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British Columbia History
British Columbia Historical Federation
Vol. 27, No. 4
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$4.00 Volume 27, No. 4 Fall 1994 ISSN 1195-8294 Journal of the B.C. Historical Federation cn, you i eaiftifm dcii MEMBER SOCIETIES Member Societies and their Secretaries are responsible for seeing that the correct address for their society is up to date. Please send any change to both the Treasurer and the Editor at the addresses inside the back cover. The Annual Return as at October 31 should include telephone numbers for contact. MEMBERS' DUES for the current year were paid by the following Societies: Alberni District Historical Society Arrow Lakes Historical Society Atlin Historical Society Boundary Historical Society Burnaby Historical Society Chemainus Valley Historical Society Cowichan Historical Society District 69 Historical Society East Kootenay Historical Association Gulf Islands Branch, BCHF Koksilah School Historical Society Kootenay Lake Historical Society Kootenay Museum & Historical Society Lantzville Historical Society Nanaimo Historical Society North Shore Historical Society North Shuswap Historical Society Princeton & District Museum & Archives Qualicum Beach Historical & Museum Society Salt Spring Island Historical Society Sidney & North Saanich Historical Society Silvery Slocan Historical Society Surrey Historical Society Trail Historical Society Vancouver Historical Society Victoria Historical Society AFFILIATED GROUPS Fort Steele Heritage Park Kamloops Museum Association Gavel Historical Society Nanaimo Centennial Museum Society Okanagan Historical Society Box 284, Port Alberni, B.C. V9Y 7M7 Box 584, Nakusp, B.C. VOB 1R0 Box 111, Atlin, B.C. VOW 1A0 Box 580, Grand Forks, B.C. VOH 1H0 6501 Deer Lake Avenue, Burnaby, B.C. V5G 3T6 Box 172, Chemainus, B.C. VOR 1K0 P.O. Box 1014, Duncan, B.C. V9L3Y2 Box 1452, Parksville, B.C. V9P 2H4 P.O. Box 74, Cranbrook, B.C. V1C 4H6 c/o F. Dodwell, RR #1 S25-C21, Galiano Island, B.C. VON 1 PO 5203 Trans Canada Highway, Koksilah, B.C. VOR 2C0 Box 537, Kaslo, B.C. VOG 1M0 402 Anderson Street, Nelson, B.C. V1L 3Y3 c/o Box 274, Lantzville, B.C. VOR 2H0 P.O. Box 933, Station A, Nanaimo, B.C. V9R 5N2 c/o 333 Chesterfield Avenue, North Vancouver, B.C. V7M 3G9 Box 22, Celista, B.C. VOE 1L0 Box 687, Princeton, B.C. VOX 1W0 444 Qualicum Road, Qualicum Beach, B.C. V9K 1B2 Box 1264, Ganges, B.C. VOS 1E0 P.O. Box 2404, Sidney, B.C. V8L 3Y3 Box 301, New Denver, B.C. VOG 1S0 8811 - 152nd Street, Surrey, B.C. V3R 4E5 P.O. Box 405, Trail, B.C. V1R 4L7 P.O. Box 3071, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X6 P.O. Box 43035, Victoria North, Victoria, B.C. V8X 3G2 Fort Steele, B.C. VOB 1 NO 207 Seymour Street, Kamloops, B.C. V2C 2E7 4474 Rupert Street, Vancouver, B.C. V5R 2J2 100 Cameron Road, Nanaimo, B.C. V9R 2X1 Box 313, Vernon, B.C. V1T6M3 SUBSCRIPTIONS / BACK ISSUES Published winter, spring, summer and fall by British Columbia Historical Federation P.O. Box 5254, Station B Victoria, B.C. V8R 6N4 A Charitable Society recognized under the Income Tax Act. Institutional subscriptions $16 per year Individual (non-members) $12 per year Members of Member Societies $9 per year For addresses outside Canada, add $5 per year Back issues of the British Columbia Historical News are available in microform from Micromedia Limited, 20 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario M5C 2N8, phone (416) 362-5211, fax (416) 362-6161, toll free 1-800-387-2689. This publication is indexed in the Canadian Index published by Micromedia. Indexed in the Canadian Periodical Index. Publications Mail Registration Number 4447. Financially assisted by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, Recreation and Culture through the British Columbia Heritage Trust Fund and British Columbia Lotteries. niuish CbhraaMi Historical News Journal of the B.C. Historical Federation Volume 27, No. 4 EDITORIAL October was declared "Women's History Month" by the Federal Government in 1991. The choices of topics for this issue acknowledge the theme by telling of diverse contributions of women to the life in our province. We thank the current president of the B.C. Women's Institute for a truly "thumbnail sketch" of that organization. Local Wis were helpful to all women and young brides, especially those freshly immigrated from other countries. My own mother was shown the art of canning fruit in glass sealers with glass lids, rubber rings and wire clamps. The Kaslo WI then requested that she share some of her skills with fellow members; Mother taught glove making. We thank those who contributed items about local branches; some of these detailed accounts may be printed in future issues. NEW & NOTES Was/is there an anniversary, official opening or special hertitage event in your community? We urge you to tell of this in a few words and send to the editor. If you are proud of a local achievement, let us tell others about it. We may have room for a picture (as on page 35 in this issue). Don't be bashful. Either write an article on your community history ... or write a paragraph about a recent development, especially if it is now a tourist attraction. Naomi Miller COVER CREDI" The lady on our cover is taken from a collector's item — an original sheet music cover sent by Thelma Lower as an illustration for her article "Music of the Titanic." The original, carefully framed, hangs in the hall at the Lower home. The hat on the lady would excite any fashion historian, and the words of Oh, You Beautiful Doll will swim through the minds of many who danced to it, or heard their parents humming it. FaU 1994 CONTENTS FEATURES Piebiter Creek: A Personal Reminiscence of Delina C. Noel 2 by H. Barry Cotton The War Work of Women in Rural B.C 5 by Gwen Szychter Sunday School Vans and Their Drivers 10 by Naomi Miller The Marine Building Revisited 15 by Robin Ward The Canadian Museum of Flight and Transportation 15 by Jack Meadows Helen Gregory MacGill: First Woman Judge in B.C 16 by Dolly Sinclair Kennedy Adelaide Bailey: Exemplary Teacher 1857-1949 19 by Carolyn Cross The Sutton Lumber & Trading Co. Token 22 by D.M. Stewart The Stolen Church - Windermere 24 by Naomi Miller A CWAC in Victoria: 1942-45 25 by Phylis Bowman Pioneer Postmistress 28 by Kelsey Mcleod B.C. Women's Institute: A Brief History 31 by Estelle Lefurgy Music ofthe Titanic 32 by Thelma Reid Lower David Douglas: Botanist and Explorer 34 by Win Shilvock NEWS and NOTES 36 BOOKSHELF 37 Robin Ward's Heritage West Coast Review by Mary Rawson No Ordinary Journey: John Rae, Arctic Explorer 1813-1893 37 Review by Maurice Hodgson Tangled Webs of History 38 Review by Duncan Stacey Wilderness Wandering on Vancouver Island Review by Kelsey Mcleod Raincoast Chronicles 15 Review by Kelsey McLeod The Unknown Mountain / Behind the Unknown Mountain Review by Elizabeth Walker A Century of Sailing 1892-1992 Review by Michael F.H. Halleran 39 39 40 40 Manuscripts and correspondence to the editor are to be sent to P.O. Box 105, Wasa, B.C. VOB 2K0. Correspondence regarding subscriptions is to be directed to the Subscription Secretary (see inside back cover). Piebiter Creek: a personal reminiscene ofDelina C. Noel by H. Barry Cotton When I first met Mrs. Noel, she was acknowl- edged as the grand old lady of the Bridge River valley, a position she earned through having prospected and hunted throughout the area since the year 1900, when she first came to the valley with her husband Arthur Noel. She would certainly not have appreciated use of the adjective "old." She was the daughter of French-Canadian parents in Lillooet, who sent her back to a Quebec convent for her schooling, and she never lost the slight accent she had by then acquired. She and her husband were the original stakers of the Lome Mine, later to become part of Bralorne, which at one time was the second largest producing gold mine in the Commonwealth (including South Arica). In 1958 she was awarded B.C.'s Centennial Medal for fifty-eight years of service to mining, a well-deserved honour. Franc Joubin's informative article about Mrs. Noel, "Bridge River Pioneer" in the Western Miner & Oil Review} was also published in that Centennial year; and in I960 this amazing woman - as he righdy decribes her - passed away after a lengthy illness. My own association with her was in 1951 and 1952, when she engaged our firm to survey some mineral claims in the property Mrs. Noel kneels beside ber first grizzly, 1906. which she was developing at Piebiter Creek. There is no doubt that she benefited substantially when Bralorne was financed (she would drive a pretty hard bargain, and I am sure she got a fair- sized "piece" of the action), yet she chose to continue living the hard life. She told my wife that she had had five miscarriages, due to the strenuous life she led. In summer she dressed in a pair of breeches, a mackinaw jacket and an old battered hat that had seen better days, and roved around her mineral claims (at this time the Chalco Group at Piebiter Creek), collecting samples and prospecting. In the winter she retired to the West End of Vancouver, where she played bridge for relaxation and wore the same clothes that most ladies of her vintage would wear - nylons, a dress and a hat transfixed with hatpins - and carried a handbag. Howev r, when she walked down the street, it was obvious that this was no ordinary little old lady; she strode out like a Highland gillie. She told us a story about herself which proved the point. Some years before (she said) she had been referred to a doctor at the Mayo Clinic. Having been examined by this doctor, she was then passed on to another, who then referred her to yet another doctor; at which time she asked the last doctor what was afoot. One examination should have been quite enough, in her opinion. The doctor admitted that the second and third times had been unnecessary, but none of the doctors had seen such physical development in a woman before, and they wanted their colleagues to see it also. There could have been a lot of truth in this story. One day in July 1951 we set out, a crew of three, to survey the first four mineral claims of the Chalco Group at Piebiter Creek. An intriguing name such as this begs for an explanation. I am told on good authority2 that the creek was called after one "Piebiter Smith," an early prospector with protruding teeth and a fondness for pies; and what could be more logical? I was fortunate in having, as my main assistant, a man whose hobby was Photos courtesy of Franc R. Joubin B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 mountaineering. Rough, steep terrain, far from slowing him down, actually stimulated him; as did the prospect of new vistas, as he was also a very competent amateur photographer. I have to admit that, in 1983, when revisiting Piebiter Creek, I found it hard to believe that anyone would willingly run lines in such country; yet, in 1951 we did, and I do not remember that we found the work unduly arduous. To drive to the Bridge River valley in 1952 it was necessary to ship the car by rail from Lillooet to Shalalth, to which end the PGE Railway Company provided a flat-car service twice per week. So we drove to Lillooet, put our car on the flat- car to Shalalth, then drove over Mission Mountain and on to Bralorne, where Mrs. Noel awaited us. This took a day. Next day we drove through Pioneer, up to Piebiter Creek, a primitive road but drive-able by an Austin A40. From the end of the road it was a two-mile backpack to the claims, and we got there with all our gear by the end of the second day. "There" was a group of log cabins and tent platforms. We stayed in the tents; Mrs. Noel was in the main cabin, where she cooked our meals. I got the impression during that two-week sojourn that meat - to Mrs. Noel - meant steak. No other meat was considered edible. Not that we complained; we had never eaten so well in our lives. When supplies became short, she took her "Trapper Nelson" packboard, walked out to Bralorne, and came back with more "meat." The claims were at an elevation of 5500 feet plus, that is to say, all the way up to about 6500 feet, and they provided my first introduction to "slide-alder." This is descriptive of a small alder tree, ten to fifteen feet high, which grows at high elevations on steep slopes. The stem, up to four inches in diameter, grows horizontally outwards for about two feet, then straightens up and grows vertically. It is usually found on old rock slides, and sometimes stretches for half a mile. It makes for tough going. But the problems of contending with slide-alder were negligible compared with sorting out the mineral claims. In those days, by definition, a mineral claim could not include land which was already lawfully held for mining purposes. The precept still holds good obviously. Now this perfecdy logical and innocuous statement is fraught with hidden complexity. For instance, where, at the time of staking a claim, part of the land is already held by a prior claim in good standing, such ground must be excluded Tbe unique Lome fireplace, with Mrs. Noel seated. from the claim under consideration; even if the prior claim were to be abandoned a month afterwards, the claim under consideration would never be entitled to such ground, which (when later abandoned) becomes open ground, and must be restaked. Although all surveyors are well aware of this ramification in the otherwise straightforward definition of a mineral claim, at the time of which I am writing there were even some Mining Recorders who were not wise to it, and certainly a great number of free miners. Mrs. Noel, when staking the Chalco Group of mineral claims, started out in an area where there were no conflicting claims. It was all "open" ground. She had an assistant, one W.E. Rutledge, whom she employed to help her stake. She could stake eight claims only in her own name, but could acquire others by purchase, so she asked her assistant to stake eight more, which she could then obtain by bill-of-sale for a nominal sum - one dollar. This was standard practice amongst prospectors, and was a recognized method of acquiring mineral claims. The assistant would agree at the start of the operation to hand over the claims which he had staked, although only bound to do so by a gendeman's agreement. Well, Mr. Rudedge turned out to be no gentleman; because after Mrs. Noel had staked her claims and he had staked his (they were merged with each other and considerably overlapped) and the claims had been recorded, Mr. Rudedge decided that he would rather keep his claims than turn them over to her. In Mrs. Noel's interesting career, several persons had tried unsuccessfully to get the better of her, and Rutledge must have been naive indeed to suppose that he could get away with this deal. She could do nothing legally, of course - the claims he had staked were officially his. But next year she staked more mineral claims around his holdings on the outside. Then she waited him out; she would not buy him out, as he had hoped. She simply held on, keeping her claims in good standing. Five years later Rudedge passed away and his claims lapsed. So Mrs. Noel restaked over his, lapsed claims and again over her own (some of which were in good standing, others never having been so). Then she decided that maybe she had better have a survey, to find out just what ground she really had covered; this was where I came into the picture. There were at least twenty-four claims to sort out. I could not ever have found a better introduction into the practical workings of the Mineral Act. It was the worst "dog's breakfast" that one could possibly foresee. Adding to the confusion was the fact that, since it was an area of many snowslides, a good many of the staking posts had disappeared, and I had to obtain affidavits to establish the positions of such missing posts. Fortunately, Mrs. Noel had a good memory. After more than a week, we were able to define legally and properly the ground to which she was entitled. Predictably, we found a large "hole" of open ground in the middle, and staked it on her behalf as a fraction. The Sub-Mining Recorder in Goldbridge at the time was Will Haylmore, also a well-known personality in the history of the Bridge River. At the time of recording this fraction, he had long hair down to his shoulders like Buffalo Bill; and we had a short discus- B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 sion on fractional mineral claims - which might have gone on longer as the whiskey botde on the table was still half full. But regretfully we were on the way to Shalalth to catch the "flat-car" to Lillooet. There is a good picture of Haylmore in the publication Bridge River Gold? now unfortunately out of print. It shows part of the circular rock wall outside his cabin, with one of several wooden models of Lewis guns, which were painted white and set in the wall facing outwards. His grave is still on the property, and is being tended, but the rest of the land, which was held as a placer mine, reverted to the Crown on his death, and the cabin, with its pictures and regimental photographs of the British army of bygone days, was later pulled down. There is another excellent photograph in the same publication. It is of Mrs. D.C. Noel as a young girl with a trophy - one of the many grizzly bears that fell to her gun. The following year, 1952, saw us back again in Mrs. Noel's country. Now that her Chalco Group claims had been sorted out, Mrs. Noel had decided to stake and survey some more. This time we had a different arrangement. My wife, who otherwise would have sat in the office in North Vancouver, twiddling her metaphorical thumbs, thought that she would like to be part of the crew. This was an excellent idea, as we needed both a cook and (since later on we were to do some work for the federal government) a bookkeeper; my wife was able to fulfill both functions. We arrived at Piebiter Creek with all our baggage about a quarter of a mile from Mrs. Noel's cabin beside the creek. This time there were no problems of tide to worry about, our claims were simply projected up the valley, and we spent the next two weeks working steadily at them. My wife had a cook stove set up in the open air (covered with sheet metal strips, after we were rained on). We had two tents, and a good camp. Mrs. Noel would often drop by for a girl-to-girl chat with my wife. Close to the camp there was a big rockslide. Mrs. Noel had on occasion remarked that this was where she wanted to put in a tunnel. Although I thought I knew what miners could accomplish, I must say that the prospect of tunnelling through a rockslide with out machinery seemed to me at the least impracticable. But this lady knew otherwise. She went in to Bralorne one day, and came back with Oscar. Oscar was a Swede, and I believe he was approaching eighty years of age. He was quite shaky, and when he walked his knees had a way of knocking against each other. He slept in a tent in Mrs. Noel's camp; and while we were in the hills surveying, Oscar started work. He used only handtools - crowbars, hand-drills and dynamite - and he cut and squared his own timbers for the adit. Napoleon once said that while a difficult problem can be solved right away, the impossible may take a little longer - or words to that effect. In three days, Oscar, working entirely on his own, had a timbered portal ten feet long through the slide and was drilling into the rock- face. We, non-miners that we were, stood and marvelled at it. If Oscar could do this at seventy-nine years old, what sort of a man must he have been in his prime? But next day he was gone, which Mrs. Noel had expected. She gave him another three days, then went to Bralorne and brought him back, completely incapable and incoherent, and when we had helped her to put him to bed, she left one-third of a bottle of rum under his pillow - a very understanding lady. Our work went well, and the only other incident that I remember of note, apart from all of us being beaten by Mrs. Noel at crib, was arriving on the line one morning to find that a porcupine had all but eaten one of the wooden transit legs. We improvised. After Piebiter Creek, we proceeded to Litde Gun Lake, after having met with the Bralorne Mine manager, Don Matheson. Our next job was to survey some lots fronting on the lake, for the company. We stayed in one of the cottages close to the Little Gun Lake Lodge. After the heat and mosquitoes of Piebiter, this place was a paradise. We swam every day and fished enthusiastically, if inexpertly. Mrs. Noel had advised us that Don Matheson was "a very nice man" and that "he would do anything for me." While talking to Don, the conversation inevitably got around to her. "Well, of course I'd do anything for her," he said. "I find that it pays. If she asked me to stand on my head here in the office, I'd do it. The fact is that if she wants something, you might as well realize at the start that she will not rest until she gets it; so in order to avoid a lot of hassle, I make sure that she gets it right away!" Which statement does a lot to sum up Mrs. Noel's character. She was a lady of great charm, and strong willpower; but whereas all the articles written about her emphasize the latter attribute, not too much was said about the former. In fact she was a very charming and stalwart lady. Her log house in Bralorne was quite unique. In it was a stone fireplace containing pieces of ore from all of the currently producing mines in B.C., and hanging on the walls were skins of several of the grizzly bears which she had shot. It would be most satisfying to be able to report that such a house had been preserved as a Heritage Site. But this was not to be. The building was not protected and was later vandalized. I was informed recently that in the early 1980s it had been sold, removed and re-erected as a dwelling on a site near Lillooet. ********** H. Barry Cotton is a retired surveyor now living on Suit Spring Island. REFERENCES 1. "Bridge River Pioneer" by Franc Joubin. The Western Miner & Oil Review. August 1958. 2. 7007 D.C. Place Names, G.P.V. and Helen Akrigg. Discovery Press, 1973. 