Exposing The Big Family Secret
The Yearbook Portrait
“Never say a word to your mother about her father, Jerry. She’ll cry.”
Dad delivered this warning in a hoarse stage whisper, and went on to tell me that my brilliant maternal grandfather—a Rhodes Scholar, Jerry—died unexpectedly from an angina attack while carrying a bucket of coal up the cellar stairs, shortly after losing a fortune—three hundred thousand dollars, that was a huge amount of money, Jerry—in the crash of 1929.
For years, I followed that parental prohibition and avoided any reference to my grandfather’s dramatic death. But I was always curious about my mysterious forebear. Nobody talked about him. There were no stories, no records, no photographs—apart from a studio portrait and exactly eight laudatory sentences in the University College yearbook of 1903, the year of his graduation.
As a boy, I spent hours alone in our mean little house. I knew there was a better life somewhere: there had to be, although what form that life might take I had no clue. So that collapsing yearbook with its dark blue cover, broken spine and brittle, yellowed pages offered a fantasy of escape into some more glamorous, imaginary past.
And there he was, Alexander Grant Brown—such a resounding name. He was about twenty-one in that picture: a beautiful, calm, harmonious face, with high cheekbones, sensual lips and a well-formed, large-nostrilled nose; granny glasses and straight blonde hair parted in the middle and drooping over his high forehead; clean-shaven; a high collar and a far-away look in his pale, slightly hooded eyes. A very sexy guy, I thought, with his starched white collar and immaculate stiff suit — distant, romantic, emblem of a life different and better than anything I knew.
He was known as “Grant”, not “Alexander”. No question that he was brilliant; he did two honors degrees simultaneously at University of Toronto, one in Classics, the other in English and History and he stood top of his class every year in both. He won a Governor-General’s gold medal. And he did go to Balliol for an MA on a Flavelle Travelling Fellowship (Dad—always an unreliable narrator—was wrong about the Rhodes).
His yearbook entry bore the epigraph, “Scarce shall you find a man of more desert”; and its anonymous author concluded the panegyric with a prophesy: “We look forward with confidence to the time when he will be the president of some great university.”
The fact that there were no other records of his life only increased my interest. I identified with him—and when my time came, it was his college that I attended, not my father’s. And still later, I followed his example in doing post graduate work in England. I was at University of London, not Oxford—but I lived in the Berkshire countryside, reading at the Bodleian Library, and walking the same streets he walked, more than sixty years before.
**
He was born in 1882, the second son of William B. Brown and Agnes Augusta Darling. The original George Brown, Grant’s grandfather, came to Canada from Paisley in Scotland with his brothers in the 1850s and was one of the original settlers of Caledonia, a village on the escarpment above Hamilton, where he opened a dry goods store. The business was taken over by his son William, who had two sons in his turn, of which Grant was the younger, plus a daughter, Jean. The business was sufficiently prosperous that when Grant went to University around 1899, his parents moved to Toronto, first to Admiral Avenue and then to a big half-house at 596 Huron Street, which William purchased in 1904 for $4,700. Brother Will continued to run the store, remaining in Caledonia until 1922, when he moved to Hamilton to become a successful insurance agent.
When Grant returned from Oxford in 1905 he lived on Huron Street with his parents, teaching History at University College and eventually marrying Edna Muriel Burns in 1911. She also grew up in Caledonia, a couple of streets away from the Browns. Her father, Wesley Jones Burns, was the town doctor. Edna went to college, an unusual accomplishment for a woman at the time, graduating in Home Economics from Guelph and subsequently teaching in Perth. The 1911 census finds her living with her mother and one sister in a nine-room house in Caledonia, without a servant. Her father died suddenly early that spring (a later correspondent noted that “all the Burns men died young”). However, he is listed on their marriage certificate, dated July 24 of that year.
The young couple bought a house two streets over from the senior Browns, at 172 Madison Avenue in 1911 for $7,000. So it was in the Madison Avenue house that my mother and her sister were babies and small girls. There’s a snapshot of them together in the garden. The family moved into the Huron Street house when his father died in 1919.
**
There is a second photograph of Grant, which came into my possession much later. Maybe my mother squirreled it away in a drawer. It’s a framed portrait of uncertain date. He looks to be about thirty-five. He has an intelligent, determined face. His hair is thin on top, but he is not yet completely bald. The same broad nose, the same ears and chin and domed forehead and granny glasses, but with thicker lenses than before. His two eyes look different: the left is level and steely, analytical; the other looks rounded. They don’t quite go together, and neither do the two sides of his face: his mouth sags slightly to the left, as if he’s trying to keep it under control. He looks anxious.
