Keeping Bytown Safe

In early Bytown, public safety emerged long before formal civic institutions. Responsibility for order initially fell to Lt. Col. John By,  overseeing canal construction. His sappers acted as de facto police and firefighters, reflecting a time when military, police, and fire duties overlapped and professional forces were rare. Bytown had only one constable in 1827, and even major cities had yet to adopt modern policing. 

Transcript

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Good day and welcome back to the Ottawa History Hub podcast. Over the last few episodes, we've been dividing our time between the macro and the micro, where we've spoken about the fur trade across the British domains in North America, the different religious organizations, and then we've looked at some individuals working within this greater system, like Nicholas Sparks and Thomas Mackay. Today we're going to be talking about community organizing and how that took a form in the creation of local organizations, specifically the marshal organizations of police and fire services. These existed long before courthouses were built or a Bureau of Public Works, or even the pervasive National Capital Commission that seems to have its fingers in every pie. And it's because police and fire services represent public safety, the first and foremost responsibility of any government that seeks to claim any legitimacy other than that of conquest. So to start with, public order was originally part of the responsibility of the first magistrate of the region, one Lieutenant Colonel John Bai, whom you may recall from episode twelve, descriptively entitled John Bai. You may recall that he was a military engineer and not a lawyer, let alone a trained judge. One of his admirable qualities was that he was self aware enough and respected the law enough to know that he shouldn't be a magistrate, despite it coming with the job description of administering a labor camp. Bai commanded two companies of sappers, military engineers, who were to be responsible for maintaining the peace and security of the camp, in a way that police and fire department would be expected to do later in the life of a more developed settlement. Today, we think of the military and the police and the fire services as being wholly separate institutions, even if they share a bit of an overlap in the recruiting pool. A paramilitary organization is one that employs the trappings of a military, like a uniform, a rank structure, and training with tactics and equipment. Police and fire services fit that bill, but are today responsible to a civil authority, not a military one. They are paid by local governments now, and they are well trained to do their jobs now. When we think of paramilitary groups now, we think of guerrilla armies, rebels, tribal militias, and the like. In the eighteen twenties and thirties, police and fire were not so well trained. They were not paid by the municipality, as there was no municipality at the time, and their chain of responsibility was vague at the best of times. In his nineteen nineteen essay Politics as a Vocation, German sociologist Max Weber posited that the state has a monopoly on the use of legitimate force. Only the state had the right to use, authorize, or threaten physical force against the public. And other actors doing so were criminal. We generally agree with that as a society now, and in many ways we're quite in line with interwar Germany, but that's the topic for another podcast. Suffice to say, we're going to remind ourselves that early Bytown and modern Canada were very different samples of human organization. And the use of force against citizens was often used by employers and often resisted when coming from government representatives. Times were different then. On one June of eighteen twenty seven, the fifteenth company of Sappers arrived in Bytown and set up camp on Barracks Hill, modern day Parliament Hill, and they were joined three months later on seventeenth September by the seventh company of the same regiment. Alongside these newcomers were approximately a thousand Irish laborers getting ready to build the canal. Everyone was cutting down trees to make housing, and when the nights grew cold, everyone was burning that abundant lumber to stay warm. The need for fire protection was present from day one. Police wouldn't be so much of a priority at first. Despite this, it was during the construction of the canal that Bytown hired Alexander Fraser as a constable, bringing the police force up to a population of one. That means that in eighteen twenty seven, Bytown had one police officer, Constable Fraser, and one magistrate, John By, and he really didn't want the job. This sounds like a recipe for lawlessness, but that's because the idea of a regular police force was still not the norm. London wouldn't adopt a full time metropolitan police force until eighteen twenty nine. The Toronto York Police wasn't founded until thirty four, and the New York Police Department wasn't a thing until forty five. Among many people, the idea of a full time police force acting on the state's behest to enforce the state's rules and regulations was a scary concept. This was something you'd find in Berlin or Petrograd, but not amongst the free peoples of the world. It was seen as an affront to Englishness. Order would be maintained by soldiers