Once Upon A Time: Cyclone Taylor, the Tara tornado – a local hockey hero

Guest author, Sylvia Hasbury looks back at our own Stanley Cup champion in article that first appeared in the May, 2025 Bruce Bulletin, the newsletter of the Bruce County Genealogical Society.

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Born in Tara on June 24, 1884, Frederick Wellington “Cyclone” Taylor, as a five-year-old, used to spend winter evenings watching the local barber, Jack Riggs, practicing his speed skating at the town pond. Riggs was known in the community for his speed skating.

Intrigued, little Fred Taylor borrowed his sister Harriet’s bob skates without her permission and tottered onto the pond ice. “I just had to get out there and try it,” he explained in Eric Zweig’s book “Star Power, The Legend and Lore of Cyclone Taylor”. “So, one day I stole my sister’s skates and ran out with them … I got the dickens for it afterward, but it was worth it.”

Jack Riggs had a soft spot for this determined boy and eventually took him out on the river ice and taught him how to skate fast as well as buying him his own bob skates when he was seven. Double-bladed skates, known as bob skates and sometimes cheese cutters, have been used since the early 1900s to make it easier for young children to learn to skate.

The Taylors moved to Listowel and as the youngest and smallest player on the Listowel Mintos, Fred was a target and suffered some hard hits and heavy checks. To protect himself he asked his mother to sew felt padding into his long johns as well as tucking the hard material from women’s corsets into his hockey pants.

As to how Fred Taylor came by his nickname, “Cyclone”, while playing in 1909 with the

Ottawa Senators he scored five goals in his first game, and a sportswriter wrote, “He may have been known as the whirlwind of the International League but he certainly is the cyclone of the Eastern Canada Senior Hockey League.”

Part of the deal for signing with the Senators (1907-1909) was a position in the Immigration Branch of the federal Department of the Interior. Taylor was intrigued by the offer—the ability to have a permanent career was important. A position in the civil service promised job security after his hockey career ended. He thus took up a position as a junior clerk for $35 a month.

He signed with the Renfrew Millionaires in 1910 at a salary of $5,250 for a 12-game season—the highest salary ever paid a hockey player at that time. In his youth Cyclone also played soccer, baseball and lacrosse, playing on championship teams throughout his life in Listowel, Ottawa and Vancouver.

Cyclone was considered one of the most prolific scorers of his era, winning several scoring championships, in addition to winning two Stanley Cups—one in 1909 with Ottawa and the second in 1915 with the Vancouver Millionaires. He hesitated to join the Vancouver team because he didn’t want to give up his job with the Immigration Department in Ottawa. The premier of British Columbia, Sir Richard McBride, was a hockey fan and arranged to move Cyclone’s job to Vancouver, along with a promotion to senior immigration inspector.

Cyclone’s duties were to oversee traffic entering the port of Vancouver, boarding ships and checking passenger manifests. One of the ships that entered the harbour on May 23, 1914 was the Japanese steamship “Komagata Maru”, carrying 376 migrants, mostly Sikhs from Punjab, India.

Cyclone Taylor was the first immigration officer to meet the ship. In a controversial decision, the Immigration Department invoked that era’s exclusionary immigration policy and rejected 352 migrants, confining them to the ship for two months and forcing them to return to India. There, police saw them as political agitators. In a riot at the docks 20 passengers were shot and many others imprisoned.

Reflecting on the incident later in life, Taylor said that “it was a terrible affair, and nobody was proud of it.” In 2014 Canada Post issued a stamp marking the 100th anniversary of the arrival of “Komagata Maru”.

The other complication was in Ottawa. As Eric Zweig wrote, “Cyclone had fallen in love with a woman named Thirza Cook who worked at the Immigration Department, but her mother did not approve. Cyclone believed her mother did not approve of him because he was just a small-town boy from a poor family who made a living as a hockey player! But Thirza was a hockey fan. Determined to marry Thirza, he promised himself he would save $10,000 before he proposed to her.”

They were married at her parents Ottawa home on March 19, 1914. In Vancouver the couple raised a family of five children. John, the second oldest, also played hockey and won two Canadian university championships while attending the University of Toronto. Offered a contract by the Maple Leafs of the NHL, he turned it down on the advice of his father. John worked in immigration law before entering politics in 1957, representing the riding of Vancouver-Burrard until his defeat in 1962.

In 1957 Cyclone’s oldest son Fred Jr. opened a chain of sporting-goods stores called Cyclone Taylor Sports after his father. Joan, Taylor’s youngest daughter, died in 1976 from heart problems caused by her figure skating career. Thirza died in March 1963, from heart issues.

A year before his retirement from the Immigration Department where he had risen to the position of Commissioner of Immigration for British Columbia and the Yukon, Cyclone Taylor was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for outstanding service as an immigration officer in two wars. After breaking his hip in 1978, Cyclone’s health didn’t bounce back and he died in his sleep in Vancouver on June 9, 1979.

At Cyclone’s death the Ottawa Citizen wrote that “former hockey great Newsy Lalonde said few players today can skate as fast forward as Cyclone did backwards”.

In 1947 Cyclone Taylor was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. The Listowel Cyclones are named after him, and a historic plaque in his honour stands in Memorial Park, Tara.

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By Sylvia Hasbury
Bruce County Genealogical Society