Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  As the last person to have a close relationship with the inventor of the telephone, Grosvenor was a precious conduit to the past for journalists wanting to know more about her grandfather’s work and personality. “People were always bringing children to Grampie,” she told her nephew Edwin S. Grosvenor for his 1997 biography, Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Inventor of the Telephone. “If they called on him or wrote that they had a deaf child, whom they wanted him to see, he would always make time to see them.”

  She also described doing experiments with her grandfather, including demonstrations of how sound carried better underwater than through the air. “When we were swimming at the shore, he would go away from us and have us duck our heads under water,” she told her nephew. “He would then clap stones under water and we could hear it. Then we would raise our heads out of the water and he’d clap stones in the air and you couldn’t hear it.”

  Grosvenor depicted Bell as “a very theatrical person,” in a 1994 interview with Baddeck journalist Jocelyn Bethune, remembering that when he told a story, “you were on the edge to hear it.” She described him as “six feet — which was tall in those days. He had sparkling hazel eyes and great expressions. His hair stood up — but it was flat when he was not feeling well.”

  While researching Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell, biographer Charlotte Gray went to visit Grosvenor in 2003 at her retirement home in Washington. By then ninety-eight, Grosvenor was nearly blind and quite deaf and “had terrific mobility problems,” but “she had all her marbles.” Happy to talk about her grandparents, she told Gray that she was ten years old before she realized that her grandmother was deaf. “We all knew that we had to look her in the face when we spoke to her, and we could never call to her from another room, but we thought this was just good manners.”

  As for her Edinburgh-born grandfather, she described him as speaking an educated English without a Scottish or regional accent. This was a key detail, because there is no known recording of Alexander Graham Bell speaking. “His father Melville was a speech teacher, and he would never allow his sons to speak with an Edinburgh brogue,” Grosvenor said. “The only times I heard him use a Scottish accent were when he was reciting ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ by Robbie Burns, or when we visited Edinburgh together in 1920.”

  In a long life stretching the length of the past bloody century and well into this one, Grosvenor embraced electricity, the telephone, cars, airplanes, female suffrage, television, men on the moon — everything but the computer, which she resolutely resisted. Self-effacing, private, and forward-looking, Grosvenor was cherished by several generations of nieces and nephews in the extended Bell-Grosvenor family, as a confidante, a mentor, and the embodiment of love and caring.

  MABEL HARLAKENDEN GROSVENOR was born on July 28, 1905, at The Lodge, Beinn Bhreagh (which is Gaelic for “beautiful mountain”), in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, her grandparents’ summer home. The property included not only “The Lodge” — the thirty-seven-room mansion built by her grandparents in the 1890s — but several other houses and buildings dating from the same era. She was the third of seven children of Elsie (neé Bell) and Gilbert Grosvenor, the man who transformed National Geographic from a dry journal into a glossy, heavily illustrated monthly magazine.

  She grew up in Washington, D.C., in the family home near Dupont Circle, but she spent extended periods of time, including most summers, in Baddeck because her parents travelled extensively as what we now call photojournalists. “He was the centre of her life, but she was the centre of ours,” she said about her grandparents to biographer Charlotte Gray.

  By all accounts the Bells doted on their ten grandchildren. In Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, Robert V. Bruce described the inventor as having “the majesty of Moses and the benevolence of Santa Claus.” Grosvenor’s older brother Melville told Bruce that his earliest memory was “sitting on his grandfather’s lap and, on instructions, tweaking the nose of Alexander Graham Bell to produce a dog’s bark, pulling his hair for a sheep’s bleat, and by way of climax, tugging his Santa Claus beard for the deliciously fierce growl of a bear.”

