Local history

YWCA Québec celebrates 150 years of support for women with exhibit, new book

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YWCA Québec celebrates 150 years of support for women with exhibit, new book

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

When Ann Martell arrived in Quebec City as a young anglophone job seeker in 1982, she was told to do what generations of young English-speaking women at loose ends had done before her – go to the YWCA.

Martell went to the organization’s headquarters on Ave. Holland and met the director, Mary Woods. Woods, who died in 2015, was the last in a long line of women from the local anglophone Protestant community who led the YWCA – dating back to a time when women couldn’t legally sign contracts and the English-speaking Protestants of Upper Town and their francophone Catholic neighbours might as well have been living on separate planets. Woods did for Martell what she and her predecessors had done for countless newly arrived women – helped her find a job.

Martell, who built a long and successful career as a public servant in Quebec, remained involved with the organization, joining its board in 1991 as it stood at a crossroads between its anglophone past and the city’s increasingly francophone present, juggling financial challenges. “With other courageous and persevering women, we managed to climb back up that hill,” she remembered.

Inspired by the role of the YWCA in her own life, Martell proposed that the organization put out a book to make its history better known and honour its 150th anniversary, celebrated this year. The book – YWCA Québec: 150 ans au coeur de la vie des femmes – was launched Sept. 4 at the Musée de la civilisation, in tandem with a temporary exhibit in the “Voie Libre” section of the museum, tracing the organization’s history. The book was written by historian Johanne Daigle and published by local publishers Septentrion with support from the Quebec City English-speaking Community Foundation (QCESCF) – initially the Jeffery Hale Foundation (JHF) before the JHF became part of the QCESCF earlier this year. QCESF assistant executive director Julie Sauvageau told the QCT the foundation’s eventual goal is to put out an English version of the book, although no timeline has yet been set for that; the exhibit is in French only.

What would become the YWCA-Québec was founded under the name Women’s Christian Association (WCA) by a group of six anglophone Protestant women under the leadership of Mary Gibbens Cassels McNab. The association turned the Dauphine Redoubt in Artillery Park into a shelter for “deserving” single women with nowhere else to go – efforts to welcome those deemed “undeserving” (read: sex workers or former sex workers) met with fierce opposition from the media and religious establishment and were ultimately dropped in favour of more discreet action.

In 1911, the WCA joined the Canada-wide YWCA movement and began empowering girls and young women through services it still offers today – swimming lessons, physical education and language classes. In the 1940s, it served as a hub for women’s participation in the war effort and for support offered to soldiers’ fiancées, wives and children. After the war, as many women stayed at home to raise large families, the YWCA expanded its offer of courses for older women who wanted to get out of the house and find other outlets for their energy and talents. After moving to the Ave. Holland building in 1968, the organization became renowned for its synchronized swimming program, which trained several elite athletes and at least one world medalist. During the economic crisis of the 1980s, the centre evolved to respond to poverty and psychological distress, and pivoted to serve a mainly francophone clientele as the city’s demographics changed.

“The exhibit invites you to relive the energy of past battles, to ask questions about current issues and to discover what the YWCA Québec is today – a survivor that continues to write her own story for the benefit of women and for society at large,” Julie Lemieux, director general of the Musée de la civilisation de Québec (MCQ) told the crowd assembled at the Sept. 5 launch event.

Visitors to the MCQ can see the YWCA Québec: 150 ans au coeur de la vie des femmes exhibit until Nov. 9. The book can be ordered online directly from Septentrion.

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Religious sites open their doors to the public for Religious Heritage Days

Local Journalism Initiative / / / , , ,

Religious sites open their doors to the public for Religious Heritage Days

Cassandra Kerwin, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

cassandra@qctonline.com

In honour of the eighth Journées du patrimoine religieux québécois (Quebec Religious Heritage Days) organized by the Conseil du patrimoine religieux du Québec, 175 religious sites in the province opened their doors on Sept. 5, 6 and 7.

Among the long list of churches, cemeteries and museums that had been opened for the occasion, the QCT visited Église Saint-Charles de Limoilou on Sept. 7. This church, closed since 2012, was reborn in a way when Machine de Cirque moved in, in

2020. The circus group saw the potential of the church as a prac- tice and performance hall with its two-storey vaulted ceilings, strong pillars and foundations. Wanting to focus on what they do best, circus performances, Machine de Cirque founded the nonprofit Centre Manivelle to manage the church as a multi- purpose space available for rent for shows, concerts and exhibits.

