Whitley, Lt.-Col. Frederick Whitley & Jessie (Chouler) & daughter Jessie Margaret Whitely

Jessie Margaret Whitley - 1882

Most of us who attend services at the chapel have probably read the inscription beneath the front windows of the chapel hundreds of times. It is both sad and funny. Read by itself, the left-hand window reads “To the Glory of God … died at Tadoussac, August” which may draw a smile to the faces of the faithful who never subscribed to the “God is Dead” movement of the 1960s. But to read across the three windows as we are expected to do, we learn of a baby who died in 1882 at the age of five months. There is sadness, and we can only wonder, well over a hundred years later, about the reason for the child’s death and the sorrow it must have inflicted on the family and friends, but particularly to her parents.
Jessie Margaret was born on February 27th and baptized on April 7th of the same year in which she died and, while named after her mother and her maternal grandmother, the family actually called her Daisy. She died on August 3rd in Tadoussac, and was buried on August 5th in Montreal.
Her father was Frederick Whitley who was the son of John Whitley and Sophie Hardy of “La Solitude”, St. Martin’s Parish, Jersey, Channel Islands. He was educated at Victoria College, St. Helier’s, Jersey and at Dijon, France, and came to Montreal around 1873-1874. Frederick was first employed in the firm of Thomas Samuel and Company, then established the firm Fred’k, Whitley and Co. Leather Importers, importing high quality leather mostly from England.
He served as an officer in the Montreal Garrison Artillery and was later transferred to the Montreal Squadron of Cavalry (about 1896), which became the Duke of York's Royal Canadian Hussars. He was also very interested in the Church of England, was a Lay Reader in the Diocese of Montreal, and was Superintendent of St. Martin's and St. James the Apostle's Sunday schools.
Frederick returned to England in 1877 to marry Jessie Chouler and brought her back to Canada with him. She was the daughter of Christopher Chouler and Margaret Wilson of London, England. Her father, Christopher Chouler, was a member of the firm of Howell’s, Drapers, St. Paul’s Churchyard, London. He was the son of Christopher and Mary Chouler, Falcon Lodge, Althorp Park, Northampton. (That Christopher, Jessie’s grandfather, was the Estate Manager of Althorp, Princess Diana’s family estate.)
Together, Frederick and Jessie had five children: Frederick, Henry, Ernest, Elsie and Jessie.
Frederick and Jessie’s son, Frederick, became an Anglican priest, married, and had one daughter, Ruth, who never married. It was in about 1941 that he gave the brass candlesticks on the altar in the chapel in memory of his parents. Frederick died in 1914, just before WW I and his wife Jessie died in 1940.
Ernest joined his father in business. He married Gertrude McGill and had one daughter, Barbara Jane Whitley, who was never married. She was well-known at the Montreal General Hospital where she volunteered for sixty years. She also started the Whithearn Foundation, a family foundation that was set up to fund research on diseases and disorders of the eye. Barbara passed away at the age of one hundred in 2018 but remembered Tadoussac very well and provided this family information just before she died.
Henry also worked with his father. He and his wife had one daughter Phyllis Rosamond, who married Ralph Collyer and had three children – John, Peter, and Jane (Wandell). Phyllis passed away in 2002, in her ninety-first year at St. Lambert, Quebec. Her daughter, Jane Wandell, is currently a director of the above-mentioned Whithearn Foundation which her aunt, Barbara Whitley, founded.
Elsie married C.S. Bann and had one child, Joan, who married Gordon Rutherford and had one child - Hugh.
The youngest child was Jessie, usually called Daisy, whom we remember in the chapel’s front windows.

Cynthia Price, Karen Molson, Alan Evans