Sleighing Soldiers: The Toronto Tandem Club

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“Success attend us, and conduce / To make our winter gay, / And may our Club the seeds produce / Of many a happy day.” Such was the raison d’être of the Toronto Tandem Club, as announced at it’s first outing by Major Frederick Markham, hero of the attack on the Patriotes at St. Denis in 1837. Markham was typical of the sports-loving British soldiers who thought, during the long winter months spent in Canada, there was nothing better than racing around town and gliding swiftly across frozen waterways in tandem sleighs. Tandem clubs were formed wherever the British were garrisoned in the nineteenth century — Quebec, Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto — becoming such a defining feature of winter in colonial Canada that the associated equipment merited inclusion in the Canadian exhibit at the Great Exhibition held at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. What made Toronto’s club unique was that, during the winters of 1839-40 and 1840-41, its members immortalized their adventures in verse, published as Proceedings of the Toronto Tandem Club (H&W Rowsell Printers, 1841 http://archive. org/details/cihm_62461)— making the Tandem Club not only one of the city’s earliest sporting clubs but also among its earliest literary societies. The poetry — which has so little to recommend it that even club members admitted it was “doggerel” — is dense with foggy, antiquated allusions. The identities of club members were obscured — each referred to only by the nickname given his sleigh — and are only made certain by the inclusion of a key published in the Proceedings (and handwritten annotations in the margins of several copies of that document).

spent drilling colonial militia, as the tensions abated in the colonies. The membership rolls were filled out with select locals drawn particularly from the town’s loyal conservative faction, including Captain James McGill Strachan, the Bishop’s eldest son who’d served with the 68th (Durham) Regiment of Foot until returning to Toronto in 1836 to become a barrister and military secretary to the governor during the Rebellion; young lawyer and municipal politician of rising influence William Henry Boulton, who was acquainted with several younger club members through their common initiation into the Masons during this same period; the jovial Irish brothers of Erindale, Major Thomas William Magrath and Captain James Magrath, both officers of the 1st Battalion of Incorporated Militia; and their Dragoon Cornet, Charles Heath, who would come to be closely linked by marriage to the Boulton family. Most of these locals were well-acquainted with the soldiers through involvement in organizing summertime horse races on the Garrison Common under the auspices of the Toronto Turf Club.

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Gathering as often as weather (and duty) allowed during the winter months, club members most frequently assembled at Osgoode Hall — in use as a barracks from 1837 to 1844 — or outside the Parliament building. In trains sometimes a dozen sleighs deep, the officers raced through town with “reckless speed,” challenging each other to go faster and faster, taking corners hard, and testing each other’s driving skills. Lieutenant E. Talbot described a typical day: “And now a curious maze was run / Through streets most intricate, / And prodigies of skill were done / Till it was getting late.”

likewise partook in the fun, eventually married club member Strachan; and a daughter of Francis Thomas Billings, treasurer of the Home District Savings Bank, who would shed tears for Captain R.W. Byron upon the departure of the troops.

The President’s responsibilities included organizing the day’s repast at a tavern — the Race Course Inn and Blue Bell Tavern, both on Queen Street west, and the “gaudy Peacock” on the Dundas Road were favourites — at the barracks, or at their own quarters in town. The lunches were extravagant, featuring hot pies, mutton chops, hashed venison, oyster patties, and ginger snaps. As members “quaff[ed] full many a toast” of champagne, flip, and hot mulled port, the President — having acted as Vice President during the previous outing and taken up the rear to better observe his fellow sleighers — would grandly recite the poem he had composed to commemorate that earlier outing’s comedies and the many ways the club made a nuisance of itself.

