The Heroine of Hull: Bertha Carr-Harris
Here’s an animated, colourized photo of my paternal great-grandmother Bertha Hannah Carr-Harris. When I saw “Grannie Bertie’s” turn her face toward me and smile, I was eager to learn more about this young woman who projected such an air of self-confidence. As I sorted through the family papers, I pieced together Bertha’s story.
Bertha Hannah Wright was born in Hull, P.Q. on May 9, 1863 to Edward Wright and Adelia Marston. Her great-grandfather, Philemon Wright was one of the first settlers in the Ottawa Valley. When she was seven, she moved to 24 Sussex Drive, now the official residence of the prime minister, to go to school and to live with her Aunt Hannah and her uncle J.M. Currier, Ottawa’s first Member of Parliament.
In 1882 at the age of 19, she stood on Sussex Street and watched young Ottawa women trudging to the sweatshops where they worked 14 hours a day, six days a week. In her autobiography Lights and shades of mission work, Bertha describes how she found her calling:
It was a beautiful evening in August 1885, when a young girl, just budding into womanhood, stood thoughtfully at a show window watching the sea of faces which, like a swelling tide, passed down Sparks street on a Saturday evening, and then receded only to return. What a sight! What a study! To her it was overwhelming. In the swelling, surging mass were hundreds of young women with pale, careworn, unsatisfied faces. What a blessed release it most have been from the crowded, ill-ventilated work rooms in which many had toiled through the long, hot, weary hours of the day.
An intense desire came into her heart as she hurried home that night to gather them into some room or hall and tell them of One who was becoming day by day so increasingly precious to her and in Whom she had found the consummation of all her soul’s deepest longings…
A woman with deep religious convictions, Bertha felt then that God had called her to help these women improve their work and housing conditions. She started a Sunday afternoon Bible club for women in 1882 and began visiting women in jail and hospital. Bertha and a group of young women took turns in attending police court to counsel, help and comfort women who had fallen on hard times.
Bertha was not popular with the religious establishment, and reportedly walked out of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church after a dispute with her minister who described her as “outspoken and opinionated.” She went on to launch Ottawa’s Young Women’s Christian Association, and became the organization’s first Canadian president.
Clipping from the Ottawa Daily Citizen, February 8, 1890, P. 2.
Bertha was also active in Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a lobby group opposed to alcohol, tobacco and drugs. In the 1890s, she tried to launch a mission for women in Hull and was attacked by a group of lumbermen and saloonkeepers. It all began when Bertha and her peers distributed handbills throughout Hull, announcing that gospel meetings would be held every Tuesday evening in the city. Their intention was to lure men and women from local bars to the mission hall, where temperance leaflets and evangelical addresses would encourage listeners to begin the long process of moral reform.
In response, a “gang of roughs, headed by a saloonkeeper, made plans to “clean them out.” As the Ottawa Daily Citizen recounted, when Bertha and her peers arrived at the Hall,
a crowd of about TWO HUNDRED MEN well primed with liquor rushed in and filled the place. For a time, their interruptions were confined to noises, etc., but on being remonstrated with they made an attack on the speaker and singers. For a time, everything was in confusion, and there was reason to fear the worst, missiles [potatoes and stones] being thrown and blows freely given, but not returned. The young women who were present joined hands and formed a circle around the speakers, and the roughs refrained from striking them but confined their efforts to separating the little band … Finally the police managed to clear the hall and took the Ottawa people to the station, fighting off the crowd with their batons all the way.
The first meeting in Hull had gone very badly, and judging from the Citizen’s account, the women were lucky to make it back to Ottawa alive.
Ottawa citizens were strongly supportive of Bertha Wright’s actions. Editorials defended her right to freedom of speech and action, and deplored the supremacy of ruffianism. Both Sir John A. Macdonald and Wilfred Laurier denounced the “brutal and cowardly violence” in the House of Commons.
After a second, more serious riot, the women evangelists were themselves attacked and knocked down. One report made to the House of Commons suggested that the “fact that murder was not committed was more accident than intention on the part of the rioters.” This experience brought national attention to Bertha’s humanitarian work; one newspaper described her as “the heroine of Hull.”
When she resigned from the Y.W.C.A. in 1896, the Association moved “to place on record its appreciation of the noble work she [had] performed … the loss of which is felt to be irreparable.” The board members commented on her untiring zeal, lofty aims and ideas, and courage under trying circumstances.
At age 33, Bertha left Ottawa to marry Robert Carr-Harris, a professor of engineering at the Royal Military Collage in Kingston. He was twenty years her senior and a widower with six children. She and Robert would have another six children.
Over the course of her life, Bertha authored six books, including an autobiography and a historical novel of Hull’s founding by our ancestor Philemon Wright.
References
Carr-Harris, Bertha, 1863-1949: Lights and Shades of Mission Work, Or, Leaves From a Worker's Note Book: Being Reminiscences of Seven Years Service At the Capital, 1885-1892 (Ottawa: Free Press, 1892).
Carr-Harris, Bertha, 1863-1949: The White Chief of the Ottawa (Toronto: William Briggs, 1903).
Carr-Harris, Bertha, 1863-1949: Hieroglyphics of the heavens or the enigma of the ages. (Toronto: Armac Press, 1933).
Cook, Sharon: Through Sunshine and Shadow: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874-1930 (McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1995).
Taking Time: The Heroine of Hull (Naklik Productions: 1993).
