Built 1914, still standing. Frederick Beardmore House, Pine Avenue. Built in 1914, afterwards purchased by Sir Henry Worth Thornton. Still standing. J.W. McConnell House. Built in 1914, for Colonel Jeffrey Hale Burland, afterwards purchased by McConnell. One of the very few which remains a private house. World War I The men associated with the Beaver Club, the predecessors of the Square Milers, had almost all served in the Canadian Militia and on the outbreak of the First World War the next generation did not hesitate to take up arms. At his own expense, Hamilton Gault raised Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, the last privately raised regiment in the British Empire. He was injured three times leading his regiment into battle, and even after losing a leg he still returned to the Front. Lord Strathcona's Horse, raised by that Canadian peer for the Boer War, was once again returned to action. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George claimed to his biographer that had the war continued into 1919, he would have sought to replace Field Marshal Douglas Haig with the Square Mile's General Sir Arthur Currie. The Ladies of the Square Mile raised money for the troops and some like Lady Meredith, the Gaults and the Baumgartens opened their houses to injured soldiers returning from Europe. The personal services in England of the Canadian Red Cross were under the charge of Lady Julia Drummond who saw that each Canadian soldier returned to an English hospital received a visit offering sympathy and supplying any basic needs. When Martha Allan trained as a nurse and bought an ambulance which she drove in France, her mother was inspired to set up a hospital in England for Canadian soldiers. Economically, Montreal would emerge from the war nearly unscathed, due in a large part to the steady hand of the president of the Bank of Montreal, Sir Vincent Meredith. In 1919, fifty families were said to have controlled a third of Canada's invested wealth, and the great majority of them were based in Montreal. The End of an Era The Square Mile had reached its peak in the Edwardian era, both in spirit and substance. What followed was a steady decline as aggressive American-style corporations took control of the family businesses whose origins laid with the Scots-Quebecers and the Beaver Club. 'New money' swept into Montreal from the United States, Western Canada and, such as