Name/Title
1905/Mack: RJ in Canada, TillsonburgDescription
The confirmed date of RJ Mack being in Canada was 1905, when he would have been 19 years old. This was at Tillsonburg, Ontario.
In the 1 January 1941 article in "Tobacco" on the Macks at Little Kendals, the following appears:
"[Mr Mack] brought out a well-used key ring, with his keys on it, the tablet of which was inscribed ‘R. J. Mack: Tillsonburg: 1905.’ Tillsonburg is in Ontario. ‘I showed them that at Tillsonburg when I was there in 1932,’ he said, ‘to prove to them I'd been there before - it was 27 years before. You make real friends at my job.’ [...] He told them at Tillsonburg that, a quarter-of-a-century before, he had known some tobacco farmers who grew their own tobacco, and he had a great admiration for their constitutions because they were able to smoke it – as it was then."
There was a vague family legend that RJ worked in a cheese factory in Ontario, but the Mack family in general seems to have been remarkably incurious about what RJ did between 1905 and 1914 when he joined Andrew Chalmers, not long before the First World War started. It is not even known whether 1914 was the year that he returned to England.
This postcard has a posting date of June 1939, although the photograph will have been taken earlier and may coincide with the time of RJ's second visit to the Tillsonburg region. The correspondents are not related to the Mack family.
