On a late Friday morning, right around noon, on April 17, 1931, Henry Smith was going down the stairs to the cellar in his home at 47 Empress Avenue in Ottawa. A widower living alone for the past six months after 60 years of marriage to Anne McLaughlin, Mr. Smith was suddenly overcome by a dizzy spell and fell. He suffered seven cracked ribs and was taken to the Walter Street hospital.

Once a contractor of great renown, Henry Smith and partner John Henney had built many bridges in Ottawa, and public structures across much of Canada. He was a man who had always enjoyed robust health, and was said to have been in full possession of all his faculties at the time of his accident. Hopes were held out for a complete recovery, but the shock to his system was too much. Complications set in, and Henry Smith died shortly after 9 am on the morning of Tuesday, April 21. He was a month shy of his 88th birthday.

So, why do we care about this?

(I guess the better question is, why do I care about it?)

Because of the seven sons of Henry and Anne Smith, all seven became prominent hockey players in their hometown of Ottawa. Alf Smith, the oldest son, and his brother, Tommy, 12 years his junior, are both members of the Hockey Hall of Fame. Another brother, Harry, probably had the talent to join them there, although perhaps he had even more of Alf’s belligerent nature than he had of Tommy’s scoring skill.

As I mentioned in my recent story about the Gilmour brothers, Alf, Tommy, and Harry were all members of the Silver Seven in their final dynasty season of 1905–06. Smith brothers Dan (known as Moxie) and Jack both played briefly with Alf on the Ottawa hockey club before it earned the Silver Seven moniker, while Billy, or Will Smith, played with several other top Ottawa clubs after the Silver Seven era. Youngest brother George Smith played alongside Billy briefly with the Ottawa Emmetts in 1909–10, but appears to have had less talent for the game than his six elder siblings.

Alf Smith was 17 1/2 years older than his youngest brother George, but it is mentioned in the obituaries for both Henry and Anne that Henry had once issued a challenge to any other “seven sons” hockey team to face-off against his talented Smith tribe. The challenge, it’s said, was never accepted.

That appears to be true.

But it certainly doesn’t appear to have been due to any lack of trying on the part of proud papa Henry!

I recall coming across stories of the Smith family challenge years ago, but had mostly forgotten about it until a recent post about the Smiths on the Society for International Hockey Research web site by a Swedish member named Oskar Tallqvist. After reading it, I went hunting through old newspapers for stories about the challenge … and found quite a lot.

The first time that a family challenge from the Smiths appeared in the newspaper is in the Ottawa Citizen on March 10, 1899:

Alf Smith was two months shy of his 26th birthday. He had played with Ottawa in the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada (the NHL of its day) from 1894 through 1898 (and would star for the team later, from 1903 through 1908) but appears not to have been playing anywhere in 1898–99. Dan was two years past his stint with Alf on Ottawa’s top team, and Jack was still two years away from his. Harry and Tommy were only teenagers, and their official hockey records don’t date back that far. And, despite what the paper says, Will (Bill) was actually the nine-year-old (though his next birthday was coming soon, on April 20), while George had only turned eight in January.

Still, the big question for me now was, “who were the Sime, or Sims brothers?”

Well, though Ancestry has some records showing the name spelled as Symms and Simms, this was the family of Henry Francis Sims, another pioneering Ottawa citizen who was even older than Henry Smith. Henry Sims and his wife Rachel had seven sons, who in 1899 would have ranged in age from about 34 to 16. (They also had three daughters.) The sons were all hockey players, and a year later, in 1900, at least five of them would play together for the same team in Ottawa’s Merchant’s Hockey League: the Henry J. Sims & Co. hockey team. Henry Francis Joseph Sims, the third son and fourth child in the family, was a furrier and a hatter operating on Sparks Street.

