Sir Charles Blair Gordon (22 November 186730 July 1939) was a Canadian industrialist and banker. Starting as a dry-goods clerk in Montreal, he built the Standard Shirt Company into a large clothing manufacturer supplying much of the Canadian market, helped found Dominion Textile in 1905 and served as its president for most of the period from 1909 until his death, by which time it was Canada's dominant cotton-textile producer. He also organized the Dominion Glass Company in 1913 and headed Penmans and Montreal Cottons, and was president of the Canadian Manufacturers' Association in 1913–14.
During the First World War Gordon served as vice-chairman of the Imperial Munitions Board under Joseph Flavelle from December 1915 and, from mid-1917, as the Ministry of Munitions' representative in the United States and director-general of war supplies with the British War Mission in Washington, D.C. He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in 1917 and promoted to Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in 1918. After the war he chaired the Canadian Trade Commission and represented Canada, with Édouard Montpetit, at the Genoa Conference of 1922.
A director of the Bank of Montreal from 1912 and a vice-president from 1916, Gordon succeeded Sir Vincent Meredith as its president in 1927 and held the office until his death, leading the bank through the Great Depression and publicly opposing the creation of a central bank; his portrait appeared on the bank's own notes from 1931. He resumed the presidency of Dominion Textile in 1933, and the company's abrupt closure of its Sherbrooke rayon mill in January 1936, in protest against reduced tariffs on Japanese textiles, prompted a royal commission on the textile industry under W. F. A. Turgeon, whose report of 1938 condemned the company's conduct and the returns enjoyed by its founding syndicate. Rated among the wealthiest men in Canada, Gordon died suddenly in Montreal in July 1939.
Early life Gordon was born in Montreal on 22 November 1867, the son of John Gordon, who ran a wholesale dry goods business in the city, and Jane (Jeanie) Roy. His father, born in Aberdeen in 1833, had emigrated in 1853 to work for the dry-goods importers William Stephen and Company; he became a partner in the wholesale house of James Roy and Son and from the mid-1880s headed his own firm of manufacturers' agents, John Gordon and Son, which Gordon's brother James Roy Gordon carried on after his death in October 1895. Gordon was the eldest of four children; his brothers were James Roy and William George Ross Gordon and his sister Elizabeth. After public school he attended the High School of Montreal. His first job, at nineteen, was clerking in the dry-goods store of McIntyre, Son and Company; two years later he moved to the wholesaler J. P. Black and Company as a shipping clerk.
Standard Shirt Company
About 1891 Gordon went into business for himself with the Standard Shirt Company, which first appears in Lovell's Montreal directory for 1891–92 in a rear building at 36 Dowd Street, while Gordon was still living at his parents' house on Palace Street. By the summer of 1893 the firm was putting up a factory on De Lorimier Avenue in the east end of the city, next door to a rolling mill. It obtained federal letters patent in April 1895, with a capital stock of $200,000, half of which was taken up by Gordon and his partners. The applicants for the charter, the Dry Goods Review reported in February 1895, were W. Yuile, James Roy Gordon, Gordon himself, Samuel Bell and A. McIntyre. Bell served as the company's president and Gordon as its managing director; the firm made shirts, collars and cuffs, overalls and, later, blouses and skirts, and sold them through the family agency, John Gordon and Son, in Montreal and through agents in Toronto and London. At the annual meeting of May 1901, when the usual dividend of 8 per cent was paid, the shareholders decided to increase the capital to $1 million; the company by then employed 1,000 hands and was shipping regularly to South Africa and Australia. By 1903 it occupied five buildings, numbered 189 to 213 De Lorimier Avenue, with about five acres of floor space, its own power plant, electrically driven machinery and cutting knives and a laundry; it had a workforce of about 1,200, met much of the demand of the Canadian market and exported to South Africa and Australia. In October 1904 Gordon, the financier David Yuile, Gordon's brother James Roy Gordon and others obtained letters patent for a new Standard Shirt Manufacturing Company, capitalized at $1 million, to take over the business, and by 1905 Gordon was its president as well as its managing director. In 1906 the shirt company was merged with three other Montreal makers of shirts and whitewear—J. P. Black and Company, the G. H. Harrower Company and A. H. Sims and Company—into the Canadian Converters' Company, capitalized at $3 million, of which J. P. Black became president; Gordon sat on its board, and by 1913 his brothers James Roy and William were respectively its president and a director. The shirt company's success made Gordon's name in Montreal business circles.
