Adventures in Canada

I apologise for dropping off the face of the earth for the last two days, but my son and I were continuing on our travels and Formula 1 was a long way from our minds. We went on an odd pilgrimage, not to see motor racing places but rather to visit a place that played a very significant part in the history of our family: Pointe au Pere or, as the English say, Father Point.

Father Point is 550 km to the north-east of Montreal, by way of Quebec City and quaintly-named spots such as Trois Pistoles (Three Pistols) and Rivière-du-Loup (Wolf’s River), on the southern shore of the Saint Lawrence River. Just after Rimouski is Father Point. It has a simple but very elegant lighthouse, beside which Marconi himself established an important early wireless station (in the old sense of the word wireless). At the same spot was a pilot station, where the ocean liners would pause to pick up the men who navigated the great ships up the treacherous river to Quebec City. For many thousands of Canadian immigrants Father Point was the very first point of contact with their New World.

My great-grandfather, Henry Kendall, was one if the liner captains. He worked for the Canadian Pacific and the ships he worked on (and later captained) carried tens of thousands of future Canadians to their new homeland in the years between 1900 and 1914. He had many adventures in these regions, including shipwrecks and icebergs and once he even had to deal with an escaped leopard roaming around his ship. An early involvement with Marconi (with whom he worked on early wireless experiments) led to an interest in radio communication, and that in turn led to his moment of glory in 1910 when Kendall became the first man to use radio to capture a criminal, when he spotted the infamous murderer Dr Crippen on his ship, escaping to the New World with his mistress. He radioed his suspicions back to Scotland Yard and an English detective was sent to Canada aboard a faster ship to apprehend Crippen. As the world followed the story in daily newspaper reports, the two ships raced across the Atlantic, and the story reached its climax at Father Point, where Crippen was arrested.

Four years later, as the youngest captain of any of the big transatlantic liners, Kendall had the terrible misfortune to have been in command of the RMS Empress of Ireland, which was hit in fog by a Norwegian coal freighter, with an ice-breaking bow. The 14,000-ton liner is reckoned to have taken on 7,000 tons of freezing water in the first minute and a half after the impact, such was the devastation. She sank in just 14 minutes and more than 1,000 people drowned. The sinking of the Empress still ranks as one of the worst disasters in maritime history.

It happened at Father Point. We might have been going to see a monument but my great grandfather was lucky (or perhaps unlucky) and survived the shipwreck. Indeed he lived to the ripe old age of 91. I even met him when I was a toddler. He carried the burden of those ghosts for more than 50 years. Regular readers will know that I have written a book on him, which you can see advertised on the right.

Today there is an Empress of Ireland Museum at Father Point and our visit marked the first time that any member of the family had been there. It turned into quite an event with a number of TV crews on hand and interviews to be done. And to be quite frank, the demise of Danny Bahar at Group Lotus and other such F1-related matters were of no import at all…

It is a lovely part of the world, particularly on a sunny day, but it is a bit of a haul, even in our trusty (and impressive) Infiniti FX35, which cruises along controlled by computers and even has the good grace to slow down when something gets in the way. It takes a leap of faith to believe that a car can do that, but once you have done it, you can let the car drive itself. OK driving enthusiasts may not like it, but for long journeys on tree-lined roads it is great.

Montreal was revolting (literally) with a few scraggly looking demonstrators wandering the streets surrounded by legions of riot police. We bumped into some of them while looking for a place to have dinner. I heard later that others stopped some of the F1 drivers from going to a charity function by throwing rocks at them. It was a suitably Flintstonian way of objecting. Listening to the voices in the crowds, the demonstrators did not seem to have much support, but who knows? We are not here to have rocks thrown at us. We are here to go racing…