The Society for International Hockey Research has records for only two of the hockey playing Sims brothers. Youngest son Herbert (1883-1947) was better known as Bert. He played at McGill University in the early 1900s along with future Hall of Famers Tommy Phillips in 1902–03 and with Billy Gilmour in 1904–05. Bert Sims went on to become a noted North American medical specialist as an ear, nose and throat doctor and was president of the Ottawa Rough Riders football club (known as the Senators at the time) when they won the Grey Cup in 1926. The second youngest Sims boy, Percy, played with the Ottawa Silver Seven in 1902–03 and helped them win the Stanley Cup that year.

But in 1899, the Sims brothers were mostly playing hockey for fun when a challenge to any hockey-playing family was issued by another Ottawa merchant family, the McCrackens, in local newspapers on February 21. A day later, it was reported that the McCracken crew (they were tailors on Bank Street) had agreed to face-off with the Sims boys:

The game was played at Dey’s rink in Ottawa on March 3, 1899. Hockey in these days was played with seven players a side, the extra player being the rover who lined up between the forwards and the defencemen, who were known in those days as point and cover point. But because the oldest Sims brother, William, was out of town, the families agreed to drop the rover and play with six men aside. They only played 40 minutes, but the Sims ran up a one-sided 12–0 victory.

Percy and Bert were the stars of the game, according to the Ottawa Citizen. There was a longer report in the Ottawa Journal, showing the following lineups:

R. G. Sims   -  Goal   -  Sam McCracken
Edgar Sims   -  Point  -  Alex McCracken
Percy Sims   -  Cover  -  Joe McCracken
Henry Sims   - Forward -  George McCracken
Herbert Sims -         -  David McCracken
Fred Sims    -         -  Robert McCracken

Little wonder, then, that Henry Smith issued the challenge on behalf of his hockey-playing offspring just a week later. And it’s no surprise why the Smiths wanted to face the Sims.

There is no report as to why the game was never played.

Perhaps the fact that two of the Smith children were under the age of 10 had something to do with it.

Whatever the reason, it seems that nearly five years passed before more talk of the Smith family playing together versus another family of seven appeared in newspapers. A story out of Perth, Ontario (not too far from Ottawa) on January 13, 1904, was picked up in capital city newspapers the following day:

I knew the name Frank McLaren from writing in the past about the Stanley Cup challenges of the Toronto Wellingtons and the Toronto Marlboros, but not the fact that he was also one of seven hockey-playing brothers. On January 16, 1904, the Montreal Gazette noted that the Smiths “are out to accept the challenge of the McLaren Freres of Perth” — although the paper got several of the Smith brothers’ names wrong. The Ottawa Journal that day only noted that the Smiths “should accept the defi,” and introduced me to another set of seven hockey playing brothers, when it noted that, if not the Smiths then the Christmas brothers of Montreal should accept the challenge. (This clarified the “Christmas” reference in that paper’s January 14 headline above.)

The Christmases seem to be a family of seven sons and no daughters born to Thomas Henry Christmas and his wife Jennie. Brothers Ernest, William, Archie, Howard, Alex, Percy and Walter ranged in ages from 27 to 16 in 1905.

The Ottawa Citizen had more about the McLaren challenge in its paper on January 18. Among other things, it introduced yet another hockey-playing family of seven with a story out of Newmarket, Ontario, indicated that Doyle family — Larry (goal), Fred (point), Frank (cover point), and forwards Ern, Harry, Ed and Tom — would be happy to hear from the McLarens. The Citizen noted that Henry Smith was also up for the challenge, and reminded readers what the seven Smiths were currently up to.

“Alf is now putting up superb hockey on the Stanley Cup holders and both Dan and Jack have figured on the Ottawas previously.” (Neither appear to have been playing anymore by 1904). “Harry was captain of the Aberdeens last season and now plays center for the Arnprior aggregation of puck-chasers. Tommy Smith was one of the Emmetts’ best forward last year… Willie tips the scales at about 105 pounds but is rapidly learning the fine points of the game…. The youngest of the family is George, age 12.” (He actually turned 13 the day this story appeared in the paper.) “George has been taught hockey from the cradle and is plucky to the core.”

