Reluctant Genius (4 page)

Abruptly, Melville Bell took a decision that, for a well-established professional in his fifties, was extraordinarily brave. He recalled how the bracing climate of Newfoundland had restored his own health thirty years earlier, and he remembered his visit only two years before to several Scottish friends who had settled in Canada. Melville had spent a few days with the Reverend Thomas Henderson in Paris, a small farming community set in the lush countryside of southern Ontario, fifty miles west of Toronto, the provincial capital. He had marveled, he wrote home to Eliza, that the Hendersons all looked
’as young
as when I saw them last. The climate, trying as it is in its extremes of heat & cold, evidently agrees well with our fellow countrymen.” Now he decided that he, Eliza, Alec, and their son Melville’s widow, Carrie Ottoway Bell, for whom they felt responsible, should immediately uproot themselves from their comfortable London life and move to Canada.

Melville was a great one for just barging ahead, on the assumption that all around him would bend to his will. Alec was not so sure. He still nursed a passion for Marie Eccleston; he still hoped to earn a degree at the University of London; he enjoyed teaching at the school in Kensington; he couldn’t imagine leaving the most important city in the world for a distant colony. But Melville had made up his mind, and Eliza was so desperate to leave behind the soot and sad memories of London that Alec knew he had no choice. Moreover, Marie Eccleston did not seem as heartbroken by his impending departure as he wished. There was an almost cavalier tone to her farewell note: “Don’t grieve about your examinations etc. … [A]ll the degrees in the world would not make up for ill-health.” Marie’s final piece of advice suggests she knew her beau better than he knew himself: “Don’t get absorbed in yourself—it is one of your great failings,” she suggested. “Mix freely with your fellow [men].”

In June, Alec took the train to Edinburgh to dispose of Melly’s piano and household effects. Slumped in the corner of the carriage, staring wistfully at fields and moors steeped in history, he felt trapped, by his own poor health as much as by his father’s firm decision. The following evening, after he had packed up Melly’s meager belongings, his mood was even gloomier. Perched on an uncomfortable wooden chair in his dead brother’s dusty, abandoned study, he listened to the sounds of the city he had loved since childhood and tried to imagine a new life in the New World. All Alec knew about the colonies in British North America was that they had swallowed up large numbers of Scots emigrants during the previous half-century and had formed a self-governing “Dominion” only three years earlier.

His bleak stereotype of Canada seems to have been based on popular books like Catharine Parr Traill’s
The Backwoods of Canada,
first published in 1836 and reprinted frequently, which described the struggle to survive in a pitiless, thinly populated landscape. “[I] tried to imagine myself in the Backwoods of Canada,” he wrote to his parents. “It was not very hard to imagine … sitting on borrowed chairs, in the empty classroom.” But he could see his parents’ desolation, and he reluctantly admitted that they had cause to be anxious about their last remaining son. Despite his own repeated denials, all the signs of TB were there. His headaches had intensified, and he coughed repeatedly. Although he was well over six feet tall, his weight was down to about 130 pounds and his face was gaunt. Eliza reassured Alec, “You don’t really think you are going into the backwoods, do you? You are merely going into a country house, and will have civilised society there, just as much as you have here.” The Bell family’s passage was booked on a steamer that left London on July 21, 1870. In later years Alec would tell friends, “I went to Canada to die.”

Chapter 2

T
HE
B
ACKWOODS OF
C
ANADA
1870

A
lec was withdrawn and gloomy during the ten-day voyage across the Atlantic; his parents saw him only at mealtimes, when he barely touched his food. Most days, he stayed in his cabin, studying a new book he had bought in London by the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, entitled
On the Sensations of Tone.
He also scribbled in a small notebook (on the cover of which he wrote “Thought Book of A. Graham Bell”) his lingering resentment against his father’s decision to emigrate. “A man’s
own
judgement should be the final appeal in all that
relates to himself.
Many men … do this or that
because someone else
has thought it right.” But once the Bells had landed at Quebec City and had transferred themselves and their baggage to the steamer that would take them up to the St. Lawrence River to Montreal, his spirits began to lift. A sense of eager anticipation rippled through the party as they contemplated the spectacular scenery in the early August sunshine. Thick green forests interspersed with pretty little villages crowded down to the edge of the mighty river, and the sound of church bells rang across the water from the silvery spires of sturdy stone churches. Alec took deep breaths of the cool, clean air, fragrant with the smells of pine resin and wood smoke. He allowed himself to address a few civil words to Melville and to accompany his sister-in-law as she took a turn around the deck.

If Alecs expectations of the Great Dominion of the North were based on
The Backwoods of Canada,
his first glimpses of his new country must have been as reassuring as his mothers words before they left England. The Bells disembarked from the St. Lawrence steamer at Montreal, the largest city in Canada—a bustling seaport of nearly 100,000 people, the hub of a rapidly expanding railroad system, and the center of the Canadian banking system. There was a comfortable familiarity to the city: although the language of the warehousemen and porters was an incomprehensible French dialect, once the Bells left the docks Alec heard more English spoken than French, often with a Scottish accent. Many of the streets were named after Scotsmen: McTavish, Drummond, Mackay. There was nothing strange about the architecture, either. Scottish merchants who earlier in the century had amassed fortunes in the fur trade had built themselves splendid stone mansions along Sherbrooke Street that were reminiscent of the granite mansions built in the Scottish countryside by wealthy lairds. When the four Bells breakfasted in their hotel, they were happy to be offered porridge, even if they were surprised to see fellow guests eating it with maple syrup. As they strolled around the cobbled streets, only the muggy heat of an eastern Canadian summer was utterly foreign.

