Stuart went to St. John's School in Montreal, and to Lower Canada College in
N.D.G. He was good at games and athletics and made several school teams. He went
to McGill but left before graduating to go to England about 1916 with the
Canadian Army Service Corps. I think he got to France but not into front line
action.
After the war he joined the stick-broking firm of McDougall & Cowans as a
trader on the ``floor''. He was badly ``hit'' when the firm failed in the market
crash of 1929, therefater becoming a free-lance trader with his own seat on the
Exchange. Apart from his 2 or 3 years overseas he lived under the parental roof
until he married late in life. I think he paid Mother a nominal board and
lodging, but his living at home annoyed his father (and also Hilda, whose
business it was not) and resulted in some friction. Stuart and I had occasional
squabbles, chiefly about how long one of us kept the other waiting for the
bathroom, but by and large we got along well. It was Stuart who led me to my
first job---a summer job with Ernest Barott whom I was later to join in
partnership.
As something of a playboy bachelor Stuart was a popular ladies' man, and also had many men friends. As a keen golfer he was runner up one year in the Quebec provincial championships. Aged 55 or so, about 1950, he married Elizabeth Brown, widow of Harold Hingston. Libby owned a house in Richelieu Place in Montreal and another on Greenshields Point, Ste. Agathe. She died late in 1958, and Stuart then went into a deep depression from which neither his many friends nor his young brother were able to release him. In February 1959 he took his own life.
(He did this in a manner characteristically calculated to cause minimal mess
and inconvenience: nevertheless it was a traumatic event for me whom he had
tried to phone just before the act. When I arrived at his house the police were
in charge.)