On April 21st, 100 years ago today, my cousin Martha Allan sets sail across the Atlantic on the Adriatic.
She is the advanced guard. Her mother my great Aunt Marguerite Lady Allan will leave on May 1st also from New York.
Martha was foiled in her attempt to join the nursing staff of the Number 3 General (McGill) Hospital that will depart Montreal on the Metagama on May 6th.
Her guardians on this trip with be a doctor who will join the No3, Dr John Lancelot Todd and his wife Marjory Clouston. Her father had been the General Manager of the Bank of Montreal. Todd will later leave the hospital and join Martha's father in setting up the pension system for Canadian soldiers.
The connections go on and on.
It was John Todd who gave Dr Jack McCrae, a close friend, a horse. Bonfire was to be forever associated with McCrae and carried his boots at his funeral in 1918.
The sailing was uneventful.
When Martha arrived she likely went to London for a few days to see her brother Hugh who had just left Eton. They then journeyed to Liverpool on or around May 7 to meet their mother and their two sisters Anna and Gwen who were due to arrive on May 8th.
It is likely that the Todd's went to Shorncliffe where the No3 was to set up and where the Allan's had rented a house called Encombe. The Allans lived there for at least a year after the sinking of the Lusitania.
Meanwhile, back in Montreal, Aunt Marguerite is closing down her home, Ravenscrag. Here are some pictures of it in its heyday. It will be rented well into 1919 when Aunt M returns in effect homeless. Ironically she was a guest there of the Byngs who rented it as their Montreal base when General Byng was Governor General. When she moved back it was full of ghosts. Martha could not bear it and moved out to the stables.
Here it is today - slowly crumbling.
The full structure 60,000 + square feet.
The ball room in 1914 hosting a charity card game.
Empty and ready for a ball.
The Dining Room - set for the family.
The entrance hall.
One of the girls in the gardens of Ravenscrag.
The Allans had bought Guy Drummond's summer home in what is now Beaconsfield. The house had 32 rooms and had been called Huntlywood when Sir George, Guys' father had it. It was renamed Allancroft.
The Allans ran a dairy farm there. The house burned down in the 1930's and the land was sold for development and is now all built up.
The farm was one of the few farms clean enough to safely offer milk and was run through the war but the house would have been closed.
Already closed up was the family "Cottage", Montrose, in Cacouna. (More here) All the family had spent much of the summer of 1914 there. The last time they would be as one family. Aunt M found it hard to return there. Too many ghosts. She sold it for $10,000 to the Capuchins in 1941.
And here are the children with their mother back in the golden days - they are in the back row and Aunt M is on the right as you look at the photo.
When I think of my own children now - they are in their late 30's - I often think of them as little ones just like this. I am sure that is how Aunt M often remembered her lost babies.
