Pilling Family Stories: #2 - Learning more about 'The Timmins Interest'

[NOTE:  As a reminder, you can find links both the audiofile and to the PDF of Doral Pilling's life story on the LaRue Investments website here:]

lots going on on p. 55

In the Moose Dome video I did last summer, I had used a bit of an audio of Doral Pilling saying "when the Timmins Interest 'took over' and literally kicked us out, we had quite a tumble."   

At the time I was making the video, I didn't really know much about the Timmins' interest, or about any takeover.   And so, I have been doing a bit of reading.   

It was on p. 55 that the "Timmins Interest" piece of the puzzle started to emerge.  As you can see, I did need to pull out some pens and colours to help me map out some of what was going on here.  There are a whole bunch of people named on this page:  R.H.Webb, Noah Timmins, J.J.Ranking W.H.Clearndon Mussen.   How did these folks play into the story?

To contextualize things, this in 1927ish.  And at this point, things are starting to really move on the 'oil discovery front'.  The 'problem' for the Pillings at this point was that they had invested 2.5 years of work to: 

1. 'discover' the structure (find Moose Dome)
2. acquire oil leases (held by The Trust Comany)
3. buy an oil rig
4. build roads
5. start drilling

So, in 1927, they bought the charter for an oil company. Basically, someone had already done the work of creating the structure for an oil and gas company, and the Pilling crew started there (rather than paying for a new company to be created).  The name of that company they bought is admittedly entertaining:  The Lucky Strike Oil Company Limited.  I have a little fantasy in my mind of finding an image or logo for that company, but I am guessing there isn't any such thing.  The first thing the Pillings did (in 1928) was change the name of that company to Moose Oils Limited.  And then, they assigned their oil leases to Moose Oils. 

R.H.Webb

But now, they needed money to really start drilling.   How to find it?   First player on the stage?  Col Ralph H. Webb.  Doral descibes him as a friend, and someone who "seemed to be a very fine man."   He was also the Mayor of Winnipeg (and later an MLA in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Webb

He agreed to put the Pillings in touch with some friends from the East who could put up $150,000 for a half interest in Moose.   The friends were Noah A. Timmins and W.H. Clarendon Mussen.  

Basically, the proposal was for something like a 50/50 partnership where one half is putting in the money, and the other half is doing the sweat equity. 

Noah A. Timmins

The challenge one might anticipate (and one that we experienced for some time inside LaRue) has to do with decision-making.  Unless you have a way to break a tie, a 50/50 split can leave you in a deadlock.  And Doral tells us that the Pillings did not want to lose control.  

So the idea then was that Webb too would be one of the group (50,000 shares for having helped set up the deal), and if there was  a conflict, he would vote with the Pillings.  As becomes clear later in the story, Webb did not hold to his part of the deal.  However, without jumping too far ahead, the end result was that there were 999,945 shares issued:

• 47.5% Pilling Interest (held in the name of Edna Pilling)
• 47.5% Timmins Interest (1/2 Timmins, 1/2 Clarendon Mussen)
• 5% Col Ralph H. Webb 

At this point, I started wondering a bit more about who these folks were.  It was easy to find more on Timmins.   Amongst other things, the town of Timmins, Ontario would appear to be named after their family.  

It was interesting seeing that Noah A. Timmins is,  according to the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, "unquestionably a founding father of this country’s mining industry." (https://mininghalloffame.ca/noah-a-timmins/).  Both the Timmins Wiki page and the entry on Noah Timmins in Dictionary of Canadian Biography point to the "Porcupine Gold Rush" of 1909.  Noah Timmins (who was the head of Hollinger Consolidated) was in on the ground floor. The wiki webpage says:  

"By the end of the 1920s, the Hollinger was the largest gold mine in the British Empire and paid annual dividends of more than $5 million. By 1927, a 3.5 mile aerial tramway was in operation.  In the 1930s, Hollinger Consolidated Gold Mines built 250 houses which were located in one area of the Town of Timmins. These houses remained in place right up until the late 1970s."

