Grads of the Belmont: Schooner Days MXXX (1030)

by C. H. J. Snider

MERRY if short was the life of the Belmont Dinghy Club.

It was fifty years ago, but boys in it are yet sailing lake regattas and winning turkeys on the alleys. It is worth recalling as a prologue for the centenary of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, which holds its 99th annual meeting next Thursday night, and on next St. Valentine's Day, will burst, into splendor with a grand ball, the beginning of the club's centennial celebrations. It was founded in 1852, and is Canada's oldest—and liveliest—yacht club.

To stick to the Belmont—it was not a junior club, like the present summer institution sponsored by the RCYC, but a club-within-the-club, spontaneous and self-propelling, and living yet in the vitality it communicated to the centenarian. It never died. Its members just grew out of school caps into commodore's hats, and when they turned to look, why, the Belmont wasn't there—but they were.

The good ship Ann Brown, as already told, became the floating clubhouse for the Belmont, after seventy years of lake faring. Rex Northcote, one of the graduates of this yachtical scholarship, recalls a gruesome story about the Ann Brown, of the dead man aboard her when she was found deserted and ice clad. Not that he was there, or saw it, except in a newspaper. It may have originated in the imagination of Chicken Fisher, or Possum Mercer, or Dyke, or Bill Bruce, or Dick Woodcock, or Charlie Giles, or Angus Munro, among the numerous ex-schoonermen who were paid hands in the RCYC fleet before the year 1900 dawned. Or it may have happened.

The Belmont Dinghy Club, like Topsy, "just growed." When it began, the town club of the RCYC was still at the foot of Simcoe st., near where it had moored in 1852. A number of established Toronto families had summer homes in the vicinity of the RCYC Island clubhouse, built in 1881 on the site of the present one. Their children attended the old Toronto Church School on Church st. The little steam-launch Bobs, tender to the Gooderham flagship Oriole, often ferried them across the Bay to the foot of the street and brought them back after school.

Some of these Church school boys were Mel Massey, Norman and Gordon Gooderham, Charles S. Sweatman, R. E. Chadwick, Tom Wade, Len Morrison, Hugh and Geoffrey Smith, Rex Northcote, George Lamont, Russell White, Trumbull Warren, Douglas Woods, Harvey Douglas, R. A. Laidlaw, R. Hargraft and maybe others. Some went to St. Andrew's or Upper Canada instead of the Church School. But they were all in the Belmont Dinghy Club when it got going.

It began with sons of the children of the late W. G. Gooderham and Sir Albert Gooderham inviting school mates to a model-yacht regatta on one of the ponds off the Goad cut, east of the yacht club, which C. E. Goad put through among his extensive Island improvements. The Gooderham boys had an edge on the others, for they had the beautiful scale models of the Aileens and Orioles of that family—but that is how the Belmont started in the late '90s, without even a name.

Along came J. Wilton Morse in 1898 with his idea of the sailing dinghy, and the boys forsook toy ships and model yachts for the real thing. The first Morse dinghy was a 12-footer that could be rowed and sailed and carry an invalid or a camping outfit, and keep both dry. The 14-footer followed, and was still more popular. The first boats were well built by professionals like Aykroyd or Harry Hodson or Warren for $50, complete with gaff sail and a pair of oars. They could not sail eight miles an hour. You can now spend $1,000 on an international 14 with all modern improvements. When you do you have a flying machine, exceeded only in speed by an iceboat, catamaran or jet plane. But you don't have any more fun than the Belmont boys had.

By Dec. 27th, 1902, the Belmont Dinghy Club had been organized long enough to hold its first annual dinner at McConkey's, top bracket restaurant of 19th century Toronto. The menu and the toast list are worth preserving. Banquets were banquets then, not iron rations smothered in a cover charge. This one cost $2 a plate. There were a dozen bluepoints on the shell, then rich consomme, Restigouche salmon with duchesse potatoes, lamb salmon chicken croquettes, a saddle of venison, with red currant jelly, salade du creme, assorted fancy cakes, fruits of the season, glace maitreuleuse, pomme surprise, cafe noir ou au lait, and cavaleria rusticana if the orchestra was not playing it at the time.

Plumb amidships in the menu in bold-face caps was the item PUNCH CARDINAL. I wouldn't know what this was, and besides I have too much respect for James McGuigan to attempt it. Tom Wade, who was there, assures us that the lemonade was wonderful and still lingers in his memory.

This is the more understandable when the toast list, with an appropriate "sentiment" for each, is considered. No. 6 was, and I again quote:

"PROHIBITION (may it never be passed)

Drink to me only with thine eyes

And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup

And I'll not look for wine."

No. 2 was:

"OUR PATRONS—A light to guide, a rod to check the erring and reprove."

The patrons of the Belmont Dinghy Club were: The Lord Bishop of Toronto (Bishop Sweetman), Mr. Aemilius Jarvis (Commodore of the RCYC), Mr. H. D. Warren, Mr. H. C. McLeod (general manager of the Bank of Nova Scotia, an ardent yachtsman, designer of the cup aspirant Minota and owner of Gloria the fastest cutter that ever sailed the lakes.

The officers in 1902, then still in their teens, were:

Charles F. Sweatman, the bishop's son, commodore.

R. E, Chadwick, secretary-treasurer.

Prize winners, 1902:

Norman R. Gooderham, Belmont Club Cup, Aemilius Jarvis Shield, and McLeod Medal.

R. E. Chadwick, George Smith Cup, Fizz Cup.

H. F. Smith, Ping Pong Cup, second for McLeod Medal.

Committees to 1904: Charles F. Sweatman, Trumbull Warren, J. M. Massey, R. E. Chadwick, Thos. K. Wade, Laidlaw, G. S. Gooderham, The club had cup races on the Bay every Saturday from mid June to mid September, for both 12-foot and 14-foot dinghies.

All went merrily until 1904 when—

The island clubhouse of the RCYC burned down.

The Ann Brown, floating clubhouse of the Belmont, had gone to pieces.

The commodore had reached 21, and was eligible for membership in the big club, and all the other boys were crowding his heels, coming out of their teens.

So they called it a day.

THERE was no coddling of the Belmont Club. The boys paid their way out of their school pocket-money and the generosity of their parents who, from the Bishop of Toronto down, were proud to see them becoming self-reliant sailors. The septuagenarian lake steamer Ann Brown, 36 feet long, bought for $25 and reconditioned for $10, was all very well as a clubhouse. But their spiritual mother-ship was the sleek black-hulled two-master Oriole, with a golden bird of that species under her bowsprit for a figurehead. She was the second Oriole to have been the flagship of Commodore George Gooderham, and she typified the gracious era yacht when yachting was highly picturesque and romantic and relatively inexpensive.

Every summer afternoon at 3 o'clock Commodore Gooderham would leave the foot of Parliament street (both office and residence were hard by the waterside) with a small party of guests, for a sail around the island. The Oriole would land the party at six in time for dinner, or, if she was becalmed and couldn't, her faithful tender Bobs would do the trick. But the Oriole was no mere pleasure palace. She had cruised all over the Great Lakes, and down the Thousand Islands. Five times in succession she had won the annual Prince of Wales Cup race against the whole RCYC fleet—and then once more, after losing one race to the Vreda. She had beaten the bigger yacht Idler of Chicago and the smaller, schooner-yacht Wasp of Cleveland in an international match in the Straits of Mackinaw. Sailors everywhere regarded her as the queen of the lakes for twenty years.

Toronto Harbor Scene When the Belmont Was in Flower