Life in our times: memoirs

THE SOUTHERN ONTARIO countryside is devoid of topographic, ethnic or historical interest. It is a flattish acreage extending some two hundred miles from the Detroit River to the Niagara River in which rich land alternates with some that is sandy, ill-drained or otherwise rejected. There are no natural features worth noting. The population is ethnically only slightly more diverting; it consists in the main of Scots or, as we called ourselves there, the Scotch. Our forebears were expelled from the Highlands between 1780 and 1830 when their lairds discovered that sheep were both more profitable and, as they moved over the hillside, more rewarding to the eye. The larger history touched this favored region only when Colonel Richard Airey, nephew of Colonel Thomas Talbot, founder of the Talbot settlement midway between the two rivers, returned to the mother land to fight for Queen and country in the Crimean War, for his was the name on the orders that dispatched the Light Brigade. And less dramatically again, in World War I, when the inhabitants showed themselves generally adverse to the slaughter. My father manifested his opposition by serving on the draft board, as it would now be called, and exempting all those who did not wish to go.
There was a final brush with history when my home county of Elgin, and in some measure my father as a Liberal leader, sent Mitchell Frederick Hepburn to Parliament and to be Premier of Ontario. So disastrous was his administration that the Conservatives have been in office in the province almost unchallenged all of the thirty-nine years since.