3. Bridge River Gold, Emma de Hullu. Published by the Bridge River Valley Centennial Committee, 1967. B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 The War Work of Women in Rural British Columbia: 1914 -1919 by Gwen Szychter The popular image of "Rosie the Riveter," in factory dress, is a familiar one from the 1940s. But the First World War conjures up no such image of mythic proportions. Our mental picture of the women of World War I is one of sock knitters and bandage rollers. Many have perceived women in Western Canada, and British Columbia in particular, as having contributed only to this limited extent to the winning ofthe war. In the past, historians have dwelt on the male adventure in Europe, cataloguing the physical losses and extolling the political achievement of serious nationhood. There has been litde interest in the activities of women, except for examinations of their struggle for suffrage and prohibition. However, as in other aspects of Canadian history where the participation of women is only recently being slowly unearthed, there is more to the story. Historians have described the enthusiasm with which men responded to the call for volunteers. A sense of national urgency unified the people and elicited not only volunteers for the armed forces, but also voluntary contributions of time and money by the citizens at large. The First World War was a conflict which required the mobilization, in one fashion or another, of the entire civilian population. Since Canada was unprepared for war and lacked the necessary infrastructure and institutions, ordinary citizens had to fill the gap, thereby saving the Dominion Government enormous amounts of money in the provision of services. The wars themselves and Canada's commitment to each were substantially different. World War I was a conflict that, from the beginning, consumed men and material in great numbers. The manpower committed to the Second World War was as large, but came significandy later in the war and the number of casualties was dramatically lower. During the course of World War 1, some wartime industrial contracts were awarded to British Columbia, but whatever factory Rest and relaxationfor returned soldiers was tbe purpose of this Soldiers' Camp at Boundary Bay in South Delta. It was supplied and sustained largely by tbe women of Delta, wbo collected food for tbe soldiers from tbe local residents. Under tbe auspices of tbe Red Cross, it operated for tbe summers of 1918 and 1919 on property belonging to Mrs. Kirkland Photograph courtesy of British Columbia Archives and Records Service, No. HP 73414 jobs might have become available to women accrued to urban women. In a small rural community where there was no factory work for women, the emphasis was on volunteer work.1 The municipality of Delta, located in the southwest corner ofthe lower mainland of British Columbia, had a population of about 4,000 in 1918.2 Its gravitational centre, the village of Ladner, serviced a farming population in the surrounding district. The ethnicity of the population is vitally important: in the 1911 census, people of British stock constituted the majority, namely sixty per cent of the population.3 From the pages of contemporary newspapers, in particular, the Richmond, Point Grey, Delta and Fraser Valley Weekly Gazette4, the image emerges of women doing much more than knitting and sewing their way through the war years. Neither of the women's organizations commonly associated with war work in the Great War, that is, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and the Women's In- stitute, was present in Ladner. Instead, two entirely new groups came into being, the Delta Women's Patriotic Society and the Comfort Club, to coordinate women's unpaid volunteer labour. In both of these organizations, there is evident the maternal feminism prevalent at the time, so that the women's activities were focused deliberately on the goal of relieving suffering, rather than helping to supply weapons for warfare.5 The Comfort Club never disclosed membership figures, but the annual reports of the Delta Women's Patriotic Society did: in 1917 there were 122 members on the roll, but the average attendance at meetings was only fifteen.6 The Delta Women's Patriotic Society (DWPS) was organized as the working arm of the male-run Delta Patriotic Fund. This latter group was formed for the purpose of raising money soon after war was declared in 1914. The ambitious goal of the national organization was to make up for soldiers who had left behind dependants the difference between the income they would have received from paid labour and the allotment paid to soldiers.7 It must be remembered that in these years there was no safety net in the form of social welfare or family allowance. Families in need had only their relatives or church-run charities to rely on in the event B.C. Historical News - FaU 1994 of illness or financial hardship. The women's branch was set up in September 1914 for the purpose of aiding war relief. Women's work was considered to be not only sewing, knitting and cooking, which they would do in great measure, but also raising money to buy materials and to send to various agencies and funds associated with the war, The society's agenda included bazaars, whist drives, dances, socials and teas. The women catered public dinners, for example, the Delta Board of Trade annual dinner, and received some of the proceeds. Their dances were profitable ventures, the one held on New Year's Eve, 1915, taking in $195 at the door. Whist drives brought in a lot of money; one in the spring of 1916 netted $104.95, while another in January 1917 added about $90 to the treasury. Individual women held teas in their homes, turning over the receipts to die DWPS. Some also donated items of handiwork to be raffled, such as a teacloth or a set of lace collar and cuffs. Tag days were held to raise funds for specific purposes. One was held in August 1915 to raise money for surgical equipment for the Fifth General Hospital, Canadian Expeditionary Force. In conjunction with a dance held for the same purpose, this tag day netted about $236. Flag days were a variation on the theme, one being held that same summer, in which young women sold flags at a horse racing meet, earning $169-57. The organization also engaged in appeals requiring a contribution of labour, such as the vegetable-growing campaign, which was first undertaken in 1917. The members of the committee set up for this purpose canvassed all the households in each neighbourhood to set aside a plot of ground on which they would grow vegetables to feed soldiers in military hospitals. Sock campaigns were frequent and were reported as receiving "a hearty response." In this latter venture, every person in the municipality was requested to donate "one pair, either hand-knitted, machine- knitted or the price of one pair (fifty cents) of good woollen socks." Canvassing was extremely thorough with every residence in the municipality receiving a visit from a volunteer. A second women's group, the Comfort Club, appeared in November 1915, as an offshoot of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) branch in Ladner. One woman, Mrs. Leila Hutcherson, appears to have been the driving force behind this organization, making her home available for meetings and fund-raising events, and sending reports on its activities to the newspaper. Mrs. Hutcherson was elected the first president of the DWPS, but she had spent the winter of 1914-15 in California with her mother, as was her custom.8 In her absence, the vice-president took over, and when a new slate of officers was elected in Tbis is Leila Hutcberson, wife of Ernest Hutcberson, wbo played a formative role both In tbe Delta Women's Patriotic Society and tbe Comfort Club. Sbe was tbe daughter of early settlers In Delta, Letitia and John Kirkland. Tbts portrait dates from about tbe time of World War I. Photograph courtesy of Mary Smillie mid-1915, Mrs. Hutcherson was not reelected. Another woman, Mrs. Lilla McKee, rose to prominence in the DWPS following this change, and eventually became the prime social "mover" in the community for the duration of the war, during the period of the Spanish influenza epidemic, and far into the inter-war years. It is apparent that some reading between the lines is necessary to arrive at a plausible scenario which may explain this second group's later appearance on the scene. The Comfort Club concentrated on supplying what were referred to as "comforts" to local men overseas. The group sent out parcels, especially at Christmas time, and the contents tended to be socks, mitts, scarves, sweets and cakes, and letters to these soldiers. This work was considered no less important, for the pages of the newspaper sing the praises of the Comfort Club, which "ever since its inauguration has done splendid work in keeping our lads in khaki supplied with reading matter, cheering magazines, socks and other things they love to get from home ... "It was also a project carried out on a substantial scale: in one month alone, March 1917, the club shipped 110 parcels to the men in the trenches. In the course of one year, that is, November 1916 to October 1917, the women ofthe Comfort Club shipped to the front 1,018 parcels, whose contents included 607 pairs of hand-knitted socks, 1500 newspapers, and over a thousand magazines. In those twelve months, these women also raised $1,275 through their various fund-raising efforts. One of its members, the secretary, maintained a correspondence with these soldiers, and the letters received from the men overseas were published regularly in the newspaper, for the benefit of the community. During this same one-year period, 300 letters from the front were answered. A comfort shower seemed to be the preferred method for acquiring donation of goods. As well as money, people brought socks, magazines, candy, chocolate and gum to be sent to the soldiers. Another favoured event of the Comfort Club for raising money was the holding of a market day, at which the members sold eggs, butter, bread, poultry, bottled fruit, candies, fresh fruits and vegetables, and roots and grains, all of which they had donated. Often, a rummage sale, where second-hand clothing was sold, was held in conjunction with the market day. Individual women also opened their homes to the public for teas, as was the case with the DWPS, in addition to the larger teas held in public places, in which the entire membership of the organization participated. A typical floral tea at which flowers, bulbs, roots and seeds were sold, along with home cooking, could net the organization about $45. The work of the Comfort Club might appear to overlap that of the DWPS, a criticism raised in a letter to the editor of The Weekly Gazette. In reality, the work of the two groups had one fundamental difference. The Comfort Club interacted directly with soldiers on an individual basis, while the DWPS supplied their needs through intermediaries such as the Red Cross or the Patriotic Guild. In addition, the former group dealt with men overseas, while the latter concerned itself primarily with returned veterans. Early in the war effort, the DWPS had a comfort committee which provided each departing soldier B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 Margaret Tamboline, Uke some other women in tbe district, pitched in to do farm work. She is shown here cutting oats with a team of horses on tbe farm of ber parents, James and Rose Frew, on Westbam Island in 1917. Margaret was tbe eldest of two girls in tbe family and bad married WiUiam Tamboline in December 1915. Photograph courtesy of Margaret Tamboline, niece of the subject. with a comfort bag containing articles such as pyjamas, socks, mitts, shoelaces, toothbmsh and toothpaste, tobacco, and a prayer book or Bible. This, however, was a one-time connection with die individual soldier, and there is no evidence that this activity continued after the appearance of the Comfort Club. In fact, the committee was disbanded at the 1917 annual meeting ofthe group. A report published in June 1918 detailed the number of different items that the Delta Women's Patriotic Society had shipped to the Central Red Cross Depot, Vancouver; the Women's Patriotic Guild, Vancouver; and to the Military Annex at the Vancouver General Hospital, since the group's inception in September 1914, a perod of less than four years. The amount of money raised is substantial, amounting to $7,141.79, but the list of items is fascinating: 3421 pairs hand-knitted socks, 392 suits of pyjamas, 200 day shirts, 200 night shirts, 75 French caps, 100 nightingales, 80 cholera belts, 25 pairs knee caps, 54 scarfs [sic], 100 pairs slippers, 75 comfort bags, 500 pillow cases, 12 large pillows, 36 sheets, 600 handkerchiefs, 500 knitted wash clothes [sic], 250 women and children's gar ments, large consignment of surgical supplies (including compresses, slings, bed boots, etc.) 355 sacks of potatoes and mixed vegetables, 38 sacks apples, 525 quarts preserved fruit, 88 dozen eggs, 25 pounds butter, 1 dresser [sic] hog, 6 roasts of beef, 40 Christmas cakes, 100 mince pies, 9 quarts mince meat, 25 Christmas puddings, 100 tins canned milk, 1 large case of candy, nuts, etc., 1 large case of Children's toys and games ... By the time the DWPS disbanded in October 1919, these numbers had increased to 4,281 pairs of socks, 420 suits of pyjamas, and 250 day shirts, and the total amount of money collected had grown to $9,136.33. The above list of items draws attention to another interest of the DWPS: supporting the wives and children of men who had volunteered for service. The women in the society made new clothes for these dependants, as well as collected used clothing for them. There is no indication that food was also distributed to these families, but certainly an extra effort was made at Christmas time to have something special to give the children, such as toys and games. When required, financial support for these women and children came from the Delta Patriotic Fund, one of the main reasons for the latter's establishment. Both the Comfort Club and the DWPS relied on the community at large for contributions of both money and goods. Various groups donated money raised through the efforts of their own mem- Hazelgrove, tbe borne of tbe Hutcbersons, was tbe scene of many of tbe activities of tbe Comfort dub. Weekly meetings, as well as more public functions, such as garden parties and "comfort showers," took place here. Located near Ladner, east of tbe Cbibtktban Slougb, Hazelgrove was a convenient meeting place for women front either tbe village or tbe farms. Photograph courtesy of Mary Smillie B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 bers. For example, the Delta Patriotic Choir gave the net receipts from their concerts to the DWPS. The dramatic club turned over the proceeds from their theatrical productions to both groups on an alternating basis. Owners of businesses pitched in. One year, women from the Comfort Club sold subscriptions to The Weekly Gazette, from which their organization received a share of the money. In 1915, when the DWPS had had the field all to itself, it had sold subscriptions, realizing $9325 for its efforts. The owners of the Ladner Hotel sponsored a dance in June 1915; the proceeds, amounting to $68, went to the DWPS. In addition to the activities of these two groups, there appeared to be an unending parade of other community events intended to raise funds, which also required women's participation, in varying degrees. Each church had a women's organization which made demands on women to raise money or materials. When the Ladies' Aid of the Methodist Church met for its annual thanks-offering, each woman was asked to bring "a ready packed box of soldier's comforts to be sent to some boy at the front for Christmas." The Anglican minister and his wife opened the manse to an afternoon musicale, after which a collection was taken for the DWPS, raising over $30. Women's community organizations such as the WCTU, which was a strong presence in Delta, also organized activities relative to the war effort. At WCTU meetings, regular collections were taken "for the military ward supported by them in the New Westminster Hospital." Also, collections were taken among WCTU members for the Cocoa Fund for soldiers at the front, an attempt to offer them a non-alcoholic alternative. In addition, the WCTU made fortnighdy donations of fruit, vegetables and clothing to the Relief and Employment Bureau of Vancouver. Schools also held various events, the proceeds from which were channelled to war relief. For instance, a Christmas concert given by the students of Westham Island school in 1916 earned $76 for the Belgian Relief Fund. The children at Gulfside school also held a concert and party in December of the same year and collected $17 for the same cause. Undoubtedly, such events necessitated the involvement of mothers on behalf of their children, at least in the areas of baking and costume-making. It is unlikely that any woman was able to avoid these public displays of patriotism, since the demand to be visibly participating was unrelenting. Whether this took the form of donating fancy- work or baked goods or other items, or working at a table, or attending and making some token purchase, if only an apron or a chance on a raffle, involvement to some degree was expected. How much societal pressure was brought to bear on women to produce homemade articles for the men overseas and for sale to raise money is difficult to determine. Certainly women who produced were publicly recognized. For instance, one issue of The Weekly Gazette in June 1918 listed the names of ten women who had knitted one hundred or more pairs of socks for the boys at the front since war broke out. Since this was a relatively small community, the lack of privacy meant that people, especially women, could be prevailed upon fairly successfully to take part, by giving of their time, their labour, and their money. Furthermore, people were being urged almost constandy to save items for the community-wide collection of materials. In the summer of 1915, the call went out for second-hand razors to be collected and sent to England, where they were to be repaired and then sent to soldiers at the front. "A couple of dozen razors" were reported to have been handed in at the collection depot, in response to this request. Residents were requested to save paper for the war effort, and the first attempt in 1917 yielded two-and-one-half tons, for which $48 was received by the DWPS. Donations of white cotton and old linen, from which to make surgical supplies, such as dressings, slings and mouth wipes, were solicited from the public. Tea and coffee tins were always in demand by the Comfort Club, as they made the best containers in which to ship soldiers' comforts overseas. Later, the soldiers' camp at Boundary Bay, when in need of reading material for the convalescents, sent out a plea for people to save magazines and paperback novels. This camp was a community project of a different sort, set up late in the war. In the summer of 1918 and 1919, the Camp for Returned Soldiers was operated at Boundary Bay, a resort area south of Ladner, where many local families had summer cottages. This was initially a project ofthe women of Delta, although they do not seem to have come specifically from any one of the groups already in existence. The facility was located on property offered for the purpose by a Ladner family, but the actual operation was carried out by these women, except for the provision of some supplies by the Red Cross, presumably medical supplies. Each week a different district in the municipality was canvassed by a resident for contributions to the food supply for the soldiers. Even transportation from Vancouver to Boundary Bay was supplied by Delta citizens. Some funding also came from the Delta Patriotic Fund, which collected money by subscriptions from Delta residents. However, volunteer work did not constitute the whole of women's war experience. Women have often been treated as a "reserve army" of labour, called upon when shortages occur and then expected to return to their traditional sphere when the crisis has abated.9 In this locale, single women, at least, took on paid employment of a sort traditionally done by men. When her older brother enlisted in 1918, Ethel Barry took over the driving of the delivery truck for her father's grocery business and did "general man's work" around the store. Another young woman, Carrie Eyton, whose father was in the salmon cannery business, drove the horse-drawn milk wagon and delivered botded milk for Mr. Robinson, a local dairyman. Women stepped into other kinds of men's jobs as well, particularly in the banks. In late 1917, Hazel Hutcherson was being congratulated on her promotion to teller at the Ladner branch of the Royal Bank of Canada. This was considered a landmark achievement, which the newspaper made a point of emphasizing by noting that she had been promoted "entirely upon her own merit." In this same category might be included the women who served overseas as army nurses. One woman from this district, Leona Whitworth, was among them. Following her departure in July 1915, her letters appeared periodically in the weekly newspaper, from a number of locations, one being Egypt. B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 8 Women also pitched in when circumstances demanded their participation in other areas. In the fall of 1917, a group of single women from Ladner, under the watchful eye of a chaperone, travelled to Vernon to pick fruit at the Coldstream Ranch. They were part of a larger project organized by the B.C. Consumers League to make up for the shortfall in available labour for the harvesting season in the Okanagan. For six weeks, these young women endured extremes of temperature, picked fruit, and carried heavy boxes and ladders, manual labour that was much harder than anything they had previously experienced. Young women from the village of Ladner, as well as from Vancouver, also helped out with the picking of small fruit, namely strawberries and raspberries, on the farms of Delta, when labour was hard to find later during the war. The shortage of labour on the farms, especially for the fall harvest, was an ongoing problem throughout the war years. A number of solutions were attempted. Chinese workers were employed, but they were resented by many residents. District school boys were recruited into an organization called Soldiers of the Soil, but their youth and inexperience limited their usefulness. Newspapers tell us nothing about whether farmers' wives did their share of field work, but family photographs and oral histories reveal that a few did help out, with pitching hay into stacks or driving the horse that operated the hay fork into the mow. Milking was another kind of farm work that a few women could and did perform when hired labour was scarce. Elder daughters in some families also were conscripted into farm work, for the duration. What, if any, were the long-term effects of women's brief entry into public life during this period? Changes did result, and while they may appear minimal to observers in the late twentieth century, in this rural community they were meaningful nonetheless. Many of the women who had been active in the war effort returned to traditional women's organizations with a lower public profile, although some joined the auxiliary to the Great War Veterans' Association, which set up a short-lived local branch. Those who had been actively involved in the Delta Women's Patriotic Society tended to re-surface in the branch of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire that was formed in Ladner in 1922. The women of the Comfort Club appear to have returned to active duty in the WCTU, where their energies were channelled into combatting the prohibition question, and then the establishment of local liquor stores. Women were in the forefront of the drive to erect memorials to the sacrifices of the Great War. In Ladner this took the form of membership in the Delta Memorial Park Association, whose goal was the creation of a park containing not only playground equipment for the health and enjoyment of children, but also a cenotaph naming the war dead. More importantly, women began to appear in a small way in public offices traditionally occupied by men. In 1920, women directors were elected to the board ofthe Delta Agricultural Society for the first time, and that innovation continued into the future. In 1924, the name of a woman was put forward from several quarters to stand for a vacancy on the school board. Although Mrs. Handford Lewis declined to allow her name to stand, the suggestion would have been unthinkable in the community prior to the war.10 The years of the Great War constituted a rare instance in the history of the women of this rural region when considerable public attention was focused on their activities. While it is true that women's activities supported a male adventure overseas, their work was given an unusual prominence in newspapers of the time, so that other concerns, suffrage, for example, were also viewed as legitimate. When scholars have studied the First World War in the past, the tendency has been to explore the activities of men. It is time that historians took seriously into account the volunteer work of women during the war, not least of all for the vast sums of money which the Dominion Government was able to save through the use of this unpaid labour force. Women achieved more than just knitting thousands of socks and rolling miles of bandages, although they did those things as well. More importantly, they proved themselves capable of organizing, planning, raising money, allocating it judiciously among a number of causes, and making decisions. They could, in short, perform competendy in public life. For a patriarchal rural society that previously had perceived a woman as possessing an identity only in relation to a man, and where birth announcements had appeared naming only the father of the newborn, that was progress. ********** Gwen Szycbter is a local historian in Ladner, whose thesis on tbe work of farm women was completed in 1992. She is presently working on a history of Ladner and Delta in tbe early twentieth century, along with several projects in local women's history. FOOTNOTES This article appeared earlier as a paper presented by the writer at the Qualicum History Conference, January 1991. lt also forms the basis of a lecture/ slide presentation given by the writer at the Delta Museum and Archives, October 1993 1. There are exceptions. See Ceta Ramkhalawansingh, "Women during the Great War," in Women at Work 1850-1930, ed. Janice Acton, Penny Goldsmith and Bonnie Shepard (Toronto: Canadian Women's Educational Press, 1974). Also Carol J. Dennison, "They Also Served: The British Columbia Women's Institute in Two World VKtrs," in Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on tbe History of Women s Work in British Columbia, ed. Barbara K. Latham and Roberta J. Pazdro (Victoria: Camosun College, 1984). 