William Dawson & the numbered company (hint : he was against it)

I am writing a book about Dr Martin Henry Dawson whose family was a very close contemporary of the much more famous Sir Willam J Dawson family back in Pictou Nova Scotia.

Medic, later infantry officer and later artillery officer  Lt Martin Henry Dawson, MC

People often think they were related but they were not.

What they did share in full though were the very same mid-Victorian evangelical Presbyterian values : after all, they attended the same churches, went to the same schools, worked in the same small business district.

Perhaps one of the most important of those values was the belief that the main thing you brought to your business was your character, your good name.

If through a combination of bad luck and il-management the family firm got into debt, such as William Dawson’s family did, the parents and their children would work harder, spend less, for decades, until the debts were all repaid and the family’s name and good character was restored.

Even today, some of this belief in good character lingers on.

You still don’t need to register your business if all your business correspondence simply reads : “Michael R Marshall, songwriter”. That’s your real name and that’s your real trade.

Victorians would have hated - not worse, simply not have been able to comprehend - the numbered company.

Their business signs all read something like, “Samuel J Mosher & Sons, Coal Merchants and Ship Chandlers”. Exactly who was running the show and exactly what they did. In your face, straight forward, straight-shooters.

Not for them today’s companies operating under fanciful made-up names or numbers.

We all know the guy who operates out of his battered van, equipped only with his cell phone and one used industrial vacuum.

Yet his van is decorated in Star Trek symbols and he grandiosely calls himself Galaxy Cleaners Ltd, though, in fact, he rarely ventures out beyond Cole Harbour-Forest Hills.

A moral cut far below him is the murderous denturist who had a numbered New Brunswick corporation set up to operate a hole-in-the-wall denturist clinic in Halifax Nova Scotia.

Victorians, I repeat again, would be appalled by all this fakery and putting on airs.

We in our age, by and large, aren’t.

 I mean most of us still distrust the numbered corporation instinctively, but fanciful company names instead of a guy simply calling himself “Bev H Albright, home carpet cleaner”, well that, that simply goes unnoticed....