On February 14, 1904, the Citizen reports that the Beavers of the Ottawa City league (who featured future Ottawa star Hamby Shore) had agreed to play a couple of games against the Smiths to get them prepared for their clash with the McLarens. However, there doesn’t appear to be any record of the Smiths ever facing the Beavers … nor of a challenge match against the Perth family ever being played.

But Henry Smith wasn’t giving up on the dream of seeing his seven sons face-off together against other teams, be they family squads like his or not. First, in January of 1907, there were stories about Henry having been in Winnipeg arranging for his boys to face teams from that city. Then, in the late fall of 1908, there was talk of a lengthy trip through the United States and western Canada. Finally, in November of 1910, there were stories about the Smiths going west to Edmonton to take on the Banford boys, another hockey-playing family said to have seven sons who were originally from the Ottawa Valley, but had relocated to Alberta around 1903. In all cases, no games were ever played.

Talk of the Smith family playing together as a team of seven ended, sadly, on June 9, 1911, with the unexpected death of Jack Smith. He’d been ill for about two weeks with inflammation of the stomach when, suddenly, his heart gave out.

“Hockeyists and sportsmen in all parts of the country will, with deep regret, learn of his untimely demise,” said an obituary in the Ottawa Citizen on June 10. “He was the third member of a hockey family which could hold its own with anything in the country….

“The Smith Brothers Seven was known from coast to coast and one of Mr. Smith’s fondest dreams had been to get the boys together again.”

As for the rest of the Smith boys, Dan passed away in 1926 at the age of 50. Alf, who had finished playing by 1909, but would coach in the NHL with the Ottawa Senators (1918–19) and New York Americans (1925–26), died in August of 1953 at the age of 80. Harry had died that May at 69, while youngest brother George died in 1954 at age 62. Tommy, whose last season as a player was in the NHL with the Quebec Bulldogs (sometimes called the Athletics) in 1919–20, died in 1966 at the age of 80.

Bill Smith was the last and the longest-lived of the seven brothers. He passed away on October 30, 1977 at the age of 88.

The new NHL season gets started tonight. COVID concerns have already begun to play havoc with a few rosters, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m sure, as in other sports, there will continue to be cases. Hopefully there won’t be anything worse.

But this story has nothing to do with the current season, COVID, the Spanish Flu, or any of that. There’s no real reason, or timing tie-in, for this one except that (as is often the case) I came across a few articles in old newspapers that got me interested, and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to write about it. This story is a little bit all-over-the-board, but here goes…

According to Wikipedia (if I counted them up correctly!), there have been 299 sets of brothers who’ve played in the NHL from the league’s beginning in 1917 through 2019–20. Of that group, 47 sets of brothers have played together on the same team, but only 10 have won the Stanley Cup together. The numbers are slightly larger if we expand the time frame beyond the birth of the NHL and back to the start of the Stanley Cup in 1893.

Still, in all that time, there are only two instances when a group of three brothers have played together on a Stanley Cup team. (I’m one of three brothers myself, so this interests me.) Both sets are from Ottawa, and played with the famed “Silver Seven.” Alf, Harry, and Tommy Smith played together in 1906, although it seems that no more than two of those three ever suited up together in a Stanley Cup game that year. (I’ll likely write more about the Smith family in a future post). However, in the spring of 1903, brothers Dave, Suddie — short for Sutherland — and Billy Gilmour all starred together for Ottawa when the Silver Seven launched one of hockey’s most legendary dynasties.

The Gilmour family was a prominent one in Ottawa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m not certain if the hockey family is related to the same lumber family of Gilmours for whom Gilmour Street in Ottawa was named, but the father and grandfather of our hockey Gilmours were both prominent in the lumber industry in the Gatineau region. So, the Gilmour boys, along with three other brothers (including one more who later played hockey) and a sister, likely grew up among plenty of privilege. This wasn’t always the case, but was not uncommon either for Canadian athletes in this era of amateurism. [NOTE: The Gilmour Street lumber family IS the same family as the lumber and hockey Gilmour family.]

