Episode 3 Brave New World

A land of spectacular contrast.

Vast prairies and dense forest

bounded by three oceans.

Canada is the second largest country in the world.

You could fit the whole of Northern Ireland

inside one of its national parks...

..yet people from Ulster have had a remarkable influence

on the history and geography of this vast nation,

spanning two centuries and across 5,000 miles.

Today, 4.5 million Canadians can trace their roots back to Ireland.

But there was a time when the Irish made up

a quarter of the population here.

And the majority came from the nine counties of Ulster.

English-speaking Canada had a noticeable Ulster accent.

This is the story of people from Ulster

who, from the 18th century to the present day,

have made this country their home,

of how they came here in such large numbers

that they didn't merely adapt to the Canadian way of life,

they helped to shape its culture, its society,

its politics and its economy.

Today, tourists come to the Ottawa Valley to explore

its magnificent lakes, forests and rivers,

but 150 years ago,

people from Ireland were coming here to begin a new life.

20 miles north of Ottawa City, on the banks of the Gatineau River,

Wakefield was first settled by Joseph Irwin and his wife,

who came here from the North of Ireland in 1829.

Within a couple of years, ten more families joined them from home

and soon, small settlements of people from Ulster

sprang up all along the river valley.

Often we look for the influence and impact of these Irish settlers

in the fields of commerce, religion and politics,

and you can certainly find that here in the Ottawa Valley,

where the Irish once made up the majority of English-speaking immigrants,

but it's the culture they brought with them from home,

their tradition of music and dance, that is their enduring legacy

in this region of Canada.

FIDDLE PLAYS

HANDCLAPS

TAPPING OF DANCE STEPS

How would you describe the kind of dance you've been teaching here, Pauline?

Well, it's a mixture here in what we call the Ottawa Valley.

It's a mixture of Irish, Scottish, French-Canadian.

We've put it all together to what we call Ottawa Valley step dancing.

TAPPING

-And along with the dancing, the music.

-The music.

The fiddle seems to go hand in hand with the dancing.

There's hundreds and hundreds of dancers and fiddlers in the Ottawa Valley.

It's just spreading like wildfire.

FIDDLE PLAYS

And how rare is it to find this kind of dancing elsewhere?

-You're not going to find it anywhere else.

-Really?

-It's...

here in the Valley.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

So, there's a kind of history here to this in the Valley?

It's been around for, you know, 100 or more years.

It started back in the lumber camps

when the men would go into the bush and all they had was

their fiddle with them, so that's basically where it started.

Ulstermen are not normally associated with Canadian lumberjacks,

but it was work in the timber trade

that attracted so many Ulster immigrants to the Ottawa Valley.

In fact, many of them came here on ships carrying timber to Europe

that returned with a cargo of immigrants.

Even those who came here to farm often supplemented their income

by working in the lumber camps during the winter months.

The shanties, as they were known,

were in isolated areas deep in the forest.

It was difficult and dangerous work,

and living conditions were extremely primitive.

Work in the logging camps was not for the faint-hearted.

You had to be tough and resilient.

These men worked hard six days a week all through the winter.

But when spring came, the loggers returned to their valley farms

and the trees they'd cut were floated down river

to the markets and ports of Montreal and Quebec City.

The river is tranquil today, but at the height of the timber trade,

in the mid-1800s, this river would have been quite literally a logjam.

What began as a local industry

rapidly expanded during the first half of the 19th century.

Britain was cut off from its main supply of wood in the Baltic

during the Napoleonic Wars

and looked to its Canadian colonies to fill the gap.

It was the beginning of a formidable timber trade

that shaped not only this province but the entire country.

Canada's forest drove its economic progress.

This lucrative industry created timber barons. And one of the most

successful of them, the biggest employer in Ottawa,

was the son of Irish immigrants.

John Rudolphus Booth was born in Ontario in 1827,

the second of five children of a farmer and his wife from Ulster.

His first job was as a carpenter

but, by the age of just 30,

he had saved enough money to lease a sawmill outside Ottawa.

Booth's big break in business came in 1859.

Ottawa had been chosen as the capital of Canada

and Booth won the contract to supply the timber for this -

the new parliament building.

On the strength of that contract,

he went on to buy valuable tracts of forest.

His holdings eventually covered 640,000 acres.

It was said of Booth that he knew the forest as a sailor knows the sea.

He obviously knew how to make money out of it.

By the 1890s, he had the largest timber operation in the world.

But his business empire didn't end there.