2. Henderson's Greater Vancouver City Directory for 1913 Embracing the area of Greater Vancouver, covering the City Proper, North Vancouver, Point Grey, South Vancouver, New Westminster and the Fraser Valley District (Vancouver: Henderson Directory Co., 1913), pp. 1764, 1767, 1770-1773, 1778. 3. 1911 Census. 4. Except where noted otherwise, the source for this article has been The Weekly Gazette. This newspaper appeared under a number of heads during the war years: The Point Grey Gazette; Richmond, Delta and Point Grey Weekly Gazette; Richmond, Point Grey, Delta and Fraser Valley Weekly Gazette and Home News; Weekly Gazette and Home News. After the local newspaper in Ladner ceased to publish in November 1914, The Weekly Gazette filled the void until another local weekly appeared in March 1922. 5. Dennison, p. 212. 6. It is not known whether this number also included the Young Girls' Auxiliary to the Delta Women's Patriotic Society, which appeared to have about twenty to twenty-four members. 7. Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada 1896-1921: A Nation Transformed (.Toronto. McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1974), pp. 222-3. 8. The British Columbian, 21 November 1914. 9. Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Canada Inc., 1988), p.141. 10. The Weekly Optimist, 14 February 1924. B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 Sunday School Vans and Their Drivers by Naomi Miller "I feel sorry for the many children who live on isolated farms never receiving any religious instruction. We should send teams of trained women out in gypsy caravans to begin Sunday Schools, train teachers, and in winter provide Sunday School By Post. The vans could be parked on a farm, then moved by horses volunteered by the hosts." The speaker was a Canadian lady, Miss Alymer Bosanquet of Kenaston, Saskatchewan. The listener was Miss Eva Hasell of Carlisle, England. The two had been classmates at St. Christopher's College, London, taking training in modern teaching techniques in programs of religious education in 1913-14. Eva Hasell rejected the use of horses as "too slow," besides being difficult to obtain during seeding or harvesting time. She proposed a motor van similar to those she had known as a volunteer ambulance driver during World War I. She had also driven her family's car, and because the chauffeur had enlisted, had of necessity learned to make running repairs. The first Sunday School van was built in Winnipeg to her specifications on a Ford Model T chassis, paid for out of her own pocket. Miss Hasell and her companion, Winnifred Ticehurst, "broke in" the vehicle on the 400-mile trip to Regina. What is now a six-hour drive on the paved Trans Canada Highway took six days over rutted, pot-holed prairie trails. On May 21, 1920, Eva Hasell and Winnifred Ticehurst left Regina on a trip that took them 3,000 miles in three months over unbelievable prairie roads in the Diocese of Qu'Appelle. They started Sunday Schools, taught in day schools and farmyards, visited pioneer homes, and enrolled members in Sunday School By Post. They survived every hazard that the prairies could create that summer: dust storms, cloudbursts, road washouts, cyclones, mosquitoes ... and amorous bachelors. The van, christened Pioneer, was presented to the Rev. Canon W.F. Busbe, rector of St Paul's Cburcb, Kamloops, chats with two vanners and a parishioner. This could be tbe commissioning of tbe van for work in the summer of 1940. Photo courtesy the Archives of the Diocese of Cariboo Qu'Appelle Diocese to be used by another team of workers during subsequent summers. The caravan idea created enthusiasm among frontier Bishops eager to supplement their meagre ministry to scattered English and Anglican settlers pouring into the West. It was hoped that eventually Miss Hasell would arrange for at least one Sunday School van in every western diocese. Eva Hasell did not disappoint them. A new van with a trained team followed: to Calgary in 1922, Edmonton in 1923, Cariboo 1924, Brandon 1925, Kootenay 1926, Caledonia 1928, Athabasca 1929, and an extra van for Qu'Appelle. Miss Hasell insisted on pioneering with each new van in each locale. She and her sister Dorothy worked in the Calgary Diocese in southern Alberta. She tried the roads in the Kootenays and was known to ask her partner to walk when an especially tricky piece of road confronted them. "There's no sense in two people being killed," she would remark. (She had more than one accident in her fifty-two years as a van volunteer.) She also learned where it was more suitable to park and walk to a destination. Each visit was recorded, with landmarks noted for future seekers of the welcoming family, names, ages of children, names of teachers at local one-roomed schools, and general information such as "fierce dog but friendly people." Lonely farm wives often poured their hearts out to the vanners, who were the first women they had seen in many months. The British settlers sometimes requested that Miss Hasell convey a message back to someone in England. The commission was always done and a letter sent back to the setder. The Sunday School van meant a great deal more than a stodgy Bible lesson. Each van was cleaned inside and out about the end of October, then it was stored for the winter. The team of vanners might stay in a community to teach an active Sunday School group, plus sending, receiving and marking B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 10 Two Sunday School John A. Lloyd in tbe papers of the Sunday School By Post pupils. Miss Hasell went on a speaking tour of eastern Canada and parts of the U.S.A. and back to England for a brief Christmas visit, followed by fund-raising efforts. Always she was alert for "well trained gentlewomen" (preferably with independent means of support) who might sign up as summer workers on the vans. This was a time when many British ladies were resigned to spinsterhood because World War I had decimated the population of eligible males. Miss Hasell sought workers with a Canadian connection first, but the majority were English. Following World War II, fewer and fewer English women came over for an eighteen-month stint (two summers on the road in a van with winter in an isolated mission outpost). Later vanners were either students or teachers from Canada or the U.S., some of whom had been visited by a van when children. Beginning in 1916, a teacher working in Vernon, Miss Iris Sayle, became partner to Miss Hasell. The two were still a team in 1972. Records of two of their summers highlight circumstances faced and problems solved. The new van ordered for the rugged Caledonia Diocese did not arrive when promised so Miss Hasell and Miss Sayle walked the sixty- mile pack trail into the Peace River block. For two months, carrying knapsacks, accepting rides and borrowing horses, they penetrated an area of 10,000 square miles where there was one Anglican church and no clergyman. They managed to cover fifteen to twenty miles a day, sleeping in whatever shelter was offered. When at last the van was delivered, they covered another section of the diocese. The report for that summer states: "912 miles walked, 1,608 by van, and 1,633 by other means." They talked to families of all nationalities and reli- -k ***HFt':-**fr^r ** ± . Wis • -, *- ♦HrJ 'd*' <&s4^ 1 '' Is "~-X* *r. ■: *-- x . %* ?*• * ,:- V : .* -Th ■■ *&* ! i -*&' .. Jit..-1 vanners in trouble near Clinton, RC Tbe photo was taken by Rev. 1930s. Photo courtesy the Archives, Diocese of Cariboo in Kamloops went to see the Dean and his wife. (She had been a van driver in Athabasca Diocese.) We were very pleased to see them and their children.'' They arrived at Whitehorse, Yukon, on June 15 and were welcomed by Bishop Greenwood and his wife. The Diocese of Yukon is five times the size of England yet he has only four clergy, one of whom is stationed at Old Crow in the Arc- gious inclination and were almost always welcomed. The vanners watched the development of the Alaska Highway. Miss Hasell and Miss Sayle took the "eleventh visit to the Alaska Highway" in 1959- There are many incidents in the report of that summer which are worthy of sharing with our readers. "Iris and I lectured all across Canada appealing for workers, especially drivers. At last all thirty-one vans were in the field. I inspected the caravans to see that all repairs had been done satisfactorily. I also visited the Bishops and clergy about itineraries. The sects seem to be growing and new training colleges are being built by them to train their missionaries who go out in large numbers all across the west. Why the Anglican Church cannot start a Training College for women in the west I cannot understand. In despair a few Anglicans are training in colleges of the sects. At the beginning of June, after a meeting in Vancouver, Iris and I went by the Princess Louise, a CP. ship, from Vancouver to Skagway. We stopped for an hour in Prince Rupert and tic. "We first went to the Diocesan Synod at the old capital Dawson City 300 miles from Whitehorse, travelling with one of the Indian W.A. delegates in Miss Matthews' car to avoid using the van. Miss Matthews was trained at the Anglican Women's College in Toronto and currently works in Carcross. We went across three ferries on the way, one beside a large, almost finished bridge. The meetings were held in the old St. Paul's Hostel that had served as an Anglican Hostel for Indian children so that they could go to Public and High School. The meals were served there and many of us were billeted there. This Hostel has been replaced by St. Agnes in Whitehorse. Of particular interest was one old chief who had travelled by canoe then by plane to attend. His address had to be translated. In the early days missionaries from England had to come in via Alaska, had to learn four different languages and translate the Bible and Prayer Book into these. One evening we were taken up the steep hill behind 11 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 the town looking over the Yukon and Klondike Rivers, to see the sunset at 2 a.m. Archbishop Clarke, Primate of all Canada, conducted concluding services ending a productive gathering in a land where people still use dogsleds for winter travel. We started out in the van. South on the Alaska Highway we were needed more than ever, owing to the shortage of clergy and the great activity of the sects, Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons, Pentecostals and many more. They are all so active and have so many missionaries and money. This made us sad to think of so few clergy and the hundreds of miles up and down the highway. Have the young men in Canada and Britain lost the spirit of adventure which the early Bishops and clergy had, who came to Yukon and the Arctic, or is it materialism? At Brook's Brook Camp on Teslin Lake we received the usual warm welcome from children and parents. We took the service (as there is no clergyman). The wife of one of the D.O.T. operators played the organ. We next held a Vacation School at Watson Lake, and another at the Air Station, eight miles off the highway. The fathers of the children who lived further away brought the children, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman. At Coal River Camp the attendance was better than ever. The families on Sunday School By Post between the camps are more isolated and wanted us to stay longer. We heard that the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were visiting Whitehorse, therefore we returned the 500 miles visiting, teaching and taking services as we went. On the main street of Whitehorse there was great activity. The Bishop, in May, had been offered by Town Council, a load of soil so that a lawn could be made around the Ca thedral and the Rectory. This soil arrived two days before the Queen was expected. The piles sat where it was planned to seat the extra visitors at service. The Canadian Engineers under Mr. [sic] Quan came to the rescue spreading the soil and laying a large army tarpaulin laid over it. Chairs were set on this and all went well during the Sunday service which was broadcast to those outside. We were, however, disappointed that Queen Elizabeth was ill and unable to attend. (We all understood the illness better when Prince Andrew arrived the following February.) North of Whitehorse over the three hundred miles to the Alaska border we visited the lonely oil pumping stations, taught the children and talked with the parents. It was a very sad visit at Haines Junction where Rev. Watson had drowned a few weeks earlier. We held a Vacation School in St. Christopher's Church, memorial to Mr. Watson as he had built it nearly all himself. Miss Abbott and Miss Graves from England who have been on the Grande Prairie van all summer, Financial Statement 1927 Travelling Expenses to Vernon & back from England Iris Sayle from Western Canada Caravan Fund S484 Ditto given by E. Hasell for own travelling expenses S484 Books & pictures from Caravan Fund S300 Running Expenses raised by W.A. of Kootenay Diocese S125 Board expenses May 26 to Oct. 11 given by E. Hasell S15 Expenses of Lardeau Trip, without Van, given by E. Hasell S53 Totals From From Western Canada W.A. of Caravan Fund Kootenay Diocese S784 S125 From E. Hasell S552 (signed) F.H. Eva Hasell Hon Sec & Treasurer agreed to spend the winter in the Rectory in Haines Junction. We went to Kluane Lake where mothers were carrying on Sunday School, then to Camp 1202. The snow was coming down the mountains making it very cold camping each night in the van. We could not pass by the Maintenance Camps as people watched for us to leave Bible assignments and handicrafts to do. At last we reached Whitehorse and it really began to snow. We cook our meals and write letters in the parish hall kitchen, a haven of refuge in bad weather. We cleaned the van inside and out, put it in the van garage and had a mechanic jack it up and put it on blocks. We gave our report to the Bishop. We had travelled in the van 3,798 miles and 770 by other means making a total mileage of 4,568." The report is signed "F.H. Eva Hasell, M.B.E., Founder and Hon. Organiser of Anglican Sunday School Caravans in Canada." She was made a Member of the British Empire in 1935. In 1965, Eva Hasell became the first woman to be awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa, by the College of Emmanuel and St. Chad, Saskatoon. In 1969 she was invested with the Order of Canada. 1970, the fiftieth anniversary, saw "business as usual" for Miss Hasell and Miss Sayle. World War II had held her in Canada, otherwise she would have had 100 crossings of the Atlantic at the time of the anniversary. The Diocese of Kootenay stretches from the Okanagan eastward to the Alberta border. The terrain of the diocese was most difficult, with long lakes, many mountains and rough and incomplete roads, and at that time was served by only thirty Anglican priests. In 1926 Eva Hasell and Iris Sayle worked the Okanagan, mentioning stops at tiny places from Monte Creek and Sorrento to Summerland. They also went down the Arrow Lake to Deer Park, Renata, Syringa Creek, Robson, Castlegar, East and West Arrow Park, Burton, Fauquier, Edgewood and Needles. The van they used for the western section of the Kootenay Diocese was christened "St. B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 12 Michael." While in the Koootenay- Boundary area they encountered Doukhobors; Miss Hasell evinced great interest in their history and tells this story: We walked five miles up a mountain to see a family who had not been to a service for years. It was a hot day. I sat on a log to talk to the mother (about Sunday School By Post) as she stood packing strawberries into boxes. A Doukhobor picker came up with a basket of strawberries to be packed. She looked at me and said: "You no work. You lazy. You fat!" Then turning to Iris: "You work very hard. You thin!" After these comments I felt that I must either pack strawberries or go. In 1927 Hasell and Sayle worked in the West Kootenay. They had to leave the van and travel by boat, steamer and work trains. They note settlements such as Beaton, Trout Lake (followed by a hike up to the mining camp of Ferguson), Gerrard, Lardeau, Argenta, Johnson's Landing, Shutty Bench (where they were told by the schoolteacher that all students at that time were Roman Catholic, hence no visiting and no service given). They then went by train from Kaslo to Sandon and Three Forks. The total mileage travelled by these two in 1927 was 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometres) and 1,190 children were registered for Sunday School By Post. For many years the van St. Cuthbert served the East and West Kootenay while St. Michael covered the many miles in the Okanagan Deanery. Records in the Kootenay Diocesan Archives in Kelowna contain reports by many of the ladies who served on either St. Cuthbert or St. Michael. There are also copies of the annual letters from Eva Hasell to the succession of Bishops of this diocese. The letters always commence with a formal "Dear Lord Bishop" and request approval of the workers for each of the vans during the forthcoming season. Apart from one summer when there was muffled discord between a young teacher and a driver "old enough to be Kathleen Towns bend and Elizabeth Philips pose with tbe van St Cuthbert Photo courtesy Anglican Church of Canada, General Synod Archives p. 7804-61 A group of vanners en route to Canada, circa 1930. Rosalie PenneV, Ursula Snow den, Gladys Wise, Kathleen Towns bend, May Vaughn and Iris Sayle. Photo courtesy Anglican Church of Canada. General Synod Archives p. 7804-60 her mother," the Bishop and attendant clergy must have been thankful that Miss Hasell continued to recruit, and for a large part, pay the expenses of those volunteers assigned to each Sunday School van. Workers within the Kootenay Diocese in later years included: 1935 - Miss de C. Buller and Miss FE. Garnett, who did a very thorough visitation of individuals and families from Sicamous to Revelstoke, Celista to Eagle Bay, Enderby and Mabel Lake, Shuswap Falls, Creighton Valley, Lumby and down to Vernon. 1936 - Miss Molly Tatham and Miss F. Garnett appear to have retraced the route followed in 1935. This very detailed report notes items such as "Mrs. Olsen had twin girls" or "Don is much better after three months in Vancouver (hospital)" or "Smiths moved to their new house up the hill behind their old one." A summary of their season states: "We left Vernon on 18th of May and came in on October 8th. At the start we had a good deal of trouble with the van which was not sent out in good shape. The rest of the summer we had no trouble. Mileage in van 4,742." 1937-40 - Miss Marjorie G. Barlee worked the St. Michael caravan with several different drivers and teaching companions: Misses Wintle, Calvert, Hawtry, Lloyd, Map Simon, and J. Sharman. 1937 - There were other visiting missionaries in the East Kootenay. The October 1937 newsletter, The W.E.B. Homesteader, aroused the ire of the Anglican faithful by declaring that "TaTa Creek had no regular Christian work being carried on." The vanners left it to Bishop Walter Adams to protest: "... we have seven families who regularly receive our literature (Sunday School By Post) and TaTa Creek was visited four times last summer." The Bishop requested that arrangements should be made to avoid this overlap. A second letter was sent in May 1938 as the first (March 14) appeared to have been ignored. Miss Frances Brook, leader ofthe Women's Evangelistic Band, wrote from her home in West Vancouver on June 7, 1938, explaining that she had waited for her council meeting before replying. The lengthy letter noted: "I know you, with us, regret the absence of Bible teaching in B.C. schools. The teaching we had sought to give is sound and confined to Bible lines, not presenting denominational outlook and not alienating the children from their present church connection. If our workers have found the children following up the Sunday School By Post, they have sought to encourage them in it; if they have lost interest, is not the stimulation of another contest worthwhile to draw their attention once more to the word of God? We think it is. It would be impossible to find a geographical area not already covered by the Anglican and United Church organisation, and yet in the isolated parts (and we count them our first charge) that can only mean an occasional, perhaps yearly or bi-yearly visit. Does it not leave room 13 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 for another testimony, another voice, which in our much favored Homeland so often means reaping what another has sown and our Lord has taught us that sower and reaper can rejoice together?" Then, almost as a PS., Miss Brooks promised to seek to avoid errors such as appeared in the Homesteader of October last. Several Anglicans would have to swallow their pride after this tempest in a teapot. A lifetime resident of Wasa, B.C., which at that time shared the mailing address of Ta Ta Creek, eagerly volunteered that the Sunday School van parked each summer beside the lake where her brother now has his home. "We would bring our lunches and stay all day. There were about eight or nine of us. It was the highlight of our summer." 1937-?? - Miss Jean Bostock of Monte Creek served as coordinator for the van(s) and Sunday School By Post in the Okanagan Deanery. She was Canadian born, schooled in England, the second daughter of pioneer M.P. Hewitt Bostock (later Senator Bostock).1 1931^44 - Sisters Emmaline and Jessie Paxton ran the Sunday School By Post out of Nelson and did some summers in the St. Cuthbert caravan. These two secretaries/markers/mailers serviced 509 families (1,089 children) in the Nelson and Cranbrook areas in the sample year of 1941. When permission was granted in 1944 for civilians to book passage back to England, the Misses Paxton moved quickly. Mr. and Mrs. L. Paddon of Nelson volunteered to take care of papers for Sunday School By Post children until a new secretary assumed responsibility. Correspondence reveals the recruiting of Margaret Orman whose father was rector in Rossland. Margaret had been assistant secretary for Sunday School By Post for Saskatchewan. It was agreed that she would be paid $40 per month in the winter and $50 when out in the van. Her father sweetened the offer by promising $10 per month for her to serve as organist in his church, as well as having free room and board ... free but with expectation to nurse a sick mother! 