(died 20 March 1969, in his 88th year), physician. Born in Montreal, of Irish parents. In 1906 he graduated in medicine from McGill. He is said in press reports to have practiced medicine in many countries, including China and India, to have been a world traveller, and to have spoken French, German, Spanish and Italian. He was in the British Navy, probably as a medical officer, in the First World War and is reported to have taken part in the Battle of Jutland. In 1945 Dr Monahan made his sole, though notable, intervention in the affairs of GC. Before then, if we ignore such minor, chance connections as the one noted in the entry for A. L. Dunlop, Dr Monahan had no connections with GC, and must have been wholly unknown there.

     At the federal election on 11 June 1945, Prime Minister Mackenzie King was defeated in his parliamentary seat in Saskatchewan. Accordingly, a new seat had to be found for the prime minister, and the MP for GC, Dr W.B. MacDiarmid, agreed to vacate the GC seat so that King could be elected in his stead. It was at first hoped by political organizers that King could be returned for GC without a contest. But this expectation proved in vain, for Dr Monahan chose to run against King as an independent candidate. King spoke in Alexandria at the Liberal nominating meeting, but otherwise he did not appear in the constituency during the campaign and made no campaign speeches. Dr Monahan campaigned vigorously, with the aid of a sound truck or sound car, and with his headquarters based just outside the GC borders, in the Rivière Beaudette area.

     He is described at this time as “tall, slight, angular, with a thatch of red-orange hair.” (Montreal Gazette, 6 Aug. 1945) The Montreal Gazette reporters, emphasizing his eccentric utterances, reported his campaign without sympathy or respect. In a long passage on Monahan in his history of Alexandria, Clarence Ostrom treats him with the most biting contempt. Ostrom insists, however, that while Monahan was sometimes jeered, stories appearing in the Canadian press about attempts to do him “physical harm” were false. At a time when Glengarrians were less tolerant of outsiders and of unfamiliar ideas and of people who “broke ranks” with established opinion than at any time before or after in their history, Dr Monahan had his work cut out for him as he campaigned for GC votes! Indeed, 30 years later a similar candidate would have attracted little attention in a more modernized GC. Ostrom himself, with another Alexandrian (Dugald McDonald) who had a reputation as a Mackenzie King lookalike, took part in a remarkable political stunt in which Monahan, approached by the pair in their car at one of his meetings, was tricked for a few minutes into believing that he had met Mackenzie King. Monahan commented “Hitler is not the only leader, I see, who has a double”–a comment based on the widespread belief in the last years of the war that Hitler and the other Nazi leaders often discharged their public appearances by way of doubles who closely resembled them rather than in their own persons. (Montreal Gazette, 4 Aug. 1945) During the by-election campaign, the Glengarry Liberal Association distributed to the households of the constituency a leaflet containing the text of a letter which Dr Monahan had written, from Temiskaming Hospital, Temiskaming, Que., on 7 May 1945 to Gen. McNaughton, the month before the general election, aggressively demanding to be appointed to the Senate so as to be in an official position to campaign for Mackenzie King’s Liberals.

     In the GC by-election, which took place on 6 Aug. 1945, Monahan got merely 325 votes to King’s 4552. Dr Monahan was married to the granddaughter of the celebrated Anna Leonowens, whose story is recounted in the movie Anna and the King of Siam. Dr Monahan also ran, unsuccessfully, as a candidate in Verdun-LaSalle in the 1949 federal election. In the 1960s Dr Monahan and his wife were living at Beaconsfield, Que. The impression that comes across from press reports about Dr Monahan in 1945 and afterwards is that he was a clever man who had been profoundly frustrated and disappointed in life well before he met the Glengarrians.

Montreal Gazette 25 July-6 Aug. 1945 (GC campaign), 14 June 1949 (Verdun-LaSalle election), 24 March 1969 (obituary) * Glengarry News for period of GC campaign * Standard Freeholder 26 July-8 Aug. 1945, 2 Jan. 1946 (his career, GC campaign, Clarence Ostrom’s denial of a news report that Dr Monahan’s car was stoned in Alexandria, Dr Monahan on foreign affairs) * Ostrom 245 * MacGillivray & Ross 541 * Old McGill annual, 1906 (his class picture) * leaflet: present author’s collection * Joe Banks, “The Doctor Who Campaigned to Give Alexandria Air Conditioning,” GN 5 April 1989 * Anna Leonowens: sources include Dictionary of Canadian Biography, XIV, 332-335 * Dr and Mrs Monahan conduct legal proceedings re film Anna and the King of Siam, GN 10 Jan. 1947, SFH 11 Jan. 1947 * for a remarkable Irish Nationalist whose career and mind offer interesting parallels to those of Monahan, see the life of Arthur Alfred Lynch, DNB Supplement 1931-1940 and ODict