Call Me True. Eleanor Darke

important part of her working life.” True, herself, later noted that “although my interests did not at first lie in that direction, I have spent most of my life in business,”² Hired in the summer of 1926 to sell books in the Toronto showroom and to screen all submitted manuscripts and decide which ones should be further reviewed by the firm’s Managing Director, Mr. Henry Button, True rapidly undertook many other responsibilities. By the time she left the company in 1930 she was “responsible for all display advertising, catalogues and circulars, special exhibits, entertainments and stunt publicity... supervision of manufacturing in Canada and much of the correspondence with our London headquarters regarding Canadian manufacturing... check[ing] copyrights, look[ing] up illustrations...considerable editorial work... read [ing] proof of authorized texts and other important books...bookkeeping...supervis[ing] our...record of stock in London, our two Vancouver depositories and our two Toronto depositories, solv[ing] stock and sales discrepancies which hinder the preparation of royalty reports, ...prepa[ring] the annual budget and annual report... act [ing] as office manager, selecting and training new staff, representing the Managing Director on occasion and, most importantly, selling...on the road, working up educational authorizations, from Charlottetown to Victoria.”³

      A later interviewer wrote that “in those days, it was possible to publish books at a reasonable cost and have them authorized for certain grades for a certain number of years” and quoted True as saying,

      This was big business and I was the first woman to be in it. It involved spending four to eight weeks in a province at a time and becoming acquainted with ministers of education, deputy ministers, and superintendents and principals of normal schools [Teacher Colleges], and people with the power to advise the department of education, the textbook committees. This sort of thing. It was a big job. I was terrified. I was not really a saleswoman. I had lots of confidence in my...teaching, but I had never done anything like this before. At first I used to go back to my hotel room after each visit and try to work my courage up before I’d go out to the next one.⁴

      Terrified she may have been but she didn’t let it stop her. A copy of a letter sent to Mr. Button in 1927 by D. McIntyre, the Superintendent of Winnipeg Schools and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Province of Manitoba, praised her selling abilities.

      I congratulate you on having so capable and tactful a representative as Miss Davidson. She made a very excellent impression on the people she met here. She pointed out to me most tactfully that the appearance of the name of your house on the book lists was not as frequent as the merit of your books would justify, a position that I felt could not well be denied.⁵

      Drawing of the Dent office, Aldine House, in Toronto. Courtesy Reeta Wright

      J.M. Dent and Sons was a British company, headquartered in London, dealing mainly in classics, encyclopedias, and school texts. The Canadian Branch Office was located in a converted house on Bloor Street in Toronto. True’s secretary from those days, Reeta Wright, remembers it as “a beautiful building...with a beautiful library... and a lovely overgrown back garden with a trellised path surrounded by rose bushes...[it was] the only place I ever worked, right out of Business College, [I] felt very lucky that I had such a lovely place to work.” The house stood somewhat alone “there wasn’t much along Bloor there” on the north side of Bloor Street, “just across the road from McMaster University [now the Royal Conservatory of Music] and the stadium was just at the corner.” The office had a small staff. Mrs. Wright remembers only “the Managing Director and his Secretary, True and me, the caretaker and that’s about all.” She also remembers it as a generally friendly, but not chummy, office. “Mr. Button called her [True] Davey all the time...he called me Tiny Tim...they treated me like family...indeed Mr. Button wrote me a letter advising me when I was getting married...telling me the problems I might face...I said he was talking to me like a father would and he said ‘I feel like that about you.” She said that True didn’t talk about her personal life at all, but neither did she, “it didn’t seem appropriate at the office.” She mainly remembered True being “wrapped up in her business world and her book sales...True and I got along alright. She’d tell me what she wanted and I’d just go and do it....I did as I was told. I guess I was kind of young and green then too...she was just herself and I was just myself...she was just my boss and I got along with her...those were happy years with True.” They didn’t take lunch together. Reeta often ate hers alone in the back garden and she couldn’t “ever recall True eating even.” She did remember True sending her a letter during one of her selling trips out West in which True had said “I bragged about you like a hen with one chick.” She couldn’t recall any of True’s family visiting her at work and certainly no male friends. They did a lot of correspondence with MacMillan’s and other publishers and there were constant reports to be typed to the London office.

      Interior view of the showroom and office of Aldine House. True and her secretary worked in the alcove part-way up the steps leading from the showroom. Courtesy Reeta Wright

      They worked the standard office hours of the time, 9-5, six days a week. Mrs. Wright remembered True’s hours as being “pretty regular. She was there when I got in in the morning. We didn’t waste too much time. We’d get right down to work and of course I was taking dictation and then I’d be typing it out and she’d be on the phone. She was on the phone a lot of the time...talking to other publishers...I didn’t pay any attention to what she was saying, I was too busy.”

      Mrs. Wright and her husband remembered True as being “fairly mannish in her ways, and sharp with her tongue, but she never lambasted anybody—she would just catch you up if she thought you were wrong.” She was “so kind of plain...anything but beautiful,” dressed in “suits, plain, mannish. To me she always looked the same... slim and tall [with] short hair, just like a brush cut.” If True got upset “she really didn’t spare her language. If she felt like swearing, she’d swear. Unusual then, but she was slightly mannish in some of her ways...but she was a born developer and promoter, so yes, so she wasn’t shy in her mannerisms, but we got along great.”⁶

      I suspect that True felt it desirable to seem “mannish” while serving as Canada’s first female publishers representative, just as at other times in her career, she would use her feminity where it seemed appropriate or useful. Also, she was still trying to assess herself and her future. Among the clippings in her files are several from this time period with headings like, “How to Get On with the Crowd,” “Break the Ice of Loneliness,” “Your Emotions Can Make You Sick,” and “Twelve Things to Avoid if You Want to Be a Success.”⁷

      Certainly she impressed her male colleagues. Among her papers was a little card from the President of the MacMillan Company of Canada in which “HSE” has written:

      We have a young lady in view,

      To whom an apology’s due,

      We admit—thought with pain

      That we rifled the brain

      That is almost too good to be True.⁸

      This rare casual photograph of a relaxed and laughing True (in centre) was taken in the overgrown rose trellis area behind the J.M. Dent offices at Aldine House. Also shown is her secretary, Reeta Wright (front). The third woman was the secretary to the firm’s Managing Director, Mr. Henry Button. Courtesy Reeta Wright

      In those years True had to learn many hard lessons about the business world; lessons she didn’t feel she had been taught at home or at school. In 1930 she condensed some of these lessons into a paragraph in a book review published in The Business Woman.

      ‘My face is my fortune, sir,’ she said, and it was all very well for the little girl in the nursery rhyme to say so; but most of us are less fortunate. We must carve out the fortunes for ourselves, if fortunes there are to be; and many of us have about as much