So that is part of the link between Moose Dome and Timmins.  Or at least, it looks like the quest for oil was financed from the quest for gold.  Certainly, that is what was going on around 1927/28.

I did note that another connecting line seems to be that these men were "entrepreneurial" by nature, and not so much interested in the condition of the workers.  Here is a nice clip from the Timmins wiki page about working conditions in the Timmins mines in 1912:

In November 1912, 1,200 members of the Western Federation of Miners Local 145 held a strike at all three mines in response to a proposal to lower their wages.^[29] Mine operators hired gun thugs, who fired on the picket line and were ordered out by the provincial government.^[30] After months without work, many men chose to leave the settlement; only 500 miners returned to work in July 1913.^[29] The strike won the men a nine-hour workday and a pay increase.^[29]

Uh... gun thugs firing on the picket lines?   I couldn't help but think of the Great Strike of 1912 going on here on Vancouver Island at the same time.  

• Ben Isitt did an amazing PhD taking up the protest ("Patterns of Protest"), and talks about the Vancouver Island stike.  You can find the dissertation on line here.  I learned TONS from it (see pp. 49-74 for a discussion of the coal strike,  one that was finally ended by the militia)
•  https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/0d2fd8fa-179a-48a5-ab09-d91ce734a4f1/content

• Audrey Behan, "Reasons for the Vancouver Island Strike"
•  https://wordpress.viu.ca/1912vancouvercoalstrike/ 

• Çağla Güneş and Rob Lyon, "The Great Vancouver Island Coal Strike of 1912"
• https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-great-vancouver-island-coal-strike-of-1912

Really, my point here is that Colonel Ralph Webb too seems to have not been oriented towards organized labour.   He was a politician, and a military man.  His life history is pretty darned interesting, and if you click here, you will see a page on him by the CEFRG (Canadian Expeditionary Force Research Group).  Perhaps there is also a link between his experiences there, and his very strong opposition to 'communism' (or indeed organized labour)?  On his wikipedia page it says: 

He was a virulent opponent of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, calling for the deportation of "radical agitators" and urging "the whole gang be dumped in the Red River".  .....   

After a series of labour strikes in 1931, Webb urged the "deportation of all undesirables", including communists, from Canada. 

Well, maybe that is all for today.   My takeaways?   Interesting to think about the larger picture of nation building, and extractive industries, and the ways capital was intervening to create space for these particular kinds of industries.   Of course, I am also thinking about the impacts (of oil and gas extraction, of goldmine tailing ponds, etc).  These are parts of the family history that I have just a bit of discomfort with, of course.  Trying to both honour the power of the family history, while also thinking about the logics of colonialism that invites us not to think too deeply about the intial conditions in which one could be said to "discover" oil, or "discover" gold.   And that is of course a story for another day.... 

Pilling Family Stories: #1 - Setting the Stage

This year, my sabbatical plan was to plunge into Pilling family history.  I was thinking, in particular, about ways to draw parts of this story into my Business Associations classroom.  What might there be to learn from thinking about all the ways that the family has encountered business structures over the generations? 

We all of us have had the great gift of connecting ourselves to the Shuswap lands because of Doral's decision to hold those lands inside a corporate form (LaRue Investements, Ltd.).  And we have also had the gift (which sometimes also feels at the same time like a curse) of trying to learn how to understand ourselves as a piece inside a family business.

my seven generations....

For the past 20 years, I have been thinking lots about "LaRue", but now I thought it would be fun to start taking steps backwards, to think about the pieces before that.  What about the Rockwool Business?   What about Moose Dome?  And, going back further, what about the Pilling farm that came before that?   And indeed, what about going back further yet, and asking what 'business' looked like in the 7 generations of our family (heading right back to England).

That is a big project, but I thought I could start small, and begin with a focus on granddad's autobiography. I wish I had done this while Arta was still around, so I could ask her now about the questions I should have asked much earlier.   Ah well.  So instead, I have been posing many of my questions to the internet!

