Henry Mill Pellatt, 1859-1939

Born in 1859, Henry Pellatt was educated at the Model School of Upper Canada in Toronto. He attended Upper Canada College for three months, and then quit to join his father's stockbroker's firm Pellatt and Osler, as a junior accounting clerk. He was known as a athlete at school, and in the years 1878-79 won many running races in the one mile category, setting a record which stood for seventy-five years until broken by Roger Bannister at the Empire Games.

In 1882 he became a full member of the Toronto Stock Exchange, and married his first wife Mary Dodgson. In 1883 his father dissolved his partnership with Osler, and the two formed the firm Pellatt and Pellatt. Pellatt was Vice-President and a Board member of Manufacturer's Life Insurance Co. Ltd., which was investigated in 1906 for fraud, and Pellatt was afterwards limited in his insurance business transactions by law. In 1883 he was involved in establishing the Toronto Electric Light Company, which obtained contracts for the manufacture of street lights. This company later joined with the Canadian General Electric Co. to form the Electric Development Company, which spent five years constructing an electrical generating plant at Niagara Falls. When the Hydro-electric Power Commission of Ontario was formed in 1906 to make hydro-electric power a public utility, the Electric Development Company was put into financial difficulty and eventually closed in 1922. Pellatt was also involved in Brazilian power and transportation developments, through Brascan Ltd., the beet root sugar industry, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, the mining industry at Cobalt, and he also set up the Kitsumkallum Timber Company. By 1913, he was one of the 23 Canadian capitalists dealing on the stock market who were said to control the economy of the country. By this time he also held 23 directorships, two of which were financial, six dealt with transportation, 11 were with industrial interests, and two were with insurance companies.

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