He went to Boston for major surgery for an aneurism not long after his marriage. Such surgery was unavailable in Canada at the time. My grandmother accompanied him, and took Joyce, her newly born daughter, leaving my mother in the care of a relative who lived nearby. Joyce was less than a year younger than my mother, and my mother was born on the eighteenth of May 1912; so the year of the surgery was probably 1914. Grant would have been 32.
According to my mother, he limped and used a cane; he had what she called a “stutter” as well. He was a tennis and lacrosse player in college—so those later disabilities must have been caused by the stroke. And it seems unlikely that a member of the University debating team would have a speech impediment. So the aneurism crippled him, and that’s what we’re seeing in this photograph.
The yearbook panegyric prophesized a brilliant future for Grant: “We look forward with confidence to the time when he will be the president of some great university.” If he shared such expectations, they were now effectively dead, and his life was bounded by his teaching, his reading, his family—and the stock market.
**
He invested seriously throughout the expansionary years of the twenties. My mother remembers him talking to his broker on the phone from his study every morning. While dad may have exaggerated the size of his fortune, he did well. Sparce as my mother’s accounts of her childhood were, it always felt like an idyllic time.
Grandma was a great entertainer, what they liked in those days to call “a famous cook,” a constant talker, a woman of high energy and decided ambition, always identifying herself as “Mrs. Grant Brown”, as if the “Grant” were part of a hyphenated name that had more class than plain “Mrs. Brown”. She went by streetcar to Kensington Market every Saturday to choose the week’s fresh produce and the flowers for the hall, the dining room, and the parlor. They never had a car, not because they couldn’t afford one, but because neither she nor Grant drove. She was a faithful Methodist, so she and the girls went to church on Sundays. Grant, officially Presbyterian but probably a quiet atheist like my mother, stayed home. On Sunday afternoons—surely not every week?—students would come for tea, the girls always separate from the boys. There were dinner and bridge parties (former Prime Minister Arthur Meighan and his wife, old Caledonia friends, were visitors). In May every year they went by train and steamer to a rented cottage in the Muskokas, the same one every year, where the girls—Marjorie in particular—roamed free and wild. They stayed into October. Grant fished and read trunkfuls of books, and they all played fiercely competitive bridge in the evenings.
Joyce suffered from asthma from an early age. My mother remembers dramatic scenes in the middle of the night, with the whole household gathered around the three-year-old child’s bed as she struggled to breathe, anti-asthmatic candles guttering, releasing useless fumes, my grandmother summoning Doctor Smith by telephone to come and save her daughter. Joyce was always the center of attention, and grandma’s favorite. Joyce, according to grandma, had “it”, and Marjorie did not.
“Look at my beautiful daughter,” she once proclaimed to a guest, referring to Joyce—in front of my mother.
“The Two Little Girls”
I have a studio portrait of the girls as a pair, taken when Marjorie is perhaps six. They’re both lovely, but in fact, Marjorie is the prettier of the two. She looks with sweet confidence into the camera. Her face is well structured, her dark eyes striking, her lips parted in a wide, trusting smile. Joyce is smaller and a bit pouty. She leans into her sister as if for protection (their heads touch), and she looks upward, neither at her sister nor at the camera, in a way that seems vulnerable, almost needy. Her pale brown hair glistens and waves; Marjorie’s jet-black hair is straight, cut in sensible bangs and a short Dutch cap (I’m sure she hated that). They are linked together by their two joined hands, which lie before them in the inseparable white of their lacy best dresses. It’s an idealized picture of “the two little girls”; that’s how they were called.
When they were old enough for school, grandma determined that Joyce was too delicate to go, so Marjorie had to stay home to keep her company, thus binding them together like Siamese twins. Grant would home-school them both. So my mother was cut off from the normal social life of the kids around them. She never forgave her mother or her sister for that.
In 1927 the girls were sent to Bishop Strachan School—one of Toronto’s two elite private schools for girls. It was located in Forest Hill, within walking distance of the Huron Street house. I suspect that only a private school would take them, since they had not attended an ordinary elementary school. Marjorie was a year older than the other girls in her class, and I think she was ashamed of that, because she kept her age a secret all her life. Not even my father knew how old she was (much later, I discovered that she was a year his senior). Joyce was fiercely competitive and a good student (she won a Governor General’s medal in her graduating year); my mother’s marks were inconsistent. Joyce was vivacious and popular as well, and made a point of stealing her sister’s boyfriends. They graduated from BSS in 1931.
But by then, everything in their prosperous, protected, pleasant world had changed.