All three Gilmour brothers played junior and intermediate hockey with the Ottawa Aberdeens, who were what might now be considered a top farm team for the Ottawa Hockey Club that would become known as the Silver Seven. The Gilmours, along with the great Frank McGee and a couple of other teammates, rose through the ranks more or less together.

By the 1902–03 season, McGee and the Gilmours were all together on the top Ottawa club. Billy was still only 17 years old. Suddie was 20 (so was Frank McGee) and Dave was 21. They were all key in leading Ottawa to the Stanley Cup for the first time that season, first by defeating the Montreal Victorias in a two-game playoff to decide their league title, and then by successfully defending the Cup against the Rat Portage Thistles in a two-game challenge. Ottawa outscored its opponents by a combined score of 19–5 in those four Stanley Cup games. Though sources do differ, Frank McGee is generally credited with scoring seven of Ottawa’s 19 goals. Dave and Billy Gilmour scored four apiece, while Suddie added three more.

The 1902–03 season marks the only year that all three of the Gilmour brothers starred together with the Silver Seven (who were named — so the story goes — when team executive and mine owner Bob Shillington presented each member of the seven-man starting lineup with a silver nugget to commemorate their Stanley Cup victory). Suddie and Billy were both there in 1903–04 when Ottawa retained its title, but only Billy was still playing in 1904–05 when Ottawa continued its winning ways.

Billy Gilmour played just a single game in 1905–06, and did not take part in either challenge series when Ottawa successfully defended the Cup that year against teams from Queen’s University and Smith’s Falls, Ontario. That makes it debatable as to whether he should be considered a Stanley Cup champion for that season or not. However, he did play a full season with Ottawa (by then, officially, known as the Senators) when they won the Stanley Cup again in 1908–09. He was the only member of the “Silver Seven” dynasty that was with the team by that season.

Hamilton Livingston “Billy” Gilmour was voted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1962, along with a host of other notables who had played before 1927, and inducted the following summer. Even so, he appears today as one of the more questionable of the Hall’s honoured members. Gilmour only ever played a handful of games at hockey’s highest level (he also played four seasons at McGill University while he was playing for the Silver Seven) and though he returned to play two more games for Ottawa during the 1915–16 season, he was basically done by the time he turned 24 right after the Cup-winning season of 1908–09.

Still, in his prime, Billy Gilmour was a talented and popular player on the top team in hockey, and was well-regarded by fans, sportswriters, his teammates, and his opponents. He was still a recognizable enough name in Ottawa and Montreal to warrant impressive obituaries in those cities when he passed away in March of 1959. He’d lived in Montreal for many years, but was buried in a family plot at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa. Just shy of his 74th birthday when he died, Billy was the longest-lived by far of the six Gilmour brothers, with the others all passing away by the age of 50.

Oldest brother Allan Gilmour, born in 1878, was the first to die when he was killed in action in World War I on June 3, 1916. (Billy Gilmour had enlisted himself just a few days prior to his brother’s death.) Allan Gilmour was 38 years old. The second-oldest brother, John Gilmour, died in 1925 when he was 44 years old. Youngest brother Ward, the fourth hockey brother, was 47 when he died in 1940. Suddie and David Gilmour passed away within a few months of each other in 1932. David was 50 when he died on September 27. Suddie was 48 when he passed away on February 14.

The death of Suddie Gilmour came nearly 30 years after his hockey heyday, but it seemed to revive a nostalgia for the days of the Silver Seven. Frank McGee had also died in the War back in 1916, and his brother John, who’d been a bit player during the 1903–04 season, died in a horse-riding accident back in 1904. This meant that Suddie’s funeral was the first in the city to truly mark the passing of one of Ottawa’s old Stanley Cup heroes. Among the many mourners who attended Suddie’s funeral two days later were former Silver Seven stars Harvey Pulford, Alf Smith, Harry Smith, Bouse Hutton, Art Moore, and Harry Westwick. Brother David was there as well, and many of the same mourners would turn out at his funeral soon enough.

