Tom Paton died on a Wednesday of yesterday’s date in 1909, of heart failure. He was 53. He’s not much remembered now, but he was a sizable hockey deal in his day, with a couple of unique claims as a trailblazer in the sport.

Paton was the goaltender of the very first team to win the Stanley Cup, the Montreal Hockey Club in 1893.

More intriguingly still (say I): he’s credited with delivering hockey unto Toronto, in 1888, when Toronto had none, or at least not much.

That last bit bears some study. We’ll get to that, but first a bit more background.

Tom Paton was born in Montreal in 1855. His background was Scottish; his father was a prominent Montreal builder. He himself worked, when the time came for working, as an official of the Dominion Commercial Traveller’s Association and, later, as a manufacturer’s agent. It’s a wonder that he had the time for a profession at all, given his devotion to sporting pursuits. That’s where his vocation clearly lay, and he pursued it full-out all his life.

“A fine specimen of the robust physical manhood for which Montreal is proverbial,” a Brooklyn, New York newspaper called him in 1894. In the 1880s, Paton he’d made a name as a crack lacrosse player (he played forward on the grass, not in goal), “one of the trickiest players of his time,” it was said. He was a sometime teammate, as it happens, of another star of the times, W.J. Cleghorn (a.k.a. Billy the Horse), who was Odie’s and Sprague’s father.

As president of the Old Tuque Bleue club, Paton was an avid snowshoer in those days when tramping the drifts was a thriving (and competitive) pastime. Was there any winter sport that Paton didn’t lustily pursue? He was president of the Montreal Curling Club and one of the first Montrealers to go in for downhill skiing, too, in 1887, when his snowshoeing pal and fellow Scot, businessman (and later Major-General) James Ross, introduced what he called “Norwegian snowshoes” to Montreal.

Paton was a key figure in the 1881 amalgamation of the Montreal Lacrosse Club with the Montreal Snowshoe Club that spawned the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. The first game of organized hockey, you’ll remember, took place in Montreal in 1875, and in 1884 the MAAA backed the formation of the Montreal Hockey Club. Paton was busily involved in that, too, as an organizer, and when the team (known, too, as the Winged Wheelers, based on the MAAA logo they wore) took the ice for the first time in January of 1885 at the old Victoria Skating Rink, he stood in to play goal — recording a win, for the record, as his team beat McGill 2-1.

A later tribute to Paton’s prowess between the flags (there were no nets, yet) went like this:

He played in the days when the goaler had to be satisfied with the same equipment as the other players and it was no picnic standing up to a barrage of shots with a square, wooden puck cutting nicks out of the shinbones on every stop. Allan Cameron, who was as hardy as any of them, relates that to get hit on the shin with one of those old-time hunks of wood was like being struck by a rock.

Rubber pucks were in common use by the early 1880s, I should say, though that doesn’t necessarily mean the pain would have been much diminished. Here’s a contemporary ode from Montreal’s Gazette dating to January of 1890 when Paton and his MAAA mates beat Quebec 5-1:

… the Quebecs on their part made a showing that they need not be ashamed of. It was not unfrequently by any means that ‘Tommy’ Paton made a stop that ‘brought down the house,’ to use a familiar expression; in fact, he had numerous opportunities of doing so, too numerous altogether to suit the Montreal sympathizers. But they had no room for regret, for Tommy simply played a wonderful game, and the off-hand way in which he attended to ticklish shots was really a wonder to behold.

This Montreal team played in the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada, which it dominated, holding on to the league championship from 1888 through 1894. Paton and his shinbones played on through 1893, a season that ended with his club being awarded Lord Stanley’s brand-new Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup.

There was, it’s true, a protracted kerfuffle following this auspicious event, as the Montreal Hockey Club refused to accept the Stanley Cup from its trustees (more on that here). The matter was finally resolved, a year later. Montreal won the Cup again that spring, although by then Tom Paton had ceded the goal to Herbert Collins. Paton had retired after the 1893 season at the age of 37. Maybe because it was just time; he also did marry that spring, so that could have been part of it.

