Molson, Doris Amelia Carington (Smith) & Colin John Grasset Molson

Doris Amelia Carington (Smith) 1902 - 1975 & Colin John Grasset Molson 1902 - 1997

C.J.G. “Jack” Molson was born in St. Thomas, Ontario to Mary Letitia Snider and Kenneth Molson. The family moved to Quebec City when Jack was two years old, where Kenneth worked as a manager for a branch of Molson’s Bank. During Jack’s childhood, he spent his summers with his grandparents (John Thomas Molson and Jenny Baker Butler) in Metis.
He learned to play the violin as a boy, and for his high school years, he attended boarding school at Ashbury College in Rockcliffe Park, near Ottawa. He went on to study economics and accounting, and as a young man, he was hired by Coopers & Lybrand.
Jack met Doris Amelia Carington Smith at a coming-out party aboard the HMS Hood, anchored in the Quebec harbour in August of 1924. (Built in 1922, it was the largest military vessel in the world at the time.) They fell in love and were married in Montmorency two years later.
Born in York (Toronto) on October 15, 1902, Doris was the first of three children whose parents were Charles Carington Smith (a Quebec City banker and first-generation Canadian in a family from Hertfordshire) and Aileen Dawson. Aileen’s father, the renowned McGill scientist George Dudley Dawson, also had connections to Tadoussac in its earliest days as a summer resort.
Doris was raised in a sprawling Victorian house built at the top of Montmorency Falls. She had two younger brothers Noel and Herbert, and a younger sister May. As a girl, Doris took up figure skating, swimming, and golfing, and pursued these sports into her adulthood.
From the time of their wedding on, Jack would spend time with his family each summer in Tadoussac, where the Smiths had a summer home. Doris and Jack had two children: Robin, in 1929, and Verity in 1932. Jack owned a little wooden sailboat called Lilith but sold the vessel when the war started in 1939.
He became Paymaster for the Black Watch in Montreal. He and Doris continued to come to Tadoussac with their children through the war years’ summers. After peace was declared in 1945, he bought land in Dwight Park and had a house built on it of his own design.
Doris was small and spirited, bright and energetic, and devoted to her family and her friends. She always had a much-adored dog whom she would train to do extraordinary tricks. Doris was especially known for her warmth and sociability, her concern for others, and her love for Tadoussac. Here, in the 1950s and ‘60s, she hosted bread-making parties where bread would be baked in their iconic outdoor clay oven, and her cocktail parties were always lively occasions.
Jack Molson continued to work as a chartered accountant in Montreal, while over the years his interest in Quebec’s history and heritage grew. He became one of the founders of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild and was one of the first to support the efforts of Inuit carvers and printmakers. In 1955 when Westmount’s Hurtubise House (built in 1714) was threatened with demolition, Jack mounted an effort to save the island’s oldest home. He persuaded his friend, James Beattie, and his aunt, Mabel Molson, to help him buy the house. In the next few years, he purchased two other properties, including natural sites in Gaspé that were vulnerable to commercial development. By 1960 the Canadian Heritage of Quebec was incorporated and had an active board of professionals as directors. The CHQ foundation, under Jack’s direction, would save the Simon Fraser House in Ste. Anne-de-Bellevue, the Laterriere Seigneurial Mill at Les Eboulements in the Charlevoix, as well as Les Rochers, Sir John A. Macdonald’s summer home in St. Patrick, and dozens of other heritage properties on both sides of the St. Lawrence River, including Bon Désir and Point à Boisvert on the north shore.
Here in Tadoussac, Jack Molson and James Beattie purchased the Pilot House (a brick Molson-Beattie House located near Anse a l’Eau) with the intention of converting it into a museum. When historical fishing vessels and sailboats were donated to the CHQ foundation, Jack had barns erected on land behind the Pilot House in order to preserve them. He bought land above the sand dunes which he later donated to the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park and also the Hovington farm which is still active today overseen by the local Municipal Regional Council. He was also very supportive of the Tadoussac Protestant Chapel.
In 1979 Jack Molson was awarded the Order of Canada for his dedication to historical preservation through the Canadian Heritage of Quebec. By then, he had long retired from his work in order to devote all of his time to the foundation. In spite of his remarkable vision of the future and all of his accomplishments, Jack was a modest man who shied away from personal publicity. His manner was unassuming, his personal life pared down to the essentials. One of the things he loved the most was a simple picnic on a St. Lawrence River beach with some boiled eggs and a cup of tea brewed in a billycan over a small fire. On more than one occasion he was known to have said to Doris, “This is a beautiful, unspoiled spot. It would be such a pity if someone decided to develop it. We should buy it.”
Doris adored Tadoussac. Early every morning, weather permitting, she would go down the path in front of their cottage to the beach for a bracing swim in the bay. Later she would rouse up friends and neighbours for picnics, or Sunday evening bonfires on Indian Rock. She was also a mainstay of the Tadoussac Protestant Chapel, where, when she wasn’t playing the organ herself, she sat as close to the organist as possible so that her singing voice would give encouragement to the player.
Her faith was strong. Had Doris been able to choose the manner of her passing, she may well have chosen to go the way she did. On July 14, 1975, she was enjoying a game of golf at the Tadoussac Golf Club with her best friends when she began to feel dizzy. She sat down; her heart failed; her friends gathered around her. She was seventy-two.
Predeceased by Doris, and his daughter Verity in 1995, Jack Molson passed away peacefully after a long illness in 1997. He was ninety-five.

Karen Molson