Ironically, the one notable teammate who wasn’t there for Suddie Gilmour’s funeral was brother Billy, who was living in France. Apparently, Billy spent a lot of time in France after the end of World War I. He’d lost his wife back in 1925, when she had died at just 38 years old, and he and his daughter were living either in Paris, or the south of France in Bayonne or Saint-Jean-de Luz.

Billy Gilmour was in Ottawa for Dave’s funeral in September of 1932, but he continued to live in Paris until the Nazi’s marched into the city in June of 1940. I’ve come across a couple of articles mentioning a “narrow escape” to London before the occupation. If I’m ever able to learn anything more about it, you’ll be reading that story here one of these days!

You’d think something as simple as who was the first goalie in hockey history to wear a mask would be an easy question to answer. It’s not. In fact, it’s been surprisingly difficult to nail down.

Jacques Plante — though he popularized the concept for modern goalies — was certainly not the first to wear one. Clint Benedict (who I’ve argued in the past was a better goalie than Georges Vezina, the NHL’s goaltending trophy namesake) was probably the first NHL goaltender to wear a mask when he put one on for a few games late in the 1929–30 season to protect a frequently broken nose. My friend and colleague Stephen Smith, on his Puckstruck web site several years ago, wondered if George Hainsworth (another early era great) might have actually preceded Benedict by a year. He may have, although Stephen concludes that Hainsworth was more likely to have been wearing an elaborate bandage to protect his own broken nose.

For a while, the trendy answer to who was the first goalie to wear a mask was Elizabeth Graham, who is known to have worn a fencing mask while playing goal for the Queen’s University women’s hockey team in 1927. However, others (including another woman, Corinne Hardman of Montreal’s Western Ladies Hockey Club in 1916) had been known to wear masks before that.

I wrote about the early history of goalie masks several years ago, although Corinne Hardman was new on me thanks to another Stephen Smith story from last year. Stephen’s story also pushed back my earliest knowledge (which had previously been of Eddie Giroux wearing a baseball catcher’s mask in practice with the Toronto Marlboros in December of 1903 to protect a cut on his face) to 1899. But that’s where the story gets murky once again.

The Ottawa Citizen of January 23, 1899, picked up a story from the Kingston Times claiming that goalie Edgar Hiscock of the Frontenacs had recently broken his nose and would be forced to wear a baseball mask in his coming games.

IF Hiscock did wear a mask in a game, he would appear to be the first … or, at least, the earliest discovery made so far. However, nobody that I’m aware of has found an account of any subsequent Kingston games that actually confirms Hiscock wore one! His name certainly appears in several game summaries during the rest of the hockey season, but there’s no mention of wearing a mask. (Admittedly, I’ve only been able to check myself in online sources. Perhaps Kingston newspapers on microfilm have something, but it doesn’t appear that anyone has found anything yet.)

If Hiscock didn’t wear a mask in any of the games before the Kingston Frontenacs wrapped up their season by defeating Guelph 5–2 for the OHA Intermediate championship on March 6, 1899, then another name moves to the top of the “first” list. Another Intermediate champion (probably of the city of Calgary): Ev Marshall.

Marshall’s case is clearly confirmed by the Calgary Herald of March 17, 1899, which reported that he wore a baseball mask while playing goal for the local Press hockey club in the championship game against a team of picked stars from other Calgary clubs the night before.

Turns out that Ev Marshall (Everett Douglas Marshall to be exact) is a pretty interesting guy!

