Index

The Diaries of Ethel Eva Conybeare

I have almost no memories of my paternal grandmother; only a few images of a woman looking somewhat lost in my grandparents' retirement home in Kelowna, when I was five and she was already pretty far gone into Alzheimer's. I always heard, however, what a remarkable person she was; a scholar, musician, and bon-vivant. She was born in Lethbridge in the late 1880's when the town was very small and had nearly as many First Nations peoples on the streets in buckskins as British pioneers. It had very recently still been called "Fort Whoop-Up" for the trouble caused by the mostly American sales of whiskey. The RCMP (then the NWMP) were primarly founded to put a stop to this trade and assert sovereignity over the "Northwest Territory" (Alberta became a province when she was in her mid-teens).

Her father, one Charles Frederick Pringle Conybeare, a lawyer, was one of those Britons (I don't know if he ever regarded himself as "Canadian") who went to the Empire's farthest corners to seek his fortune and made very good; he started a few companies, made a fair pile, and has a courtroom in Calgary named after him.

So while his daughters may have grown up on the frontier, they did so on a 7-acre estate called "Riverview" and went to Canada's finest school for young ladies, Havergal.

My Dad, 4, playing at Riverview, 1924

The fortune did not outlast Charles' death by long; his wife, in my Dad's phrase, "drank the estate", and she and my grandfather had a very middle-class life after the Depression drained the last of it.

I had heard something of her extensive diaries: some nine volumes, starting with her youthful trip abroad and continuing through her service as a nurse in WW1 when she met and married my grandfather. The last volume has a multi-year gap, the last few pages filling in "I guess I should finish this story" - the first years of the marriage and the births of her two children.

EEC, her children Bob and Eildon, 1923
The last page shows my father as an infant.

The kids, 1921, the year of the last entry

That infant was just a few months passed on when I was cleaning out the storage closet in the basement of my parent's condo, I came across the fading books in a cardboard box. Reading the "happy ending" story of his birth as we were still mourning his death was one of the most extraordinarily bittersweet moments of my life.

Here are a few pages of the first volume to give you a taste of my reading. She was almost entirely writing about the museums and art and architecture she saw - this was a kind of "finishing school" continental tour for the Edwardian young lady, after all - but as near as I can understand it, the Carpathia took her from New York to Gibraltar and they got off at Naples, the rest - Rome, Capri, much more of Italy, then France - by train and other boats. Still, the first few stops of our 2010 Cunard tour certainly do follow in her just over century-old footsteps, and I will try to contrast the two trips where I can.

To see a 'screen-sized' (1024x768) version of a photo, click on the thumbnail photo. To see the much-larger original file, click on the JPG file name above the thumbnail.

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The books are old student's notebooks, most of them falling apart now. You have to lay it flat to flip over the separated pages.
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This little rhyme to provide a title page is the first of thousands; Ethel wrote a little topical ditty every day for the Lethbridge newspaper under the pen name "Chris Casual" for decades... right through WW2.

A digression into "Chris Casual", because her little rhymes show up a fair bit in the diaries. The block of photos below are not clickable.

Samples from the "Chris Casual" scrapbook, July 1945
Most of this doggerel was light-hearted, but Ethel, serving in her second war, and now with two children in their early 20's in uniform, reflected the martial views of the time.
EEC, 1945 Bob, Eildon, 1942
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It was when I read the first page, about the start of her Big Trip to Europe - a hundred years ago, that I got the idea of making our ocean voyage this year.
You have to love the remark about "these degenerate days" at the bottom.
diary_hug.jpg
Speaking of "degeneracy":
The gap of time over a century shows up sharply in some of her attitudes, which may also reflect how sheltered a life a young lady of means had in 1910; it's hard not to laugh at this passage, from a walk she and a friend took in Toronto: her shock at seeing a "man and woman hugging for all they were worth...in broad daylight"
I believe in 1910, "bathing costume" for women involved a long, flowing dress on top of a layer or two of full arm-and-leg coverage, a terrific way to drown. As I mentioned, I'm too young to remember her as a conversationalist, but certainly she was still sharp enough to about 1960, so what she thought about the bikini when it came along, I can only wonder.
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It wasn't long after I found the diary that we took and enjoyed a trip on the Cunard Queen Mary 2. And just a few pages in is pasted her postcard of her ship, the Cunard Carpathia; already familiar to me as the ship that rescued the Titanic survivors two years later. That's when I got really enthused about this idea. Remarkably, for 1910, she even brought her own camera, producing tiny family photos aboard, not to mention historical images: what steerage looked like, a sighting of a sailing ship(!) in the mid-Atlantic, which was surely non-commerical, steam having taken over decades earlier.

I have, for the moment, custody of the first two volumes, about her trip; my brother has the last seven, many of them about the first world war, when she served overseas as a nurse. Some of those contain passages so painful - about the long nights in a ward of soldiers in deep suffering - that I snapped the book shut and backed away.

Of course, they are just diaries, mostly full of the now-meaningless day-to-day conversations and relationships with friends I don't know; and of course, painstaking hand-copies of letter she sent home to daddy asking for more money to have fun in England with. Increasingly, the fun is with a certain Regimental Sargeant Major named Brander.

Time has, however, a way of turning the most banal of remarks into History, and I suspect our family should turn much of this over to the University of Lethbridge one day. In the meantime, they remain a family treasure we can point to proudly as proof that my brother's kids are a real rarity: a fourth generation of born-Albertans.