As the public learned on guided tours offered by the Société d’Histoire de Limoilou, this church has had a rocky history. After it was opened in 1897 for surrounding residents who didn’t want to walk to Ég- lise Saint-Roch, it burnt down

in 1899. It was rebuilt in 1901 and handed over to the Frères Capucins in 1902. It burnt again in 1916, and the parishioners had it rebuilt and inaugurated in 1920. There was no major event to report over the next 60 years besides major renovations in 1945 for its 50th anniversary the following year. The parish took over its management in 1982, only to close it 30 years later in 2012 due to rising maintenance and upkeep costs. But this was not the end of Église Saint- Charles de Limoilou.

In 2020, Machine de Cirque was searching for the perfect training space, and this aban- doned church caught their attention, especially with its two- storey-high vaulted ceilings in the centre, facing balconies and strong pillars. Street, circus and acrobatic performers have a long history of performing in the front courtyards of churches, so why not inside?

Centre Manivelle and Machine de Cirque teach their visitors that buildings can always have a second life. Bibliothèque Monique-Corriveau (Église de Saint-Denys), the Pavillon du Centre de recherche de l’Hôtel- Dieu (the original St. Patrick’s Church), and St. Matthew’s Church, now a public library, are among the many examples of this in Quebec City.

For more information, visit journeesdupatrimoinereligieux.ca, centremanivelle.ca and machinedecirque.com.

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More than 200 reenactors bring history to life on the Plains

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More than 200 reenactors bring history to life on the Plains

Cassandra Kerwin, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

cassandra@qctonline.com

“The British are coming!”  “The Americans are coming!” From Sept. 6-7, near Martello Tower 1 on the Plains of Abraham, the National Battlefields Com- mission (NBC) reenacted four sieges of Quebec City and invited 200 reenactors to set up camp and sleep on the Plains of Abraham.

“It is amazing. I walked my dog around the Martello Tower on the morning of Sept. 5, and nothing was there. I came back yesterday, and today, I have travelled through time and space,” said Mathieu Lemelin. “It is quite a sight to see so many reenactors dressed in period clothing – and not just the British and French soldiers, but also the Americans!”

Rest assured, these Americans reenacted the Siege of William Phips in 1690 and the American invasion of 1775 – not the theoretical invasion that could make Canada the 51st state. They came in peace to reenact two failed attempts to take Quebec City. Between shooting practices with blanks, they cheerfully shared their knowledge of history and acknowledged that Quebec City was not easily conquered – at least until the British arrived in 1759 to win the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. The French retaliated to win the bloodiest battle on Canadian soil, the Battle of Sainte-Foy in 1760. During the American Revolutionary War, the Americans tried and failed to conquer all of British North America.

For passionate armchair historians and reenactors, learning about history from books and movies is important, but nowhere near as interesting as a reenactment. For two days and through the rain, over 200 men, women and children from all over Canada and the United States camped on the Plains of Abraham for the annual Battlefields – Quebec City Under Siege reenactment. The bad weather did force the event to end earlier than scheduled on Sept. 6; however, it stopped in time for the reenactors to have a dry sleep on the Plains of Abraham.

“The event has become, over the years, a must-see for the public at large and for history buffs,” said Stéphanie Roy, director of museum affairs at the NBC. The public attended in great numbers to watch reenactors fire blanks from muskets and cannons – always a crowd pleaser – and learn about games, food, tools and medicine used in the British, French, Continental Army and First Nations camps at the time.

This event echoes the current temporary exhibit on display at the Plains of Abraham Museum, Quebec 1775-1776: Blizzards and Battle, on display until January 2026.

“As well as being one of our biggest events to organize annually, and this edition being particularly enormous with all the tents and community tables and fire pits, it is also one of our most popular,” said NBC outreach program manager Virginie Arsenault. “We are very pleased with the outcome.”

This event concludes the NBC summer events program. To learn more about upcoming activities and events this fall and winter, visit plainsofabaraham.ca/activities-events.

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Celtic Music Festival returns to Kinnear’s Mills this weekend

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Celtic Music Festival returns to Kinnear’s Mills this weekend

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

On the South Shore, Irish tunes aren’t just for St. Patrick’s Day weekend, and Québécois reels and sets carrés aren’t just for le temps des Fêtes. Lovers of Irish, Scottish, Québécois and Acadian traditional music and dance will be able to get their fill at the Kinnear’s Mills Celtic Music Festival, which runs from July 17-20 in and around Sainte- Catherine-Labouré Church in Kinnear’s Mills, between Lévis and Thetford Mines.

