Blake, Margaret

• Cronyn Blake, Frances Margaret

Margaret Blake was born in 1837, the daughter of the Right Reverend Benjamin Cronyn, Bishop of Huron, and in 1858 married Dominick Edward Blake, the eldest son of William Hume Blake, a lawyer who was chancellor of Upper Canada (1849-1862) and of the University of Toronto (1853-1856). Her sister, Rebecca, married Edward’s brother, Samuel Hume Blake, who was a partner in his law firm and later sat on the senate of the University of Toronto. Edward Blake was a prominent lawyer and politician, sometime premier of Ontario (1871-1872), leader of the federal Liberal Party (1879-1887) and chancellor of the University of Toronto (1876 to 1900) who in 1892 was returned to the British House of Commons as an MP for South Longford. His health in decline, Blake resigned his seat in 1907 and he and Margaret returned to Toronto. Soon after he suffered a debilitating stroke and died on 1 March 1912. Margaret followed on 2 April 1917.

The Blakes had four children: Sophia Hume, Edward William Hume, Edward Francis (Ned), and Samuel Verschoyle. Sophia married George MacKinnon Wrong. Hume Blake attended University College at the University of Toronto (BA1884) and was a prominent Toronto financier and sportsman who died in 1930. Ned was born in 1866; his wife was Ethel Mary Benson. (Another member of this family was Clara Cynthia Benson, the first woman professor at the University of Toronto; the Bensons were also related to the family of John Galbraith, first dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering.) Ned’s eldest son, Gerald Edward Blake, attended University College (BA 1914), fought in France during World War I and was killed on 23 July 1916. Samuel Blake was born in 1868, attended University College (1887-1888)and Osgoode Hall, and moved to London, England with his parents, where he practiced law and pursued his love of literature. He married Florence Cameron, daughter of John Cameron of London, Ontario and sometime editor of the Globe. They had no children. He dropped dead from a heart attack on a golf course in 1923. A similar fate awaited his cousin, William Hume Blake (BA 1882), a year later on a golf course near Victoria, BC.

The Blakes owned two houses, Le Caprice and Maison Rouge, in Murray Bay (now La Mal Baie), about 160 kilometers downriver from Quebec City. Here the extended family spent most summers. William Hume Blake and his family were among the first to summer there regularly, perhaps from the early1860s (Edward Blake had ‘Maison Rouge’ built in 1874). The place was also popular with American families from the mid-west, such as the Harlans and Tafts –they produced a future Supreme Court justice and President, respectively. William Howard Taft and his wife were family friends and correspondents. The residences were sited on the west side of the bay at Pointe-au-Pic. Le Caprice, in particular, figures in the family photo albums; it burned down in a spectacular blaze in the summer of 1914 as the male Wrongs and Blakes threw furniture out the windows. In England, Edward Blake rented, as a retreat from London, rooms at Bamburg Castle near Whitby from the Duke of Northumberland. This arrangement was continued for a time after World War I by the next generation of the family.