Gentlemen Engineers: The Working Lives of Frank and Walter Shanly

John D. Blackwell is the reference librarian and collections coordinator
of the Goldfarb Library at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

The story of Walter (1817–1899) and Francis (1820–1882) Shanly’s
engineering careers in 19th-century Canada and the United States is not
unknown. Frank N. Walker’s Daylight through the Mountain (1957) and
several fine Dictionary of Canadian Biography articles on various
members of the Shanly family have already appeared. However, Gentlemen
Engineers explores these two remarkable lives in greater depth and
within the context of the latest historical scholarship.

The Shanly brothers grew up in a modest Anglo-Irish gentry family that
emigrated to London, Upper Canada, in 1836. There they tried
unsuccessfully to re-establish their landed traditions. It soon became
clear to all the sons that professions were the avenue to success in
British North America. Walter and Frank took up civil engineering in
“an industrializing pioneer society, not far removed from frontier
life.” They worked on numerous projects, but their greatest
accomplishments were the engineering of the Grand Trunk Railway (Canada)
and the Hoosac Tunnel (North Adams, Massachusetts).

Richard White deftly leads the reader through a labyrinthine story of
herculean projects, family tragedies and tensions, financial fiascoes,
and political machinations. The Shanly brothers worked closely until the
late 1860s and then went their separate ways. Frank always lived from
boom to bust and died at 61, leaving his young family in enormous debt.
Walter, ever the dutiful bachelor uncle, continued to shore up his
spendthrift relatives and died a bitter old man.

The final brief chapter of this book is in many ways the most
thought-provoking. It traces the intricate, seemingly uneasy,
relationship between the concept of gentleman and the engineering
profession in 19th-century Canada. As White notes, “gentlemanly values
suffused ... [the Shanlys’] working lives from start to finish.” In
the final paragraphs, White seems to raise more questions than he
answers. More research is needed to provide a fuller understanding of
the engineering profession in Victorian Canada.

White’s eloquent and perceptive study is marred by at least three
faux pas. A caption accompanying a photograph of James Shanly, Sr.,
claims that it was taken in Ireland “probably early 1830s”; in fact,
the first Irish portrait studio did not appear until ca. 1841. The CCIP
Data erroneously give Walter’s year of birth as 1819, rather than
1817. It is also regrettable that the University of Toronto Press
mistakenly left eight of the illustration pages blank.