The story of Tom Paton’s career as a hockey evangelist is one that I wish we knew more about. Was he indeed the prophet who led Toronto out of the hockeyless darkness and into the light?

Alas, we don’t have any first-hand sources to prove this out but still, you’d think that Montreal hockey partisans would have made more of what we do know.

If you’ve paged into the first proper hockey book, Canada’s Royal Winter Game (1899) by Arthur Farrell, you might remember this passage, from page 30:

In Toronto, the game was introduced by Mr. T.L. Paton, for many years a member of the champion MAAA team, who chanced to be travelling in the Royal City. Mentioning to some friends that hockey was the winter game par excellence in Montreal, he was induced to write for a puck and some sticks, and teach them the sport. This was in 1887, and in a few years the game that electrified the people of the eats, was destined to secure a fast hold upon the sporting instincts of those in the west.

I like this succinct origin-story immensely. I know I shouldn’t take it literally, but I can’t help it, the idea that Toronto’s entire hockey history started with a single puck in 1887 is too much to resist. Although it’s almost certainly unintended, there’s something irresistible, too, about the ignorance that’s implied (what is this strange game of which you speak?), not to mention the suggestion that Tom Paton learned the locals how to play the game all in the space of a short visit before leaving them to their own devices.

Arthur Farrell may have got the goods as he reported them from Tom Paton himself. Farrell was a Montrealer himself, after all, who was in on two Stanley Cup championships of his own, in 1899 and 1900, when he played for the Montreal Shamrocks.

It’s possible, too, that he based his account of Paton’s proselytizing on a feature in an 1893 edition of the Dominion Illustrated Monthly. The writer there, W.A.H. Kerr, offers a few more specifics even as he banks his account with cautious language:

Although shinty had been played on Toronto Bay away back in the seventies, when annual matches between Federal and Commerce banks used to one of the events of the winter, as far as far as one can learn, Hockey as at present played, was introduced into Toronto somewhat in this wise: Mr. T.L. Paton, the well-known member of the Montreal [AAA] champion team, was in the Queen city some five or six years ago on business. In Mr. J. Massey’s office he happened to Mr. Massey and Mr. C. McHenry the fact that hockey was fast becoming the leading game in winter in Montreal, and suggested the idea of getting Torontonians interested in it. With characteristic energy he telegraphed Montreal that day for 18 sticks, a puck, and a few copies of the rules. On receipt of the material the next evening some ten skaters turned out on the Granite ice and had a ‘little game.’ For the next few evenings they turned out again. Their elbows and hip-bones must have been sore after this and a few fingers skinless, for we hear of no regular games being played till the winter of ’89. In this year the Victorias and Granites played a draw, and St. George’s Club had matches with both of them. The following year these same clubs were again in the arena, and were joined by C School of Infantry. The Victorias and Granites again played a draw in the final match of a tournament in which all four clubs took part.

It’s this account that hockey historian (and long-time member of the Society for International Hockey Research) Leonard Kotylo used in 2015 to pinpoint the intersection of what he believes to be Toronto’s hockey kilometre zero (the Granite Skating Rink on Church Street, just north of Wellesley) and zero hour (Thursday, February 16, 1888). That’s when the Granites took on the Caledonians and beat them 4-1. If it doesn’t exactly align with W.A.H. Kerr’s account above (is this really the “little game” described?), I tend to think that there’s a good chance that this Granite-Caledonian could indeed have been Toronto’s first organized hockey game.

I do have some details to add to the overall picture, and if some of them unfocus the frame … well, see what you think.

First of all: Kerr’s account.

Bravo to him for sticking with the one, true puck angle: if I wasn’t clear before, I do love the notion that Toronto’s hockey history began with a single puck … from Montreal. It should have been preserved, of course, bronzed or embedded in amber, enshrined in a block of well-cooled and thereby never-melting ice downtown somewhere for all eternity.