This is the Rideau Canal in Ottawa city -

once the main commercial shipping route

linking central Canada to the transatlantic ports.

In its heyday, barges carrying timber would have been

a very common sight on this canal.

By John Booth's time, however,

the railways had superseded the waterways

as the fastest, most economic route to market.

So, Booth put his money into the railway.

He built a railroad linking Montreal to Chicago

that made him proprietor

of what was then the world's largest privately-owned railway.

Booth continued to run his business empire well into his 90s.

For most of his adult life, he had watched and, in many ways, directed

the progress of his province and his country.

And when he died, Prime Minister Mackenzie King described him as

one of the fathers of Canada.

I've come 360 miles west of Ottawa where, for seven months every year,

the town of Stratford in Ontario bursts into life.

Actors, directors and audiences come to participate

in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival,

the largest classical repertory theatre in North America.

The festival was the brainchild of a local journalist

called Tom Patterson.

But the man who would turn his idea into world-class theatre

was the British director, Tyrone Guthrie.

Tyrone Guthrie was born in England

but his father was Scottish and his mother was from Annaghmakerrig,

County Monaghan, a place Guthrie would later make his home.

He began his career in radio at the BBC in Belfast in 1924

but made his name as a theatre director at the Old Vic in London

where he recruited future stars

such as Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness.

To find out how and why he came to Canada,

I'm meeting the current artistic director of the Stratford Theatre,

Antoni Cimolino.

-Hello, William.

-Good to see you.

-Welcome to the Stratford Festival.

So, what can you show me first of all? Backstage?

Let's go back, let's go back. Have some fun.

All right, so we're backstage on the famous Festival Theatre stage.

The Stratford Festival is North America's largest

not-for-profit theatre.

It has about 1000 employees,

attracts visitors from around the world.

Half a million people come here per year.

They come here from Thailand, Japan, every country in Europe,

every state in the United States.

And we run from about the end of April through to November.

So, it was conceived as a short, summer season

and it's expanded to being a powerhouse.

12 to 14 productions in four different theatres

and visitors from around the world.

What would Stratford, as a town, be like, without this festival?

It would be, you know, pretty, but quiet.

Stratford was called Stratford by an engineer who was

laying down the railroad here in the 1850s and was in love with

Shakespeare, so there are surrounding towns called Shakespeare.

There are sections of the city called Romeo.

But not much was done about this until the 1950s.

So it took 100 years

before the town lived up to the promise of its name.

And that all happened when one of our citizens,

who was a great dreamer and a great salesman, Tom Patterson, had the

idea of creating a festival based upon the Shakespeare connection.

And somebody put him in touch with Tyrone Guthrie, and he called,

and Tyrone Guthrie's maid wasn't sure who this was,

could barely hear the connection across the Atlantic,

was about to hang up,

when she mentioned something in passing, to Guthrie who was

in the other room, who had enough curiosity to come and take the call.

And that's how history was made.

Guthrie's curiosity brought him to Canada,

but the reason he got involved in the Stratford Festival project

was that it offered him an opportunity to build a new and revolutionary type of stage,

unlike any in Europe at that time.

Our repository of skills that range from wig-making

to shoemaking - I mean it's very hard to find a shoemaker nowadays -

but to one that can make shoes in all sorts of different periods

are even harder to find.

We have 150 people who make costumes.

-We have...

-Beard makers!

Beard making, that's right!

Why don't we have a look at some of our wardrobe shops here?

We've got a series of rooms like this.

And, right now, we've made eight productions.

We only have five more to begin and, in the days ahead...

So this is actually very quiet.

In the spring, this room is just filled with people

working on every style of costume.

You go to one table and see something from, you know,

Greek theatre, and another table it'll be Elizabethan

and then something else will be modernistic.

Back in 1953, Guthrie and the festival committee

had to beg, borrow and barter

to get the set, costume and craftspeople they needed

to pull off a show.

But when the curtain went up on Alec Guinness in Richard III,

it was an immediate success.

All right, so here we come.

We're walking onto the festival stage.

Here, we've laid out on top of this floor

the cloak that was worn by Guinness as Richard III in 1953

and you can see that it looks quite sumptuous.

Like in all theatres, basically taking rags and junk

and making it look like gold.

Here, we have a model of the stage.

And the miracle here is that nobody is further than 66 feet away.

And the actor is right in the middle of the audience.

So you don't have to do a lot of acting.

You can just speak.

And when people did this in 1953, the audience were shocked.