Excursions might begin by dashing up and down King Street, wreaking havoc through the market place, and sliding across the ice of Lake Ontario — following whatever route was charted by the President assigned for that outing. “Away they go, and in and out,” Lieutenant Charles John Colville of the the 85th Regiment of Light Infantry (Bucks Volunteers), the club’s resident painter, contrived in January 1840, “Through street and lane, they wander; / Like snakes, they twine and twist about, / In wonderful meander.” They might race to the Magnetic Observatory and through the King’s College grounds, travelling as far as the Credit River in the west, across the Don in the east, and up to Sugar Loaf Hill near the presentday Prince Edward Viaduct. The Proceedings include copious references to extant and extinct landmarks in and Charles Wallace Heath of “Deer around Toronto. lieutenant in the 1st Incorporated member of the Toronto Tandem The Tandem Club, each member described him as “a very tall young man.” This portrait in trying to outdo the other in May, 1843, by Henry Bowyer extravagancies of dress or the Heath who later became a handsomeness of his sleigh, made Boulton of “The Grange.” quite the scene around town. And Credit: Lawrence Fine Art of naturally the dashing officers — most of them young and unattached — had no difficulty enticing the daughters of the local elite to join their sleighing parties. But while many “fair companions” surely hoped that huddling beneath bear-hide robes for warmth in the open sleigh might lead to matrimony with their gallant escorts — and the Proceedings recount at least one maiden’s jealous reaction to seeing another in a club tandem — the officers knew well that a colonial pairing would be frowned upon at home. Although almost every entry referenced female accompaniment — including the officers’ own wives, and married women of the town — the identities of most remain concealed beneath poetic references in the Proceedings, making it difficult to name all but a handful with certainty. Emily Robinson, eldest daughter of the Chief Justice, regularly joined Captain Osborne Markham; her sister Augusta who

The poets boasted of boisterous late evening returns down King, of giving “no end of sleepless nights,” and of dashing through the gates of prominent citizens like Judge (later Chief Justice) Archibald McLean and Lieutenant-Governor Sir George Arthur, who had a reputation as a dour evangelical that disapproved of public Park,” Toronto, was a amusement. The club’s harassment of Light Dragoons and the latter was allayed because Arthur’s Club. A contemporary son Frederick and his aide-de-camp and remarkably fine-looking watercolour was made in (and future son-in-law) Lieutenant Lane, a Toronto architect. Compton Charles Domville were both lawyer married Sarah Anne members of the club. Crewkerne Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Henry Wingfield, commanding officer of the 32nd, recounted Lieutenant Colville’s near-collision with Governor General Lord Sydenham and Ensign William Henry Baring, his aide-de-camp. “Had it not been for ready skill, / Which for all else atones, / He had paid off the Union Bill, / With disunited bones,” Wingfield said of Colville, with tonguein-cheek reference to the controversial joining of Upper and Lower Canada. Almost every club excursion included at least one crash, often tipping on a tight turn or misjudging the width of a gate. They were regarded as great fun, even by female passengers — who were considered to have “earned [t]hy laurels” after their first tumble. Although broken sleds and bruised egos were the only casualties according to the Proceedings, the club eventually recruited a doctor to trail the party on watch for accidents.

2 The Fife and Drum

As beloved by local society as they might’ve been as officers, they earned criticism as coachmen. “Altho’ I hear it has been said / Within the town by some wise head,” Lieutenant F.H. Lang of the 34th admitted, “That we are ruining the nation / By this complete misapplication / Of draft I hope our Club will thrive, / And we may yet have many a drive.” Local boys expressed their opinion by pelting the notorious club with snowballs as they glided past. By February 19, 1841, the club’s last official outing, it was apparent that the Tandem Club’s days were numbered. Lieutenant Talbot expressed some officers’ sadness at their impending departure: “Ah, [Boulton] can but little guess, / And few there are will ever know, / Our deep-felt grief and wretchedness, / Our utter misery and woe, / When we are forced to leave this place / To sail for England’s milder shore, / Regretting many a pretty face / Whom we perhaps shall see no more.” That spring, the 34th and few remaining members of the 32nd removed to Quebec and beyond. While former Tandem Club members distinguished themselves in India in the next decades, it is certain that the club’s spirit alive by other horsing enthusiasts in the city.