The festivities will begin on July 17 with an evening variety show of traditional Québécois music by members of the Thetford Mines chap- ter of the Association québécoise des loisirs folkloriques (AQLF), under the festival tent. The next day, La Famille Leblanc, from Bathurst, N.B., will perform under the tent at 7 p.m. Singers and multi-instrumentalists Robin Leblanc and Rebecca Huot and their three teenage daughters, Mélodie, Rosalie and Charlotte Leblanc, are festival regulars and have made a name for themselves in Canada and Europe with their festive blend of Celtic and Acadian music. Their set will be followed by a square dance, called in English by festival organizer James Allan.

Those familiar with Québécois set dancing, Irish ceili dancing or American square dancing won’t be completely unfamiliar with Allan’s dances, but might be thrown off by slightly differ- ent patterns and steps, or by the terminology, called mostly in English with a few French words thrown in, in Allan’s distinctive singsong cadence as he accompanies himself on the piano. “We call the dances ‘traditional dances of down home,’” he explained. “A lot of the time, callers will throw in dances from other regions – they’ll say, ‘Here’s one from the Gaspé’ or ‘Here’s one from Lanaudière’ – but I stick to the ones I learned here. I’ve kept up the tradition of call- ing in English, and there’s a lot of step dancing in these dances, which people get a kick out of.”

On Saturday afternoon, starting at 1 p.m., fiddler Stéphanie Labbé will per- form, followed by Quebec City-based singer and traditional music booster Philippe Guay, Breton trio L’Heure du Bosco and Montmagny-based traditional accordionist Éric Saint-Pierre. The highlight of the evening will be a second square dance, called by Allan at the nearby English School.

On Sunday, an ecumenical church service will be followed by the now-traditional bagpipe concert featuring three pipe bands from around the region, and a closing concert and jig show by Quebec City-based Irish quartet McCool (dancer and percussionist Maude Filion, fiddler Daniel Fréchette, guitarist Dominic Haerinck and multi-instrumentalist François Matte).

Allan, who grew up in a traditional music-loving Scottish family in the region and has been dancing for most of his life, said the festival started more than 30 years ago with a single bagpipe show, and has grown into a celebration of traditional music and dance and of the area’s rich Scottish and Irish history. The events are free, with the exception of the Friday night show featuring La Famille Leblanc ($20 cash at the door) and the Saturday night dance ($15 cash at the door). Regardless of language, age or level of dance experience, Allan said, “Everyone’s welcome.”

The festival is funded by Canadian Heritage, the St. Andrew’s Society of Montreal, Boralex and the town of Kinnear’s Mills.

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Sillery, Valcartier groups receive heritage funding

Local Journalism Initiative / / / , , , , ,


Sillery, Valcartier groups receive heritage funding

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Heritage preservation groups in Sillery and Valcartier are among the 15 organizations across the province that have received funding from the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) through the SHARE grant program, a Canadian Heritage-funded initiative to support projects “sharing the diverse history of English speakers in the province,” Sherbrooke-based QAHN announced last week.

SHARE program co-ordinator Julie Miller said she was “very pleased” about the diversity of the selected projects, which span the province from the Outaouais to the Gaspé, via the Laurentians, the Eastern Townships, the historically bilingual Pontiac region in Western Quebec, and Quebec City.

The Société d’histoire de Sillery (SHS) has received funding to contribute to the creation of a vast, bilingual archive of Quebec culinary history, from a multicultural, local perspective. “It’s an immense project to do an inventory of what exists in terms of culinary history, particularly anglophone and Indigenous culinary history – the Fédération Histoire Québec is doing a project on the scale of Quebec. We’re going to focus on the anglophone history of Sillery,” said SHS president Jean-Louis Vallée. The project will centre around inventorying, digitizing and translating recipes and stories about ingredients, traditions, communities and companies that have left their mark on local cuisine, writing articles which make those stories accessible to the general public, and indexing the content to make it easier to search. Vallée also said the SHS planned to conduct oral history interviews with older members of the anglophone community, to discuss culinary traditions and memories around food and cooking.

“Sillery has an interesting anglophone history that we haven’t made a lot of room for in the past 20 years,” Vallée said. “The population was 50-50 [francophone-anglophone] in the 19th century, and I don’t think we had a francophone mayor until the 1930s. There was a strong proportion of people of Irish ancestry, but every cultural community came here with its cooking methods and its recipes.”

Author Rose-Hélène Coulombe, a retired civil servant and self-described “memorialist” who has written three books on the culinary history of Quebec, is one of the project’s co-ordinators. She said the Sillery project will be the first step in expanding the wider project, dubbed Patrimoine ~ Identités, to the anglophone community. “We will have articles, recipes, updated recipes, talking about products and food that are key to identity,” she said. “We are working with students as well; I have a student who has done an article on the history of pouding chômeur, on how we used to use buttermilk, that sort of thing.” The ultimate goal, Coulombe and Vallée said, is to create a provincewide archive, using Sillery as a pilot project.

The Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier Historical Committee has received funding to finish a documentary about Valcartier Elementary School, to mark the school’s 75th anniversary. The project began shortly before the pandemic and was paused due to public health measures. “We finally finished the interviews last spring,” said historical committee president Debbie Chakour. “We have multigenerational families and seniors sharing their experiences. It was easy to find families where three generations went to the school. One of the seniors we spoke to was the daughter of a teacher; she was actually born in the school building and lived there as a baby!”

Chakour said the small school was deeply linked with the local English-speaking community and the growing bilingual community on the nearby military base. “Twenty- five years ago, there were about 50 kids; now there are closer to 120, and they almost sit on top of each other. They may need to build a new school in the next few years, which is another reason why we want to document it. Let’s celebrate the memories while we have them!”

Chakour hopes the film will be completed by the end of February, 2026. “The deadline is the end of March, but you can’t really do anything in March in Valcartier because there are too many Irish things going on,” she said.

Miller said there will be a third round of SHARE grant funding distributed to heritage projects in February 2026. Organizations must be members of QAHN to apply for funding. To learn more, contact her directly at julie@qahn.org.

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New book offers detailed look at wartime Quebec Conferences

Local Journalism Initiative / / / , ,

New book offers detailed look at wartime Quebec Conferences

Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

peterblack@qctonline.com

According to a newly published book, the first step in the long fight to beat the Nazis and liberate Europe from their grip began in the Salon Rose of the Château Frontenac in August 1943.

The Quebec Conference, bringing together British prime minister Winston Churchill and United States president Franklin Roosevelt, committed the Allies to the invasion of Normandy the following spring, code name Overlord, which became known as D-Day.

The momentous Quebec City meeting is chronicled in fascinating detail in historian, retired naval officer and QCT contributing writer Charles André Nadeau’s new book, Churchill et Roosevelt à Québec: Grande et petite histoires des conférences de 1943 et de 1944. (It’s available only in French at the moment, pend- ing translation arrangements.)

The book launch on Sept. 12, naturally, took place in the Salon Rose, little changed from when the chiefs of staff of Great Britain and the United States met there to debate the grand strategy for the rest of the war in Europe 81 years ago. In attendance were Nadeau’s family and friends, his naval comrades, fellow historians and the man who initially proposed the book project, former Château Frontenac director general Robert Mercure, himself a history buff.

Nadeau said the book, initially imagined as a pamphlet, would help Mercure respond to one of the most-asked questions by visitors about the landmark hotel, namely what happened when Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec in August 1943 and again in September 1944.

Mercure, who wrote a foreword to the book, applauded Nadeau at the launch for “having succeeded in bringing alive” the events at the two conferences. He confessed to getting a “frisson” each time he enters the Salon Rose, knowing what took place there.

Nadeau said his background as a student of military strategy at the U.S. Naval War College provided the context for the book, which lays out in accessible detail how the president and prime minister approved the “grand strategy” for the reconquest of Europe.

Nadeau notes that by pure coincidence, the 1943 Quebec conference took place at a crucial turning point in the war in Europe, the Allied forces having captured Sicily on Aug. 17, with the Italian boot literally in view across the Strait of Messina.

Churchill, Nadeau said, “was a better politician than a military strategist,” preferring to launch an invasion of Europe through Italy rather than northern France from across the English Channel. Churchill’s reticence, Nadeau said, was partly due to his role as British naval minister in the disastrous and bloody invasion of Turkey in the First World War.

“He saw Normandy as a potential Gallipoli,” Nadeau said. Besides the fascinating account of the strategy for the next crucial stage of the war hammered out by military commanders in the Salon Rose, the Citadelle and other places in the city, Nadeau offers up countless colourful details of the eight-day gathering.

One that boggles the mind is that of British vice-admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, taking out his revolver in the Salon Rose and firing bullets at a block of ice and one made of a new material called pykrete, developed to clad an aircraft carrier, an experiment that got no further than a lake in Alberta.

The overall conclusion of the Quebec Conference, as Nadeau asserts in the book, is that henceforth the United States would be the dominant force in the selection of the strategy of the war in both Europe and the Pacific.

As Nadeau observes, “kilometre zero” in the long road to win the war in Europe was the Salon Rose in the Château Frontenac.

Churchill et Roosevelt à Québec is available in local bookstores and online.

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