It was no longer something from the 19th century.

It was no longer big and large.

It was intimate, it was truthful.

Shakespeare, for the first time, became our contemporary.

All because of this stage design?

The architecture was everything, and he knew that.

I think he made that discovery at Elsinore, actually, in Denmark,

Where they were doing a performance outdoors of Hamlet

and it started to rain on opening night.

And they had the crown princes of Europe showing up for this

performance, that included the Guinness, so what they did was,

they went into a ballroom and they put chairs around the outside.

This was 1937. And the great discovery Guthrie made was, wow,

we just put the actors in the middle of this ballroom.

It was riveting.

He desperately wanted to create this stage

and he couldn't get it done in Europe.

He could not get it done in Britain.

So, when he got the phone call from the New World,

and this small town of, you know, extraordinary personalities

really, when you think about it, now, he saw an opportunity.

So he came here.

He said to them, "Look, if you want to make money, just put on a bunch

"of showgirls, do a show of that kind and you'll make money.

"But, if you want to do something really extraordinary,

"then I suggest to you that, together,

"we can put on some of the best Shakespeare plays in the world."

And, to their credit, that group of citizens in a small town said,

"We want to do something extraordinary."

How significant do you think Tyrone Guthrie was,

as a director in the 20th century?

He was huge. He was probably recognised

at that time as THE greatest director of the 20th century.

He worked all over the world.

He had an ability to inspire, to debunk, to excite, to teach,

which made him a great source of creation.

Is he still known about here in Stratford?

There are streets named after him.

There are still people that remember him.

The men who built all this, Oliver Gaffney,

he went for weeks paying his workers when no money was coming forward.

And they said to him years later, "Oliver,

"why did you continue to build when there was no money?

"You might have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars."

And he said, "Well, there were two reasons.

"One, I didn't want this enterprise to fail

"and have someone blame it on somebody in this community not coming through.

"And the second is, you know, that Tyrone Guthrie, he's a really nice guy."

Canada offered Tyrone Guthrie a unique opportunity

to make his mark, just as it did the many thousands of

Ulster immigrants who came here and made this place their home.

From Ontario, I've come 1,000 miles west to the province of Manitoba.

When immigrants from Ulster first started coming to Canada,

vast tracts of this country were unknown and uncharted,

but, as the nation grew, so the need to open up the last great

wildernesses to agriculture and settlement became more pressing.

The land west of Ontario was generally considered

unsuitable for agriculture. It was little more than one vast desert.

Or so they believed.

So, in 1872, the Canadian government commissioned the first of five

surveys of Western Canada.

And one of those tasked with finding out if the land could be put

to use was a botanist called John Macoun from County Down.

Born in Magheralin in 1831, Macoun emigrated to Belleville, Ontario,

with his mother and brothers in 1850.

But what they found when they got there was a disappointment.

Most of the good land had already been taken

and what was left was covered in forest.

While his eldest brother, Frederick, cleared the land,

John and his brother James worked as labourers on neighbouring farms.

In his autobiography, John described just how tough life was

for the pioneer settlers, and how his brother Frederick

almost gave up and returned to Ireland.

But he also writes about how the neighbours supported them,

and each other, helping to build homes and barns,

to plough the land and bring in the harvest.

With what little free time he had,

John began to study the plants and flowers of his new home

and within a few years, his hobby had become a full-time occupation,

one that would bring him to the attention of universities

and botanists across North America and the British Isles.

At the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, botanist Dr Diana Bizecki Robson

has been following in the footsteps of Macoun,

studying the flora and fauna of Western Canada.

What kind of person was John Macoun?

He was one of those people like many other botanists in the past

that seemingly got obsessed with the pursuit of plants.

He was virtually a self-taught botanist

so, most of what he learned, he learned in books

and he learned from studying the plants themselves.

It was just something he really enjoyed.

It was a passion. He loved going out and collecting plants.

He started off when he was quite young.

Why did people back then think Saskatchewan and Manitoba

were simply unsuitable for agriculture?

A lot of people's impressions of Canada

came from a report that Captain John Palliser wrote.

He came through those areas from 1857-1860.

And there were a lot of negative things going on, climatically.

There was a severe drought happening at the time.

There were some pretty big grass fires in the areas

that Palliser travelled through

so the vegetation did not look lush at all.

In fact, in places, it would have looked like a desert,

with blowing sand and everything

so when people read that report, they just thought, "Oh, dear.

"There's not going to be anything."

Any kind of possible settlement in this area.