Dominion Textile
In 1904 Gordon, then aged 37, joined a syndicate led by Yuile that brought together four struggling Canadian cotton companies—Dominion Cotton Mills, the Merchants' Cotton Company, the Montmorency Cotton Mills Company and the Colonial Bleaching and Printing Company—to form the Dominion Textile Company, which was chartered on 4 January 1905. The historian of the company, Barbara J. Austin, has called the merger "a desperate move" intended to curb competition and steady the trade. Contemporary financial journalists believed that the merger had been prompted by the Bank of Montreal, which had millions tied up in the cotton companies, and that Gordon and J. P. Black had been brought in for their knowledge of the trade. Gordon borrowed to buy 496 shares at $100 each and was named second vice-president and managing director, with the job of getting the new company started and managing it. Yuile was president and Louis-Joseph Forget first vice-president, and the executive included Herbert Samuel Holt, Henry Vincent Meredith, Senator Robert Mackay, J. P. Black and David Williamson. Because of his role in getting the company started, Gordon shares with Yuile the title of founder. The syndicate's terms were generous to its members: the company's secretary told a royal commission in 1908 that its $5 million of common stock had cost the original owners "ten cents on the dollar", so that a dividend of 5 per cent returned 50 per cent on their outlay, and the Turgeon commission calculated in 1938 that the $500,000 the syndicate had put into common stock had yielded an average annual return of more than 98 per cent.
Dominion Textile was from the outset the largest company in the Canadian cotton trade, producing about 45 per cent of the country's cotton textiles from eleven mills. In the spring of 1908, in a trade recession, it joined the other Canadian cotton companies in cutting wages by 10 per cent, and strikes followed at its Magog, Montmorency, Hochelaga and Saint-Henri mills; Gordon told the Dry Goods Review that the company wanted "to give our employes work" and believed that they would "prefer a reduction in wages to a closing down of the mills", and the dispute was investigated by a royal commission conducted by the deputy minister of labour, William Lyon Mackenzie King. In February 1909 the Quebec Superior Court annulled, at the suit of two dissenting shareholders, the lease under which Dominion Textile ran the mills of Dominion Cotton Mills, which it did not wholly own; Gordon said the company would simply operate Dominion Cotton as a subsidiary, and the litigation continued until a Privy Council decision of 1917 finally settled the claims of the dissenting shareholders in the company's favour. When Yuile died in June 1909 a special meeting of the directors on 19 July elected Gordon president and managing director; Saturday Nights Montreal correspondent described "the clean shaven, boyish looking chap over at the Dominion Textile Company's place" whose promotion had made his former workmates "fairly gasp". He appointed Francis Galvin Daniels as general manager, and while Daniels reorganized and consolidated the mills, Gordon took a leading role in lobbying for protective tariffs. Dominion Textile was closely linked to the Penman Manufacturing Company, Canada's biggest maker of woollen goods, which its board took control of in 1906 and renamed Penmans Limited; Penman's president, David Morrice, had belonged to the Dominion Textile syndicate, and when he died in 1914 Gordon, the vice-president, took over the Penmans presidency too. Gordon had also sat since at least 1908, with Holt, Forget and Black, on the board of the Montreal Cotton Company of Valleyfield, whose management Dominion Textile assumed in 1911 and of which he was vice-president and later president. Under his leadership the company grew steadily; by 1911 the Montreal Daily Star ranked him a millionaire.
Other business interests
Gordon became a director of the Molsons Bank in August 1909, filling the seat of his first employer, W. C. McIntyre, of C. Meredith and Company in 1910, of which he was vice-president by 1913, of the Bank of Montreal in 1912 and, by 1913, of the Royal Trust Company and the Dominion Bridge Company; he was elected vice-president for Quebec of the Canadian Manufacturers' Association in 1911 and its first vice-president in 1912. A Quebec royal commission on industrial accidents appointed in 1907, on which he sat with the lawyer Arthur Globensky and the labour leader Georges Marois, led to the province's Workmen's Compensation Act of 1909, and in a signed statement in the association's journal in 1912 he observed that Canadians and Americans "probably do not realize how far behind the rest of the world they are in this matter". He chaired the meeting that founded the Greater Montreal Housing and Planning Association in March 1913 and served as chairman of the Metropolitan Parks Commission. With Holt, Sir Hugh Montagu Allan and Charles Hosmer he was one of the founders of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, built in 1911–12, and he later served as president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. In 1913 he led the syndicate that merged the Diamond Flint Glass, Canadian Glass, Sydenham Glass, Manitoba Glass and Jefferson Glass companies into the Dominion Glass Company, whose preferred shares his own house, C. Meredith and Company, placed with a London syndicate; George A. Grier was the new company's first president and Gordon its vice-president, and he later became president. The company eventually controlled plants in Montreal, Hamilton, Wallaceburg, Beausejour and Redcliff. He was also president of Hillcrest Collieries Limited, the owner of the Alberta coal mine at which 189 men died in the Hillcrest mine disaster of June 1914.
At the association's annual convention in Halifax in September 1913 he was elected its national president for 1913–14. Presiding at the convention dinner as incoming president, he declared that although the tariff was "generally satisfactory to the manufacturers' interests", the passage of time had let "inconsistencies" creep into it, and he asked for adjusted duties on the semi-finished materials used by the iron and steel industries; later in his term he urged the continuance of the protective National Policy and criticized the Ontario workmen's compensation bill then before the provincial legislature as impracticable, and he handed the office to E. G. Henderson of Windsor at the Montreal convention of June 1914. He was one of the eight businessmen who founded the town of Hampstead, Quebec, incorporated in 1914, and served as vice-president of the Hampstead Land and Construction Company, of which Holt was president.
First World War