Mar. 6: Legislature speaker tarred; Winnipeg supply creaed; Rith Collie, author and poet.

March 6, 1873 - Dr. Curtis James Bird, speaker of the Manitoba Legislature, was lured from his bed in the middle of the night on a false medical call, beaten unconscious and smeared in warm tar. It was retribution for a procedural call he made that prevented the passage of the first City of Winnipeg Act.

March 6, 1904 - The Winnipeg Supply and Fuel Company was incorporated by a Toronto-based consortium of lime manufacturers and contractors. The company began as a fuel distribution business and ran a limestone quarry at Stonewall. It is now part of Service Experts.

March 6, 1936 - Poet and author Ruth Jacobs Cohen Collie died. She moved to Winnipeg from her native England with her husband in 1912. When he died in 1919, she was encouraged by her friends to use her writing as a way of supporting herself and her son.

Collie wrote under two pseudonyms: Sheila Rand, (book reviews), and Wilhelmina Stitch, (poetry and prose). Her work first appeared in the Winnipeg Telegraph, Winnipeg Tribune and Western Home Monthly. She returned to Britain, married Dr. Frank Collie in 1923, and became one of the widest-syndicated female authors of her time.

For more about Collie, see my Free Press column, as well as this and this.

© 2012, 2020 Christian Cassidy