McGill Library
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Letter, 1 September 1865
Item
1 letter
Although William Bell Dawson is less well known than his more famous scientist father, Sir William and older brother George, he became a serious engineer in his own right. Born in 1854 in Pictou, Nova Scotia, by the time he was ready for university, his father had become principal of McGill and that is where he received his B.A. with honors in 1874, also receiving the Logan medal. He continued with his studies and achieved a B.A. Sc.in 1875, then in 1879 went to the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees in Paris for three years while also obtaining an M.A.E. from McGill in 1880.
With this educational background, he returned to Canada and began working for Dominion Bridge in 1882. Following his marriage in 1883 to Florence Jane Mary Elliott, daughter of General Elliott, he took a post with the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1884 where he continued to design railway bridges and was involved in arbitration between the Canadian government and CP concerning the quality of construction of some of the British Columbia sections of the railway.
Perhaps his most important work was as superintendent of the Canadian government’s Department of Marine and Fisheries Tidal Survey, a monumental task at which he spent 1893 to 1924 drawing up tide tables for the principal Canadian harbors, and for which he gained membership in the Royal Society of Canada. During much of this time, he and his wife and son Victor (born in 1885) lived in Ottawa at 436 Gilmour Street.
He was a prolific author writing many books and tracts on tides. After his retirement in 1924 and until his death in 1944, he devoted himself to writing on the relationship between religion and science, a topic that had also interested his father. His best known works are Forethought in creation (1925), Evolution contrasted with Scripture truth (1926), and The Bible confirmed by science (1832).
Eva, the last born of the nine children of the Dawson family, was considerably younger than most of the others. Born in 1865, she was closest in age to Rankine, who was her companion as a child, and she often defended him when her siblings were impatient with his erratic behavior. She claimed that his unstable behavior dated from his experience of being lost in the woods during a trip to the west, which imbalanced him, altering his character and producing “peculiarities of manners and ways.” Eva grew up largely in the east wing of the Arts building at McGill where her family had moved in 1855 before she was born. In 1890, she married Hope Tweedale Atkin (1856-1921), a Cambridge graduate from Cheshire, England. After the wedding in Montreal, they returned to Birkenhead in Cheshire where their first child was born in 1891, and in 1894 they moved to Lancashire where they resided for many years. They had three children: Sylvia Lois Dawson Atkin (1891-1968), Grace Margaret Dawson Atkin (born in 1892), and George Fawson Hope Atkin (1896-1916), who was killed during World War I.
When the family was in turmoil concerning the publication of her father’s biography after his death, she tried to convince them to cease the quarreling with Rankine in the interests of honouring Sir William and comforting their mother, but the older siblings maintained their opposition and she wound up siding with them.
When their mother died in 1913 she willed Birkenshaw, the family’s summer home in Little Metis to her daughter, Clare, who in turn willed it to Eva and her niece Lois Harrington. Eva died in 1915 in Holyhead, Anglesey, Wales.
Rankine Dawson, born likely in 1863, was the next to the youngest of the children of John William Dawson and Margaret Mercer Dawson, born after George, Anna, and William Bell. He graduated from McGill College, having been a member of the first McGill hockey team that played and won (2 to 1) its first match 31 January 1877. The summer of 1878 he helped his brother George with a survey of the Queen Charlotte Islands. He graduated from McGill Medical School in 1882 having already been admitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1881. He began his career as a medical officer for Canadian Pacific in Manitoba, then went to London for further training and served as a surgeon on the ocean liners of the P & O Company for 4 years. In 1896, he married Gloranna M. Coats, a wedding which his parents travelled to England to attend, and they had one child, Margaret Rita.
They moved from London back to Montreal but soon returned to London where Gloranna left him. This was probably due to his unstable temperament and severe bouts of depression, a chronic problem for him which had earned him the reputation among family members of being impractical and rebellious. When he visited Montreal, he was regularly given a special room to himself and his mother may have used the passageway that had been constructed between the older Dawsons’ residence and the Harringtons’ (her daughter’s family) next door to retreat from her difficult son’s company.
He was not on close terms with his father, who was dubious about his worldliness and material concerns. However, in the last year of Sir William’s life, 1899, Rankine visited and seems to have promised to help with the publication of his father’s autobiography, which the latter wished to be published soon after his death with a minimum of editing. This initiated a family feud after the patriarch died. The oldest son, George, who had collaborated with his father and was himself a geologist, claimed that his father had written that the manuscript would be turned over to him, and that Rankine would help him with it, but Rankine maintained that he himself had been entrusted with the publication. Rankine went ahead and published it in 1900 in London against the wishes of his siblings, George and Anna, who had hoped to edit the manuscript to better show their father’s accomplishments. There followed a long bitter estrangement and Rankine died in a London nursing home in 1913.
Letter from the younger Dawson children (Eva, Rankine, and William) to their brother George.