From Montreal, the family took the Grand Trunk Railway train west, to their friends the Hendersons in southern Ontario. As the iron engine steamed through the sunlit countryside, Alec stared out of the window at the prosperous little towns, well-established farms, and snake fences weaving their way around flat fields of wheat. Within a few days of unpacking his bag at the Hendersons’ rectory in Paris, Melville Bell had seen a ten-and-a-half-acre farm called Tutelo Heights, eight miles away. With customary brio, he snapped it up for $2,600. The main house, a pleasant two-story white building, boasted four bedrooms, a large dining room, a study and parlor, a good-sized kitchen, and an attractive front porch with gingerbread trim. There was a glassed-in plant conservatory, and behind it a small workroom. There were also an orchard filled with apple, plum, and cherry trees, a stable, a carriage shed, a henhouse, a pigsty, an icehouse, a well, and rainwater cisterns. At the back of the house, beyond a high bluff, wound the Grand River on its way to Lake Erie. And on the other side of the river were the church spires and factory chimneys of Brantford, one of the busy little manufacturing towns (Elora, Waterloo, Berlin, Gait, and Guelph were its friendly rivals) that had sprung up in the Grand River Valley in the mid-nineteenth century.

Tutelo Heights, the Bell home in Canada, was an Italianate villa near the friendly little manufacturing town of Brantford.

In 1818, only twelve Europeans lived by the ford across the Grand River that was named after Mohawk chief Joseph Brant. When the Bells arrived fifty-two years later, there were close to ten thousand. Although Tutelo Heights was four miles from the center of town, just before seven each morning they would hear the whistles and bells of a hundred factories, summoning mechanics, foremen, timekeepers, bookkeepers, and laborers. Massey mowers and reapers, Tisdale’s iron stoves, Lily White Gloss Starch, T. J. Fair cigars—“Made in Brantford” was stamped on goods that were dispatched to every corner of British North America. The burghers of Brantford were intensely patriotic, raising their glasses to Queen Victoria at celebratory dinners as if they lived in Kent or Cumberland back in England. The town boasted two daily papers (the
Brantford Courier
and the
Daily Expositor
) and, of particular interest to Melville Bell, its own rail link to the United States—the Buffalo and Brantford Railway had opened in 1854.

Tutelo Heights fulfilled Eliza Bell’s promise that, in Canada, the Bells would live in a comfortable “country house.” And Melville didn’t have far to look for “civilised society.” Between the town and Tutelo Heights lay the property of Ignatius Cockshutt, one of Brantford’s leading citizens and owner of the best dry goods store in town. Eliza and Carrie soon discovered that Mr. Cockshutt’s bolts of silks and wool cloth were as good as anything on offer in Edinburgh stores. A short drive away from the Bells’ new home was Bow Park, a large estate belonging to George Brown. By 1870, Brown was a leading Liberal MP in the Canadian parliament in Ottawa, as well as the wealthy editor of the influential Liberal newspaper the
Toronto Globe.
He was also a fellow Scotsman—born in Edinburgh, he had been educated, like Alec, at the Royal High School. Thanks to Brown, along with their other friends from Edinburgh days, the Bells easily slipped into the Scots-dominated society of late-nineteenth-century Canada.

Yet Brantford had little to offer Alec intellectually. The nearest school for the deaf was in Belleville, 180 miles to the east. The nearest university was sixty-eight miles away, in Toronto. All Alec could do was acknowledge his poor health and take things easy. He spent the rest of that summer at Tutelo Heights quietly sitting in the garden with a rug, a pillow, and a book, feeling the sun on his face and brooding about the life he had left behind. Memories of his dead brothers were never far from his mind, and he often caught his mother staring sadly at a photograph she kept tucked in a drawer, of Edward lying in his coffin. Melville busied himself with organizing his new estate, and Carrie helped Eliza master such rural obligations as planting a garden and keeping hens. But Alec felt bored and frustrated. He never really warmed to the flat landscape of southern Ontario. “Go where you will in Canada,” he wrote a few years later, “your horizon is bounded by trees! You seem to be perpetually in the midst of a clearing! … The fields are full of stumps. Here and there some solitary giant tree—a relic of the primeval forest—stands mourning over the remains of its companions—to show how recently the land has been reclaimed from the wilderness.”

However, enforced idleness did give Alec time to notice what was happening in the wider world. In particular, he began to see how his little experiments back in Britain with tuning forks and the speaking machine might fit into the explosion of inventions and scientific advances in North America and Europe.

The mid-nineteenth century was a wonderful time to be alive for a young man with a quick brain and endless curiosity. Today, we can understand the technological revolution of Bell’s day only if we compare it with the impact that microprocessors have had on our own lives. The same coal-driven steam power that had accelerated travel and shrunk the world had also transformed a way of life that had existed virtually unchanged for over a century in the United States, and far longer in Britain’s rural areas. The Industrial Revolution picked up speed in the early nineteenth century, as steam-driven machinery vastly increased productivity and spawned factories in the rapidly expanding cities of northern England and the United States. Working conditions in the new industrial cities were brutal, but ordinary people’s lives on both sides of the Atlantic were immeasurably improved by such mechanical inventions as the sewing machine, the rotary printing press, the mechanical reaper, and the steam train. The entrepreneurial spirit thrived in North America. It soon appeared as though every young go-getter had a blueprint for a new gadget in his back pocket: better bobbins, music stands, valves, kitchen implements. “There is no clinging to old ways,” a German visitor to the United States noted in the 1820s. “The moment an American hears the word ‘Invention’ he pricks up his ears.” A town like Brantford, the Bells’ new home, owed its prosperity to technological ingenuity coupled with entrepreneurial push.