who would also bear responsibility for firefighting. It was a blessing for the inhabitants of Bytown that those locally stationed soldiers were well trained in fighting fires. Colonel Bye was appointed as the commanding royal engineer of the Royal Gunpowder Mills in Waltham Abbey in eighteen twelve. A year after an explosion there killed seven and broke windows ten miles away. The military engineers were responsible for the explosives that were necessary for blasting their way through the limestone and sandstone around Entrance Bay. And fire safety was one of the things that they took very seriously. It was in eighteen thirty that a steamer ship, bringing supplies upriver from Montreal, brought the first fire engine to the settlement. Suffice to say it was not something that would pass modern muster, but it was unambiguously better than nothing. Built on four large wagon wheels, the engine carried barrels of water, a strong hand pump, and hoses. Horses would bring it along the muddy roads of Bytown to the location of the blaze, and then back to the river, to fill up again as needed. Again, it was not ideal, but better than letting fires burn themselves out. Both sides of the town had different difficulties to being accessed by the fire engine. In the early colonial days, before plumbing arrived, water was from the rivers, and everyone in town lived nearby to rivers for that reason. Lower town had mud streets, making progress of the fire engine a challenge in Ottawa's wet climate. And Upper Town, which had better roads, was uphill from the river, adding a different challenge of access. The biggest challenge was the deep freeze of winter, when the Rideau Canal and Ottawa rivers froze over. Ice was always being removed and melted, but that took time, and because of the bitter bite of winter, brazures were always burning. The hardest time to fight fires were the times when their appearance was most likely. It was in the eighteen thirties that this situation was upset. The sappers were well trained and well equipped to intervene in the event of any escalating riot, and put out any fires of a less metaphoric nature. Things were grand until the canal construction project came to an end in thirty two, at which point regular work disappeared, as did the deployment of the military and the accidental village of Bytown. While we know the answer to this question, the locals of the time did not know if the settlement of Bytown was going to continue or disperse. The precarity of employment led to violence in the form of what would be called the Shiner's War, which we'll look at in more detail in two weeks' time. The need to keep order was increased, and the presence of those capable of using force for public order had decreased. Bytown wasn't really a singular town, but it was more like two neighbouring villages, both alike in dignity, in fair Bytown where we lay our scene. Now from ancient grudge, bearing the Protestant Catholic divide, broke new mutiny, where civil blood made civil hands unclean. Catholic Lower Town was more violent than Protestant Upper Town, and was replete with body houses, taverns, and urban abattoirs, that I'm sure made the place smell just lovely. It was rough and crowded, to the point that it had already spawned two distant suburbs for people to get away from the mean streets, in the forms of New Edinburgh. I'll start calling it New Edinburgh when it becomes less Scottish, though I'm not sure if I'll ever start calling Orleans Orleans and Janeville as the future Vanier. It was not just a religious divide that segregated the towns, but there were social class distinctions at play as well. There were working class Protestants, as well as moneyed Catholics, who shirked the grand narrative. But they often managed only to exacerbate the conflict. By 1835, the police force had ballooned to a giant population of sixteen. That year saw some of the hardest tests for the nascent force. The Orangeman's Day Riot, an annual festival of anti Catholic violence, masquerading as a cultural celebration, resulted in far more violence than was normal. The police force, long a bastion of middle class Protestant order, was forced to intervene at the blatant assault of the peace. Because the police got in the way of the Orangemen's enthusiasm for patriotic mayhem, the rioters turned on the constables, and of the sixteen special constables available for duty, only four turned up the next day. Later that year, the crime in Bytown was serious enough that Sir John Coburn petitioned the village aldermen to create a standing police force, and on twentieth October, the Bytown Association for the Public Peace was founded with two hundred militiamen as volunteers. All of age men were supposed to be active members of the militia. But in practice, many people shirked this responsibility by not enrolling or by not taking it seriously. The majority of the two hundred volunteers were active members, Protestants, and residing in Uppertown. Another potential conflict of interest that might emerge with regards to the proto police force was that they were not paid a standing salary from the public coffers. There effectively were no local public coffers at this time, and everything was done at the provincial level. But this would make the modern mind ask, so how did they get paid? And the answer is a libertarian's dream. They got paid