**
On June 26, 1929 the Globe and Mail reported that he was leaving the university.
A. Grant Brown, Ancient History Authority, to Become Broker
Terminating his association with the University of Toronto, Prof. A. Grant Brown, associate professor of ancient history in University College, is going into a brokerage business. Announcement was made yesterday by P. A. Moure, bursar of the university, of the acceptance of Prof. Brown’s resignation.
Prof. Brown for the past two years was associate professor in the department, until recently headed by Prof. Milner. He is an Oxford graduate and considered an authority of note on ancient history.
Prof. Brown stated last night that he had no announcement to make as to his plans beyond the fact that he is definitely relinquishing academic work for the business field.
“I will continue with the university until the end of this month when my term expires,” stated Prof. Brown.
Grandma once told me that Grant quit because he wanted to teach modern history, but the department insisted that he teach classics. If she meant classical history rather than classics, then this newspaper account does not contradict her story. But was this a voluntary separation? He had taught there since 1905; he was an associate professor in a tiny department, with, apparently, a good reputation. And, in hindsight, he could not have chosen a worse moment to give up a secure job and go into the brokerage business. The old department head—“Prof. Milner”—was gone. Grant may have been pushed out.
So when the stock market crashed four months later, he lost everything, and had no job to fall back on. “Oh it was terrible,” my mother told me: “no money anywhere.” And then, on May 13, 1932, he died, just short of his fiftieth birthday.
There was a news story in the second section of the Toronto Star:
FORMER PROFESSOR DIES FROM INJURIES
A. Grant Brown Fell Down Stairs in His Huron St. Home
Falling downstairs in the cellar of his home yesterday at 596 Huron St., A. Grant Brown, MA, for 20 years professor ancient history at the University of Toronto, received injuries that caused his death a few minutes after he had been found by his wife and daughter.
Mr. Brown graduated from the University of Toronto in 1903 and had a brilliant record, winning the Flavelle scholarship which took him to Oxford for two years. On graduating from Oxford he joined the staff of the University of Toronto and continued in the history department until 1929 when he resigned to take a position with G. H. Stanton, financial house, as an investment counsel.
He was held in high esteem for his wide knowledge of economic and political factors the world over. He is survived by a widow and two daughters, Marjorie and Joyce, and his brother, W. W. Brown, Hamilton.
On the same day, May 14, 1932, The Globe ran a photo – the one I described above – with similar information in the caption but no story.
Much later, when my mother had mostly lost her memory, she asked me how her father had died—with no hint of tears. I told her the story.
“Those stairs were wicked, Jerry!” she said.
The Huron Street House.
**
According to Grandma, Grant wanted to accept his losses and settle accounts in the immediate aftermath of the crash, escaping with what we would now call a “haircut”, and avoiding ruin. However, she said, his broker was dishonest and other creditors hung on and by the time everything was wound up, two years later, only ten thousand dollars remained of his fortune.
This story doesn’t make sense. If his holdings were stocks and bonds, there would have been no need to await an agreement from other brokerage clients. He could have just sold his diminished shares on the open market. She also indicated that the money enabled her to keep the big Huron Street house (she took in lodgers), put both girls through university—and nonetheless emerge from the depression ten years later with the funds intact, to build up her own portfolio during her long subsequent life as she ran small town YWCAs around the province.
She couldn’t have done both. Either she used the money to finance the family through the depression and pay for U of T—or she saved it for her future portfolio.
**
But that was the end of the story, as far as I knew—until a friend came across Grant’s death certificate while he was researching his own family tree. He gave me a copy.
It differs from the newspaper accounts in several significant ways. First of all, it was issued on May 13, but gives the date of his death exactly one month earlier, on April 13. That’s a strange error in an official document. The handwriting of both the date of death and the issuance of the certificate is the same, and belonged to the coroner himself.
Were the newspaper accounts wrong about the date?
The death certificate states that there was an autopsy – and yet the date of burial was May 16, only three days later. I checked the calendar. In 1932, May 13 fell on a Friday and May 16 was a Monday. Would the coroner have been able to carry out an autopsy so quickly, over a single weekend? That seemed unlikely, particularly when I worked out a basic sequence of events.
Grant’s brother William (“Uncle Will” as my mother knew him), is listed on the certificate as both the contact person and informant. But he lived in Hamilton. So if grandma and Aunt Joyce found Grant dying on the cellar floor, grandma must have called him. I assume that, unlike Grant, Will had a car. But in those days the drive from Hamilton would take a couple of hours. We don’t know what time the accident occurred, but even with the most favorable assumptions it would have been late morning by the time Uncle Will arrived at the house. So only then would he have informed the coroner—around noon, at the earliest. And then the body would have been transported to the morgue where an autopsy would be performed and the death certificate signed—all on the same day? Bureaucracies do not normally move that fast.