Or, more precisely, I have been heading to other archives and libraries to see what resources there are to help me get a bit more context for what Doral had to say in his autobiography. I am noticing that the more I scratch the surface, the more questions that emerge.   

I keep thinking it would be fun to make a whole bunch of small videos, so I could retell some of the stories I am finding, and connections that are to be seen.  But it feels a bit overwhelming.  So I thought maybe I just start with the blog?  I thought what I might try, as I walk down that path, to just start sharing (in more fragmentary ways) some of what I am seeing along the way.  If anyone might find these connections interesting or entertaining, it is family!   And maybe some of you will have ideas about other connections to be found.   

So... I am going to just use the heading "Pilling Family Stories" to organize these stories and fragments as I go along, while I am trying to think both about the 'business' side of the Pilling family history, and also to think about the ways that our story is connected to the larger stories of economy, immigration, colonialism, nation building and family.  hahah.  Some big questions!  But I will see if I can't share some of the interesting tales as I go along. 

 

Go for Gold!

 Volleyball season is from Dec-May.  There are 3 "premiere tournaments" at which your results determine your standing.  At each Premiere you go up in standing or down.  So eventually you end up playing teams that are just perfectly as strong as you.  By the end of the year you are playing exceptional volleyball against the teams that are just barely better or worse.  Then the provincial tournament and the national tournament in Mid May.

I got Michael into a 'club' in 2022.  It's expensive but if you coach then the fees for your child are waived.  I've coached Michaels team for 3 years, but this year I was planning on dropping off of Michaels team and playing on Alices team.  Michael is on the competitive U15 Canucks, and Alice went right to the competitive 'feeder team' U13/U14.  There is no U13 Canucks, but they do a blended 13/14 with girls that didn't make the actual U14.  Instead they can teach younger girls, and the younger girls can get some excellent experience before their actual U14 year.

I tried to get onto Alices volleyball team but Diego and Tolu were the coaches and they wanted two other 'girls' as coaches.  So I am just the parent, and I coach on Michaels team again.

Premiere 2 was this weekend.  Feb 27/28.  Diego couldn't coach so he asked if I would coach Alices U13/U14 team for the weekend.  Of course I was so excited!

We played on Saturday at the seven chiefs gym on the tsutina reserve.  Three games, and they won them all.  In the second game, they won 25-22 and then 30-28!!!  They are playing in division 3, but they are also playing against girls a year older than them.

On Sunday, because of all the winning, they were in the Semi finals right away.  Coach Diego showed up right at the end of the semi final match and the girls won!  In the finals, they ended up against the team that they'd beaten 30-28 yesterday.  The 'Cranes' for gold or silver.  The Cranes are a new club that plays down by Mount Royal.  I ended up socializing with their coaches a few times.  They were just wonderful people.  We lost the first game, it seemed as if the Cranes had figured us out.  The second game, we had some excellent serving and won.  In the final game, scored to 15, we ended up serving the lights out and beat them 15-5 in the third set to win the gold.  

I claim all rights to the gold medal and the success.  Rachel is 18, and a good coach, but it seems like teams need a younger relatable person and an older person to organize the line up cards, interface and organize timing when the games are starting, reminding to do timeouts in strategic points to try and ice the other team.  I was also filling Rachel up with all of the motivational talk before team chats, and most importantly of all I was cheer leading like nobodies business.  

The things that I do, are very strategic.  I know what a bad serve looks like, what a bat hit looks like, and yet when I see five seconds before things go bad, and know what they should have done, at the moment when the gym quiets from the cheer I'm yelling to them that they did it exactly right, and to do it again, and that they were perfect.  wait, wait, wait, wait wait,   EMMA EMMA EMMA EMMA!!! THATS THE WAY!  PERFEECT!!!!  DO IT AGAIN!!!!!

I think that it's a mormon thing.  I don't remember a specific mother at the basketball games cheering for me as a child, but I felt it.  I know that people were yelling my name, I know that there was positive feedback ALL OF THE TIME!!!

