William Collis Meredith - Montreal

Montreal

From the late 1830s Meredith, "a careful, shrewd lawyer", was senior partner of the firm Meredith & Bethune (a relation through the explorer Alexander Henry the elder) and subsequently Meredith, Bethune & Dunkin. Their offices were situated at 33 Little St. James Street and the firm was described in the 1840s as the most influential in Montreal, having brought together the largest legal business by any one firm in the Province of Quebec.

In 1844, he was created a Queen's Counsel (Q.C.), declining the office of Solicitor General, and subsequently that of Attorney-General, which he declined again for the second time in 1847 during the Draper administration. Meredith disliked politics. In the same year Chief Justice Valliere de Saint-Real offered him the position of Dean of Law at McGill University, which he also turned down. His grandson, William Campbell James Meredith of Montreal, would hold the position over one hundred years later.

Meredith was involved in many ways for the betterment of the city of Montreal. He was one of the founding members and a director of the High School of Montreal, which was established with his help in 1843 to supersede the grammar school. He was counsel to the board of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning and on the committee to save McGill University in the early 1840s. He conducted a good deal of business for the university, and it was with his influence that his younger brother, Edmund Allen Meredith, who had recently arrived from Ireland, became the sixth principal of McGill from 1846 to 1853. In 1848, he was a founding director and trustee of the Montreal Mining Company along with Peter McGill, George Moffatt, Sir George Simpson, Sir Allan Napier MacNab and James Ferrier.

1844 was also the year that Meredith commissioned John Wells (architect), one of the best known English architects of the time (whose work included the head office of the Bank of Montreal on St. James Street, and the Sainte Anne market, which no longer exists) to build him a new house on what was then la Côte-à-Baron, now part of Sherbrooke Street at the corner of Clark Street. The house neighboured Belmont Hall, the Molson family home, and was built on a plot surrounded by fields, Elm and Maple trees.

In 1849, a judicial appointment took Meredith to Quebec City. He rented his Montreal house to several prominent citizens including Thomas E. Blackwell, President of the Grand Trunk Railway, before selling it to fellow barrister Alexander Molson (1830–1897), a grandson of John Molson. The house still stands today, known as ‘Notman House’, after the celebrated Montreal photographer, William Notman, who bought it from Molson in 1876. After Notman’s death it was bought by Sir George Alexander Drummond for the Anglican sisters of the Society of Saint Margaret, to serve as a residence for terminally ill women. Today the house serves as a home for Montreal's web and technology community.