And in the midst of it all, Uncle Will found time to contact the two newspapers, provide them with a photo, and give them the story? Or maybe grandma did that while he handled the coroner?
The death certificate does not say that he fell on the cellar stairs. Rather, he was “Found dead at foot of stairway”. Further, it says that the cause of death is “not yet determined”. It gives the “Contributory Cause” of death as “Acute Haemorhagic Gastritis”. That’s a condition caused by erosion or tears in the stomach lining; without that protective layer, acids act on the stomach walls, causing digestive problems and considerable pain. It’s treatable, and serious, but it does not cause death. It is often caused by excessive alcohol intake; stress is also a cause.
What, then, was the primary cause of death? If he fell from the stairs, surely he would have died from fairly obvious head or other bodily injuries, and surely the coroner would have identified those. Alternatively, if my father’s account was true and he had suffered a fatal heart attack, wouldn’t the coroner have identified that in his report? Likewise, if he’d died of a stroke.
As for the confusion of dates: how could a full month elapse between the official date of death on April 13, and the signing of the certificate on May 13? Would his body have lain in the city morgue for a whole month—particularly in those pre-refrigeration days?
So the official certificate of death is not consistent with the newspaper story, either respecting the date or the cause of death; and it seems to raise more questions than it answers. As for the story of the bucket of coal: Dad liked to elaborate stories, but he did not invent them. So that detail must have come from grandma or my mother. Why would Grant have been carrying a bucket of coal up the cellar stairs in mid-May—or mid-April? It was spring. And what about that cane?
It doesn’t make sense.
**
I did more digging, or tried to[i], and mostly came up dry. Grandma buried him in Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Monday, May 16. His brother and sister were buried with the other Browns in the family plot in Caledonia. I always assumed that grandma, herself a Burns, had placed him in the more prestigious Mount Pleasant Cemetery, beside her Burns forebears. But that’s not the case. Yes, he’s in Mount Pleasant. There is a spreadsheet recording everyone who was buried there, by date and year, and there he is, with Edna M. Brown as next of kin, a “Dr. Saunders” listed as attending physician, and, in a “Cause of Death” column full of coronaries and strokes, he was “Found dead—cause unknown”.
There is no monument on his grave.
And a further dead end: the Ontario Archives have no records of inquests for 1932, but they do have a list of bodies brought to the coroner. His body is not on that list. This makes sense of something my mother told me at some point, long ago, almost incidentally: that his body was laid out in his study, above the parlor. Did the undertaker place him in a coffin and hold him there, over the weekend, rather than take him to the funeral parlor? Possibly. In which case, the only time the body left the house was for his funeral.
Therefore, there was no autopsy. The death certificate is untrue. Somehow or other, Uncle Will and my grandmother persuaded the coroner to sign the certificate, possibly without seeing the body at all. Did he give April 13 as a false date of death as a kind of cover, an implicit explanation of how an autopsy might have taken place, even though one never did? In the event of future challenge, it could always be called a clerical error.
Why?
**
The answer was waiting for me in full view in the public archives, where both his will and the probate records pertaining to his estate remain.
Life insurance.
When Grant died on May 13, 1932 he had fourteen dollars in the bank. The house had two mortgages, not quite to its full assessed value, the second (for $1,600) taken out in March 1931. That’s how they got through the girls’ graduation year. His partnership in the Stanton brokerage is valued at $700; clothing and jewelry is worth $100. There’s no mention of furniture or silver, although they had a lot of good stuff, some of which has come down to me. And there was an insurance policy for fifteen thousand dollars. That was the major asset, given the mortgages on the house. There is no mention of any stocks, bonds or other investments.
In contrast, his will is a carefully written, complex document, drafted by a lawyer. It was executed on 12 July 1928, near the market’s peak and before the disaster. It assumes a minimum of one hundred thousand dollars in the estate, because it provides donations of five hundred dollars each to three charities (the mission fund of Bloor Street United Church, the Sick Children’s Hospital and the Muskoka Free Hospital for Consumptives) are to be made only if it’s worth more than that amount. So that’s the floor value.