The game ended and one of the kids said "Alice, are you coming to Boston Pizza?".  She looked to me, and I said 'of course we are'!  

I hate boston pizza.

We go to the team dinner afterwards so that 9 of the 12 kids that were available could chat and eat.  During the dinner Natashas mom Natalia was talking with me, and said that she heard a small group of our girls bad mouthing the other ones.  She asked if she should tell the coach.  

Now I had just gone through a moment with Michael where I was going to light the world on fire.  I had been supported by Rebecca on the path and tools.  I had gone half way towards writting a letter.  I'll say it again.... I was about to write a letter, with a CC line, and print it, and send it in the mail.  Thats bad.  Thats real bad.

After talking to the two parent groups about the two culprits in Michaels situation I noticed that the one whom is the real problem was still trouble, and their parents were not interested in contrition or accountability.  

I was talking to Mary about this and she said "you shall have no satisfaction".  That is what I shared with Natashas mom Natalia.  Natalia, register it in your mind, don't forget it, but just wait and see how much and if it's more often.  

I could have really gone crazy on that one family with that one little jerk, but I see that my mess would not have given me any satisfaction.  

The day after the tournament, the head coach Diego texted the whole team and said that the Cranes coach had reached out because one of our Canucks had written a mean post on Instagram about the Cranes.  He posted in the chat a copy of what all kids had signed.  The code of conduct for in person and for in social media.  He pointed out that it is a dismissible offense and that the posted should be taken down and that the child should come talk to Diego.  DRAMA!!!

Later on in the day, another post popped up on the team chat saying THOSE ARE EMMAS!!!!

J'acuse!!!!!

OMG, someone has just straight up pointed to Emma as the rude social medial poster.  I'm going to pop some popcorn.  Lets go!  This is going to be good......

I texted Miranda Johnson... Did you see!  OMG,  did you see the post, who is it!  What's going on!!!

Miranda said look at the post.  That was about someone leaving shoes at the gym the day before.  Aw..... nuts.... I was so excited for all the drama.

I am really enjoying being a grade 7 girl again.  So much fun.

The real gold medal:  Natasha is the quiet single child, tall girl that Alice made friends with first at Canucks.  Then she moved on a bit to Emily, who by coincidence is the daughter of someone that I went to Branton Jr High with.  So I talk to Emily's mom Catherine Irish quite a bit.  Sorry, I meander in my stories sometimes.  Emily, and Alice, and Natasha, and Taylor are the four tall girls.  All 12.  So the younger group, super extra tall, super quiet and demure.  None are gregarious and outrageous and big.  The real gold medal is that Natalia, Natashas mom, said that after the saturday games she said "I wish Richard could be our coach.  He's so calm and quiet and nice.".  

You could not give me a bigger gift.  A gift that is received more seriously.  A gift that will stick with me forever.  That the silent kids see what I'm trying to lay down, and appreciate it, and it helps them.  You could not give me a bigger gift.

On monday, after the tournament and the gold medals, this is what I came into.  The life thinks I can handle way more than I think I can handle.  

4 inches of water covering the whole buildings ground floor.  Where did we keep that insurance policy....

Have a little heart! (Catherine storytells Arta's 2017 heart attack)

 

Last summer, when a group of us were going through the last of Arta's papers and files, we were thinking about how to share and archive family stories/histories.  

At one point, we had come across a picture of Arta's heart, back in 2017 when she had a stent put in during a heart attack. 

The photo was quite a thing, and we wrote up a post about rivers and veins.  Here is a link to that post:   https://larchhaven.blogspot.com/2025/08/rivers-and-streams-or-artas-coronaries.html

Back then, we had promised to tell the stories around the image of Arta's heart attack.  We recorded Catherine's story (on August 4, 2025), but I only just got the video uploaded.   If you want 11 minutes of fun and mayhem (everything ended well, and we got an additional 4 years with our mom), then follow the link below.

https://youtu.be/dqcqLtW9J0U