s wharfs were then bedevilled and often damaged by massive pileups of ice. By September 1892, my grandfather was pulled out of school by his father and sent to work at Canadian Pacific?s foreign freight office in what we now call Old Montreal to help support the family. He earned $8 a month, which he received at month?s end. He was ambitious, and by 1897 he was with the United Counties Railway in St-Hyacinthe. After more than 20 years with different railways in progressively senior sales positions, he founded Guy Tombs Limited. Early in its history, in 1922, the firm ? which primarily provided shipping for the pulp and paper industry ? got into the coal business as a broker, and ended up with 1,100 long tons of surplus unsold coal sitting on the Montreal wharf. This occurred because of a misunderstanding between the British supplier and the local buyer over long tons and short tons. Many months passed before a businessman named Camillien Houde came into the office and proposed a clever way to take the massive quantity of coal off of Guy Tombs?s hands. My grandfather would never again expose the firm to the coal business, and Houde would become mayor of Montreal in 1928. My father was the first employee of the International Air Transport Association in Montreal in 1945, as the acting secretary and treasurer. The IATA is now a massive international organization with almost 300 airline members in 120 countries. My father had acquired extensive related experience and connections when he worked in Geneva for the League of Nations before the war, and in London during the war. He wrote his doctoral thesis in Geneva on international organization in European air transport. This was long before I was born, but we heard about it as children. The Gazette reported several times on the beginnings of the IATA in postwar Montreal, always mentioning my father. The announcement of a major October 1945 meeting at the Windsor Hotel, with delegates from all over the world, was in the newspaper the day before my parents got married. My grandfather retired at the end of 1963, at the age of 86. In that era, someone went onto the roof of the company building and tore down our traditional company flag from its pole. The red pennant bore a gold maple leaf and my grandfather?s initials. It was assumed by our staff that this was a political gesture, due to the maple leaf. The flagpole was taken down and the pennant was never recovered. When my grandfather turned 90 in 1967, he was interviewed by the Gazette. He still had a hearty chuckle, an active mind and certainly a long memory. He almost made it to his 97th birthday. The company has had many other adventures. My late father told me of a young Brian Mulroney coming into the office after Expo 67 to resolve a sticky employee issue, which he did adroitly in his capacity as labour lawyer. In the 1970s and ?80s, when we had a travel department, we organized New York City weekend bus tours that often left from Concordia University. The favourite hotel was the Milford Plaza on W 45th St. I was a tour guide several times, and we advertised in the Gazette. My grandfather had long been a conundrum to me. The large age difference contributed to this. Naming me after him in some ways set the bar high, even though it was a bar set many decades earlier. In the time afforded by self-isolation during the pandemic, I have read his papers again, this time with more acceptance. I have also discovered his life afresh through the objective eyes of the newspaper?s archive. |
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