Robert could have frittered away his inheritance, but since he possessed a sound business sense and a marked distaste for frivolity, he invested his legacies providently in an impressive range of stocks, bonds and real estate properties. An editorial that appeared in the Lethbridge Herald after the death of his son George illustrates the Senator’s prudence (Robert was elevated to the Senate in 1901) and aptitude for business, two qualities that he passed on to his daughter, Cairine, who would have made an excellent businesswoman had she embarked on a business career.
When the old Senator made a disbursement for the advancement of the business, he was wont to ask George for a memorandum of the requirements, which he would carefully put away, saying, “There should be a record of this for those that come after.”
This methodical manner was an ever-present ideal with the uncles and the fathers in the conduct of their affairs in the important merchandising business that they founded in Montreal and in all their transactions that led to the foundation of a considerable fortune.18
In 1893, twenty-six years after becoming a partner in the family firm, and three years after becoming its head, Robert Mackay retired from the drygoods business to devote more time to managing the enormous Mackay estates and to meeting the demands of his wide assortment of business commitments. These multiplied so rapidly that before his death in 1916 he was a director of sixteen companies, including such illustrious institutions as the Bank of Montreal, the City and District Savings Bank, the Dominion Textile Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway. Given his formidable list of directorships and his active participation in the affairs of such companies as the Bell Telephone Company, which he served as vice-president, it is not surprising that he earned the reputation of being the most sought after man in Canada for directorships. In fact, the Montreal Standard placed him among the twenty-three titans who were preeminent in the Canadian financial firmament in the opening years of this century.19
Hon. Robert Mackay, father of Cairine Wilson.
When one contemplates the daunting number of directorships and company offices Robert Mackay held, one might conclude that he had little time for anything else. But such was not the case. As befitted a leading member of Montreal’s business community, he joined the Board of Trade, becoming president of it in 1900. He was also a member of the Board of Harbour Commissioners, which he served as president from 1896 to 1907. In tribute to his farsighted leadership, a stretch of wharves was named after him as was the tug, “the Robert Mackay.” Decades after his death this squat boat could still be seen plying the waters of Montreal harbour, not far from the Harbour Commissioners building and the richly furnished third-floor boardroom where the Senator and his fellow commissioners met weekly to manage the port and plan its future. Cairine Wilson’s father also played a leading role in preserving the traditions of his native Scotland, serving at one time as president of the local St. Andrew’s Society and as honorary lieutenant colonel of the 5th Regiment, Royal Highlanders of Canada. His abiding love of tradition and history would be inherited by his daughter, Cairine, who, in her adult years, would amass scrapbooks crowded with clippings relating to her family and things Scottish.
When it came to business acumen and moral earnestness, Robert Mackay resembled Joseph and Edward. But unlike his “kindly uncles,” as he once referred to them, and his brothers, Hugh and James, he abandoned celibacy for marriage and the role of paterfamilias. On 10 May 1871, at the home of the bride’s father, in Trois Rivières, Quebec, which in those days was called Three Rivers, he married Jane, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of George and Isabella Baptist.
A self-made lumber baron, George Baptist had begun his career as a sawmill employee in Dorchester County, Quebec in the 1830s. From these humble beginnings he had gone on to become a member of the “brotherhood of the Saint-Maurice barons,” a group of powerful logging entrepreneurs that exploited the enormous timber wealth of the Saint-Maurice region of Quebec. By the time that Robert Mackay became his son-in-law, this transplanted Scot had created an industrial empire that produced between 25 to 30 million feet of lumber each year. He had also succeeded in becoming an outstanding member of Trois-Rivières' growing bourgeoisie. Of his eight children, five were daughters, Jane, or Jeannie, as she signed herself in her letters to her husband, being the youngest. Like Jane, the older girls all married businessmen. Phyllis married James Dean, a Quebec City merchant; the other daughters married local men: Isabella, George Baillie Houliston, a lawyer, banker and broker; Margaret, William Charles Pentland, an accountant; and Helen, Thomas McDougall, a metallurgist.20
Robert, the up-and-coming merchant and financier, was thirty-two when he married Jane Baptist in her family home in Trois Rivifcres. From a Notman photograph taken in 1878, we can see that the young Mrs Mackay was, if not exactly pretty, at least tall and handsome, with a high forehead and fair hair that was parted in the middle and then pulled straight back. Resplendent in a dark dress whose severity is relieved by a border of brocade, she stands beside a draped table and stares pensively at the camera. Even more impressive in appearance is her sombre husband: a strikingly good-looking man with deeply chiselled features, a high intellectual brow and a short cropped beard. In later photos, taken when he was in his fifties, the beard appears more luxuriant, the face fuller and the expression, if anything, sterner.
The somewhat hazy picture that emerges of Jane Mackay is of a kind woman who was dominated by her husband and plagued by ill health. A family story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that Robert Mackay would dole out some money to his wife for groceries each month and then pocket any that she left on the hall table after she had made up her monthly accounts. Certainly she was no bold, high-spirited chatelaine, as this rather pathetic excerpt from a letter written in 1879 indicates:
...I regret dear Robert that home is not more happy for you. I know that you feel that you have more to bear with than a great many, but you must not forget that I have my own little troubles & I know I am not able to bear up the way I ought to. I will try in the future to keep these little things to myself & not trouble you more than I can help.21
Just what she meant by these “little troubles” is not known. But no doubt the reference alludes, in part, at least, to assorted ailments that afflicted her during her lifetime and to the demands made upon her far from robust constitution by frequent and debilitating child-bearing. The first child, a daughter, Louisa, had arrived during the first year of marriage and had died shortly thereafter. Then, in rapid succession, had come Angus Robert (1872), George Baptist (1874), Hugh (1875), Euphemia (1876) and Isabel Oliver (1878). At the time that she penned her rueful observations in a fine copperplate hand to Robert, she was pregnant with her seventh child, Anna Henrietta, who would enter the world on 25 December 1879. Mercifully for Jane, there would be a six-year interlude until Cairine arrived in 1885. Edward, the last of the children, would be born in 1887.
Cairine Mackay was born in February 1885, a month that would later prove to be a portentous one for Montreal. For it was in February that a Pullman porter from the Chicago train was admitted to the Hotel Dieu hospital with a slight skin eruption that was later diagnosed as smallpox. The disease quickly spread to other patients and before long a major epidemic was in progress. Goaded into drastic action by a public outcry for sterner measures, the city finally introduced compulsory vaccination that fall and soon the epidemic petered out, but not before some three thousand lives had been claimed and thousands of French Canadians had rioted in the streets to protest the new measure.22
Interestingly enough, the day that Cairine Mackay appeared on the scene — Wednesday 4 February — a notice appeared in the The [Montreal] Gazette advertising the sale by auction of her father’s semi-detached stone