The Fairest Girl.

In the latter part of 1922, a committee of Montreal citizens, busy planning a carnival to promote the city as a winter-sports capital, decided to include the selection of a winter queen among its social functions. She would be known as Miss Canada.

It was the latest craze. A year earlier sixteen-year-old Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C., had been crowned the first Miss America at Atlantic City, the first of many beauty queens who would reign in the post-World War I era. Though American circus impresario P.T. Barnum had floated the notion of a beauty contest in the 1850s (unsuccessfully; the mores of the day wouldn't permit such display), and though a young woman at a carnival or festival in the late nineteenth century would be chosen for her social position to become queen of the fete, the notion of a beauty contest had to wait for the Jazz Age and the loosening of Victorian strictures. However, in organizing a Miss Canada competition and inviting eight other cities to send participants, the Montreal organizers wished to make clear that it was not simply a beauty or a personality contest. While the young ply a beauty or a personality contest. While the young women would be judged on general appearance, personality, and deportment, the contest was to choose a winter sports queen. The winner, as the first Miss Canada would later say, had to be "an all round Canadian girl who was active in winter sports."

But, as it turned out, proficiency in winter sport was among the lesser attributes that fed the public imagination.

Just before midnight on Saturday, February 10, 1923, at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, Miss Muriel Harper (Winnipeg), Miss Anna Lois Walsh (Quebec), Miss Pearl Miller (Regina), Mrs. Ora Doherty (Halifax), Miss Eileen Hawkins (Sherbrooke), Miss Leona McIntosh (Edmonton), Miss Gwendolen Shaw (Ste. Anne de Bellevue), Miss Gabrielle Rivet (Montreal), and Miss Winifred Blair (Saint John) waited for the announcement of the winner of the first Miss Canada title. They had arrived in Montreal some days earlier to find neither judges in place nor criteria established for the selection of Miss Canada. They were quickly swept up into a round of social engagements; no opportunities arose for them to show off their winter sports skills as they had expected. By February 9, several of the contestants threatened to withdraw. "We did not come here for pink teas," one of them fumed to the Montreal Daily Star. One of the girls' chaperones explained: "These girls are essentially athletic girls. They did not enter for a beauty contest ... Not only that, but the girls are still in the dark as to what qualifications they must possess in this contest."

By 6 P.M. on Friday, February 9, five judges were in place. Two hours later, they were at the Montreal Athletic Association open-air rink watching the candidates skate. As the Star reported, "Not only the candidates, attired in sports costume skated around the rink, but they indulged in fancy skating, therein displaying considerable prowess on the blades." Following the skating, the contestants appeared at the Venetian Gardens, where each was introduced under a spotlight. They were then free to enjoy dancing as the judging continued. There was no official program for Saturday. The girls were to rest before the evening's grand ball at the Windsor Hotel.

When the winner was announced at the ball, no one was more stunned than Miss Saint John, Winifred Blair. When the Star reporter asked her how it felt to be selected as Miss Canada, she replied, "I don't know, it's all so sudden, but I'm pleased." "And what about future movies, stage or business?" the reporter continued.

"All I want to do when this is over is to go home and go back to the office," was Miss Blair's response.

Miss Blair was nineteen, the youngest of the contestants in Montreal. The office she was anxious to return to belonged to customs broker H.C. Olive. She worked for him as a stenographer. for ten dollars a week. When she prevailed over ninety-four other contestants to be crowned Miss Saint John two weeks earlier, on January 27, her mother had been a widow for only a few weeks. Her father, a telegraph operator before the war, had died of the gassing he'd received in the trenches of France. Her sponsor in the Miss Saint John contest which local winter carnival organizers decided to run so they could send a representative to Montreal -- had been Walter Golding, manager of the Imperial Theatre. He told the newspapers after her triumph in Montreal that she represented an ideal: She did not smoke or drink; she was an unaffected, unspoiled business girl from an average family; she was not popular in elite groups, but popular in groups around her home; and she was very active in sports. He felt all girls should be as unspoiled as Miss Blair. Years later, Winifred, by then Mrs. Harold Drummie, said that Golding had suggested she enter the local competition "to get her out of his hair," since she loved to hang around the theatre with his daughter, Ollie.