1932^7 - Miss Margaret Hannah, tall and raw-boned, lived and worked year- round with her shorter, equally enthusiastic friend, Dinah "Di" Illingworth. Prior to WWII they paid their own way to England or Scotland for the winter months and returned to St. Cuthbert in the spring. In the fall of 1939 they were unable to cross the Adantic; they chose instead to stay in Kaslo, B.C., where they started a Girl Guide Company and Brownie Pack. These two Guiders/Train- ers spent subsequent winters in either Vancouver or Victoria where Illingworth became Provincial Commissioner and Hannah, Provincial Training Chairman. 1948 - Misses Sheila Harris and M. Dibben were together on the van St. Cuthbert in 1948. Their schedule was interrupted several times by road and bridge washouts in that year of great flooding. Miss Harris was very young, energetic and capable. Miss Dibbens had to do all the driving because Miss Harris, 20, freshly arrived from England, was not eligible for a driver's licence. Parishioners were not aware of the discord between these two workers, whom Miss Hasell noted "were the only two of all the 58 from the Pacific to the Atlantic that were not happy. That is why I did not move one of them as I did not wish to upset the other teams." I960 - The volunteers found by Miss Hasell to serve in each diocese were introduced to the local bishop with references such as: "Miss Helen Holmes, aged 28, a Solicitor from Carlisle is a very experienced driver and a keen Sunday School teacher. She is giving up a good salaried post in England to come and do this work. She has a very good reference from her Vicar, and is now doing a running repairs course. Also she has a good Doctor's Certificate (i.e., is medically fit)." This was written in an April I960 reference, in a letter with a postscript that "Mrs. Craft who served earlier on St. Michael for two years, is prepared to come out in May." While most of the work by the vanners was appreciated, there were a few parishes where the incumbent reverend did not cooperate before or after the vanning season. Reports might contain mention of disappointment that recommendations from the previous year had not been acted upon. This might be omission of training willing candidates for confirmation. Or, although many of these ladies were granted Lay Reader status and were prepared to conduct service for adults as well as children, rarely were they permitted to do this, even in unmanned churches. Miss Hasell clearly insisted that the caravans were to be manned by women, even when a minister suggested that he and his wife take a route for that summer. The vans eventually outlived their mechanical endurance; volunteers were increasingly hard to find. Sunday School By Post was disbanded in 1969. Miss Hasell was unable to come out in the summer of 1973 but four vans operated in Qu'Appelle, Caledonia, Calgary and Saskatchewan dioceses. Eva Hasell passed away in May 1974 and Iris Sayle died shortly after. Miss Sayle left £500 to the mission and Hasell £10,000 from her estate, worth £200,000 before taxes. A Canadian organization named "Western Canada Sunday School Caravan Fund" was established from which individual dioceses could apply for funds for special programs. Eva Hasell's original program served well in its day; present needs are met with money set aside because of this inspiring lady from Carlisle, England. *•***•••** The author received Sunday School By Post papers as a child, met some of tbe vanners and thought tbe history cf these pioneer women worth sharing with our readers. FOOTNOTE 1. Gentlewomen of Monte Creek by Eleanor Witton Hancock. BIBUOGRAPHY Frontier Odysse)t Canadian Sunday School Caravan Mission 1920-1970, published by the Diocese of Qu'Appelle. Ups and Downs of Caravan Work: The Eleventh Visit to the Alaska Highway by Eva Hasell, 1959 Missionary on Wheels by Vera Fast, pp. 35-41. Selected reports 1926-1967 from Diocese of Kootenay Anglican Church Archives. Special thanks to archivists Gail Greenhalgh and Bert Billesberger. Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, 600 Jarvis Street, Toronto. Thanks to Dorothy Kealey. Interview with Barbara Roberts of Wasa. B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 14 The Marine Building Revisited In the Spring 1994 issue (Vol. 27:2), Robin Ward's photograph of the Burrard Street entrance of the Marine Building was reproduced without acknowledgement. Your editor apologizes for this omission. The picture is shown below with the missing credits ... this time with the kind permission of Mr. Robin Ward. Here, too, we present, with permission, Mr. Ward's drawing of the Marine Building. This drawing is featured in Robin Ward's Heritage West Coast by Harbour Publishing, based on his weekly column on architectural heritage in The Vancouver Sun. This photograph of tbe Burrard Street entrance to tbe Marine Building was taken by Robin Ward for tbe book Exploring Vancouver. Photo courtesy Robin Ward \ii- ~ =+ JU Tbe Canadian Museum of Flight and Transportation by Jack Meadows A major upheaval confronts the Canadian Museum of Flight which is being ejected by a Surrey Council that seems unappreciative both of history and the contribution to tourism made by this collection which brings in visitors Irom all round the world. Started in 1971 by a group of enthusiasts disturbed at Canada's loss to foreigners of important historic aircraft, the museum was in 1977 incorporated as a non-profit charitable society. Its collection at Crescent Beach grew to some seventy aircraft, some flyable, many complete, others awaiting restoration. Covering the 1930- 1950s, they include jet fighters, WWII bombers and trainers, bush planes, helicopters, light aircraft, all with some story of our past. There are also many other artifacts and the largest aviation library in B.C. In the earty 80s the museum was faced with possible eviction when the land on which it lives rent-free was slated for expropriation by Surrey Council. From then on long-range planning was impossible, valuable aircraft stood out in all weathers, and the future of the museum itself was in doubt. Now, after several appeals, Surrey has finally confirmed the museum must move, perhaps as earty as next June. Of the possible alternative sites, at present Boundary Bay Airport in Delta seems the most likely. The immense task of moving anywhere is only a small part of the huge costs involved and the museum fears it may have to sell perhaps a substantial part of its exhibits to raise the necessary capital. These will almost certainly go out of province, out of Canada. The vultures are already hovering. The museum has always been entirely volunteer-run, with no help from governments at any level, other than a few make-work grants some years ago. The only aviation museum on the B.C. mainland, it looks at the five flourishing Alberta ones, and the much smaller one at Pat Bay on Vancouver Island, all of which have had official support, and wonders at its own treatment Aviation took over in Canada where the railways stopped. Without aircraft, much ofthe B.C. TreCanadian Museurr ot Rghrs Handley Page Harpaen s tlie onty one cl Ss kind ir, the world (another retrieved Yom Fnnrsh bog *;« soon be restated at RAF Museum Hendon. UK), Harrrpders «re pari oi RAF Borate Comnwtfl '939-41 front lie. This Canadian-txjJt version, operating from Pal Bay, crashed into Saanch inlet m 1943 when on a torpedo-dropping enerdse. Discovered in tie 60s in 600 feet o! water by museum votunteers, th e wecfcage was lilted, lafcen to Crescent Road, and ave< tie years F-ai.-ista^ngiy rebtjitl piece ay piece, coast and north might never have been opened up. It is vital this part of our history continues to be made known to future generations. Interest and support - financial, moral or practical - is urgently needed from anyone concerned with our history or with aviation (receipts for tax purposes are available). CMFT is determined to stay alive and grow, even if this has to be from a smaller base. It welcomes new members (currently there are some 2,000, not all active). At the end of October public display will close for the winter but it is hoped to keep at least the gift shop open until the move. Write to 13527 Crescent Road, B.C. V4P 1J5, telephone (604) 535-1115. 15 B.C. Historical News - FaU 1994 Helen Gregory MacGill, First Woman Judge in B. C. by Dolly Sinclair Kennedy Helen Gregory MacGill, B.A., M.A., Mus.Bac, LL.D., 1864-1947, was the first woman to be appointed as a judge in British Columbia. Helen's father, Silas Gregory, was a rare political figure of Victorian Canada, a completely and ardently bilingual Anglican Tory. He had been born in Montreal, Quebec, but later moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and became the owner of a successful grain company. His daughter Helen was born in 1864 at the family home. Helen grew up in a social world where girls were privately educated, usually at home, and at the age of twelve it was assumed that their formal education was over. However, at the age of nineteen, Helen announced that she wanted to become a concert pianist. She persuaded her parents to allow her to go to Toronto and study with a renowned teacher, Arthur Ficher. Helen's fight for women's rights began with her own career. In 1884, Helen was the only person to receive first-class honours in the Cambridge music examination at the University of Toronto. However, Helen was denied a degree because she was female. In 1886, Helen's grandfather fought a successful court batde to have her enrolled at the University of Toronto. She subsequendy became the first woman undergraduate of Trinity College, Toronto, and the first to take the Mus.Bac, the B.A., the M.A. and, indeed, she was the first woman Mus.Bac. in the British Empire. In his article "Historical Toronto," Donald Jones describes Helen as a small attractive woman with an oval face and a mass of hair the colour of corn. He goes on to say that throughout her journalistic career, she was dubbed by her fellow reporters as "The Pocket Venus." In 1890, at the age of twenty-six, she was invited to speak to the Canadian Club in Washington, D.C. One of the men in the audience was the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. He was so captivated by Helen that he offered her a job as one of the magazine's first female foreign correspondents. Helen Gregory MacGill Doctor of Laws, University of British Columbia, 1938 Photo courtesy UBC Archives Helen's first assignment was to Japan, a country that had recently created its first representative parliament, the Diet. Helen was to interview the leading members of parliament. Armed with letters of introduction, she left Toronto by train, en route to Vancouver and Japan. Helen was lugging a camera, tripod and photographic plates because she had persuaded a Canadian editor to assign her the job of taking photos of the immigrant families now pouring into the prairies, and whom she would pass on the trip across the prairie to Vancouver. This added assignment would help pay her expenses. Little did she know how this prairie assignment would change her life. At one of her train stops, Helen met a handsome young man, the son of a land agent. She spent the next week in his company, and at the end of the week they were married. Helen persuaded her young husband, Lee Flesher, to let her complete her assignment in Japan. When she returned he was at the dock in Vancouver waiting for her. While she was away, Flesher had sold his land, and when Helen returned he informed her that they were going to start a new life on a farm in California. The venture was a total failure, and her husband confessed that the only career that he had ever wanted was that of being a doctor. Helen insisted that he enrol in medical school, and told him that she would support the two of them. Armed with copies of her Cosmopolitan articles, she soon got a job as a reporter. There were now two small children in the family, and to help run the house, Helen's mother came from Hamilton. With the aid of money from her mother, the two women started a local newspaper which proved to be highly successful When Flesher graduated from medi-. cal school, he received an offer to become a general practitioner and the family moved to Minnesota. Helen was proud of her conscientious and dedicated husband but the long hours he B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 16 devoted to his practice made him ill, and within a few years he was dead. To support her family, Helen now returned to journalism, this time in St. Paul. Over the years Helen had been receiving letters from a former classmate at Trinity, James MacGill. He was now a prosperous lawyer in Vancouver; within a few years they were married. Immediately after the marriage, he brought his wife and the two boys to their new home in Vancouver. They took a rented house on Comox Street near Burrard, in the new residential district, the West End. This was a frame house, two-storied, with piped- in water and electricity. They had a Chinaman named Gong who, like his fellow domestics, slept in "Chinatown" and came early to work, wages fifteen dollars per month. About 3,000 Orientals lived in communities on Pender and Cordova Streets in those days, principally Chinese labourers from the years of the CPR railroad construction in the Rockies. The family later had a house on Greer's Beach, renamed Kitsilano. In Vancouver, Helen turned to the women's societies for friendship and charitable duty. She joined the University Women's Club which had been organized in 1907. There she found loyal and enthusiastic support for her work. The members were a cosmopolitan, articulate and erudite lot. They believed that an educated woman had a public duty as well as a private one. Shortly after joining the club, Helen became chairman of the Laws Committee. Club members were shocked to learn how debased was domestic legislation in B.C. These women dared the impossible by boldly resolving to petition the government for changes. Helen turned to history to trace the provincial law to its source. She learned that an Imperial Proclamation in 1858, promulgated when the B.C. mainland became a Crown colony, declared: "The current law of England was to prevail in the Colony subject to change by the Colonial Legislature." No one had been concerned over laws affecting women and children and they had remained largely unchanged. Turning to the minutes of the University Women's Club: December 9, 1911, moved by Farris/Fuller "that $10.00 expended in the purchase of copies of laws be refunded to Mrs. MacGill." On January 10, 1912, Mrs. MacGill reported interviewing Mr. Bowser, the Attorney-General, in Victoria, and presenting to him the amendments to existing laws concerning women and children, desired by the club. Helen made every effort through existing organizations to rouse public opinion. During the winter months of 1910-11, they arranged a series of law lectures open to the public and delivered by judges and banisters. One was the court magistrate, Alfred E. Bull. Turning to the club minutes of February 27, 1912, we note: The Club decision to ask for legislation to remove disabilities from women desiring to practise law in this province had been followed by energetic action. The editorial support of the Province and the News Advertiser had been secured, and Mr. Bowser was to bring in the Bill as a Government measure if favored by the Benchers; if otherwise, a private member had been secured to introduce the Bill. In February, the University Women's Club was informed that a bill permitting women to practice at the bar in B.C. had passed into law on February 27, 1912. Early in her career Helen had campaigned for women's suffrage. As well, she became a founding member of the Vancouver Women's Press Club in 1909, at Glencoe Lodge on the corner of Georgia and Burrard. This was followed by Helen becoming a founding member of the Vancouver Creche, a free nursery for children of working mothers. In 1913, at her own expense, Helen brought out a little book, Daughters, Wives and Mothers in British Columbia, Some Laws Regarding Them. Helen sold the book privately for twenty-five cents, to anyone who wanted it. She dedicated the book to the Countess of Aberdeen, "Whose Deep and Abiding Interest in the Welfare of her Sex, has Endeared her to Women of all Nationalities." Helen pointed out in her book that when our local legislature had passed no civil law, and the federal Parliament no criminal law, then reference was always taken to English law as it was in 1858. Age for Marriage: A girl of twelve or a boy of fourteen may contract a legal marriage in B.C. with the consent ofthe father or guardian appointed by the father. The mother's consent is not necessary if the father is living. For many years the University Women's Club, the Local Council of Women, the Political Equality League, and other organizations, has asked that the law give recognition to the right of the married mother to share equally with the father in the guardianship of their children. Under the present law, while the child of an unmarried mother belongs to her, the child ofthe married mother belongs exclusively to the father during his lifetime. Until 1913, the father could will away from the mother the child unborn at the time of his death. Mothers in B.C. were living under an Act passed in the time of King Charles II. In the lifetime ofthe father, the mother had no right to the child's person or estate, either against the father or the guardian he may choose to appoint. The Official Guardian Act: If the father has not appointed a guardian to act after his death with the mother, the Court may appoint the Official Guardian to act jointly with the mother. The Official Guardian is entitled to receive by way of commission 5% ofthe gross value of the estate under his guardianship, and such commission is a first charge on the estate. Divorce: By an Act coming down from Colony days there is in B.C., jurisdiction to grant divorce. This Act entitles a husband to divorce his wife for a single act of adultery. The wife may not obtain a divorce for adultery alone, however numerous the husband's offences may be. This despite the light that medical research throws upon the awful danger of infection and consequent suffering. When this English Act was passed in 1857, Mr. William Gladstone spoke 29 times in a 10 hour debate, in eloquent protest against a clause so immoral and so unjust. The Dower Act: In B.C. the home may be sold, mortgaged, or otherwise disposed of without the wife's consent, her signature or even her knowledge. The husband by will, may leave his wife penniless. Helen began spending more of her time fighting for the right to vote. When B.C. established a Minimum 17 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 Wage Board, Helen was the only woman on its first board. On March 19, 1913, a special edition of the Sun newspaper came out, The Women's Extra. This edition was published to help raise money to build a Vancouver Women's Clubhouse Building. Helen wrote an article in which she said: "So far as we know, nowhere in the history of women's work, has there been a project of housing together under one roof, women's public service organizations." Among the organizations banded together for this common purpose were the Local Council of Women, the Graduated Nurses Club, the Equal Franchise Society, Women's Musical Club, Daughters of the Empire, Political Equality League, Women's Canadian Club, and the University Women's Club. This Vancouver Women's Building did materialize at 752 Thurlow Street, the cornerstone being laid in 1926. The affairs of this association of women wound up in 1940, at which time the building itself was turned over to the Salvation Army. In 1917 Helen was appointed B.C.'s first provincial woman judge, working in the Juvenile Court. Helen also found time to become president of the University Women's Club, 1917-18, and throughout the rest of her life she enjoyed their friendship and support. In 1938 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of British Columbia. Helen's daughter, Elsie Gregory MacGill, PEng., a consulting engineer in aeronautics, wrote a book about her mother in 1955, My Mother the Judge. Elsie suggests "that throughout the life of each of us runs a dominant trait that reveals our moral purpose and dictates a recurring pattern of thought and action, clearly discernable in our work. Helen's golden thread was a passionate yet objective sympathy for the hurt, the helpless, the exploited, and throughout her life it traced a recurring pattern of public service directed toward their succour." Helen retired in 1945, having seen most of her personally urged reforms become law. She developed during her twenty-three years in the Juvenile Courts, standards that gained general acceptance. This remarkable woman died at age eighty-three in 1947. On May 4, 1947, a memorial service was held for Helen in the library of the University of British Columbia, The service was arranged by the University Women's Club in her memory and the club presented a plaque which was to be placed in the east wall of the reading room. During the service, Helen's children returned her LL.D. robes to the University of British Columbia. Alexander M. Manson, formerly Attorney-General and at that time judge of the Supreme Court ofthe province, gave the address. He acknowledged the contribution Helen had made to society by using her skill as a journalist, her knowledge of the law, her influence with women's groups. She managed to rouse public opinion so that necessary steps were taken by the government to enact laws for improved conditions for women and children. The Hon. Justice Manson said: "Under the auspices ofthe University Women's Club of Vancouver, we are assembled this afternoon to pay tribute to a life rich in service, and to mark the esteem in which she was held by those of her day and generation, by placing a tablet to her memory in these Halls of Learning." ********** Tbe writer is a member of tbe University Women's Club in Vancouver where she spends volunteer time organizing, and using, tbe archives. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Jones, Donald, "Historical Toronto," Toronto Globe and Mail, September 21, 1985. Minutes from the Archives of the University Women's Club, Vancouver. MacGill, Helen Gregory, Daughters, Wives and Mothers in British Columbia, Some Laws Regarding Them. The Moore Printing Co. Ltd., Vancouver, B.C., 1913. MacGill, Elsie Gregory, My Mother the Judge, Toronto, Ryerson, 1955. 