However, other provisions indicate that it may have been worth substantially more. First of all, he ensures that the financial assets remain intact rather than sold. Only people with a lot of money do that. The assets are to be managed by his trustees (grandma and a trust company), and he specifies that she receive an annual payment of at least three thousand dollars as long as she lives. In 1928, a ten-year government bond yielded 3.17%, and a three-month T-bill yielded 3.08%. So he was assuming a three percent interest on a minimum of one hundred thousand dollars. He specifies that if revenues drop below three thousand in a particular year, his trustees are to make up the three thousand from capital.
He also makes complex provisions for greater revenues. If grandma’s payment from the estate reaches five thousand a year, he specifies that the two girls should each receive five hundred dollars, unless the revenue exceeds six thousand, at which point the additional dollars flow back to grandma. (He also provides three thousand for each daughter, in the event that they seek higher education after matriculation—again subject to variations in the market.)
Since his market passion was stocks rather than fixed income instruments like bonds, these provisions suggest quite a large portfolio. There would be dividend-paying stocks, of course; but a man who quits academic life to become partner in a brokerage firm is likely to speculate, and is unlikely to have more than a third of his portfolio in bonds. Therefore, in 1928, when he made that will, my father’s story may be true. His assets may have been as much as three hundred thousand dollars: one hundred thousand in income-producing bonds and the rest in stocks. That seems incredible, given the modesty of the Brown lifestyle. Just using the percentage increase in the RPI since 1928 as a multiplier, one hundred thousand dollars in 1928 would be worth about six million dollars today. And two or three hundred thousand? Grant was a wealthy man.
So—what happened to wipe out all that wealth? Bonds would not just disappear, and neither would dividend-paying stocks. We tend to imagine the crash of 1929 as a huge one-day catastrophe: all those stockbrokers leaping out of windows, or hawking their Cadillacs on the street for ten bucks. In fact there was a crash on October 24, and then a bit of a recovery, followed by a dramatic drop on the 29th which erased about 25% of market value from the Dow. But people thought it was temporary, and there were short, shallow rallies in the months that followed. It was not until July 8, 1932 that the Dow hit bottom, a loss in value of 89%. In all likelihood, during the winter of 1929/30, and for most of the following year, Grant would have assured his clients (and himself) that the pull-back was temporary.
Grandma always claimed that his broker was crooked and she never told me that Grant was, in fact, a partner. Did he somehow become responsible for client losses? Did he misjudge and recklessly gamble? We don’t know. But there’s another interesting aspect to the will. Right on the first page, he acknowledges that grandma owns an unspecified portion of his financial assets.
I acknowledge that at this time I am indebted to my wife in a certain amount and that I hold certain securities in my own or my broker’s name which are her absolute property. My intention is to leave with my papers a memorandum which will exhibit the true situation with regard to such debts and securities which memorandum shall be taken as conclusive evidence of the true ownership of such securities and the amount of such indebtedness.
When she went into their marriage, she had no significant assets of her own. Her father, Wesley Jones Burns, died intestate. When everything was settled, his estate was worth $9,100, of which $7,700 was an insurance policy. Most of that went to his wife, Louisa C. Burns, but the court awarded $280 to each of their five kids, including grandma. So the financial assets to which he refers would have been created through his investments.
But is it possible that, because of this provision of the will, all his diminished financial assets were deemed to belong to her, rather than to his estate—along with the silver and household furnishings? That would make sense of her story—that when eventually the brokerage accounts were settled, she ended up with a nest egg of ten thousand dollars, which she maintained intact and invested assiduously in her own right for the rest of her long life.
In which case, it was the insurance money that saved the house, and paid for the girls at U of T, and saw the family through the depression.
**
We’ll never know the true cause of Grant’s death. He had a village upbringing in Caledonia. Did he hunt as well as fish? Was there a rifle in the house? Did he hang himself in the cellar, to be found by his wife and daughter? Or maybe in those terrible last months he turned to alcohol for consolation (“Acute Haemoragic Gastritis”), and had a drunken fall on the stairs (not necessarily in the cellar). We’ll never know.
But we know that he was in desperate financial straits. And we know that there was a cover-up, along with a falsified death certificate. And we know that his death was the means—the only means available to him—by which his widow and his two daughters lived through the depression, and came out successfully on the other side.
Grandma destroyed every scrap of paper that he ever wrote (he was, my mother said, “always writing”). She put no monument on his grave. And none of them—except in response to my persistent questions—ever spoke of his death, and hardly ever of him. These family behaviors are consistent with suicide, and its lasting scars for survivors. He may or may not have taken his own life, but they behaved as if he had.
But whatever he did, he did it for them.
Alexander Grant Brown. “Scarce shall you find a man of more desert.”
[i] I am indebted to the work of Robin Bourgoyne for much of the research that informs the rest of this story.