Marshall (all this information comes from his obituary in the Calgary Herald from August 25, 1949 after his death the night before) was born in Megantic County, Quebec, on December 19, 1875*. Although there seems to be some conflicting information as to when his father died, it appears to have been before Everett’s mother brought her only child with her to settle in the Calgary area in 1885, just one year after Calgary had been officially incorporated as a town.

[* Daniel Doyon found birth records showing that Everett Marshall was actually born three years earlier, on December 19, 1872, in Inverness, Quebec, which is part of Megantic County.]

By 1888, young Everett was one of three delivery boys working for the Calgary Herald. He soon apprenticed as a printer’s devil and later he and M.C. “Mike” Costello (a future mayor of Calgary) became the first printers in Calgary to operate a linotype machine, which eliminated the need for printers to lay out a newspaper by hand. After 1894, Ev took on editorial duties as well, and would briefly serve as the Herald’s editor. He later set up his own paper, The Market Examiner, in 1917, in partnership with the Herald’s first women’s and society page editor, Jean A. Grant, whom he married in 1928 – two years after he had established The Western Oil Examiner, Calgary’s first oil industry newspaper.

In addition to his newspaper interests, Ev Marshall was also one of the first secretaries of the Calgary Volunteer Fire Brigade, and in the late 1890s, he played hockey for both Calgary’s Press hockey club and the Brigade hockey team. At this point, Marshall was not a goalie but a defenceman. It appears that he was the captain of the both teams in 1898, but while playing for the Brigade team on January 28, 1898, Marshall took a stick in the face while trying to check an opponent and lost his left eye.

Despite the injury, Marshall continued to referee hockey games during the winter of 1899. (Insert your own referee joke here!) There’s no story as to why he chose to make his first appearance as a player as the goalie for the Press team on March 16, 1899, but clearly the reason he chose to wear a catcher’s mask must have been to protect his right eye (and his glass left eye too).

Everett D. Marshall played what appears to be the last game of his hockey career for a team called the Nonpareils against a C.P. Railway team on April 3, 1899. No mention of a mask in this one (although I suspect he wore one), but his work in goal was said to be “very fine.”

Turns out, the historic 85-save effort by Columbus goalie Joonas Korpisalo in the 5 overtime, 150 minutes, 27 seconds, 3-2 loss to Tampa Bay the other night wasn’t quite as historic as the NHL says.

Back on April 3–4, 1933, the Maple Leafs beat the Bruins 1-0 in a 6 OT, 164:46 OT game in which Toronto outshot Boston 114–93 … meaning Leafs goalie Lorne Chabot made 93 saves and the Bruins’ Tiny Thompson made 113.

That game was the longest in NHL history at the time, and still ranks second to the 1936 6 OT game in which the Detroit Red Wings beat the Montreal Maroons 1-0 in 176:30. Lorne Chabot was the losing goalie on that night, but faced “only” 67 shots. Winning goalie Normie Smith of Detroit stopped all 90 shots he faced (some newspapers show 91) … but that’s still not what Thompson did!

So, why doesn’t the NHL recognize Thompson’s record? I haven’t seen the game sheets for that one, but my guess is, the NHL wasn’t officially tracking shots that night. (Shots on goal didn’t become an official statistic until 1955-56.) Obviously, some one at Maple Leaf Gardens was tracking them, though. Still, from what I’ve seen of the old game sheets, I’d say that in the early games where the NHL (unofficially?) did track shots, it’s more likely they were counting shots AT goal than shots ON goal … meaning a defencemen might have blocked some, and that possibly even some of the shots went wide. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to know that for that historic Toronto–Boston game.

And as for Seth Jones’ record time on ice of 65:06 the other night? Well, I’d bet a lot of money that Eddie Shore was on the ice for a lot more time than that back on April 3–4 of 1933! As likely were Boston’s Lionel Hitchman, George Owen, and Alex Smith, and perhaps all four of Toronto’s King Clancy, Hap Day, Red Horner and Alex Levinsky as well. Some early NHL game sheets did track time … but I don’t think we’re ever going to know this one for certain.