1993 ENTRIES B.C. HISTORICAL FEDERATION WRITING COMPETITION / Rough and Ready Times: Port Mellon by Eileen Frith with Peter Trower Stanley Park by Mike Steele North Coast Odyssey by Kenneth Campbell The Legacy and The Challenge by Richard Rajala Women of the West Coast Then and Now by Mamie Anderson * Taku: The Heart of North America's Great Wilderness by Allison Mitcham /# Women Volunteer to Go to Prison: The Elizabeth Fry Society by Lee Stewart A Traveller's Guide to Historic B.C. by Rosemary Neering Vancouver's Many Faces by Kevin Griffin Vancouver: A History in Photographs by Aynsley Vogel and Dana Wyse Land of Dreams: Photos of B.C. Interior by Meredith Bain Woodward Craigflower Country Edited by Maureen Duffus The Wild McLeans by Mel Rothenburger The Beaver by James Delgardo Coasters by Rob Morris The Port of Vancouver by Jim Lyon with Barbara Duggan People of Terra Nullius by Boyce Richardson The People's Railway by Donald MacKay From Maps to Metaphors Edited by Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston Ships and Memories by Eric W. Sager Comox Valley Memories by Judy Hagen The Sculpture of Elek Imredy Edited by Terry Noble They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever by A. York, R. Daly and C. Arnett / Fields of Endeavour by Albert E. Field The Tokens of Greenwood and Phoenix, B.C. by Ronald Greene Fishing for a Living by Alan Haig-Brown Grace: The Story of Grace Maclnnis by S.P. Lewis Grizzlies and White Guys by Clayton Mack, Edited by Harvey Thommasen My Father, My Friend by Arthur Mayse / Raincoast Chronicles 15: Stories and History of the B.C. Coast Edited by Howard White / Robin Ward's Heritage West Coast by Robin Ward * Whistle Punks and Widow Makers by Robert E. Swanson A Shadow Passes by Ursula Surtees More Tales from the Outer Gulf Islands Edited by Douglas Harker / Reviewed by this magazine * Winners B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 18 Adelaide Bailey: Exemplary Teacher 1857—1949 Adelaide Susan Steinbeig Bailey was a pioneer woman in British Columbia's history. She grew up in Yale, yet she managed to obtain the skills and knowledge to become one of the first frontier teachers in British Columbia. She taught for thirty years with excellence and enthusiasm, and contributed much to the establishment of several new communities. Adelaide Bailey was born in San Francisco on December 11, 1857, the first child of Benjamin Bailey and Sarah Margaret Paterson. Her father, born in Boston, came to California lured by the promise of gold. Similarly, her mother, with her parents Captain and Mrs. Paterson, travelled from Hobart, Tasmania, aboard her father's schooner to the California gold fields. In I860 Benjamin Bailey was drawn to British Columbia by better prospects in the new Cariboo gold rush, and had the foresight to establish a freight trading business in Yale where the road through the Fraser Canyon was under construction. A year later, his wife and two children sailed to British Columbia aboard the steamer Brother Jonathan to join him. After a brief stay at the Colonial Hotel in Esquimalt, they obtained passage across the Strait of Georgia and up the Fraser River to Hope. There they were met by Mr. Bailey and travelled upstream to the busding frontier town of Yale - the gateway to the Cariboo. Mrs. Bailey never was favorably impressed with Yale, despite being assured by Governor Douglas that "there will be trails and wagon roads, even a railway built through here before long."1 There were times that she had to close the curtains to prevent Adelaide and her siblings from seeing lawbreakers hung. It was in this rough town that Adelaide grew up. The Baileys lived in Yale for twenty years and twelve of their fifteen children were born there, including a set of twins, which by Carolyn Cross incited great celebration among the whites and much curiosity among the Indians. However rustic this community had been, Adelaide managed to acquire education and was knowledgeable enough to pass the Teachers Certification examination in Victoria in June of 1875 at the age of seventeen. She also became proficient at playing the piano, a talent that was very advantageous in future years. Adelaide was well suited for her cho- Adelaide Bailey. This studio portrait, taken in Victoria circa 1888, was given to George A. Clair, of Yale and Vancouver, as a Christmas gift Tbe collection of George A. Clair is now in tbe Vancouver archives. Photo courtesy City of Vancouver Archives No. Port P.45 sen career as a public school teacher. As the eldest child, "Addie" had the responsibility of helping her mother with the care of her siblings. This allowed her to develop a stern, but caring character. She was described as "a strong, forceful woman, though underneath very kind."2 Her tall and angular physi cal appearance complemented her personality to provide the overall impression of being an authority figure. She was known to make a decision that would not, under any circumstance, be altered. A clear example of her steadfast decisions was her eighteen-year chilling reception to advances by John Fingal Smith. Adelaide's early experience may have influenced her not to marry young, nor to have any children of her own. She was a career woman and did not want children to confound her ability to make a living for herself. Once a woman was married, her chances of maintaining a job were very slim as "married women were seldom deemed suitable to be in the classroom. "3 These aspects of her character, combined with her dedication to education and conscientious attitude, allowed Adelaide Bailey to become an excellent teacher who gained the respect of the people in the communities where she taught. Miss Bailey began teaching in Fort Hope in August 1875. The school was "held in a very dilapidated, old house ... and [had] for a long time been propped up to prevent its falling."4 Despite the decrepit state of the school facility, Adelaide provided an excellent education for the children of Fort Hope. When Miss Bailey left Fort Hope her "departure was much regretted by all interested in the school, which [there] meant the entire population."5 The journey to Yale, the location of her new teaching assignment, from Fort Hope was an adventure she wrote about years later. She and Mr. John Jessop, Superintendent of Schools, who had finished inspecting her former school, "went together to Yale by canoe which had to be towed along the bank of the Fraser in many places by the Indians on account of the swiftness of the current. In one instance, the tow 19 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 rope broke and [they] shot back with great velocity. The Indian crew managed to take them safely to Yale."6 Miss Bailey taught for three years in Yale before being transferred to Lytton. During her time in Yale, she probably taught her younger brothers and sisters, making for an interesting and possibly awkward situation. She provided exceptional education as one of her students, John Shaw, later became the principal of the Nanaimo Boys' School. She taught in Lytton from 1880 to the fall of 1884 when the Lytton school was accidentally burnt down, and she was released from her contract. During the time she spent in the Cariboo, she braved the rigors of stage coaches, sleighs, canoes, and travel on horseback. One description she left says: "On my first trip to Lytton I started from Yale at 3 a.m. by Barnard's Express. I drove behind a team of six horses, the leaders being the only ones unbroken, much to my terror. The driver, Steve Tingley, entertained the passengers by pointing out the dangerous parts of the Cariboo Road such as Jackass Mountain, Hell's Gate, and Roaring Canyon etc. In the winter we had to travel by sleighs and often the road was in very dangerous condition with ice and snow. One time the runner broke and we were left helpless and had to walk over a mile to a 'stopping place' while the runner was taken back to Yale, a distance of 20 miles for repairs. C.P.R. Engineer Eberts was a passenger on this occasion and shortly after met a tragic death when climbing the steep side of the Fraser. During the C.P.R. construction the mode of crossing the Fraser at Cisco Flat was in a car slung on a cable extending across the river at a high elevation, large enough to carry a few passengers and a bale of hay. When the cantilever bridge at the mouth of the Thompson was completed I rode horseback from Lytton, in company with Engineer Hannington, his wife and others to be present at the opening. This was the second of this type of bridge built on this continent and linked the section of the Onderdonk contract between Kamloops and Yale. Mr. Onderdonk, with a party of friends, came from Yale on a construction train decorated with bunting and evergreens. We walked over the bridge and got on board the train so as to be able to say we were among the first passengers to cross the Fraser on the C.P.R. train. Mr. Onderdonk had an elaborate champagne luncheon provided for us."7 Thus Miss Bailey experienced train travel as soon as it was available in British Columbia. After losing her job in Lytton, Adelaide quickly acquired the position of principal at the Nanaimo Girls School. When she resigned from Nanaimo she was told, "We would rather have the whole staff of teachers resign than yourself'8, a testimonial she cherished until her dying day. She then taught briefly in a one-room school in Cadboro Bay, near Victoria, in 1885- Adelaide was the first teacher at Bonaparte Creek (in the southern Cariboo) in 1886. About that time a teacher at Ashcroft,. John Fingal Smith, became acquainted with her brothers, who had business at the railhead there, and also met Miss Bailey. When she was transferred to Clinton, he was able to visit during holidays and weekends. When Ashcroft school closed due to lack of sufficient enrolment, Mr. Smith quickly John Fingal Smith. This portrait appears to have been taken in tbe same studio in Victoria as Addie's 1888 picture, and was also in tbe George A. Clair collection. Photo courtesy City of Vancouver Archives No. Port P.54 found work in Clinton. In 1894, Adelaide was chosen to be the first teacher at the burgeoning East Kootenay town, Fort Steele. Miss Bailey began teaching twelve students in a one-room school in Fort Steele in 1895. The school was a new building "neatly furnished with desks, maps, blackboards, etc."9 The school was heated by a large wood stove; however, the heating was not sufficient. Mildred Mather, one of Miss Bailey's students, remembered Miss Bailey coming "to school wearing one buttoned boot and one laced boot. She would sit up at her little table with her feet resting on a hot rock - the floors were that cold!"10 Miss Bailey joined the Anglican Women's Guild and soon held the position of vice-president. She inspired the ladies to raise funds for an organ. Church services for all denominations were held in the schoolhouse, initially with lay readers, then trained clergy for both the Anglicans and Presbyterians in 1898. For weddings, funerals and social services, Miss Bailey volunteered as organist until 1899 when she resigned from the position as organist. By 1897 the school population had grown significantly and a new school- house was constructed; the former schoolhouse became exclusively St. John's Anglican Church. In January 1898 Miss Bailey, along with an assistant "monitor" Mrs. James Clark, provided education in the new one-room school. Adelaide was promoted to the position of principal. The report by Mr. William Burns, inspector of public schools from Nelson, was "much pleased by the proficiency of the pupils and the work done by the zealous teacher, Miss Bailey. [He] was surprised at the large attendance."11 The school population continued to grow. Another room had to be built onto the schoolhouse and another teacher was hired to teach in the senior room. John Fingal Smith was the first to hold this new position. He, along with his successors, took over the principalship and were paid $70 a month. Adelaide's wage decreased to $60 a month; a wage identical to her initial teaching wages twenty-three years earlier. During these final seven years of Miss Bailey's teaching career, she remained as a teacher at Fort Steele school under several male principals, including Mr. King, Mr. W.L. B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 20 J*" iJc/Wk This was a postcard sent January 1904 from A.S.B. (AuntAddie) to a nephew in Ashcroft, RC Tbe picture was taken from the original water tower in Fort Steele, showing tbe remains of tbe Mountie barn and tbe board sidewalk along Riverside Avenue. Tompkins, Mr. Reid, Mr. Jas Hislop, Mr. Tupper Blakeney and Mr. A. Holland. Adelaide's teaching ability was far superior to that of her male colleagues. Her pupils were making "fair progress" whereas the senior grades teachers' students were "not advanced in problem work, [and] backward [with] apparently little progress made."12 During the summer of 1897, Miss Bailey was granted a permanent teaching certificate. This Length of Service certificate was granted to only two teachers, both self-taught. This meant that Adelaide did not have to go to Victoria to write teacher examinations each summer. However, most summers she returned to Victoria to spend time with her family who moved there from Yale in 1885. John Fingal Smith obtained a job as a clerk in the government office after his short teaching career in Fort Steele. He had a house in the next block to the cottage occupied by Miss Bailey. He escorted her to whatever dances, musical performances or social gatherings were taking place. In December 1895, their names, along with the "elite" of Fort Steele, were listed among those attending a ball held in Wasa. They participated in fund-raising performances for either the Presbyterian Church or the Anglican Church. They also raised funds for the .school when it needed a new bell. Miss Bailey encouraged community involvement in school events she planned, such as Christmas school concerts and picnics. Miss Bailey and a few others threw themselves into fund-raising for a hospital at Fort Steele. Once the hospital was operational, Adelaide was one of the board of directors and Mr. Smith became the hospital secretary- treasurer. Citizens either donated funds or materials, or subscribed to a prepaid insurance plan. Whatever Miss Bailey put her efforts into, she was praised, with comments such as "with names like Miss Bailey connected with it, it means success."13 Miss Bailey and Mr. Smith's relationship continued throughout their time in Fort Steele, A story handed down by neighbours claims that Mr. Smith cooked porridge every morning and took a hot bowlful of this to Addie. These same neighbours had been told in confidence that Adelaide chose to avoid marriage until she was past child-bearing age. By 1902, public criticism about their long- term relationship was printed in the social column in The Prospector, the local newspaper. "There is an old bachelor in this town who has been waiting on the same girl more than twenty years. He must lack a great deal of nerve."14 In January of 1905, the government office and staff, including John Fingal Smith, were transferred from Fort Steele to Cranbrook. Adelaide taught until June, and while she was visiting her family in Victoria, she submitted her resignation from Fort Steele school. John Fingal Smith and Adelaide Susan Steinberg Bailey were married in St. Barnabas Anglican Church in Victoria on December 11, 1905. Adelaide wore a navy blue suit while her sister in attendance wore a cream-coloured ensemble. The newlyweds returned home to Cranbrook and resided across from present-day Baker Park on 14th Avenue. Mr. Smith worked as the Government Agent for Cranbrook between 1906 to 1918, then he retired on a small pension. Adelaide took advantage of her spare time to do things she never managed to do in earlier years. She took swimming lessons with a group of twelve-year-olds at the Cranbrook pool. She went skating on the community rink and enjoyed taking turns around the ice with teenagers who sought her as a partner. Adelaide is remembered for wearing feather boas, a fashion accessory popular after World War I. Mr. Smith bought an early Ford car as a gift for his new bride. The vehicle was Two great-nephews with "Aunt Addie" in Vernon in January 1937. Bill Baldwin, left, and Jack Baldwin. Photo courtesy George Baldwin's family album 21 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 rarely used as he preferred to walk within town and use horse and buggy for more distant errands. Mrs. Smith, a lady, was not allowed to drive the car. Young men around watched this car with envy, especially when Mr. Smith took it out of the garage to clean and polish every feature on it. Adelaide and John remained very active members of the church. John became a parishioner at Christ Anglican Church in Cranbrook shortly before he married Adelaide, as well as maintaining his ties to the Presbyterian Church. They worshipped at the Anglican Church on Sunday mornings and at the Presbyterian on Sunday evenings. Adelaide also taught Anglican Sunday School. John was an elder and the church secretary for the Presbyterian Church for several years. He represented the East Kootenay at national meetings, one of which saw the creation of the United Church of Canada in 1925. Adelaide's mother became ill in 1924. She spent several months in Victoria nursing her mother. However, her mother succumbed to her illness in September of that year. In October 1936, a fire destroyed much of the library in the Smith's home. Mr. and Mrs. Smith were rescued by Mr. and Mrs. Erickson, then taken to the home of Anglican Reverend Harrison. John Fingal Smith died a few days later as a result of shock. After his memorial service in the Presbyterian Church, he was laid to rest in Cranbrook Cemetery. Adelaide erected a tombstone on her husband's grave which reads: "John Fingal Smith, Born P.E.I. 1846, Died Cranbrook, B.C. 1936. A Faithful Lover for 18 years and a Devoted Husband for 31 years." There is a plot beside this which is unoccupied. Adelaide remained in Cranbrook for about three years, then went to live with or near relatives at the coast. She was with her sister Amy, Mrs. Sinnott of White Rock, when she passed away on January 22, 1949- She was given an Anglican service at a funeral chapel and laid to rest in Surrey Center Cemetery. The grave has a simple marker: "Susan Adelaide Smith 1857-1949." Tbe author prepared a study of Miss Bailey for ber History of Education assignment at tbe University of Victoria three years ago. Since that time new details have been uncovered and are included in this article. ENDNOTES 1. The Cranbrook Herald. Vol. 26, No. 32. Octolxr 3. 1924, p. 6. Obituary of Mrs. Hailey. 2. Schcx3lhou.se File. Fort Steele Archives, p. 6. 3. Jean Barman. "Pioneer Teachers of British Columbia," British Columbia Historical News. Vol. 25, No. I, p 16. 4. Annual Public School Reports 1H74-1K75, p. 25. 5. Ibid. 6. Adelaide Bailey. Records of the Pioneers of the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. British Columbia Archives, p. 88. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. A.B. Grace. The Prospector (Fort Steele). November 7, 1896. 10. Schoolhouse File, p. 6. 11. Grace. Octobers, 1898, p. 8. 12. Public School Reports 1899-1900. 13. Grace. December 14, 1895. 14. Ibid. May 24, 1902, p. 2. BIBUOGRAPHY Annual Public School Reports of British Columbia and Public School Reports, 1874-1875 to 1904-1905. Bailey, Adelaide. Records of tbe Pioneers of the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. British Columbia Archives, pp. 87-90. Barman, Jean. "Pioneer Teachers of British Columbia," .British Columbia Historical News. Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 15-18. Broadland, T.R. "Fort Steele: British Columbia's 'Instant' Ghost Town," Beautiful British Columbia. Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall 1967, pp. 22-30. The Cranbrook Herald. Vol. 26, No. 32, October 3, 1924, p. 6. Grace, A.B. The Prospector (Fort Steele). 1895-1905. House, Candice L. The Galbraiths and the Kootenays. Vantage Press Inc., New York: 1969. Inwcxxl, Damian. fort Steele: The Golden Era. Sunfire Publications Limited, Langley, B.C.: 1988. Johnson, F. Henry. "The Ryersonian Influence on the Public Schrxjl System of British Columbia." Johnson, F. Henry. John Jessop: Gold Seeker and Kducator. Mitchell Press Limited, Vancouver: 1971. Johnson, F. Henry. A History of Public Education in British Columbia. Morris Printing Company Ltd., Victoria: 1964. Leighton, Douglas. "Fort Steele Reborn," Canadian Geographic. Vol. 104, No. 2 April/May 1984, pp. 34-41. Miller, Naomi. Various correspondence. Schcxjlhouse File. Fort Steele Archives, White, Derryl. Eon Steele: Here History Lives. Heritage House Publications Limited, Surrey, B.C.: 1988. The Sutton Lumber & Trading Co. Token by D.M. Stewart A friend, John Cheramy, quickly caught my attention when he showed me a worn twenty-two-millimetre aluminum trade token (enlarged in the illustration on the following page). It is the first known token from Meares Island, Clayoquot Sound, and the reverse is printed in French. Is this evidence that a large group of Quebec lumbermen had worked in west coast forestry, just as some three hundred Quebec mill workers had been employed at the Fraser Mills sawmill? The history of the settlement at MaillardviUe in 1909 and 1910 has been well documented, but who had heard of a similar setdement on Meares Island? My curiosity was aroused. Consulting Vancouver Island's West Coast by George Nicholson, I found that he had written: "William and James Sutton took up a large tract of land in the early 1880s and their shingle and sawmill was then the only one beyond Alberni. Surplus logs they sold to the Alberni mill for $6 per thousand feet b.m. They also opened Ucluelet's first store. Their holdings, which embraced most ofthe timber around Kennedy Lake, was subsequently disposed of to Seatde Cedar, using the name Sutton Lumber Co. Ltd. in its future operations on the west coast of Vancouver Island. One enterprise was an export shingle mill at Mosquito Harbour, Clayoquot Sound." Next I turned to the British Columbia Archives for assistance and was handed B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 22 a file folder which contained a Memorandum of Association under the Companies Act, 1897, Section 5, ofthe Sutton Lumber and Trading Company Limited dated 17th November, 1902. This was signed by William John Sutton, Victoria, B.C. Geologist; James Edward Sutton, Ucluelet, B.C. Merchant; and Fannie Keyworth Sutton, Victoria, B.C. Spinster. The articles of the memorandum are very broad and include all phases of logging, lumbering and sawmiUing, all rights for the production of power and include dealing in seals and seal skins, operating fish canneries and trading in general merchandise, among other things. The capital of the company is stated to be $100,000 divided into 1,000 shares of $100 each. It is also noted that the memorandum is for the purpose of re-incorporation and registration of Sutton Lumber and Trading Company, Limited Liability, a company incorporated under the Companies Act, 1890. Ownership from 1898 to 1901 was held in varying amounts, mainly by family members. By October 3, 1903, this had changed and the shares were owned by William Hunter McEwan and Alexander Fraser McEwan of Seattle, Washington. As plans went ahead for a cedar shake and sawmill operation at Mosquito Harbour, which is located seven and one- half miles northeast of Tofino on the east side of Meares Island, it is likely that the owners were actively seeking a market for their production. It may have been part of an arrangement to sell in the New York area that resulted in Benjamin W. Arnold of Albany, New York, becoming one-half owner of Sutton Lumber in 1905. The September 1907 issue of West Coast Lumberman reported that: "The Sutton Lumber Company's mill near Clayoquot has shipped the first cargo of cedar lumber for a foreign port that has gone from this part of the Province, destination being New York." This was a shipment of 3,500,000 feet of cedar aboard the Earl of Douglas. A further mention in the February 1908 issue of this journal noted: "The Sutton Lumber & Trading Co., at Mosquito Harbor, on the west coast, suffered from the recent gale. The wind and the high tides carried away some teredo weakened piles, which released timber estimated at about a million feet." All this was interesting but it made no mention of French-Canadian workers. The MacMillan Bloedel Storystated that Sutton Lumber had employed 400 men but no further details were given. John Parminter, the Alberni District Historical Society and the Roman Catholic Church were all very helpful but knew of no large group of Quebec workers at Meares Island. Nor did Mrs. J. Hanson of the Municipality of Tofino, but she sent copies of interesting Mosquito Harbour photographs which did show Chinese workers. A letter to Pierre-Louis Lapointe, Reference Archivist at the Archives Nationales du Quebec, brought welcome information about the strike at Buckingham, Quebec, in October 1906, and the blacklisting which followed the strike would have made many experienced men available for employment at Mosquito Harbour. There was, however, no mention of any leaving for the west coast. The Forests Library in Bastion Square, Victoria, put me in touch with J.M. Duncan, a Division Forester with MacMillan Bloedel Limited, who in turn suggested that I write to Ken Gibson at Tofino. By this time I was becoming skeptical of a French-Canadian presence at Mosquito Harbour and was further discouraged by consulting the Alberni Electoral District voters lists for 1907, 1908 and 1909 which held only one name which appeared to be French. Reluctantly, I came to accept the thought that the American owners might have taken it for granted that any forest operations in Canada would employ a large number of Quebec foresters. The order for trade tokens from Mayer Bros. in Seattle had therefore been in English and French. It seems likely that the tokens would be struck in sets of five cents, ten cents, twenty-five cents, fifty cents and one dollar. A reply from Ken Gibson of Tofino acknowledged his interest in local history and told of several visits to the site at Mosquito Harbour where there had been a large number of Chinese workers. Also, that a friend had the payroll ledger and some old mill records. The final verdict was rendered and my hopes dashed. Sutton Lumber would have been better served by striking their tokens in English and Chinese. The store at Mosquito Harbour included a post office in the years 1906 to 1908, which coincide with Sutton Lumber's most active period. The company continued operations on the west coast in a small way until the 1930s and retained their timber rights. In 1954 the ownership was with Aird Island, Inc. of Albany, New York; the English Lumber Co. of Seattle; and Seattle Cedar Lumber Manufacturing Co. of Seatde. The company wound down with a final distribution of $4,232,549.07 to the shareholders in the two years ending in 1957. ********** Tbe author is a keen numismatist living in Victoria. He is also a diligent researcher. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The writer wishes to express his deep appreciation to all those people whose assistance is mentioned in this article and also to R.A. Greene and anyone else who was consulted. Empire of Wood: Tbe MacMillan Bloedel Story. Douglas & Mclntyre, Vancouver, B.C., 1982. Vancouver Island's West Coast 1762-1962 by George Nicholson. Morriss Printing Company Ltd., Victoria, B.C., 1962. COLLINS" CLEAR-TYPE. DrCTTONAKi ■-. .*.;.. "-■-■.It.j.* 23 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 The Stolen Church — Windermere by Naomi Miller St. Peter's Church at Windermere is also known as "The Stolen Church." It was built at Donald, B.C., when that community was the divisional point on the newly completed Canadian Pacific Railway line. Donald had a sawmill and was home to many railway workers. The community had stores, a school, and St. Peter's Church, built by Anglicans but serving other denominations as needed. The records of St. Peter's baptisms, marriages and funerals are in the archives at die Golden and District Museum, as well as at the Anglican Archives, Kootenay Diocese, in Kelowna, B.C. Hotel owner Rufus Kimpton and his wife Celina were two of the builders of that church. (Celina was organist for most of the services held in Donald.) The CPR changed the planning for their divisional points in 1898. At this time, too, a forest fire decimated the timber reserves supplying the Donald sawmill. Residents were offered transfers to Golden or Revelstoke. Many houses were stripped and their walls loaded onto flatcars to take them elsewhere for reassembling. It was decided St. Peter's Church would be moved to Revelstoke (where it could serve as a hall for the new Anglican Church to the west). Rufus Kimpton moved to Windermere where he expanded an existing store that he owned. Their home was transplanted from Donald, via Golden on the The Stolen Church, Windermere, RC Sketch courtesy of the artist, Marcile Campbell 'r' M,_#T Tbe church with the stolen beO. St Paul's Church, Golden, BC Reproduced courtesy of Golden Anglican Women's Guild railway, and up river on a barge. Celina Kimpton was heard to say, "I miss my neighbours of those years, but, even more, I miss my church!" Rufus Kimpton was a man of action. He caught the next riverboat to Golden, hired a crew of workmen, went out by train to Donald, and proceeded to dismantle the church. The pieces were loaded onto a flatcar and taken to the waterfront in Golden, where they were loaded onto a barge. At nightfall, the eighty-pound bell given to the Donald church was lashed atop the load. Next morning, when the steamer moved upstream with the barge, the bell was missing. The church was reassembled well above high water at Windermere. On a subsequent trip to Golden, Rufus Kimpton dropped in to see the magistrate, "Judge" Griffiths. "Griff," he said, "some danged thief stole my bell!" Griff retorted: "Some one stole a whole church. Get out of my office or I'll lay charges." Several months later, St. Paul's Anglican Church, Golden, had a belfry built with a bell, weighing eighty pounds and inscribed as a gift from Baroness Burdett-Coutts, hung in that new belfry. The parishioners at Revelstoke eventually moved to claim the building from Donald, and learned that it had been moved elsewhere. They complained to the bishop, who wrote to the Windermere congregation that the church could not be consecrated because of its illegal move. Kimpton gleefully replied that they could worship just as well without the extra blessing of the bishop. The feud continued for a few years, then Bishop Sillitoe capitulated and arrived to dedicate St. Peter's on August 27, 1906. The church with the stolen bell did a repair of their bell tower in 1956 - and parishioners from Windermere grabbed the bell for a few hours. It was returned to Golden under RCMP guard and still serves to call the congregation to service or to celebrate special events such as weddings and baptisms. St. Peter's has been carefully preserved and is a popular site for weddings to this day. B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 24 A CWAC in Victoria 1942-1945 When I was a kid, I used to think that anyone who could remember things which happened fifty years ago was ready for the Glue Factory. But now that I am older and can remember that long ago, it doesn't seem that way at all. For I can vividly remember the summer of 1944, fifty years ago, which was a very happy one for me and has lingered long in my memory after some other happenings have long since been forgotten. Because it was while I was stationed in Victoria as a member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps during the Second World War that I spent that particular summer as duty driver at the Military Hospital on Lansdowne Road - the large, imposing building now known as Camosun College. When I first arrived in Victoria in 1943,1 was assigned to the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals orderly room as a clerk at Work Point near our barracks, and spent several uneventful months making up nominal rolls, typing out orders, and generally working at humdrum jobs. I was then transferred to the Transport Office at the Woollen Mills on Dallas Road; it was still called the Woollen Mills even though the mills had long been moved out of there and it had been taken over by the government as a huge garage for Armed Forces vehicles. My job was to keep track of the many assorted kinds of vehicles which came in for repairs and paint jobs, etc., and I loved working there for I got to know all of the drivers and would often get picked up when waiting on the corner for a streetcar, and thus whisked home or out to barracks without the tiresome wait and the long ride on a crowded, swaying public vehicle. by Phylis Bowman For when I started to work at Woollen Mills, I had to live out of the barracks - "out on subsistence" it was called - as the distance between the Mills and Work Point at that time was too far to commute. And so another co-worker, Anne, and I moved into the Balmoral Leave Centre which was on Douglas The author, Pte. Phylis Hamblin, was a member of tbe Canadian Women's Army Corps when she was duty driver at tbe Military Hospital in 1944. All photos courtesy of the author Street in the heart of downtown Victoria until we could find quarters somewhere near our work to rent. Finding suitable accommodation wasn't all that easy for the city was pretty crowded, with every litde basement, attic and extra bedroom rented out to construction workers and Armed Forces personnel and their relatives. We looked at several places, including a sleeping room which we rejected because it would have cost us eight dollars a week (that was a lot in those days), and then others which were cheaper but were too far away from our work- And then we luckily latched onto a room in a big old mansion on Dallas Road, a few blocks away from the Mills, with a fantastic view of Juan de Fuca Strait. The owner, an older widower, had rerrted out all the rooms so there were about fourteen of us staying there, sharing the two bath rooms and the large upstairs kitchen. Ours was the front room with a fireplace which we much enjoyed, a table and chairs where we had our meals, a dresser, a double bed, and a large bay window overlooking the road and ocean, and ornate double doors which had formerly opened up into the dining room which were then barricaded up, for there were others living in that room. It wasn't a bad set-up and not too expensive, but the cooking arrangements left something to be desired. For, according to my old diary, in which I meticulously detailed my hopes and dreams and joys and sorrows and ups and downs all during those years in the Army, some of the other tenants worked at a nearby fish cannery and often brought fish home for their supper, cooking it, naturally, in the community kitchen while we were cooking ours there. Now I have nothing against fish or its smell. Quite the contrary, in fact, for I had downed a great deal of it while growing up in Prince Rupert, the acknowledged Halibut Capital of the World, so I don't mind fish smelling like fish. But not pork chops or hamburger or sausages, or any of the other dishes that Anne and I concocted up. But many's the dish of those we ate which smelled strongly offish after it had been cooked in that fish-smelling community kitchen, but as we were young and healthy - and hungry - litde things like that, and also being short of hot water frequendy, were small things to be reckoned with and we gready enjoyed our stay at this place and our walks to and from work along windy Dallas Road and watching the waves and boats bounce by. Buying food was no problem. We 25 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 Driver Phylis Hamblin sat on tbe running board of tbe hospital ambulance to have ber picture taken in 1944 with another driver, Red, and CpL Gerald Fagan behind tbe wheel and another member of tbe Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps staff. shared the cost of the groceries and ate often at the Leave Centre Canteen or at the little Tea Room which used to be beside our digs in the big old house, or sometimes at the mess hall at Work Point if we had to be there for lectures or drill practice, etc. Once when we were dead flat broke just before payday, we took our last fifteen cents and five milk bottles to turn in at the litde corner store to get a tin of soup, and begged some bread and eggs and milk from the small artillery outpost positioned near us on Dallas. Then when I was transferred into the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps, I went back into barracks and began a new life motoring around the district in jeeps and sedans and trucks, taking mail and personnel and officers to the heavily guarded forts along the coasdine - Duntze Head, Mary Hill, Rodd Hill, Albert Head, William Head and Christopher Point, where they had mock guns set up as camouflage in the bush near the beach. We girl drivers not only had our driving duties, but we had to take turns helping out in the men's kitchens, for the Service Corps also ran the mess halls and it was one of the duties of the CWAC drivers to serve in the kitchens, a week each in turn. So for that week, instead of arising as usual at 6 a.m. and going to breakfast with the others, we got up at 5:30 and reported to the kitchen by 6. We sliced hundreds of loaves of bread (by hand, as electric slicers had not yet been invented) and helped dish up the food and clear off the tables after meals. There was lots of time off and you could always sit down whenever you wanted and enjoy a cup of coffee from the always-full pot on the huge stoves. But, on the whole, it wasn't that much of a hassle taking kitchen fatigue. We had 200 men in our mess, some members of the Midland Regiment from Ontario who were stationed there at that time and Dental Corps and Signal and Service Corps, and they filed by our counter for their food, cafeteria-style. They each had their own silverware and we supplied the plates and the food and tea and coffee and stacks and stacks of bread. But not butter, as it was rationed, as was sugar. As each fellow filed by, it was one of my duties to give him one small pat of butter and, since the quartermaster-sergeant was standing there, keeping a stern, watchful eye on everything, no one complained. There were dozens of beautiful/lowers in tbe showy gardens ofthe old hospital In 1944 and also round the unique sundial which kept fine time there. But I left all that behind when I was assigned to the hospital - the great building on Lansdowne Road which had been constructed as the Provincial Normal School. When it was officially opened on January 4, 1915, with about fifty students, its purpose was to train teachers for the elementary and high schools of B.C. and it had become a famous landmark in Victoria with its tower and clock which could be seen for miles in any direction. It had been converted into a military hospital in 1942, with students transferring to Craigdarroch Casde for their lessons. It was a grand old place, with tremendous green lawns and colourful arrays of rhododendrons and other showy plants in multi-coloured flowerbeds flanking it on all sides, and an ornate rock area and sundial in the front yard. Quonset huts had been set up at the rear to house the medical staff and schoolrooms had been converted into wards full of beds or administration and consulting offices. I lived in barracks but ate most of my meals at the hospital. The three men drivers had the ambulance and trucks, while I had the lighter station wagon for routine and other runs. There was one-way traffic around the building after driving up the wide front driveway, with all vehicles going to the right of the building, around the back, and exiting around the left-hand side. We drivers were allocated the first small room on the right of the lower floor, with a well-equipped, sterile laboratory in the large room across the hall and a big refrigeration room down the hall. The huge kitchen was on the left at the very end of the top floor and we would enjoy our delicious meals there with the afternoon and evening sun just pouring in the windows - in fact, to me, in my memories, I'll always refer to that place as the "Place with the Golden Windows." And I often went with the duty driver in the truck to pick up dozens of boxes of Dixie cups from a nearby outlet, and that was another happy memory - sitting in the front seat of the large truck, eating one - or perhaps two - little cups of ice cream as we rode up Hillside. For that was our standard joke: that I eat some of the ice cream to "test" it before it reached the hospital and, of course, I never found This picture, taken from tbe front steps of tbe Military Hospital on Lansdowne Road, shows the patients in beds rolled out onto tbe grounds to enjoy tbe music of the Garrison Band wbicb often came to entertain them. B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 26 anything wrong with it! It was like being in a great big family, working there. It was a huge complex running itself. None ofthe patients were very sick - all of the heavy suigery was done at Royal Jubilee Hospital, with the patients coming to our hospital for convalescence and treatment. During the hot summer afternoons and long evenings, the beds would be rolled out onto the lawns and placed under the trees and the up-patients in their hospital-issue "blues" - blue suit, white shirt, red tie and their own field caps - would stroll around the grounds and chat with other patients and visitors. My job was quite interesting: there were designated runs to Jubilee Hospital with blood and other samples, and trips to Work Point and other camps with records, supplies and patients, or to train, boat or bus stations to pick up or deliver personnel. And in between runs there were visits to the canteen in the front large room on the lower floor at the extreme left of the building, with delicious cups of coffee for five cents and jam tarts (two for a nickel) or other tasty treats. Sometimes in the evenings we drivers would go to Cedarhill Crossroads Golf Course to play golf - none of us were experts at the game but we had a heck of a lot of fun and usually ended up stopping along the way for a milkshake before dropping me off at barracks. Sometimes the Garrison Band came to play, with the musicians seated in a circle on the wide cement walk in front of the buildings with all the windows open so those who had to stay inside could hear and enjoy the music as much as those who had been wheeled outside in beds and wheelchairs. Sometimes concert parties would come to entertain the patients in the assembly hall, and the floor and balcony would be jam-packed with men in beds, wheelchairs, on crutches and on chairs - there were no seats such as there are now - and the corridors would ring with music, songs and laughter. There was another kind of music filling the lower hall, too - the lilting music of that old band leader, Vaughn Monroe, and his dulcet voice singing the lyrics along with his band, just like Rudy Vallee and other leaders of their time. Vaughn had a special place in our lives for one of our butchers, Jake by name, had a stack of records which he left in the drivers' room for us and him to play on our breaks. Jake was a great litde guy but had an awful inferiority complex because of a long jagged scar across one cheek, the result of a childhood accident. He sure liked Vaughn Monroe's music and claimed if he could only sing like his hero, then all the girls would like him and he would be a most popular fellow. So he played his records over and over and over again till we knew them practically by heart: There, I've Said It Again; Yours-, There'll Be Some Changes Made, Dardenella; Thanks, Mr. Florist; Dance, Ballerina, Dance; and my favorite, Racing With The Moon, which had kind of corny lyrics but a most delightful, melodic tune. Early in August it was announced that Gorden Head Military Camp was going to be made into a retraining casualty centre and not Harrison Hot Springs, as had been originally planned. Officers and inspection crews swarmed into the area and the empty, sagging huts at Gordon Head were renovated. Soon after that, casualties who had been wounded on D-Day and in other bat- des began to arrive and the sheer senselessness and horror of the war struck us anew as we saw those shattered limbs and crippled youths with the lines of suffering on those young fellows' faces. I remember one in particular who had been stationed in Prince Rupert with the Canadian Scottish before going overseas. He had been shot in the leg by a sniper when parachuting onto the Normandy beach. He ruefully told us he had been fed and clothed and trained by the Army for five years, only to be shot down as he landed to take an actual part in the war. And now he was crippled for life. After all the patients and facilities had been moved to Gordon Head, the old Normal School was turned back to the government and extensively renovated back into schoolrooms and now it houses hundreds of students in its rooms and laboratories. But to me that stately old building with its windows of gold at sunset will always bring back memories of that happy summer of 1944 which I spent there. Instead of the noise of scurrying feet and the chatter of students throughout the halls as I wander through the place on visits to Victoria, for me the corridors will always carry the de lightful scent of the canteen's five-cent cups of coffee and the echoes of the syrupy voice of baritone Vaughn Monroe singing with his orchestra. Several years after the war, I saw Monroe on a television program from Seatde and he, like the rest of us, had grown a litde older and a mite slower with these many passing years. But when he swung into his theme song, I was right there, back at the old Military Hospital, singing along with him: Racing with the moon, High up in the midnight blue, And then all too soon, It's lost from view. Racing with the moon, That is what I'll always do, Till I overtake the moon - and you! ••***•*•** North coast writer and historian Pbytts (Hamblin) Bowman bos written numerous articles about ber years as a "CWAC - a member of tbe Canadian Women's Army Corps during tbe Second World War and bos detailed many of ber amusing and interesting experiences when stationed in Victoria and Prince Rupert in one of ber books, catted We Skirted the War. Sbe bos written and self- pubUsbed thirteen books on tbe north coast area. BCHF CONFERENCE 1995 CHILLIWACK IS HOSTING THE 1995 CONFERENCE. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE A MEMBER TO ATTEND. WATCH FOR DETAILS IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE B.C. HISTORICAL NEWS. MARKMAY4,5,6,1994 ON YOURCALENDAR AND PLAN TO ATTEND. 