Penmans Mill workers among those who answered the call

Neil Edwards

Paris Independent Contributor

Penmans Limited was the cornerstone of industrial life in Paris for over a century. Founded by John Penman in 1868, at its peak the company was the largest producer of woollen knit goods in Canada. By 1883, Penmans employed 400 of the 750 people working in the Paris knitting sector. The company became famous for its "combinations"—all-in-one winter underwear for men, women, and children—shipped in bulk to lumber camps across the country. Also, during both World War I and World War II, Penmans mills manufactured critical supplies for soldiers, including thermal undershirts, fabrics used for uniforms and parachutes, as well as socks and stockings which were vital to soldiers fighting in the trenches of Europe in the First World War.

To address chronic labor shortages in the early 20th century, Penmans Limited launched a targeted recruitment drive to bring skilled textile workers from the United Kingdom to Paris. Between 1907 and 1928, Penmans brought approximately 700 British hosiery workers to Paris. The majority were unmarried young women recruited specifically for their expertise with hosiery machines and knitted fabrics. Agents focused their efforts on established textile hubs in Lancashire and Yorkshire, in England, where industrial knitting was already a mature trade. Penmans also paid the steamship fares to bring women across the Atlantic.

Upon arrival, many of these women lived in supervised housing, such as the local Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), which housed dozens of workers at a time. These women became the "core of the mill workers' community". The recruitment drive significantly altered the town's social fabric, leading to many marriages between the new arrivals and local mill workers. These recruited women were prized for their "dexterity" in complex tasks like countering, shading, and seaming. Their arrival helped Penmans maintain its status as Canada's largest producer of knit goods despite local labor shortages. 

That background is generally well known, but it is only part of the story.

This past winter and spring, the Homes of Heroes committee has been searching out First World War veterans. It has been a more difficult task than researching Second World War veterans, mainly because of the passage of time. Nevertheless, we have found at least some information about over 150 of those veterans, mainly through information provided from their attestation papers which are the documents required at enlistment in the military. They give basic information about the recruits, such as name, age, place of birth, next of kin and employment. It is not an entirely reliable source, since not all recruiters were equally precise, but the information has been very enlightening, especially since many of these recruits, at least 68 men, out of a total number of 133, worked at Penmans. (There may be more, but some attestation papers were not clear.) Of those 68 men, 12 were born in Paris, three in Port Dover and one in Canning. But 49 men were born in England and three more in Ireland or Scotland. So, immigrants who enlisted outnumbered locals by about 3 to 1. Why were there so many British men immigrating to Paris? And why did they find employment in Penmans?

Surely the answer is obvious –they immigrated to Paris for the same reason as the British women: a steady, well-paying job where they could use the skills they have acquired in the textile mills of England to build a better life for themselves. We need to remember that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Industrial Revolution was going at full steam, and there were well-paying jobs in the industrial factories for men as well as women, in fact even more so for men. Factory work was not “women’s work.” 

There is no evidence that Penmans paid the fare to Canada for men as they did for women, but the men came anyway, many as boys with their parents. Many of those immigrant men filled the more skilled roles such as supervisors, specialized technicians, machinists, and so on, but most worked right beside their female co-workers at the “more dexterous jobs” of knitters, spinners, sewers, lace makers, weavers, cutters and hosiery boarders. There were undoubtedly more men than women in supervisory roles, and women earned less than men doing identical or equally valuable work due to the prejudices of the day. But the men, Englishmen, were working there at the looms right beside the women.

And contrary to the common belief, the men did not just come from the Midlands Counties of England. They came from Kent, Cornwall and London in the south, from Manchester and Liverpool in the west, and from Glasgow in Scotland, and Omagh or Tyrone in Ireland. They came for the same reasons that all immigrants come—for a better job and a better life for themselves and their families.

But there is another question to ask. Why is there such a significant difference in enlistments between the men who were born in Ontario and those who came from overseas. Of the 133 men that Homes of Heroes have found who enlisted from Paris in the First World War, 36 were from Paris and 19 from elsewhere in Canada, mainly from nearby towns. But 76 recruits were born in England and 19 more were from Scotland or Ireland. So, nearly twice as many British immigrants as homegrown Canadians enlisted to go overseas at the outset of WW1. Why would that be? 

Well, this is an admittedly small sample, but one possibility is that for the Englishmen, the war was more personal. For Paris men, the war was a world away, and a bit of an adventure. After all, when war was declared in July, 1914, they were told that it would be over by Christmas. But the immigrants working at Penmans had arrived very recently from Britain. The Penmans recruitment drive had begun in 1907, just seven years before the outbreak of war. And many of those immigrants had friends and brothers and fathers fighting in that war. And many may still have thought of themselves as British rather than Canadian. 

The patriotic pull of King and Country would have been more powerful for Britons than for Canadians, who were fighting for that Empire somewhere way across the ocean. It took the Battle of Vimy Ridge, in 1917, when all four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together for the first time in the war and delivered an unprecedented victory, that as a country we could start to think of ourselves as simply Canadian. At the cost of over 10,000 killed and wounded, Vimy has since become an important symbol for Canadian strength and independence. And many young men from Paris, wherever they were born, fought in that victory and some died.

Like those Canadian mill workers, the First World War seems far away for us too, in time as well as distance, but the men and women who worked at Penmans helped to create the foundation for the Paris we live in today. That is why Homes of Heroes wants to learn and share all we can about those men and women. In particular, we want to recognize and honour all the ones who risked their lives, and in many cases who gave their lives. Their courage and sacrifice allowed us to build the community we live in today. Please go to our website, www.homesofheroes.ca, and read their stories. We owe them that.