Written By Alice Gibb
There’s an old joke that asks - “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The answer; “Practice, practice, practice.” We don’t know if Charles Saunders (1867-1937) of London dreamed of performing at New York’s celebrated concert hall, but he did plan to make music his career.
Charles was one of four sons of William and Agnes Saunders of London, and grew up on the present-day site of tiny Campbell Park on Dundas Street. A frail child, Charles loved family concerts around the piano, becoming an accomplished musician himself. But his father William, although also a music lover, was obsessed with science, particularly entomology and the art of cross-breeding or plant hybridization. William’s studies started out in the family garden on Dundas Street and later spread to experimental plots near the London Insane Asylum in London Township.
Despite his musical goals, Charles gave in to his father’s wishes and studied science at the University of Toronto. He eventually earned his doctorate at John Hopkins University. But Charles could only tolerate teaching science at a Kentucky university for one year.
Charles’ wife, mezzo-soprano Mary Blackwell, then encouraged her husband to pursue his musical dreams which he did from 1894 to 1903. He opened a studio for music pupils while also offering professional recitals and wrote a column on music events for the local newspaper. But while Charles was finally pursuing his dreams, sadly those dreams didn’t produce a living wage!
By now, his father, William, had been named the first director of the Dominion Government Experimental Farms in Ottawa where he could continue his cross-breeding experiments on a large scale. One of William’s goals was to develop a better wheat for farmers in the Canadian West. Red Fife was wonderful for bread-making but matured so late that the crop often fell victim to fall frosts on the prairies.
In 1905, Saunders named Charles, his brilliant son, to the new position of Dominion Cerealist at the experimental farm. He knew that Charles would apply his meticulous standards to cross breeding experiments to develop an earlier maturing wheat. By 1909, Charles launched a new strain of wheat he named Marquis wheat – which ripened a week earlier than Red Fife. Eventually 90 per cent of the wheat grown in Western Canada was Marquis. In recognition of this achievement, in 1934 King George V made Charles Saunders a knight of the realm.
After a physical breakdown in 1922. Mary whisked her husband off to Paris, where he finally happily followed his passion for music. Eventually they retired back home to London. One history, The 100 Most Influential Canadians of the Twentieth Century, lists Sir Charles Saunders in first place!
Learn more about the Saunders family in a new book, Living Between The Antlers, by Londoner Ann McColl Lindsay.