27 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 Pioneer Postmistress by Kelsey McLeod In the early years up the British Columbia mainland coast, Eliza (Granny) Young was terrified of the southeast gales. "It's coming! It's coming!" she would cry, wringing her hands. From the distant ocean, roaring up through Welcome Pass, the wind was climbing through the forest, reaching upward over the easy terraces of the land that was in a few years to be re-named Lang Bay. The voice of the wind would increase and at last slam into the trees edging the clearing, bending the tree tops, making the unfinished two-storey house shudder under the impact. Granny could be forgiven her fear, for nothing in her years in Lowland Scotland had prepared her, a woman now well into her fifties, for a life of isolation in a West Coast rain forest, seventy miles north of Vancouver, in the early years of this century. Nothing to prepare her for a primitive home without running water, electricity or bathroom, a home set amidst what would today be called old-growth trees. Eliza Vessie Young and her husband, John, had a few years earlier settled first in Vancouver. Then the prospect of free land lured them up coast, for the area was beginning to open up to settlement. Son Jack was a cook in the logging camp of Brooks, Scanlon and Obrien on the Gordon Pasha Lakes and was the reason for choosing a homestead far inland, so he could come home at weekends.1 Long years after, each summer some of the family would hike to this long- abandoned homestead. It was a sobering experience. I always went first to a small shed at the edge ofthe overgrown clearing. It was full of horse collars and reins, all mildewed and stiff. A rusty buggy crumpled into the earth floor in the farthest corner. John Young had understood so litde of what he was going to face that he had thought a horse and buggy feasible. What he found were winding, rock-strewn, root-crossed trails through the forest, worn into place by deer or Indian feet. Even a quarter of a century later, no one else had seen fit to live here. GORDON PASHA LAKES TEXADA ISLAND The numbers on the map correspond with footnote numbers In the article. In spite of neglect, the unfinished house stood for many years and the diminishing clearing remained mossy. The First World War had disrupted all. Jack Young joined the Canadian Forestry Battalion and went overseas; Jimmy, the youngest son, went into the woods as a whistle punk at eleven; Jenny, the youngest daughter, worked in Powell River as a mother's helper. Money for the finishing of the house was not forthcoming and on those visits to the property afterwards, the most poignant memory is of climbing the wooden stairs and reading the newspapers that had been pasted on the bedroom walls to keep draughts out. The papers had long, endless lists of the names of the Canadians killed in action in France. Dreary reading for anyone lying in those bedrooms listening to the winds. When eldest daughter Maggie married in 1917, the isolation became too much for the Youngs. Fortunately this coincided with the departure of Jack Mullen, Lang Bay's first resident, which left his house at the beach vacant. John and Eliza moved into the Mullen house,2 perched on its headland and cabled to the granite so it would not be blown into Malaspina Strait. Shortly after, the government saw fit to establish a post office at Lang Bay and the couple became postmaster and postmistress, posts they were to keep till 1939. Granny had had a store in Scodand and John also had his own business, so they were well equipped for the positions. At least on the headland was not the claustrophobic crowding of trees, because of the rocky terrain, and the view of the ocean was panoramic. But the few neighbours were miles distant and water had to be carried from a well down by today's Palm Beach.3 Yet, after the first house, this one seemed a refuge to Granny, particularly as she now had people, few as they were, coming and going. Here at last was a home where the family's many books and the furniture they had brought from Scotland could be settled in, where the ornaments and china could be enjoyed. The one way in or out was by boat. There was a pole-line trail to Powell River, but Granny was too old to make such a hike. The highway was the rolling Malaspina Strait, and an unpredictable highway it could be. Early on there was a boat strike that lasted six weeks, and it was at its beginning that John took ill. He had to wait for the strike's end to get to Vancouver for treatment. Granny nursed him as best she could, but by the time he was hospitalized his condition was so critical it was eighteen months before he returned home. In spite of it all, it is certain that once B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 28 Eliza Vessie Young, Lang Bay postmistress, 1920s. Photos from the family album he did so, Granny felt life was much improved. Settlers were trickling in, there was a local logging company, more names on lists of mail that arrived. The winds no longer frightened. The time was one of optimism and hope, a time when the true pioneer spirit prevailed. There was little talk of doom and gloom in those days. People were too busy getting on with life. Then came the devastating forest fire of July 1922.4 Where the home had been was now a ruin. Twisted metal, bedsteads, stove and heater bent and ruined. Against a wall that contained book shelves were now rows of grey, de stroyed books, looking at first intact but which crumpled at a touch. Nothing had been saved. All that remained of the family's original possessions were a steamer trunk and a paisley shawl that had been Granny's grandmother's wedding shawl - items that had been given earlier to daughter Maggie. Gone were all treasured reminders of a safe and comfortable life in the Old Country. The old couple had but the clothes they stood in, and those were scorched and burned. Granny talked after - once - of how "the faither," as she called her husband, had sat for long hours motionless in the weeks after the holocaust in the shell of the building he had used as a workshop. There were no disaster funds then, but the Red Cross stepped in. It was strange to see Granny and John camping in a tent by the beach, Granny cooking over a camp- fire. All the equipment seemed to have a red cross on it, such as a first aid kit in khaki drill, doubdess leftovers from the war. John set about building a new house, and soon a small, two-room dwelling was ready to move into. Not on the headland, but on flat ground above the curving bay where the fire-damaged wharf was.5 One room was for living, the other for the post office. And here was established the store that was to become the core of Granny's existence for the remainder of her life. As time went on, John added a section for storage with a cellar underneath to keep items cool, a workshop area and, finally, a further good-sized living area with a large living room with fireplace and two bedrooms. Whenever John and Eliza went to Vancouver for their once-yearly holiday of one week, they replaced the burned furniture, and Granny once more had "good" dishes and "good" linen. Eliza's salvation was the store. It is strange, in retrospect, when one listens to today's endless whining litanies on everything, to recall with surprise and gratitude that neither John nor Eliza ever talked about their misfortunes or their hardships. If they had regrets they never voiced them. That store was Granny's life. She loved people and her existence became serving in the store and post office, meeting the mail boats. She knew every Union Steamship crewman by name and early on they gave her a Union officer's cap which she always donned when meeting the boats. As John had but one leg, the boat meeting fell on her and all five feet of her, pristine in a starched cotton dress, officer's cap perched on her silvery hair, rejoiced in this errand. If I brought her flowers from our garden, or wild flowers, she made nosegays of them and handed them to a chief steward she nicknamed "Sweet" William,6 so that he could have flowers on his dining-room tables. During the twenties there was a southbound and a north-bound boat each day and later it was a three-times-a-week service. Whether the boat arrived at six p.m. or ten p.m., the mail was sorted at Granny Young, in officer's cap, with ber daughter Maggie and granddaughter Velma Young, 1933. 29 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 once and handed out. Mail - that link with the outside world - was too precious for waiting. It never occurred to the Youngs to keep people waiting for it. Eliza was known as "Granny" Young to everyone. And no matter who they were, what time they arrived at the store, they were served and made welcome. She listened with sympathy to many a harrowing tale of hardship, such as that of a Mrs. Watt who lived way back at the foot of the mountains in a shack. Mrs. Watt had set out for the store and became lost in the woods. She had wandered for two days before finding her way out. It was hilarious to hear Granny with her Scottish accent conversing with the setders from Kelly Creek, who were Ukrainians. Her good nature rarely faltered. When a summer visitor (this visitor had had all her provisions shipped up from Vancouver) grandly stumped in and asked in a pseudo-English accent for "one-quatah pound of brown sugah, if you please, Mrs. Young," Granny's smile wavered but she opened a one-pound bag of sugar without comment, adjusted the counter scales to four ounces, and weighed out the amount. She made no comment as the customer took herself, her brogues, and her tiny packet in the direction of Maitlands beach.7. Granny loved flowers, and every tiger lily, every branch of flowering currant, every star flower and violet I spied I took to her. It must have been sadness without measure for her to live in the devastated landscape that followed the forest fire. She was Lang Bay's only career woman. She spent a minimum of time on household chores and meals were simple. A family member was paid to do the washing and ironing. No preserving of fruit, no kitchen garden for Grandma. She made no pretense that housewifery was her reason for being, though she did bake and she knit furiously at socks every moment she was not busy in the store. The click of her steel needles was always present, and years after her death her socks were still keeping feet warm. She had, she said, been taught to knit at the age of three. She did keep chickens, birds that scratched busily in the dust around the buildings, and which produced large brown eggs on schedule. She gave up on this finally. One morning, when she opened the henhouse door, the hens were dead on their roost. A weasel had killed the lot. More important to her was the business of taking and despatching messages on the community's one phone. More important was the business of making sure on mail nights that no boy, hovering about waiting for the boat, damaged the fragile fir saplings that had miraculously sprung up on the bank opposite the store after the fire. Anyone who touched one of those tiny wisps of green was instantly the object of Granny's wrath. Today those trees are her memorial - they stand tall and green and dense, a symbol of nature's ability to survive and of a small Scotswoman's concern and protection. As the 1930s dawned, as the new road to Powell River8 drew more and more people to shop in the paper town, the Youngs' store still was an important community asset, for not everyone had a car. Stillwater had a store, but even after the road went in, Granny's store was the only one between Stillwater and Westview. The Depression was a difficult time. She even took quilts from cashless settlers as payment (a practice that failed to provide funds to pay the Vancouver wholesalers). Eliza maintained as long as possible many traditions. Periodically, during the summers, the weekend Union boat would hoist a dripping wooden tub from hold to dock. The children watched its swinging progress with taste buds already in action, for it was that rare treat, ice cream. (In a refrigerator-less world, ice cream was but a dream.) The tub sat on the shallow step in front of the waiting room-library till the mail was distributed. Then the container of cones, scoops, Granny and a helper appeared and everyone ate ice cream till the metal container, surrounded by its packing of rock salt, was scraped clean. John Young died of a stroke in February of 1939, well into his.eighties. By summer Granny was ailing. After more than fifty years of marriage and the long road they had travelled together, his loss was traumatic for her. The Harry Lauder song Keep Right On To The End Of The Road, played so often on the phonograph at Sunday family gatherings, became her motto. When World War Two broke out, Grandma was in hospital with cancer. Yet eighty-odd or not, dying or not, she avidly read reports of the war's progress till she went into a coma and died in November. You can speculate on what strange fate brought Eliza Young to Lang Bay at a time when a store and post office was needed. The fact remains that she was a vital part of the early years of the area. She was neither famous nor learned, nor provincially influential. She was simply one of the host of unsung women pioneers without whom our communities, our province, Canada itself, could not have been built. ********** Tbe writer grew up in Lang Bay but bas spent most of ber adult life in Vancouver. She bas worked many hours as a volunteer at tbe Vancouver Museum and tbe Maritime Museum. FOOTNOTES 1. The locution ofthe Youngs' pre-emption. 2. The headland where jack Mullen had built his house. 3. Hob Simpkins, who had a sense of humour, named this lwach "Palm" lteach. Today there is a provincial park where Mullen had his garden and well. 4. See B.C. Historical Neivs, Summer 1991 issue. 5. The location of the new house was more sheltered than that on the headland. 6. William Gardner. 7. There were a number of "summer" homes on "Maitlands" beach. 8. It was fifteen miles to Powell River, over a winding, dusty, pot-holed road. See "Road Mania" in B.C. Historical News, Summer 1989 issue. CHANGE OF ADDRESS? PLEASE NOTIFY OUR SUBSCRIPTION SECRETARY: MARGARET MATOVICH 6995 CANADA WAY BURNABY, B.C. V5E3R6 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 30 British Columbia Women's Institute: A Brief History by Estette Lefurgy To begin to tell the story of the B.C. Women's Institute one must leave the province momentarily and visit the small rural town of Stoney Creek, Ontario, in the year 1897. Because of the vision of Mr. Erland Lee, an active member ofthe local Farmers' Institute, together with the moral support and literary skills of his wife Janet, the beginnings of a women's organization were created on February 19, 1897, in the local Farmers' Institute hall. This cold and stormy night was host to one of Canada's greatest public speakers, all the more notable because the orator was a woman. Adelaide Hunter Hoodless had worked tirelessly for the education of women, particularly in the area of home economics. Her presentation so gready motivated the women, they decided to immediately associate a women's group with the Farmers' Institute. However, it was evident that as the movement quickly grew, a separate organization was required, and with the support of the Ontario ministry of agriculture, the Women's Institute organization was established. By 1909 the province of British Columbia was experiencing a great surge of migration from other areas of Canada and from Europe. The B.C. ministry of agriculture recognized that to assure permanent setdement in these newly opened regions, the settlers must be content, particularly the women. Having heard of the great success of the Women's Institute, the B.C. ministry of agriculture arranged with the Ontario ministry of agriculture to have a Miss Laura Rose travel throughout British Columbia establishing branches of the Women's Institute. Over the past eighty-five years, more than 200 B.C. communities have been home to branches of the Women's Institute, the first being established in Gordon Head on Vancouver Island in 1909 and the most recent addition be- Letterbead (top) and badge of tbe Women's Institute in British Columbia. ing Wildwood WI outside Westbank in 1994. Outstanding achievements accomplished by the Women's Institute in British Columbia over the years usually began as a response to a need of local rural women. In 1922 a woman wrote to the then government-appointed WI superintendent, Mrs. V. McLachlan, asking for help for her young niece who was suffering from spinal tuberculosis. Although she desperately needed medical attention within a hospital environment, there was no facility at that time in British Columbia that specifically treated children. When Mrs. McLachlan informed the B.C. WI members of this letter requesting assistance, the response was overwhelming. After many meetings, letters, fund-raising events, etc., together with the support and cooperation of other ogranizations, the first Vancouver Hospital for Crippled Children was founded. Today that institution is known as the B.C. Children's Hospital. The reputation of the institute as an organization capable of "getting things done" prompted a Dr. Cyril Wace of Vancouver Island to ask Mrs. McLachlan to mobilize the efforts of the WI members to establish a residential medical facility for children on Vancouver Island. Once again the members set about the work required to "do the impossible." As a result of those efforts, the Queen Alexandra Solarium was established. Today it is known as Queen Alexandra Centre for Children's Health. With the monies remaining from these ventures, the institute created the Othoa Scott Fund, so named in honour of the litde girl who was the catalyst for the members' efforts. This fund continues to disperse monies to assist B.C. families in meeting non-medical costs for an ill child. This has been particularly helpful to rural and isolated families as they are often required to make regular trips to B.C. Children's Hospital in Vancouver. Many rural communities have the Women's Institute to thank for their local libraries, early medical and dental clinics, regular public-health nurse visitations, mobile tuberculosis X-ray vans, etc. The two world wars saw B.C. WI members organizing jam-making sessions for export to England and quilts, handmade socks, goody parcels and other items were prepared, donated and shipped overseas to less fortunate families during these conflicts. Upon the return of local servicemen, many branches organized welcome home socials, dances and parties. Frequently the institute and the schoolhouse were the only constants in the social life of small communities. As a result, the institute stood on the doorstep of the school with assistance of scholarships, bursaries, awards, books, activities, costumes, etc. Many of these branches, together with the provincial Women's Institute, continue to support the needs of our students today. 31 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 It has always been the belief of the Women's Institute that "a nation cannot rise above the level of its homes; we women must work and study together to raise our homes to the highest possible level." Throughout the years and currently, workshops, seminars, information meetings and/or resolutions on family violence, child abuse, pornography, illiteracy, pensions for homemak- ers, child care, Canadian unity, have all supported the institute's dedication to this belief. Initiatives to educate and inform women throughout B.C. have been carried out in the form of small gatherings to large provincial conventions. These include the volunteer Agriculture in the Classroom program, the Adolescent Lifestyle Choices program, and self-confidence programs. The institute developed and offered to women throughout the province forums to learn skills to access decision-makers, to present briefs, to make a difference. Outstanding achievements accom plished by the Women's Institute in British Columbia over the years began as a response to a need of local women. This also applied to those small acts of kindness carried out by a local branch that may only be known to the givers and the receivers. The strong sense of self-reliance and resourcefulness that is very much a part of rural folks and rural communities is very much a part of the B.C. Women's Institute. The self-effacing style of this organization reflects the basic values of its members. Because of this, the B.C. WI did not feel the need to "announce its achievements or to seek reward." This, however, is beginning to change as the B.C. WI is learning that it must keep the greater community informed of what can be accomplished by a group of ordinary women who have done, and continue to do, extraordinary deeds. 1997 is the centennnial of the Women's Institute movement and the B.C. WI will be celebrating in a number of ways. A booklet containing poems, plays and skits written by WI members and performed thoughout the years by WI branches and others will be published. A centennial quilt with historical blocks being prepared by each of the fifteen B.C. WI districts will be exhibited at the 1996 B.C. WI triennial convention. Also, each WI community will be asked to officially declare February 1997 as WI Month; also, the B.C. Premier will be asked to proclaim February 1997 as WI Month provincially. Local museums will also be approached to assist WI branches with historical displays during 1997. The motto of the Women's Institute - "For Home and Country" - is as relevant in the 1990s as in the 1890s; strong homes make for a strong country! ********** The author, who lives in Langley, is tbe current president ofthe Women's Institute in RC Music ofthe Titanic by Thelma Reid Lower When the Vancouver Maritime Museum was planning its 1993/94 exhibit featuring the Titanic, it was decided to add a further dimension to the usual Titanic displays. On the walls of the orientation room at the start of the museum's Titanic walkabout, there were framed covers of sheet music which focused on two aspects of Titanic history: (1) the music popular before the sinking on April 14/15,1912, and which was part of the social history of Titanic passengers and (2) music written after the sinking which has now become part of global music history catalogued under "Disasters at Sea." For the enjoyment of first and second class passengers on the Titanic, a band of eight musicians played selections from the White Star Music Book listing 350 tides popular at that time. The most frequendy listed composer in the White Star Music Book m m WORDS AND MUSIC by Arthur S.LESUE Frice 50 cents Publisked cy. ARTHUR S. LESLIE, 3iiHospa»l sr NEWWESTMMSTER-.B.C.CAMADA. -« was the "English Waltz King" Archibald Joyce, whose waltz masterpieces were advertised widely as "popular in every London ballroom." Among his romantic waltzes were Salome, Dreaming, Sweet William, A Thousand Kisses, Boating, Vision d'Amour, and Songe d'Automne. Songe dAutomne is the waltz reported by some survivors to have been chosen by Bandleader Wallace Hartley to play as "the last waltz" while the Titanic was sinking. Challenging the popularity of the European waltz in three-quarter time was the new music in syncopated rhythm called "ragtime." The American composer Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag (1902) was soon followed by his Fig Leaf Rag. During the last agonizing throes of the Titanids foundering, the Canadian Major Arthur Peuchen, rowing in Lifeboat No. 6, recalled hearing Alexander's Ragtime Band, which appears at the B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 32 top of the list of novelty dances in the White Star Music Book. Written in 1911 by Irving Berlin, Alexander's Ragtime Band has become the most famous of all popular rags. (This author was not able to find a first edition of this rag.) Peaks of romanticism and sentimental music on the Titanic came from the waltzes of Franz Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow. At Daly's Theatre in 1907, the premiere performance in London caused a sensation in fashion. Wide-brimmed hats trimmed with flowers and feathers appeared on every woman's head, while lovely waltz tunes were hummed on every lip. The light-hearted joyousness of the couple-dancing waltz era made the sudden and unexpected disaster of the Titanic all the more grievously shocking. Afterwards, an outpouring of immediate grief was followed by a deepening, almost spiritual, fascination with the mysteries of the Titanic. In 1985 Samuel Goodman and Joseph C. Hickerson, Head, Archive of Folk Song, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C, compiled a list of over 400 song tides inspired by the Titanic disaster. The list includes The Loss of the Titanic composed in New Westminster in 1912 by Drum-Major Arthur Simpson Leslie. Drum-Major Leslie had arrived in New Westminster in 1893. Born in Wellington Barracks, London, England (his father being a sergeant-major in an English regiment), Drum-Major Leslie served with the 12th Lancers and was for ten years stationed in India. After securing his discharge with pension from the British forces, he came to New Westminster where he joined the local company of the Duke of Connaught's Own Rifles. Later he was put in charge of the drum and bugle band of the 104th Regiment of Westminster Fusiliers, during which time hundreds of local boys passed through his hands as buglers and drummers and paraded through the "Royal City's" colourful events. During World War I, when the 131st Battalion was formed, Drum-Major Leslie was placed in charge of the bugle band and went overseas with the Westminster unit. In England the authorities refused to allow him to proceed any further because of his age. Returning to Tbe author is tbe archivist for tbe Vancouver Bach Choir. (See B.C. Historical News24;2, Spring 1991, pp. 14-18.) She and ber husband are active members of tbe Vancouver Historical Society. Mr. Lower is currently Honorary President of tbe BCHF. SELECTED SOURCES National Library of Canada, Music Division, Ottawa, Ontario. Dedicated \o Miss Florence Roher[s. Songs w-wk * ;*?Wj^| "■? h ^FfL'E COPY T9 BE ,REf(jRW£Dx5-K^ ■ fi .MfflBflinlaycE. . eonr-urn er VISION or 3naMl'*H.sc,Q) "SWEET MEMORIES v»lsE.r.I CvyyAr. Express Prims New Westminster from England, he again joined up and was in charge of the 47th Battalion bugle band at the time of his death in 1923. An elaborate funeral procession with full military honours testified to the respect in which Drum-Major Leslie was held by New Westminster citizens. It was not unlike the massive funeral in Colne, England, for another musician, Bandmaster Wallace Hartley of the Titanic. ********** The British Library, Music Division, London, U.K. Britten's Music Ltd.. Mail Order Office, West Byfleet, Surrey, U.K. Titanic Disaster Music, Archive of Folk Song, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Royal Westminster Regiment Museum, Armoury, New Westminster, B.C. Irving House Historic Centre, New Westminster, B.C, Vernon Museum, Vernon, B.C. Vancouver Maritime Museum, Vancouver, B.C. REFERENCES Goodman, Samuel and Hickerson, Joseph C. Titanic Disaster Music, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C, 1985- Klamkin, Marion. Old Sheet Music, A Pictorial History. Hawthorn Books, New York, 1975- Lower, Thelma Reid. Titanic Exhibit, Mitsic on tbe Titanic, Vancouver Maritime Museum, 1993- McCann, Leonard, Curator Emeritus. Summary Reports, Vancouver Maritime Museum. 