W. E. Bishop

W.E. Bishop, manager of the Hamilton Steamboat Company, has risen to his present responsible position by his natural merits as an indefatigable and clever business man of unusually good judgment, and he is an excellent director of men under him. His company owns three fine vessels, the Modjeska, Macassa and Mazeppa, the first two on the run between Hamilton and Toronto, and the Mazeppa plying from Hamilton to the Beach and Burlington.

Mr. Bishop was born in 1868 in the city of Brantford, Ont., and was educated in the common and high schools of that place, learning rapidly. He started in life for himself at the age of fourteen years, his first employment being with Messrs. A. Harris & Co., the prominent manufacturers of agricultural implements, with whom he remained for some time intending to learn the business. Not having a strong liking for it, however, he gave it up and went into the freight office of the Grand Trunk railway at Toronto in 1881, occupying a position there for three years, after which he went to Topeka, Kans., and secured lucrative employment in the auditor's department of the Topeka & Santa Fe railway. Returning to Canada, he entered the employ of the Hamilton Steamboat Company, as a clerk under Mr. Fergus Armstrong, who was at that time, in 1889, Toronto manager, and he remained in the Toronto office for three years, at the end of that time accepting a position with W.A. Geddes, wharfinger and vessel owner, of Toronto, as purser on the propeller Ocean, sailing between Montreal and the Upper Lakes in the passenger and freight business. That position Mr. Bishop continued to hold for four years, when he relinquished it to take charge of the Toronto end of the Hamilton Steamboat Company's business, Mr. Armstrong having been promoted to the position of general manager for the company at Hamilton. In the year 1896 Mr. Armstrong resigned, and Mr. Bishop was given the general managership with headquarters at Hamilton, in which incumbency he is still retained, as it has always been the policy of the Hamilton Steamboat Company to keep a good man.

Mr. Bishop was married in 1889 to Miss Margaret Sin, and three children have been born to them, two sons and one daughter, all bright children who promise to be a credit to their parents. Mr. Bishop's party politics savor of Conservatism, but he is not a bitter Tory, always voting for the good of his country, and in his life he has as often voted Liberal as Conservative. Religiously he is a Presbyterian.

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Volume I

This version of Volume II is based, with permission, on the work of the great volunteers at the Marine Captains Biographies site. To them goes the credit for reorganizing the content into some coherent order. The biographies in the original volume are in essentially random order.

Some of the transcription work was also done by Brendon Baillod, who maintains an excellent guide to Great Lakes Shipwreck Research.