Kerr puts a number on the sticks, 18, which adds credibility. And there’s the rulebook — “a few copies.” These would have been the McGill (or Montreal) Rules, considered to be the game’s first written code, which was first published in the Gazette on February 27, 1877. Good to have those at hand.

Tom Paton’s co-conspirators? With a little digging, I’ve been able to flesh them out, a bit. They were lacrosse players, teammates with the Toronto Lacrosse Club as well as officers in the organization. John Massey had been captain and president of the club, Charles McHenry treasurer.

That’s how Tom Paton would have known them, I’ll guess, and how he ended up at their office. If he took the train in from Montreal that fateful day, he could have walked up from the old Union Station, which was a little father west on Front Street than the current rendition. The two men worked together, too, at Western Canada Loan & Savings, where Massey was the assistant manager and McHenry a clerk. Their offices were at 70 Church Street, just north of Adelaide.

I guess it makes sense that it was bankers who brought hockey to Toronto.

Scouring a selection of Toronto newspapers from the winter of 1888, I turned up no mentions of Tom Paton or his visit to the city. That’s not so surprising. What I did find does shed light on the Toronto’s hockey awakening, though it also introduces some new murkiness, too.

There’s the item, for instance, that appeared in the Globe in December of 1886 advising that the Toronto Lacrosse Club was planning to be out on the ice at the Granite Rink “two nights a week during the winter to play hockey.” If the lacrosse players made good on that, no further word of their exploits (or any scores) made the news. Either way, it does suggest that sticks and at least one puck were on the loose in Toronto before Tom Paton got to work in 1888.

Unless it was 1887? That’s the year Arthur Farrell cited, after all. And an item did appear in the pages of the Empire in December of 1888 that would seem to move the advent of Toronto hockey back in time. “Two years ago,” it reads, “hockey received an impetus here, but its progress was of short duration. Last winter there was little if any played ….” That would get us back to ’87, with “last winter” being the previous, post-Christmas season of ’88. Kerr, in his telling, does seem to allow for this, too: “five or six years ago,” he says.

But then I haven’t come across any evidence of hockey being organized in Toronto in 1887: it’s all in ’88 that you see the momentum building. And while there’s no mention of Paton, there is a fair amount of Montreal goading in evidence.

It is remarkable (as Kotylo remarked) that organized hockey was so slow to take hold in Toronto. The game was fully afoot in Montreal in the mid-1880s, as well as in wintry Ottawa and Kingston.

Toronto, which had a population of 119,000 in 1888, just couldn’t get interested. It’s not that it wasn’t a sporting town: wintertime Toronto was enthusiastically curling and skating in these years, snowshoeing and ice-yachting, boxing, walking (pedestrianism was a thing), racing horses out in the cold at Ashbridge’s Bay. As Kerr mentions, there was also (and had been for years) shinty on the lake and local rivers, a free-for-all version of the old Scottish game of ball and crooked sticks, sometimes played on skates but not always.

As for indoor rinks, there were those, too, naturally iced, mostly crowded with curlers: the Granite on Church (just north of John Massey’s offices), the Caledonian on Mutual Street, the Victoria Rink on Huron Street, the Moss Park, and others, no doubt. But hockey? The papers often bore news of what was happening on Montreal ice, with teams like Tom Paton’s, but the game itself just couldn’t seem to stick in Toronto.

Change seemed to be stirring in January of 1888. Maybe Paton had come and gone already? “The Toronto Athletic Club are making arrangements to play hockey at the Caledonian Rink,” the Globe advised on January 14. They were going to take on the Toronto Lacrosse Club, apparently, and then the best players from those teams would be selected to go to Montreal to play. The Caledonian Club was wary, it was noted: they wanted to know just how badly a hockey game would damage the ice their curlers relied on. The Globe had high hopes that they would see their way clear to hosting hockey: “they have a rink better fitted for such sport than any in our city.” Plus, they felt sure, the hockey players would pay to fix the ice they carved up.

