Aunts, Uncles and Cousins – Part II by John Caverhill My Grandparents, Wm. A. (Carpenter Bill) and Cecilia had six children. My Aunt Winnifred (Winnie), their oldest, was born in 1881, in a frame house that replaced the original cabin on our farm. The remaining five children were born in the new brick house completed in 1883 by my grandfather. One section of the frame house was joined to the carpenter shop and became a blacksmith shop. The other section was moved over to the barns behind the new house and became a pig pen. This gave rise to a standing family joke. If Winnie made a kid’s typical blunder, as all kids do, the standard comment was, “What can you expect? She was born in a pigpen!” Eventually, Winnie married Jack Campbell, a London school teacher, in 1917, and they had two sons, Lloyd and Glen. Before they were married, Uncle Jack (as I knew him) would ride his motorcycle from London to visit his fiancée in Lobo, and he could do the trip in less than twenty-five minutes, which meant pretty high speeds over rough unpaved roads. After they married all mention in Father’s diary of the motorcycle ceased, so one may infer that this departure coincided with the bride’s arrival. In 1946, with things returning to normal after the war, Uncle Jack bought a new motorboat. It was a mahogany-hulled beauty with tiller steering. Its larger-than-usual outboard motor gave it a fast top speed (which Uncle Jack didn’t use when Aunt Winnie was present). For several years after the war, a good stretch of the Thames River in London’s Springbank Park was a popular place for motorboats. Springbank Dam was still operative at this time. In the later 1800s, three steamboats, Forest City, Princess Louise, and Victoria ran daily excursions from the Forks of the Thames down to Springbank Park. River depth varied from 20 feet behind the dam to less than two feet in some other stretches, which meant the steamboats had a draught of only 16 inches. Victoria had two decks, both above the water line, and on the day of the disaster had over 800 passengers, three times her safe capacity; so being top-heavy, she overturned with a loss of at least 182 lives. By the 1940s, many parts of the river were very shallow, especially in summer. There was still deep water clear of obstacles for over half a mile behind the dam, which was ideal for motorboats, and Springbank once again became popular for boat rides. On summer weekends there were often up to a dozen operators offering rides on their boats. The large dock where the Victoria and her sister ships tied up was long gone, replaced by several small floating docks that were beached when not in use. Uncle Jack always gave us a free ride. When we were settled in our seats, he would reverse away from the deck, and then swing around. Suddenly the boat would squat and accelerate with a burst of speed that made me almost become unhinged with excitement. A regular ride consisted of one circuit of about a mile, but Uncle Jack always gave us a two-circuit ride. Even though our ride was twice as long, it ended far too quickly. As we headed home, a rare treat of an ice cream cone topped off an exciting day. It was several years later when we learned of a misadventure experienced by their boys. If business was slow, Uncle Jack
would go home and return in the afternoon leaving the boys to look after the occasional riders. To put in the time, they took turns on the boat, one driving and the other riding. The rides evolved into a game called “Flip”. The passenger rode up front, straddling the bow while the driver would try to “flip” the rider off by sudden swerves of the boat. Needless to say, they didn’t play Flip when their father was present. On one particular trip, Glen was driving while Lloyd was straddling the bow. They had just turned away from the dam and were heading back to the dock. A sudden jerk of the tiller, an abrupt swing of the boat, and Lloyd was enjoying a plunge into the Thames. “The best laid plans o’ mice and men/gang oft agley” sang the poet, Robbie Burns. While he would have expressed it differently, Glen would have agreed wholeheartedly with the poet Burns. The sudden swerve didn’t dislodge Lloyd this time; instead, there was a “clunk”, the tiller jerked from Glen’s hand and the motor disappeared into the river. They were close enough to the dock for Uncle Jack to witness the whole affair. The boys rowed back to the dock, and as Glen put it, “Dad seemed a little upset.” He made several comments during which the collective intelligence was compared unfavourably with that of a block of wood. He concluded by ordering them to row back and dive for it, and not come back until they found it. Uncle Jack accompanied them to oversee operations and warn other boats to keep clear. Being strong swimmers, the boys were not at first unduly concerned with the task confronting them. Retracing the course when approaching the dock was the thing to do. It was then that they realized the real problem lay in locating the motor in the fifteen feet of murky water. It took repeated dives and traversing back and forth across the river bottom, like dogs running back and forth to locate the trail of their quarry. It was well over an hour later, after countless dives before they finally surfaced and heaved the motor into the boat. They were back on the river the following weekend, the motor dried out and running smoothly but they never again played “Flip”. The Victoria Day Disaster in London, Ontario, as depicted by the Toronto Litho Company on June 13, 1881.
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