And they sort of wrote it off.

But, by the 1870s, pressure on land resources in the East

and the need to build a railroad to the West Coast

convinced the government to send Macoun

and a group of railway engineers to survey the prairies once again.

When he came out here during what was quite a wet period

and saw all these lush grasses,

he was actually a little bit surprised

at how beautiful and wonderful it looked.

And he thought, hey, there's no trees here,

it will be easy to cultivate.

And he figured that the weather, you know, there was rain in the spring

which is usually when wheat needs the rain, not so much in August,

which is fine, because wheat's not a rain plant,

so he thought that the land was going to be just fine for agriculture,

perfect for agriculture. In fact, he was really enthusiastic

and didn't really pay attention to the fact that maybe

droughts were periodically going to be a problem.

When he did complete his report and said

this place was suitable for agriculture,

was that idea immediately accepted by everybody?

Well, the government was really, really happy

because they desperately wanted to settle that area.

They were worried that Americans were going to expand into Canada

so they wanted Canadian people living in the West

and they also really wanted the money.

The railway was there to ship wheat from the prairies out East

to sell for export and to get money from taxes

but they also saw it as an opportunity

to manufacture things in eastern Canada

that they would ship out to the settlers.

So, they saw the prairies as a potential cash cow

and John was the one who gave them the data that they needed

to go ahead with a southern railway route.

So, he opened the gateway to the West, really?

He did. In fact, people like to say that Macoun changed the map.

Before John came out, they were actually planning on

routing the Canadian Pacific Railway further to the north

through what was basically along the historic Carlton Trail.

They decided afterwards to send it through the South.

So now it goes through Brandon, it goes through Regina and Calgary.

Those cities might not have existed, actually,

if the route had gone to the North.

If it wasn't for John Macoun, Robert Stoop might not be

farming in Manitoba today.

He and his family moved here from Warrenpoint in 1998

and have a mixed farm of 200 acres,

200 miles west of Brandon, Manitoba's second city.

What brought you to Canada from Warrenpoint?

We were landlocked, where we farmed back in Ireland,

simply because you couldn't afford

to buy land and pay for it through farming.

I saw an opportunity here to come and...

Even a different enterprise which I think probably pays a bit better.

At least it's a bit more steady income.

Ann, what were your first impressions when you arrived in Canada?

What was it, 17 years ago?

Yes. The first impression was the heat

when we first came out of the airport

and once we started travelling west, just wide-open spaces

not like our nice, little neat fields back home, you know?

The tractors were big out here, and we often say, goodness,

they would never fit down the roads where we came from, you know?

So, and just, at that time, you know, fell in love with Canada.

How did you find out about this part of Canada?

Oh, I think I'd known about it all my life.

Prairies, to me,

was the only part of Canada that I knew anything about.

1897 was when the first of mum's uncles, my great uncles,

emigrated to Canada. And between then and 1903,

there was five of them here.

My grandfather, who was the youngest of the family,

he didn't come to Canada.

He told stories about William leaving home

and about how their mother walked him down the lane.

And by intuition,

she probably knew that day she would never see him again.

And neither she did.

It was a three day round-trip from where they homesteaded

to the nearest town.

They went to the town, I think, about once every six months

and brought enough provisions home.

It would not have been an easy job.

They were young. I guess they were pretty eager.

They were getting 160 acres,

something they would never have a hope in high heaven of owning

back in Ireland, and they sure did a good job on it.

You feel part of a long story of Irish people who have come here.

You know about it in terms of your family's background, but it goes back

even further than that.

I think so. Once you mention that you're Irish or whatever,

"Oh, my great-grandmother or someone was from somewhere else."

And a lot of them came from the UK and Ireland

and that, yeah, you almost feel related to everybody,

in the sense that they want to identify with you,

and none of them have one clue where their ancestors came from.

It was Ireland, but that as much as they know.

And you feel full Canadian identity, or are you a bit mixed?

Well, I still tell people I'm British-Irish, you know?

I don't like to admit that I'm Canadian, but I am!

ANN LAUGHS

But no, yeah, this is home now

and this is the place I'll live for the rest of my life.

Canada is a vast country with a rich and complex history.

And you can't fully understand the story of this great nation

without appreciating the contribution of those pioneering settlers

from Ulster, who crossed an ocean and brought with them

the values that would help shape this place.

An adventurous spirit, a willingness to take risks,

a passion for justice,

and an ambition to make a better life for themselves

and for their fellow countrymen

they would meet here in this brave new world.