There was a game — “a practice match” — at the Mutual Street rink on Wednesday, January 18, involving members of the Toronto Athletic Club, Wanderers’ Bicycle Club, and Toronto Lacrosse Club, who had “an exciting time.” No names or score were reported.

The Globe was doing its part that winter to keep things moving. “Hockey is a game in Montreal which holds the same place in the hearts of the people in winter that lacrosse does in summer,” it explained on January 23. “During the past week two teams have been organized by well-known athletes to introduce to the Toronto public this fine sport.”

The Caledonia (curling) Club had a team practicing at their rink while the Granite Club was getting into the swing of things a little to the north. “A private practice match between the two teams will probably be played on Thursday evening.”

Montreal was keeping an eye on all this activity. In early February, though, the Gazette was lamenting a loss of Toronto drive.

A couple of weeks ago the Granite Hockey Club and the Caledonia Hockey club were hard at practice, and it was thought that two well-trained clubs would give exhibitions in this splendid winter game about this time. Apparently the game has died on account of a dearth of enthusiasm by the players. Now, this should not be the case. Hockey is a lively winter game and is the only one that can take the place of lacrosse, baseball, etc., for the enjoyment of spectators. If Montreal hockey clubs attract thousands of spectators to see their games there is no reason whatever why Toronto people should not support this game equally as well.

The patient was still alive, though. On Thursday, February 16, the Granites and Caledonians faced off at the Granite Rink on Church Street. John Massey and Charles McHenry didn’t play, though it’s possible they were in the house to watch. There’s no record of how many spectators were on hand. We do know that W. Johnson was the referee and that the umpires (goal judges) were Messrs. J.W. Carroll and Totten.

The teams lined up this way:

Caledonian                                                       Granite

Fletcher                        Goal                              William Badenach
Temple                          Point                             Billy Donaldson
Harston                        Cover Point                        W.A. Littlejohn
C.P. Orr                        Forward                        John Drynan
McGee                            Forward                        Pete Green
Hurst                             Forward                        Charles Crawford

The teams played two halves, probably of 30 minutes each, though that wasn’t noted in press reports. Charles Crawford scored the opening goal for the Granites, which is to say, I guess, the first goal in Toronto hockey history. Littlejohn and Donaldson added to that tally, with McGee pulling one back for Caledonians. Another unidentified Granite scored, too, to make the final score Granites 4 and Caledonians.

The teams played again on Friday, March 2, with a prominent Toronto cyclist, Fred Foster, refereeing. There were some new players on the ice and some veterans in new positions:

Caledonian                                                        Granite

C.P. Orr                         Goal                              Charles Crawford
Merrick                         Point                             Fred Garvin
Nasmith                       Cover Point                            W.A. Littlejohn
Fletcher                        Forward                        Billy Donaldson
McGee                                   Forward                        McBrien
Temple                                   Forward                        William Badenach

The Globe report of this game doesn’t note who scored, just that Caledonians roared back to win 4-1.

And just like that, Toronto was a hockey town. It took some time to catch up; while Montreal teams like Tom Paton’s started winning Stanley Cup championships as soon as they were available in the 1890s, it wasn’t until 1914 that a Toronto team was able to claim one.

Where does all this leave Paton and Toronto’s not-entirely-immaculate hockey conception? My considered guess would be that the story of his visit to Messrs. Massey and McHenry and the subsequent emergency transfusion of equipment is a true one, and that it probably occurred in the winter of 1888. I don’t doubt that his gesture was an important one in spurring the city’s sportsmen to organize a game that had underway already by then, with local pucks and sticks, in some more or less chaotic form. It does pain me to acknowledge that Paton’s sticks and puck were not the very first Toronto had ever seen, although it is probably true that the city had never seen better quality sticks before.

One last observation: it’s interesting that Toronto started in with six-man hockey in 1888 while in Montreal at that time, they were playing seven-a-side. Maybe Tom Paton forgot to mention that.