NEALE, FREDERICK EDWARD (1867-1931)

NEALE, FREDERICK EDWARD, shipping broker and consular agent; b. Bilstone, Leicestershire, England, 14 Jan 1867, s/o Thomas Neale and Frances Elizabeth Dickinson; m. 1890, Sarah Mignowitz Blair, d/o George Adam Blair and Sarah Mignowitz Williston; d. Toronto, Jul 1931.

After attending the Tudor House School in Nottingham, England, Frederick E. Neale became a shipping broker. The date of his entry into Canada is recorded as 1888, but for several years after that date he was employed by a trading firm in Pensacola, Florida. He married a Miramichi woman in 1890, and in 1892 he opened an office and established his residence in Chatham. At the time, he was with the firm of Neale, Harrison & Co., timber brokers in Liverpool, England.

In the 1890s some lumber producers on the Miramichi were also shippers or made their own sales overseas. The small sawmill operators did not do so, however, and neither did a few of the operators of larger mills, such as William M. Sullivan at Red Bank and William A. Hickson at Newcastle. Neale bought lumber from such manufacturers and resold and shipped it in the name of his firm. In 1900 he left for Liverpool in April to make arrangements for shipping some fifty million board feet during that summer season.

The census taker recorded Neale's annual income as $600 in 1901, but this was far from factual. He was employing two domestics that year, one of whom may have been the "first class house servant" for which his wife advertised in the Miramichi Advance in 1897. By 1902 he was the largest lumber shipper on the North Shore of New Brunswick, with a fine home in Chatham and a fashionable summer residence at Burnt Church. In 1911, in addition to his shipping activities, he was filling the office of vice-president of the William Richards Lumber Co. From 1905 until he was terminated at the outbreak of World War I he was the German consular agent for the four northeastern counties of the province. In 1918 he was named Danish vice-consul for the same district. In 1926 he was honored by the Danish government by being inducted as a knight of the Order of St Olaf.

Neale played an active part in local affairs and sat for a number of years on the Chatham Town Council. In 1904 he was president of the reorganized Chatham Lawn Tennis Club. In 1919-20 he was president of the Miramichi Natural History Association. He was a member of the Anglican church, and he and his wife, "Minnie" Blair, sang in the choir of St Mary's Chapel in Chatham. They moved to Toronto in 1926. Their home, "Bilstone," subsequently housed the Chatham RCAF Wing. They had a son and a daughter. Their son, Blair Neale, a talented pianist, died as a young man, not long after the family left the Miramichi.