The history of McMaster Meighen begins in 1823 at a time when Montreal’s economy was based on the fur trade, and shipping and banking were the main enterprises. McGill College received its charter two years earlier and the Bank of Montreal received its charter the preceding year.

The office that opened in Montreal with one lawyer (which then had a population of 20,000) has grown into a national and international enterprise with offices in four cities. The first partner, William Badgley, could hardly have foreseen that from this beginning would come a prime minister, an ambassador to the United States,...

The founder of the firm which today is known as McMaster Meighen, was William Badgley, “lawyer, judge and politician”¹ who, in November 1823, was admitted to “the practice and profession of the law as Barrister, Advocate, Attorney, Solicitor and Proctor in all His Majesty’s Courts of Justice.”² Badgley, born a Montrealer in 1801, was the grandson of an English merchant who had, like many others, been lured to Canada by the prosperity and opportunities offered by the fur trade in the second half of the eighteenth century. The British merchants, predominantly Scots, who established the North West Fur Trading Company...

The year 1849 was an eventful one in Montreal and it was also the year when John Abbott joined William Badgley in practice at 88 Notre Dame Street. John Joseph Caldwell Abbott was born 12 March 1821 in the town of St Andrew’s Parish in the county of Argenteuil, north of Montreal. He was the son of an Anglican minister, Joseph Abbott, who had come to Lower Canada in 1818 from Norwich in England. As a young man John Abbott was uncertain as to what career he should follow. After completing his schooling, he spent five years in business and...

For the firm and particularly for its senior partner, John Abbott, the twenty years which followed Confederation were dominated, above all, by the affairs of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The construction of a railway line to link the developed eastern provinces with the undeveloped west was the linch-pin of the Confederation government’s economic strategy; it would expand the domestic market and, by so doing, further encourage industrialization.

To construct some 2,000 miles of line across the continent, much of it over inhospitable terrain and with the formidable obstacles of the Canadian Shield and the Rocky Mountains, would be both...

The retirement of John Abbott and the departure of Melbourne Tail from the practice in 1887 left the firm with three partners. Of Abbott’s two sons, the younger, Henry, then thirty, was the more distinguished lawyer. He was appointed a Queen’s counsel in that year and, in 1890, was invited to follow in his father’s footsteps as professor of Commercial Law at McGill University. He was able to use his experience at the firm during his formative years as a lawyer to write a definitive “Treatise on the Railway Law of Canada.” Harry’s elder brother, John (J.B.) Abbott, then thirty-five,...

To the Conservative government of Robert Borden, which had been in power since 1911, the outbreak of World War I seemed, at first, “something like a blessing.”¹ The stimulus it gave to the economy relieved the recession which had created both unemployment and industrial unrest. Moreover, support for Britain and France in the war against Germany initially united the divided races of Canada, especially when the influential French-Canadian nationalist, Henri Bourassa (publisher ofLe Devoir), publicly announced that it was Canada’s duty “to contribute within the bounds of her strength, and by means which are proper to herself, to the...

For the firm the first casualty of the war years was the senior partner, F.E. Meredith, who died just two months before his eightieth birthday, on 23 November 1941. Meredith had been with the firm for over fifty years, thirty of them as senior partner. Although he had been less active in recent years, he had continued to be the dominating force within the firm; even in his last year when he was essentially no longer practising, he had taken a larger share of the profits than his younger fee-earning partners! To many, both outside as well as inside the...

When Reward died in 1959, seniority dictated that R.C. Holden should succeed him. But Holden, who was then sixty-four, had little interest in management or administration and, after a brief period as senior partner, thankfully handed over the reins of power to Ross McMaster. This freed Holden to do as he wished – to give all his time to the practice of maritime law, his enduring passion and the field in which he excelled.

It was perhaps as well that there was a younger man at the helm (McMaster was fifty). During Reward’s twenty years, Canada had enjoyed not only...

Commercial and industrial corporations tend to centralize their operations and locate their head offices not only close to each other, but also in proximity to banks and insurance offices, a tendency which has accelerated in recent years. Legal and financial advisers naturally followed suit, for efficiency and accessibility demand such concentration. Montreal has been no exception to the rule; downtown business has always gathered around the plazas and public squares (Dominion, Victoria, Viger, and Place d’Armes), a trend which became even more marked after the economic boom of the early fifties. But during the last two decades, the commercial heart...