How The Canadiens Got Their Name

In researching the Canadiens' famous name, I went back through the records to 1908 and a meeting held, not in Montreal, but in Renfrew, Ontario, a small town in the Ottawa Valley. It seems a Renfrew team, a power in the Upper Ottawa Valley League, a circuit once described as “a fence corner league,” wanted a crack at the Stanley Cup. At the meeting it was decided to import star players, offering jobs and other enticements until a Cup challenge from the creamery town could not be ignored. Renfrew’s bold hockey ambitions would lead team executive Ambrose O’Brien to another meeting in Montreal one year later. The 1909 meeting would bring together two hockey men who concocted a marvellous idea: create a powerful team of French-speaking hockey players.

By 1909 Renfrew iced a professional team playing in the Federal League against clubs from Cornwall, Smiths Falls, and Ottawa. Goalie Bert Lindsay (father of Ted Lindsay), an import who ran a successful poolroom in town, helped Renfrew win the Federal League championship.

The following season a new league was introduced in Montreal - organizers tabbed it “the greatest league ever formed” - and Renfrew wanted in. Three teams from Montreal were reported to be charter members of the new Canadian Hockey Association: the Nationals, Wanderers, and Shamrocks. Representatives from Quebec and Ottawa, holders of the 1909 Stanley Cup, were invited to join the circuit.

Ambrose O’Brien of Renfrew, then 24, journeyed to Montreal and urged the CHA to consider an application from Renfrew. “Let’s make it a six ream circuit,” he pleaded. “I’ll gladly pay the 30 dollars initiation fee you’re charging new teams.” O’Brien won the support of the Wanderers and the Shamrocks but the Ottawa executives scoffed at his application and persuaded their colleagues to reject the Renfrew bid.

O’Brien left the meeting room quite dejected. But he was not nearly as devastated as Jimmy Gardner, the principal owner of the Wanderers. Gardner emerged from the same meeting at the Windsor Hotel enraged. His team, thought to be a shoo-in for admittance, had just been denied a franchise in the new league. The reason? The other club owners decided the Wanderers’ home rink - the Jubilee Arena - was too small so they showed Gardner and his associates the door.

Gardner stomped around the hotel lobby, cursing the men who'd sabotaged his plans. Finally he sat in a chair next to the equally disconsolate O'Brien.

“Ambrose, let’s show those arrogant pups a thing or two,” he said. “I’ve got the Wanderers, you’ve got a good team in Renfrew. And I know you own a couple of teams in Haileybury and Cobalt. Let’s start a new league of our own. But we’ll need a second team here in Montreal. Why not organize a team of French-speaking players? We’ll call it Les Canadiens. Who knows? In time such a team could become more popular than any other Montreal clubs.” And with those words, he laid the foundation for what would become the world’s winningest hockey team.

Some historians say the idea for a team called Les Canadiens originated, not with Gardner or O’Brien, but with James Strachan, another part-owner of the Wanderers. But O’Brien, who would put up the money to finance the Montreal franchise, insisted until his death that it was Gardner’s idea and Gardner who proposed the name Les Canadiens.

In his book O’Brien, author Scott Young poses the following question: If the owners of the Wanderers were so sure that a French-Canadian team would be a hit, why did they present it so grandly and free of charge to a 24-year-old from Renfrew? There is a lurking possibility, suggests Young, that it was one of those frequent instances where the progenitors of a great idea prefer to let someone else risk the money to find out if the idea is really so surefire after all.

At any rate, the name Les Canadiens appears to have first surfaced during the conversation between Gardner and O’Brien in the lobby of the Windsor Hotel on November 25, 1909.

A week later, on December 3, 1909, after papers were drawn up, the new club became a reality. Financed by wealthy Irish Canadians from Renfrew, and by T. C. Hare of Cobalt, Les Canadiens promptly hired Jack Laviolette as manager and first employee. The French-Canadian team was about to take its first tentative skate strides into the world of professional hockey. Les Canadiens booked the Jubilee Rink for home games, despite its seating capacity of only 2,700.

Ambrose O’Brien then hired Joe Cattarinich, who, like Laviolette, was a player of note (a goaltender), to help manage Les Canadiens’ affairs. He signed Newsy Lalonde and Didier Pitre, both flashy goal scorers, to the Canadiens’ sparse roster. The public was told that the franchise for the new team would be transferred to a number of Montreal sportsmen or investors as soon as such a group could be put together.

The season opened on January 5, 1910. Les Canadiens got off to a fast start, defeating Cobalt 7-6 in overtime in the opening game. Alas, it was one of only two games they would win all season.

During their first season, the Club de Hockey Canadien wore blue jerseys with a narrow white band at the shoulder and chest and a large white “C” in front. Their pants were white and their stockings red.

The CHA, meanwhile, floundered from the beginning and most of the games attracted only a few hundred fans. After a mere two weeks of play, in mid-January, team owners swallowed their pride and pleaded with the NHA clubs for admittance, suggesting total amalgamation as their salvation. But Ambrose O’Brien and James Gardner remembered how they were slighted by rival-league operators a mere two months earlier. The NHA operators huddled and then agreed to admit only two franchises to their fold: Ottawa and the Montreal Shamrocks. When these clubs abandoned the CHA, the league folded.

O’Brien generously offered the defunct Nationals the opportunity of taking over Les Canadiens and was amazed when the answer was no. It ranks as one of the greatest missed opportunities in the history of sport.

A Montreal team emerged from that initial season covered with glory - but it wasn’t Les Canadiens. Jimmy Gardner’s Wanderers captured the league title (11 wins, one defeat) and went on to win the Stanley Cup. They also skated off with a glistening new trophy - the O’Brien Cup - made of silver from the O’Brien mines in Cobalt and valued at $6,000, far more than the $50 bowl Lord Stanley had donated to hockey before the turn of the century.