Covering Niagara: Studies in Local Popular Culture

Polite Athletics and Bourgeois Gaieties: Toronto Society in Late Victorian Niagara-on-the-Lake

POLITE ATHLETICS AND BOURGEOIS GAIETIES | Toronto Society in Late Victorian Niagara-on-the-Lake PHILLIP GORDON MACKINTOSH Tennis week at Niagara-on-the-Lake, which begins to-morrow, promises to be as popular an attraction and as altogether enjoyable as in past seasons, and the Queen’s Royal will doubtless be filled with happy guests. The attractions of golf and cycling will occupy the mornings, while something special in the way of amusement has already been arranged for the evenings. Quite a large number of people are going over from town. (Globe, July 15, 1896, 6) INTRODUCTION In August of 2007, an entourage of Torontonian bicyclists boarded the “Bike Train” to Niagara-on-the-Lake for an adventurous weekend of bicycling and wine tourism through the town’s celebrated grape and wine district.1 Via Rail Canada’s bike service allows twenty-first century, haute bourgeois Torontonian cyclists the opportunity to repeat the leisure pursuits of their late Victorian forebears: participation in polite athleticism and bourgeois gaieties in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Curiously, the small town at the mouth of the Niagara River toward the southwest end of Lake Ontario has afforded an escape to Torontonian cyclists, and sport and leisure seekers in general, since the late nineteenth century.2 Railway and steamer service flourished as privileged Torontonians took their desire—and often their bikes—out of the city to escape the heat and congestion. Indeed, so many comely leisure seekers took their bicycles to Niagara-on-the-Lake that Henry Winnett, a proprietor of the Queen’s Royal Hotel, arguably the most famous hotel in Ontario at the time and celebrated summer home for Toronto’s and the northern North 3 4 Public Showings American elite in general, had to build “a bicycle stable for these silent steeds” (Globe, July 9, 1895, 9). There were, of course, other reasons for bourgeois interest in Niagaraon -the-Lake, which was regarded as a suburb of Toronto (Mackintosh 2007, 130): Toronto’s streets and “resorts” (parks and green spaces) were occupied by “a plague of nuisances” in summertime, from peddlers and boot blacks to noisy music makers, roving bands of rowdy boys, and drunks who made haute bourgeois pretensions and activities in public difficult.3 Undoubtedly , some Toronto resorts, such as Munro Park in the beaches district, where an “absolute prohibition of intoxicating liquors” and “the splendid and complete manner in which the grounds were lighted and policed,” maintained “excellent order” for the park-goers.4 These places notwithstanding, suburban and exurban resorts such as Niagara-on-the-Lake became havens for haute bourgeois entertainments, as respectable Victorians sought distant locations resistant to non-bourgeois intrusions. Late Victorian Torontonians loved Niagara-on-the-Lake. It provided seasonal recreational refuge for the beneficiaries of Toronto’s burgeoning industrialism . Niagara-on-the-Lake, as an everyday extension of Toronto’s urban geography, was commonly mentioned in the “General City News” column in the Globe. Indeed, all Toronto papers made frequent references to the town, whether in society pages, advertisements for steamer or railway excursions, social events at such “Blue Book” destinations as the Queen’s Royal Hotel and the Oban Hotel, or through regular news of the military activities, reviews, and galas and hops at Fort George or the Queen’s Royal.5 The preoccupation with Niagara-on-the-Lake as a site of polite leisure for late Victorian Torontonians was especially apparent in the summer months. The lack of refrigeration and central cooling (electric fans were becoming available only to a privileged few) compelled city people of all classes to develop heat-avoidance strategies. Polite Toronto looked elsewhere in the summer months: as the Globe suggested in its “Niagara-on-the-Lake” column , “It is hot in town these days and one’s friends are, one and all, departing for fresh fields and new pastures … and, in a moment, we are once more in that delightful summer-hotel the Queen’s Royal” (July 20, 1895, 9). Thus, availing itself of the proliferation of steamer excursions to fashionable destinations around Lake Ontario (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Niagara Falls, Port Dalhousie , Kingston, and the Thousand Islands, among others), Toronto’s Four Hundred set (haute bourgeois) also mounted extended bicycle trips into Toronto’s hinterland (Mackintosh and Norcliffe 2006) and, increasingly, railway escape to exclusive resorts in the Muskoka and Haliburton lake districts of central Ontario and even points beyond. Niagara-on-the-Lake...