  Grosvenor was in Baddeck when her grandfather’s red silk kite, Cygnet, soared 150 feet above Bras d’Or Lake with a young man named Tom Selfridge clinging to its structure. The apparatus hovered for a breathtaking seven minutes and then sank gently into the water after the wind dropped. Bell, who was obsessed with the idea of manned flight, later wrote about this experiment: “I almost forgot to mention the witness who will probably live the longest after this event (and remember least about it) — my little granddaughter Miss Mabel Grosvenor — two years of age.”

  He was right about that. She didn’t remember the Cygnet’s brief flight in 1907, and she was not even there — being at home in Washington — when the Silver Dart achieved the first controlled powered flight in Canada, on February 23, 1909. Even so, in a 1994 interview with journalist Jocelyn Bethune, she said: “I swear I remember being there with Grandma — being very cold, being frozen, but everyone was excited. I didn’t see why everyone should be so excited — if Douglas [pilot J.A. D. McCurdy] wanted to fly, why shouldn’t he? Being brought up on wonders, they seemed commonplace.”

  Four years later, on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, Grosvenor, then eight years old, rode in an open carriage up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol building in Washington with her mother, grandmother, aunt Daisy Fairchild (neé Bell), and two of her own four sisters. They were part of a suffragist march at least five thousand strong, demonstrating in favour of giving women the vote. The march drew an estimated half-million onlookers; many of them were violently opposed to the female franchise and hurled abuse and lit cigar butts at the marchers while the police looked away. According to Grosvenor, her grandfather was the original suffragist in the family. “He persuaded my grandmother. I think he felt that women had just as much right [to vote] as men.”

  She described her early school days to journalist Jim Morrow in an interview for the Baddeck Victoria Standard in 2005. “We got out of school at lunchtime. And then in the afternoon two days a week we had horseback riding and one day a week we had dancing class,” and all of this in addition to art classes on Saturday. All the great adventurers of the day probably passed through the Grosvenor home, but the only one she could remember was the Canadian Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, because he stayed with them and “he put sugar on everything.”

  An intelligent, studious girl, Mabel at the age of fourteen served as an unofficial secretary to her grandfather, taking dictation from him on a variety of subjects ranging from genetics to genealogy to the mechanics of hydrofoil boats. She’d had a bad bout of whooping cough in the spring of 1919. Her parents, wanting to “toughen her up” because the deadly influenza epidemic (which had spread through returning soldiers of the Great War to civilian populations around the world), was still raging, agreed to let her extend her usual summer sojourn at Beinn Bhreagh. She was in residence on September 9, 1919, when her grandfather’s hydrofoil boat the HD-4 set a world marine speed record of 114 kilometres per hour, a record that stood for a decade. “As I remember, the speed of the HD-4 was measured on land,” she told Morrow. “There was a mark on the shore and when the HD-4 reached another mark further up the shore, they measured the time it took to get there.”

  At Beinn Bhreagh she slept in a sleeping porch off one of the balconies, a habit that persisted until her last five years. “I slept out there all winter. We had a child’s play broom and we’d brush the snow to get to the floor. And I had a cold bath every morning to strengthen me,” she told Morrow. That winter she took up skiing, ice skating, and snowshoeing, but mostly she was being “tutored” by her grandfather in his new hobby, genealogy.

  The following year she accompanied her grandparents on a sentimental trip back to Bell’s native Scotland, partly in search
of his roots. “He didn’t really get interested in genealogy until his father died,” she remembered decades later. “We went to parish offices to look through records and visited cemeteries. He found several cousins he didn’t know existed.”

  While they were in the U.K., Bell, who had never flown in any form of aircraft himself despite his fascination with manned flight, arranged for his granddaughter and his wife to fly from London to Paris, but, as she told journalist Allen Abel in 2003, “at the last moment, he chickened out and wouldn’t let us go. He said it was too dangerous.”

  Back in the U.S., Grosvenor enrolled in Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, a liberal arts college for women and the eldest of the academically elite “Seven Sisters.” After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1927, she entered the medical school of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, choosing that institution over Harvard because of its smaller classes.

