A Good Friday Donnybrook Fair

In 1888, feelings in Dufferin were running high. The Canada Temperance Act, aka the Scott Act, had been introduced a decade earlier, and Shelburne was dry. Theoretically. But “intoxicating liquors” were still readily accessible at illegal stills and “low groggeries.” One notorious groggery was the three-storey Mansion House hotel, pictured at the right front of the photo below.

Hotel proprietor George Thompson was well-known for flouting temperance laws. This rankled Dufferin’s chief constable, Laurel resident Alfred Finbow, who gathered 20 special constables and, early on Good Friday morning headed to Shelburne to call Thompson to account.

Arriving in the village, the constables were joined by local temperance supporters, described acerbically by the Shelburne Free Press as “parties … who fancy they have a heaven born mission to fulfil in carrying out the Scott Act.”

Breaking down the hotel’s door, the constables arrested Thompson. But by then, Scott Act opponents had also gathered. When things threatened to turn ugly, a magistrate read the Riot Act and ordered the crowd to disperse – to no effect.

So Finbow, ordering the crowd to stand back, tried to escort Thompson to a waiting sleigh. To clear the way, he struck one or two men with his leather-covered iron baton. And this, according to the Free Press, sparked a brawl “in Donnybrook fair style*.”

In the mayhem that followed, several men – on both sides of the issue – were “brutally beaten” by the constables. Several other arrests were made before Thompson was finally transported to Laurel, where he paid a fine and was back in Shelburne by that evening.

The Mansion House remained a landmark on Shelburne’s Main Street until it was badly damaged in a 1991 fire. It was eventually torn down and replaced by the building that now houses Caravaggio IDA Drugs.

* The idiom “Donnybrook Fair” would have been familiar to Headwaters’ many residents with Irish roots. It referred to an annual fair held in Donnybrook, a village near Dublin, Ireland. By the mid-1800s, the fair had evolved into a drunken free-for-all – and it was shut down. In Canada, the expression endures in its shortened form, donnybrook: a rowdy brawl.