Members-at-Large

← The Society · not a branch · assembled from the newsletters, 1957 to 2023

A place in the Society from the start

The arrangement is as old as the Society’s displays. In 1957 the report noted that “CSCL this year divided its display into branch showings plus a section for members at large,” and added that the policy would be followed in future. By 1959 the executive list named Members-at-Large of its own, among them Dr. Ralph Larmour and Mrs. Anne Hook, both of Toronto. A report of 1962 on how the Society was organized set the shape down plainly: it was built “on the basis of Regional Groups, members at large, and Associate and Fellows.”

To the very end the membership form kept Member-at-Large as one of its categories, beside Branch Member, Student and Sustaining Member. The definition it printed was simple: an individual interested in leathercraft who does not belong to one of the branches. A member who joined through a branch paid the branch treasurer. A Member-at-Large sent the annual fee straight to the Society’s own treasurer, and in at least one year a Member-at-Large, Joyce Poulson, held that treasurer’s office herself.

Kept together by the quarterly

What held them together was chiefly the quarterly, Canadian Leathercraft. For a member with no meeting to attend it was, as one wrote, “the only contact with all members.” The Society leaned on it deliberately. For years the editing of an issue was rotated among the branches and the Members-at-Large in turn, so that a Fall number might be theirs to fill, with shop tips, book reviews, project write-ups and news of members scattered from the Maritimes to the American border.

Their pages ran under names of their own. There was a “Members-at-Large-at-Work” column, the “To Tans or Not To Tans” features, and a long run of Library Reviews, all credited to the group rather than to one hand. The editor Margaret Monteith, herself a Member-at-Large, gathered material for these issues and held it for them.

The table at the Annual, and help by post

At the Annual Meeting there was a Members-at-Large table among the branch tables, with its own display of the year’s work. The Society’s Larmour lending library reached them by mail, where a branch member could borrow in person, and supply orders that branches gathered together, a Member-at-Large could place directly with the supplier. In competition they stood, as the Society put it, “on equal footing when trying for any of these awards.” The one exception was the Weston Trophy, contested branch against branch, though even there a handful of Members-at-Large could enter together as a group.

Distance was the standing problem, and the Society tried to answer it. At the 1985 Annual in Barrie a session asked how a member far from any branch could get help with a craft difficulty, and the Council of Fellows set up a scheme: most of the Fellows had a specialty, and the Chairman of the Council would act as a clearing-house, matching a distant member to a Fellow who could answer by post.

From every direction

Their reach was wide. Over the years the rolls and reports place Members-at-Large in Buffalo and Rochester in New York State, in Prince Edward Island, and in New Brunswick, where Bonnie Goguen of Newcastle joined in 1997. Gertrude Hilder sent her articles from the Maritimes, Ann Morrison forwarded reviews from Prince Edward Island. Further afield still, Silva Fox of Mundelein, Illinois — a Fellow of the Society and winner of the 1997 Al Stohlman Award — took part from the United States as a member of the Mississauga Branch. Glen Nelson, a Member-at-Large for many years, made a leather quilt for the Society and showed it at exhibitions before his death in 1999.

When a branch closed, its members most often did not leave. Barrie and Belleville dissolved as branches in 1985 and their members converted to Member-at-Large status, as Tillsonburg’s and the Kingston chapter’s had before them. Of Barrie and London the Newsletter noted with relief that “it is with regret that the Barrie and London Branches are no longer in existence but we are glad to note that their members stayed on as Members-At-Large” (Winter 1989–90, page 10). Laura Bush of the former Belleville Branch, an Ontario Volunteer Service Award recipient in 2003, was one who did. When the Woodstock Branch disbanded in 2010 its members likewise carried on as Members-at-Large, the roster rose above twenty, and around the McPhersons’ home in London an informal London Leather Guild grew up.

Who kept them organised

The work of holding a scattered membership together fell to a Members-at-Large Representative, a role that ran for decades. Dorothy McPherson of London held it, with her husband David, and after them their daughter Lauren carried it on as the Members-at-Large Appointee from 2012 to 2023, serving as the Executive Council’s secretary from 2021; a Member-at-Large from Kingston, Doug, completed a further two-year term ending in 2025. They wrote to scattered members, gathered their work for the Annual, and made sure the person with no branch still had a way in. Among the Members-at-Large so kept were craftspeople of real standing, Carol McLean of Woodstock among them, honoured with the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

It is why the Society could say, plainly, that its Members-at-Large were participating in events.

Assembled from the Society’s newsletters, 1957 to 2023, among them Summer 1957, Summer 1959, Winter 1962, the membership and payment notices of the 1980s through 2020s, the “Members-at-Large-at-Work” and Library Review columns, and the Annual Meeting reports that name the Members-at-Large table.