through their own entrepreneurial hard work. A fee for service system was established. Hey, your father was a drunken menace, so we put him in the clink. We'll let him out as soon as you can pay the fine. The nearest jailhouse and courthouse were in Perth, a two day march away. So the public peace officers were more likely to find local resolutions to any serious conflicts. What's that, I hear you thinking? How could they avoid corruption, or at the very least the appearance of corruption? The answer is simple, by only harassing people incapable of bringing pressure against them. That way, the town council would be content since they didn't witness or experience any misbehavior by the police. So things were seen as okay by those who mattered. One of the most curious things about the local police service in the thirties that really distinguished their social role from today was that obedience was optional in most cases. Local groups in Lower Town would be able to keep police at bay and protect law abiding citizens from the predations of police trolling for fines. The entrepreneurial spirit of the police also extended to the fire department at the same time. Today, full time firefighters get paid, whether there's a blaze about or not. In the eighteen thirties, firefighters were part timers, who would be paid if they found a fire to fight. As I've said, there was no town coffer to pay municipal employees, so they were paid by insurance companies. Buildings would post a shield of their insurance companies on the front windows, so in the event of a fire, the firefighters would know that they would be reimbursed for their time. The Upper Town residents named their community's first fire engine the Mutual, after the insurance company that paid for it, bringing down the insurance premiums in the process. That was 36. And later that year, Lowertown got its own fire engine, the Alliance, based on the same naming conventions. The following year, Lowertown established its first public firefighting company that would act regardless of insurance status, and being cognizant that a fire spreads regardless of the insurance status of local inhabitants. The settlement that many thought would have closed up shop in 32 when the canal was completed continued to grow, from 1,000 people in 32 to 2,400 five years later. It would then quadruple to 10,000 in 1850. Rather than disappearing, the town was growing fast. Infrastructure was not keeping up, and police and fire were not doing a good job at keeping people safe. The forties saw big changes to police and fire. 1842 had the Dalhousie District proclaimed, and on 5 October, Justice James McAuley presided over the first Court of Justice on land donated by Nicholas Sparks and a courthouse built by Thomas Mackay. This removed the dependence on Perth and empowered local law enforcement to take a more practical approach to local crime. 1847 was also a busy year for both the police and fire, exacerbated as it was by the so-called Irish Potato Famine, when Ireland exported more people than ever before. The first hook and ladder company was founded that summer, and Nicholas Sparks' failed attempt at creating a West Ward market to rival the By Ward market had failed. So the building was donated first as Town Hall, and then it became the first permanent fire station in Bytown. I say permanent, though it was torn down before the First World War. It would be the first of three fire halls that would grace Bytown and outlive the town into the Ottawa era. 1847 was also the year that Bytown formally incorporated as a town, and it was then that Isaac Berrichon was installed as the first chief constable and chief firewarden. Twelve regular constables were put on the payroll, three constables for each ward, imaginatively named North Ward, South Ward, East Ward, and West Ward. Berrichon assured the town council that the locals were naturally law abiding and not prone to violence, and that the breaches of the peace that happened every St. Patrick's Day in March, and every Orangeman's Day in July were the result of external agitators coming into the peaceable kingdom of Bytown to disrupt all the good that they had. While this was laughably false, that didn't mean that Berichon was out of touch with reality. It meant that part of his mission was to convince the provincial government of Upper Canada that they should pay for the police and militia instead of the locals, who didn't want to pay taxes for services. The false claims were a result of strategic pursuit of funding, and indicated dishonesty, but not idiocy. And that was how peace was kept in Bytown. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ottawa History Hub Podcast. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please drop me an email at OttawahistoryHub at gmail.com or through the website's contact page at OttawahistoryHub.com. There you can find reviews of museums, historical walking tours, and books set in the National Capital Region. You can also stream the podcast from there directly, if you don't like traditional podcasting apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. If you are following on one of those, please take a minute to leave me a five-star review and a nice comment. I always appreciate that. This show is written, researched, and produced by me, Brendan Ray, and until we meet again, Advent Stawa Anaboo.