  Grosvenor was one of only seven female medical students (one dropped out after contracting tuberculosis) in her graduating class in 1931. After doing an internship at the New York Hospital in New York City, she moved back to Washington, where she worked as a pediatrician in private practice and in clinics for disadvantaged children at the Children’s Hospital.

  After practising medicine for thirty-five years, Grosvenor retired early, in the mid-1960s, to care for her own parents, who were both frail and in poor health by then. As well, she took over stewardship of the Beinn Bhreagh estate. She loved to sail on the lake in her dinghy, the Carola, or on the yawl Elsie. A well-known figure in Baddeck, she spent her time driving her silver convertible, gardening, presiding as honorary president over meetings of the Alexander Bell Club — one of the longest continuing women’s clubs in Canada — and taking care of others.

  She was an ongoing source of awe for family and local residents for her ability to recall names, events, and people. As she grew older, she was granted the first conservation easement in Nova Scotia to help ensure that the property and its gardens would continue as a heritage site.

  As she had done almost every year for more than a century, she travelled from Washington to Baddeck in June 2006. As the days grew shorter and cooler she stayed on because her health problems, including congestive heart failure, were accelerating and she thought she would receive better medical care there than in Washington, according to her great-nephew Grosvenor Blair. “That’s what she said, but I think she also loved Baddeck and the people, and she was very much at home here,” he said. Grosvenor died quietly of respiratory failure on October 30, 2006, in the place where she had been born more than a century earlier. She was 101.

  Dora de Pédery-Hunt

  Artist

  November 16, 1913 – September 29, 2008

  AFTER CONQUERING GAZA, Alexander the Great and his troops headed for Jerusalem in 332 BCE. The news of the brutal siege and the raping and pillaging that had ensued preceded him. So instead of resisting, the high priest Jaddus and a multitude of inhabitants welcomed the invader on the outskirts of the city. In gratitude, Alexander declined to sack Jerusalem and is said to have given a “golden button” — the world’s first medal — to Jaddus before pushing south into Egypt in his quest to conquer the known world.

  The Italian artist Antonio Pisano, or Pisanello, made the earliest modern medal in 1438–39. It was small enough to be held in the hand and depicted the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus on one side and an allegorical scene on the other. From Italy, medal-making spread throughout Europe, but it was slow to cross the Atlantic and take root in Canada.

  The earliest Canada-related medal was the “Kebeca Liberata,” which was cast in France in 1690 to mark the defeat of a British attack on Quebec. After the fall of Quebec in 1763, the British cast medals to commemorate military victories and other significant events, including the signing of treaties with First Nations chiefs. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, however, that local artists Louis-Philippe Hébert and Alfred Laliberté began creating medals here, having learned the technique in France.

  These were isolated examples. Medallic art barely existed until an influx of skilled European artisans arrived in the middle of the twentieth century. Sculptor Dora de Pédery-Hunt was the first woman to make an international reputation as a medallic artist in this country, but even she had to use a commercial iron foundry to cast her first medals. She arrived in 1948 as an indentured servant from Hungary, having survived both World Wars: the one that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the one that had turned Europe into an inferno.

  Her name may not trip off the tongue, but her work is as familiar as the change that jingles in your pocket. She is the artist who sculpted the effigy of a “mature” Queen Elizabeth that appeared on all our coins minted between 1990 and 2003. It was the first time a Canadian artist had ever been given such a commission.

  Beginning with the Canada Council Medal in 1961, de Pédery-Hunt designed and moulded hundreds of commemorative decorations. She created medals for Canada’s centennial in 1967, Expo 70 in Osaka, the Montreal Olympics in 1976, the 300th anniversary of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the portrait medallion of Dr. Norman Bethune that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau presented to Mao Zedong during Canada’s first official visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1973. A founding member of the Medallic Art Society of Canada (MASC), she was also the first and for many years the only Canadian delegate to the Fédération internationale de la médaille d’art (FIDEM), the International Art Medal Federation.