As the pattern would become for all future winners of such contests, Winifred Blair was immediately caught up in a round of social engagements, the guest of honour at plays and teas, dropping the puck at local hockey games, and meeting with the Saint John carnival committee. Local merchants supplied clothing, jewellery, toiletries, chocolate, perfume, skates, and a set of furs (loaned, in this case). To cover her expenses, the City of Saint John voted her an allowance of $500-the equivalent of a year's stenographer's salary. When she left for Montreal with her escorts, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Golding, no one but the Saint John Globe expected her to win, including Miss Blair herself. Asked on her arrival in Montreal about her chances of becoming Miss Canada, she replied: "I haven't the slightest idea about winning. I am here to enjoy myself."

Before she left, the Globe wrote: "It is safe to say that when Miss Saint John takes part in the Montreal show, she will create a sensation by virtue of her personal charm and by reason of the material excellence, good taste and general fitness of her costume." No mention of winter sports. The Fredericton Daily Gleaner likewise overlooked the sports criterion: "It is pleasing to know that in our good girls we also lead in the best types of beauty, of grace and the national characteristic." It is unclear what the "national characteristic" might have been.

On the Monday after winning the Montreal contest, Winifred returned home. She passed through a large crowd of well-wishers at Montreal's Windsor Station and was met by an equally enthusiastic crowd at Union Station in Saint John that escorted her a half mile to the uptown area. The Globe likened it to the return of a "triumphant Roman Emperor." She did not go back to the office as she had hoped. Saint John's winter carnival had begun and she had official duties: Tuesday evening it was the military ball at the South End Armories; Wednesday afternoon it was the opening of a skating competition at Rockwood Park's Lily Lake; Wednesday evening, she, Miss Moncton, and Miss Halifax were drawn through downtown Saint John in a "Regal Coach" for a torchlight parade. The following Monday she was in Moncton to preside at that city's winter carnival.

The winner of the Miss Canada title had been promised a number of prizes, including a trip across Canada, a trip to England to meet Queen Mary, and a sitting to have her portrait done. They did not materialize. The Montreal Winter Carnival committee said they hadn't the money to fulfill their promises. However, Winifred did tour the Maritimes in early March and was kept busy attending luncheons and garden parties, crowning queens, and visiting hospitals and schools -- everywhere greeted by large crowds. In Fredericton on March 8, she attended the opening of the legislature, seated to the left of the Throne so everyone could see her. She was the first woman allowed to sit on the floor of a Canadian parliament. The-Globe called it "the first distinctive recognition by any legislature of Canadian womanhood." In June, in Glace Bay, she broke an ancient taboo by being the first woman ever allowed in the coal mines.

In May she travelled to New York for a screen test and sat in the studio waiting room in the company of Joan Crawford. She decided a career in films wasn't for her. The last major event of her reign was a June trip to Cleveland to assist Miss America in crowning Miss Cleveland.

All along she was watched closely by her chaperone, Walter Golding, who made it clear he did not want her exploited. The Miss America contest he considered too commercial in nature. With the American competition having incited controversy by giving second place to a married woman and inviting a large lawsuit by another unhappy contestant, Montreal began to have second thoughts about continuing the Miss Canada competition. A report out of Montreal, carried in the Globe, noted such contests "place an undue emphasis upon mere physical attributes and, as conducted in the United States, involve wearing costumes and a display of person subversive to modesty." Noting that "those on the inside were aware of 'petty bickerings and keenly felt disappointments'" at the Montreal event, the article concluded that such competitions were "distasteful to a large section of the public."

What Miss Canada thought of her reign is unclear. Her trip to Montreal was the first big trip of her life. When she arrived there, she was told that her troubles were only beginning, that the week ahead would be difficult. To this she replied: "If this is trouble, I like it." Yet interviewed many decades later, she declared most of what she was called on to do as Miss Canada was boring. "I always felt like there were flowers sticking out of me," she said.

Other than gifts, the material rewards of being Miss Canada were few. Her stenographer's job wasn't hers to return to. In her absence, H.C. Olive found another young woman to fill the position. Winifred had the $500 from the City of Saint John, but much of it went for expenses. She did receive payment from Muir's Chocolates to have her picture appear on their boxes, but with a Widowed mother and a brother and sister still in school, she soon had to find work. In Saint John, she got a job as a stenographer with the Power Commission of the City of Saint John, where she worked until June 1930 when she married lawyer Harold Drummie. Winter carnivals continued and young women were still crowned at festivals and contests, but the idea of Miss Canada vanished. It wasn't until 1946 that the contest was revived. In the intervening years Winifred (Blair) Drummie raised two boys through Depression and war and gave her win little thought. She rarely spoke of it unless pressed. As she said when she won the title, "All I want to do ... is go home." And that is what the first Miss Canada did.