Joseph Tremblay

Joseph Tremblay, chief of the Montreal fire brigade, was born at St. Isidore, a little village a few miles from Montreal, where his parents were the proverbially poor but honest French-Canadian small farmers. His education was the usual course of reading, writing and arithmetic gleaned from the village priest. At the age of twelve years he left school and the farm, thinking to find more congenial and profitable occupation in the city. He made his way to Montreal with all his earthly possessions tied in a bundle, after the manner of Dick Whittington of old. At that period he knew no English, but he had little difficulty in finding a position as errand boy with one Beauvais, a merchant tailor of Chaboillez Square. Being an errand boy had small attractions in those days and it did not suit Joe Tremblay to remain one for long. He, therefore, gathered up his bundle, put his money in his sock and departed for the United States. For a while he lingered on that side the border, learning many lessons in the school of experience which have since been of much use to him. Following his return to Montreal he sought to establish himself in the tailoring business, which he had followed during his sojourn in the United States. He located at Ste. Cunegonde, then a separate municipality south of Westmount and north of Point St. Charles. There he hung out two neat brass signs, one of which read Joseph Tremblay, Tailleur, and the other Joseph Tremblay, Tailor, thus soliciting business from both the English and French population. While he was then ready for business, it appeared that business was not ready for him. F. Beecher Edwards, in an article in a Montreal paper, said:

“Fate, wishing to do some good to poor old Montreal for a change, glimpsed one Joseph Tremblay working busily in his little tailoring and men’s furnishing shop on the southwestern borders of the city. Whereupon, things went very badly for the said Joseph Tremblay in his little tailoring and men’s furnishing business. People to whom he owed money camped on his doorstep and people who owed him money left for parts unknown in the dead of night, so Joseph Tremblay put up the shutters on his little tailoring and men’s furnishing shop on the southwestern borders of the city and went into the Ste. Cunegone fire department. Consequently the Montreal fire department is today a thing to be proud of in a city which has little enough reason to be proud of the vast majority of its civic enterprises.

“Fate, it will be observed, may be a trifle circumlocutious in her methods, but she gets there in the end. So we may thank fate that made Joseph Tremblay an unsuccessful tailor and haberdasher, for the fact that during the tragic Christmas week—1913—when through somebody’s outrageous blundering the greater portion of this great Canadian metropolis went inadvertently dry; when the fire menace, ever present, hovered more threateningly over thousands of human lives and millions of dollars worth of property, because of the fact that our strongest barrier of defense was broken down with the collapse of a few feet of unstable concrete somewhere out beyond Point St. Charles, we may thank fate for the fact that we had at the head of the Montreal fire department, deprived from no fault of its own of its heaviest ammunition, a man of the quality, the resource and the ability of Joseph Tremblay, the bad tailor who became one of the greatest, if not the greatest of fire chiefs on the North American continent.

“At the time that Joseph Tremblay became a member of the fire department he was much as he is now, with the exception of recent inclination to embonpoint, a well set up, good looking man of above the average build and as strong as two ordinary men. He had a brain, too, but they did not find that out until he had been in the Ste. Cunegonde force at least a week, when it began to be hinted that there was more to this young man than to the average. Six months after Joe Tremblay joined the Ste. Cunegonde fire brigade the chief of the brigade retired from office; whereupon, to the amazement of one and all, the Ste. Cunegonde council made the new recruit, the man who had been an unsuccessful tailor, chief. This may safely be put forward as the world’s record for rapid promotion.

“In the course of time Ste. Cunegonde was annexed to Montreal and Chief Tremblay became Sub-Chief Tremblay, in charge of the western division. This was in 1906. In 1907 he was made a deputy chief to Chief Benoit and when one year later the veteran retired in his turn Deputy Chief Tremblay became head of the Montreal fire brigade.

“Chief Tremblay is an omnivorous reader of all literature appertaining to fires and fire fighting and he is not above learning from other cities and makes at his own expense at least one trip a year to the principal cities in the States to see what helpful piece of information he can pick up.

“One of his first official acts was to institute an inspection system which was largely instrumental in reducing the rates of fire insurance here. In 1905, 1906 and 1907 the fire loss was around nine dollars per annum per capita. In 1913 it was something like two dollars and thirty-four cents per capita. He was responsible for the introduction of automobile fire apparatus here; he started the firemen’s drill school at Chaboillez Square, and he had the fire headquarters transferred from the City Hall to its present location on Craig Street. The chief is well known by sight to Montrealers. His inspiring figure has bulked large on the horizon of many a panic stricken householder at hundreds of fires during the last few years. He is a big, handsome man, and his very size begets confidence. He works his men hard and he works himself just as hard, for he believes that the citizens should get full value for their money. He has one or two hobbies, all of them connected with fire fighting, a high pressure system for the down town district, a fire tug for the harbor and the placing of the firemen’s benevolent fund on a sound footing. Chief Joseph Tremblay is a man’s size man and if there was any doubt on the subject lingering in anyone’s mind it was banished by the splendidly efficient manner in which he handled the appalling situation during the water famine of December, 1913.”