  Although she worked on larger secular and especially religious sculptures, including altarpieces, stations of the cross, candlesticks, and crucifixes, medals were her “favourite form of expression,” as de Pédery-Hunt said later. “They are like short poems.”

  In a passage that appeared in Medals, a trilingual book about her work with photographs by Elizabeth Frey, she said: “I have to accept the challenges of working inside the limits of a small disc and obeying the strict rules of the striking, casting and finishing processes. But the clay is soft and it yields pleasantly, almost too easily to the touch of my fingers. Maybe, after all, these limitations are necessary. I welcome these odds — my medals are the result of a good fight against them — and at the end at least I can look back on a bravely fought battle.”

  There were other, less lyrical impulses to make medals. They are small, so they don’t require a huge financial outlay for materials or a large studio in which to fashion them. Indeed, medals can be moulded in bed, a key consideration if you are as poor as de Pédery-Hunt was in the early years, when pulling the covers up was one of the best ways to stay warm.

  DOROTHEA DE PÉDERY, the middle of three daughters, was born prematurely on Sunday, November 16, 1913, in Budapest, Hungary. Her mother, Emilia Festl, was out with friends; her father, physicist Attila de Pédery, was at the opera. The tiny baby, who weighed less than a kilogram, was wrapped in cotton wool and placed in the only available bassinet — a shoebox.

  Her hastily summoned father took one look and quickly baptized his daughter, naming her “Dorothea — gift of the Gods,” because in Hungarian folklore a Sunday child will understand birdsong and commune with flowers. That makeshift incubator saw Dorothea (Dora) through the night and launched the beginning of a long, adventurous life that transformed her from the “shoebox baby” into, as she herself liked to say, “the mother of Canadian medals.”

  After graduating from the State Lyceum in 1932, she vacillated between her artistic ambitions and pleasing her father by becoming a scientist. By her mid-twenties she had found her vocation, and despite her father’s disappointment, she entered the Royal Hungarian School of Applied Art. Besides fine art, she studied bronze and plaster casting and wood and stone carving — crafts that later helped her support her family. After four years of basic studies for her honours diploma, she earned a master’s degree in sculpture and design in 1943. For her graduation project, she sculpted a thirty-centimet
re solid bronze elephant.

  Life in Hungary carried on in a twitchy fashion during the early years of the Second World War. The country had formed an uneasy alliance with Germany, so it wasn’t occupied like many of its neighbours. De Pédery found work designing clothes and accessories, did some private teaching, eventually sold some drawings to international fashion magazines and even had a bust and a life-sized plastic sculpture exhibited by the National Gallery of Hungary.

  All of that changed in March 1944, when Germany occupied Hungary, imposed martial law, and began mass deportations of Jews to death camps. The de Péderys, who were Catholic, were spared that horror, but they knew that the Germans were losing the war and they were afraid of the Soviets marching towards them from the east.

  On Christmas Eve 1944, the family, including her two sisters and two small children, fled Budapest by foot and then train, with the frail Attila de Pédery lugging his daughter’s bronze elephant. The journey to Dresden took them twenty-three days on a barely functioning rail system. Fortuitously the de Péderys left the city the day before the Allies launched their intensive bombing sorties in February 1945, and so they escaped the firestorms that destroyed much of the city. They headed northwest until they reached Hanover, which by then was occupied by the Allies, becoming part of the British Occupied Zone.

  Father and daughter both found work with the British Admiralty — he designed anti-sonar devices from 1945 to 1948 — and were befriended by a British officer in the occupation forces named Chutter and his Canadian-born wife. The Chutters offered to sponsor de Pédery as a Canadian immigrant. To increase her chances she posed as an unmarried woman, although she had recently married Hungarian journalist Béla Hunt, and agreed to work as an indentured servant for two years for a family in Toronto in return for her passage.