33 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 David Douglas: Botanist and Explorer History often has a way of playing tricks on people — recording in some detail numerous facts concerning nonentities and then, turning around, almost completely ignoring a person worthy of being remembered. This is the story of a man who falls into the latter category. David Douglas, who was born in Old Scone, Scotland, in 1799, is one of our greatest but least known explorers and botanists. Even the Douglas fir tree which is named for him is often thought to be ascribed to Sir James Douglas, the first governor of British Columbia. Although his formal education ended before he was twelve, Douglas had an innate and intense interest in plants. Fortunately this was recognized by the manager of the Scone Palace gardens, who offered a botanical apprenticeship to the young man. Then a series of events happened that would change his life. Before long he came to the attention of the brilliant botanist at Glasgow University, Dr. William Jackson Hooker, who was so impressed with David'.s work that a position was arranged for him with the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. This prestigious appointment attracted the attention of the Royal Horticultural Society of London and for the eleven years that were left of David's life, the society would sponsor his scientific explorations. In 1823, at the age of twenty-four, David Douglas' first assignment was a six-month plant-collecting trip to the northern United States and Upper Canada. The trip's success was recorded by the Royal Horticultural Society: "This mission was executed by Mr. Douglas with a success beyond expectation." Douglas' greatest adventures began, however, when he arrived at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River in April 1825. For twenty-three months he explored up the Columbia basin for 220 miles and south as far as northern California. In all, he collected 499 different specimens by Win Shilvock of plants and over 100 varieties of seeds. During his wanderings he continually came across the fir tree that would carry his name and he noted in his journal that it was "one of the most striking and truly graceful objects in nature." A further comment unknowingly presaged the vast northwest lumber industry. "The wood may be found very useful for a variety of domestic purposes ..." In March 1827 Douglas decided to return to England. Accompanied by his faithful servant, William Johnson, and his beloved dog, Billy, an incredible journey got underway. The expedition went north through the upper part of the massive Oregon Country, which sixty-two years later would become Washington State. After a rest at Fort Colville (north of today's Spokane), the three continued north, arriving at what are now the Arrow Lakes in British Columbia's West Kootenay country. Leaving the lakes, they passed where Revelstoke is and at the site of the Mica Dam veered east to Athabasca Pass, about thirty miles south of today's Jasper, Alberta. Here David Douglas made the first recorded ascent of any of the peaks in the Rocky Mountains. One, the name of which is still retained, he named Mount Brown in honour of Robert' Brown, a botanical friend in the British Museum. The other, Mount Hooker, honoured his close friend Dr. Hooker. The Hooker Icefield today bears the same name. It was near here, too, that he caught and preserved a species of grouse which he named Franklin grouse after his Arctic explorer friend, Sir John Franklin. This bird is now in the Royal Scottish Museum at Edinburgh. After crossing the Rockies, Douglas travelled over the prairies by foot, horse and canoe, and on September 15, six months after leaving Fort Vancouver, he arrived at Hudson Bay and took ship for England. His reception at home was akin to that given a returning hero. The Horticultural • Society noted that more plants were introduced into England by Douglas than by any other individual from any other single country. It also stated: "... that nothing could surpass the zeal and spirit with which he (Douglas) had executed the trust he had undertaken." Another pleasing aspect was that the expedition, which had encompassed two and one-half years, had been completed at a cost of less than $2,000, including Douglas' wages. It's an interesting note that among the seeds brought back by Douglas were some from the fir tree that so fascinated him. One was planted in his home town and it grew to a gigantic, magnificent Douglas fir. After two years of being feted and honoured with membership in almost every learned society in Britain, David Douglas became "nervous and irascible" and yearned to return to North America. A nineteen-month tour of the Columbia River area between June 1830 and January 1832 appeased him somewhat, but he had a much larger plan in mind. In October 1832 Douglas again arrived at the Columbia River, prepared for a gigantic feat of endurance. Assured by the Russians they wouldn't interfere, the plan was to travel north to Fort St. James in New Caledonia (British Columbia), cross what is now Alaska, and work across Siberia to Europe. On March 20, 1833, he set out on the initial leg ofthe 1,150-mile stretch to Fort St. James, a route that would take him through the Okanagan Valley. Travelling the Hudson Bay Fur Brigade Trail, he arrived sometime in April at the mouth of a swift-flowing creek that emptied into the Great Okanagan Lake. This is generally conceded to be Bear Creek, the site of our modern government campsite. During his two years in England in B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 34 the late 1820s, he'd studied how to take geographical positions and elevations. Using this knowledge, he spent a couple of days taking sightings in the Kelowna area. He also found gold at the creek mouth — "enough to make a seal." This was the first discovery of gold in the West — fifteen years before the strike in California and twenty-three years before the finds on the Fraser River. Continuing on the Brigade Trail through Fort Kamloops, Douglas arrived at Fort St. James to find the next part of his journey would be extremely hazardous, if not impossible. The journey would require 500 miles of travel over little-known trails and rivers just to reach Fort Simpson at the mouth of the Nass River. Then would come a 300-mile struggle over similarly rough terrain to get to the Russian fort at Sitka on Baranof Island, where he hoped to winter. Threatening along the entire route were very hostile Indians. This appeared to be too much for even the indomitable David Douglas, so the original plan was aborted. Turning south, he arrived at Fort George (Prince George) from where he, William Johnson and his dog Billy set out in a canoe for a descent of the Fraser River. They'd hardly started when the canoe was wrecked on a small island in Fort George Canyon. Johnson and Billy were washed up on shore but David was carried into a whirlpool where he spun around for an hour and forty minutes before escaping. Everything was gone. According to Douglas, "... my canoe was dashed to atoms — I lost every article in my possession." Worst of all, he lost "The journal of my occurrences," a year's worth of scientific notes, and more than 400 species of plants. Gone, too, were the details of his sojourn at Bear Creek. Eventually he made his way back through Fort Kamloops and the Okanagan Valley to Fort Vancouver, where he hoped to get a ship to Sitka. But the expedition had been so strenuous that his health deteriorated and he decided to go to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) for a rest. In December 1833 he arrived on the Big island and for eight months leisurely collected some 2,000 species of ferns. He also scaled the peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, the first haoli to do so. In August 1834 disaster again struck David Douglas. While wandering around the island with his dog Billy, he inadvertently fell into a wild cattle pit and was gored to death. Although he was only thirty-five, David Douglas had compressed into those few years a lifetime of scientific achievements. These live on today in dozens of gardens throughout the world. His name, too, lives in the Douglas fir tree. David Douglas ********** Tbe author is a retired businessman living in Kelowna. ADVERTISEMENTS FROM AN 1883 DIRECTORY. NMAIMO 3IILL STREET, JOHN MAHREIl :~ ' PROPRIETOR, c+®5/i BASTION STREET, Opposite the Literary Institute Hall, NANAIMO, B. C. J. E. JENKINS, Proprietor. Good Accommodation for Transient and Permanent Boarders and Lodgers. The Bar is supplied with the Best Brands of Wises, Liawn and Cigars, 35 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 NEWS & NOTES Fort Steele Heritage Town in the East Kootenay offers hands-on history to school classes and other youth groups. They sleep on straw-filled mattresses, attend an old-fashioned one-roomed school, pan for gold, learn a bit about grooming and harnessing a horse, chink between logs on a building wall (with mud), participate in butter churning, ice cream making and laundry, pioneer-style. Two Idaho Girl Scout leaders had to suppress a giggle when one of their small troop, up to her elbows in sudsy water scrubbing clothes on a washboard, declared: 'This is funl I wish Mum would trade in her washing machine for this!" Canadian Historical Association Certificates of Merit The Regional History Committee of the Canadian Historical Association invites nominations for its Certificate of Merit awards. Two awards are given annually for each of five Canadian regions, including British Columbia and the Yukon: (1) an award for publications and videos that make a significant contribution to regional history and that will serve as a model for others; and (2) an award to individuals for work over a lifetime or to organizations for contributions over an extended period of time. Nominations, accompanied by as much supporting documentation as possible, should be sent no later than December 15,1994, to Dr. John Douglas Belshaw, Department of Philosophy, History and Politics, University College of the Cariboo, Kamloops, B.C. V2C 5N3 (fax: 604-371-5510). The 1993 awards were presented to (1) Dianne Newell for her Tangled Webs of History: Indians and the Law in Canada's Pacific Coast Fisheries (see review p. 38 this issue) and (2) Keith Ralston, historian. Congratulations to Keith, who was recently the Honorary President of the BCHF. Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre A group of citizens in New Denver, B.C., conceived the idea of preparing a display as a memorial to Japanese-Canadians interned in the interior of British Columbia during WWII. This collection of shacks represent the drafty buildings, each occupied by two families, in that cold winter of 1942-43; the outhouse; a somewhat improved cabin c. 1957, with family garden; the first community hall adapted to include a Buddhist temple; and a new community hall with photographic and other displays. The courtyard is planted with a Japanese garden symbolizing the past, present and future. This memorial centre was officially opened on July 23,1994. The guests on the platform each spoke briefly to convey his or her feelings on the value of this centre. They were Bishop Matsubayashi of the Buddhist Church; Mayor Gary Wright of New Denver; Sakaye Hashimoto of the Kyowakai Society; the Japanese consul-general from Vancouver; Dr. Henry Shimizu of the Japanese-Canadian Redress Foundation from Edmonton; Chair ot B.C. Heritage Trust Ardyth Cooper; Don Johnston of the Vancouver Foundation; MLA Corky Evans of Nelson; Minister of Tourism and Culture Bill Barlee; MP Jim Gouk; R. Inouye of the National Association of Japanese-Canadians; Miss Yoshiko Godo of the Japanese-Canadian Citizens Association; Tom Shoyama, retired federal deputy minister of finance, now living in Victoria; Dr. John Shintani; and Rev. Noshiro of the United Church. Dr. Shintani, a dentist, made a brief address in the Japanese language taught to him as a boy by Mrs. Chie Kamagaya. Mrs. Chie Kamagaya came to Canada to instruct Japanese-Canadians in their ancestral tongue. She was evacuated to Kaslo and lived there for many years before moving to New Denver. She worked steadily and quietly with volunteers and contractors to ensure that details of this display were correct. Mrs. Chie Kamagaya saw the completion of this project and was thanked for her role. She thanked all helpers in their turn. She passed away in her sleep on August 18, 1994, at the age of eighty-five. A Buddhist funeral was held in the memorial centre in New Denver and a service to honour her memory was conducted in Toronto, with hundreds of her former pupils attending. The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre is open for viewing daily during the summer and by appointment year- round. It is a most commendable heritage attraction. Travel on Highway #6 and/or #23 to reach New Denver. Aquam Community Care Home St. Mary's Band has long wished to keep elders close to their culture in their declining years. This is now possible. A home to provide nursing care for fifteen elders was officially opened on August 4 on the St. Mary's Reserve near Cranbrook. The first five residents were Ktunaxa (Kootenay) residents of the St. Mary's Reserve, who were joined by two from Vancouver Island. Those eligible for care at this centre must have lived on an Indian reserve anywhere in Canada. Rosemary Nicholas has directed this project since its inception in 1990. It was financed by CMHC as a special services project and is the first full-term facility on a reserve in Western Canada. Yellowhead Highway Anniversary On September 4,1944, the highway between Prince Rupert and Terrace was officially opened. Both the provincial and federal governments had been promising this road but it was the perceived threat of a Japanese invasion that caused the United States to press for a land route to move their troops. For thirty years the railroad was the only overland link between Prince Rupert and the rest of Canada. The war-time emergency road was built as quickly as possible. Today, fifty years after the official opening, the original narrow winding road has been almost totally rebuilt. An article giving details of the history of this highway, written by Dirk Septer of Telkwa, will appear in a future issue of the B.C. Historical News. Cutting the ribbon at the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre In New Denver. Left to right: Gary Wright, Mayor of New Denver; Dr. H. Shimizu of the Japanese-Canadian Redress Foundation; Mrs. Chie Kamagaya; and Sakaye Hashimoto of the Kyowakai Society. July 23,1994. Photo courtesy of 77ie Valley Voice, New Denver B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 36 BOOKSHELF Books for review and book reviews should be sent directly to the Book Review Editor: Anne Yandle, 3450 West 20th Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V6S 1E4 Robin Ward's Heritage West Coast Robin Ward. Madeira Park, Harbour Publishing, 1993. 128 p., illus. $32.95 Robin Ward came to the west coast as an adult immigrant from Scotland. The first book of his drawings produced by Harbour Publishing was Robin Ward's Vancouver (1990). Like the first, Robin Ward's Heritage West Coast is based on his weekly column in The Vancouver Sun. It is a mix of pleasing sketches of older, mainly Vancouver, structures, capsule histories, and usually apt, sometimes scathing, commentary. Inevitably one is drawn to compare Ward's output with that of Michael Kluckner. Perhaps this is unfair, given that Kluckner is an artist in watercolours and a native of Vancouver to boot One could hardly expect Ward's work to match the richness of Kluckner's Vanishing Vancouver (1990) in any respect - historical record, detail, captured ambience, deep feeling. Nevertheless, Ward's too is a worthy record of "built Vancouver." Given the state of the city's official heritage efforts as described, it is doubtful that few, if any, of Vancouver's large heritage structures will survive much longer, let alone the gentleness of established neighbourhoods in the "residential city" recorded by Kluckner. Ward has a fine flow of words to describe what most distresses him - "aberration," "fiasco," "grotesque banality." Though he is often surprised by what he happens upon, even delighted, he can be seriously depressed by the "blinkered attitudes" of some developers and councillors. He refers to several failed or wrongheaded attempts at heritage preservation, and notes also that the City of Vancouver, incredibly, allowed the removal of the distinctive and powerful Canadian National neon sign, even though it had received the city's heritage designation. Can Ward's public and caustic commentaries save his sketch subjects? Surely they will help. Mary Rawson Mary Rawson, a town planner, is a member of the Vancouver Historical Society. No Ordinary Journey: John Rae, Arctic Explorer 1813-1893 Ian Bunyan, Jenni Calder, Dale Idiens, Bryce Wilson. Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland, Montreal & Kingston, McGill University Press, 1993. 166 p., illus. Cloth $42.95, paper $19.95 This is a seductive book. The illustrations are glorious, from the numerous reproductions of early sketches and paintings to the modern photographs of the ever-photogenic Arctic. The text is equally enthralling - the authors draw John Rae in epic proportions from the young Hudson Bay Company surgeon/trader to the retired Arctic expert living in late 19th century London. The book, which was published to coincide with an exhibition of John Rae's Arctic collection at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, richly evokes the exhibition and John Rae's life. The book was published last year to commemorate Rae's death and its purpose is stated in the preface: "The contribution of Dr. John Rae and the native Canadians he learned from was not appropriately acknowledged in his lifetime and he has never been given due weight by Arctic historians." There are few early Arctic travellers who can be compared with Rae and perhaps only Stefansson equalled him in ground covered and dedication to learning from the natives. Stefansson's life has been well documented by himself and others, but published information about Rae is scant. For that reason any publication about John Rae is welcome. No Ordinary Journey is not a biography of Rae but is a compilation in five sections of aspects of his life, from his childhood in the Orkneys to a description of his considerable collection of native artifacts. These five chapters are written by four different authors with appropriate backgrounds in history and ethnography. Having been written in this fashion, though, the text does lack the unity that would come from a single author, but the reader can be assured that individual chapters do have an authori tative voice. The book is a bit of a curiosity as it seems to have created its own genre: its format and content place it somewhere between what one would expect from a coffee table book and a history of the Arctic in Rae's era. Perhaps the main problem with the book lies with its thesis: that the lack of recognition given Rae in the 19th century has continued into ours. In Rae's own time he was certainly denigrated by the Admiralty and naval Arctic explorers, but that feeling was reciprocated. Then, for a number of reasons, he was severely criticized by the press when he returned to England with the relics of Franklin's expedition and proceeded to claim the £10,000 reward that had been offered for information about the lost expedition. And, finally, he was chastised by many, notably by Charles Dickens in Household Words, when he suggested that Franklin's officers had been reduced to cannibalism. But Dickens was more journalist than novelist when he wrote in his periodical and was simply echoing the general sentiments of the public; in fact, Rae was highly respected by the HBC and by George Simpson in particular. As well, the Royal Geographical Society acknowledged his Arctic exploration in 1852 when he was presented with its Founders Medal. In his later life, the authors tell us, he lectured on the Arctic and was given an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh. Today, as then, he is acknowledged as a pioneer in Arctic exploration and travel; someone whom 20th century explorers like Stefansson admired and emulated. He may have been briefly pilloried by the press, but he has hardly been forgotten or denied his rightful place in Arctic exploration. One wonders, therefore, if it's necessary in a book about John Rae to write the kind of panegyric that characterizes this book. If one accepts Rae's contribution to Arctic history then the elevation of Rae into heroic proportions seems needless: his feats of endurance in the Arctic and in southern Canada are well known by anyone familiar with the published Rae material that is available. What 37 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 BOOKSHELF seems to be needed now is a more balanced view of Rae, perhaps the publication of the manuscript autobiography at the Scott Polar Institute or, even better, a balanced assessment of the man in a well- documented biography. Even the photographs of Rae in No Ordinary Journey seem to present a number of sides of the man: from the young, ambitious surgeon to Rae in old age, but the one in which he is portrayed with his wife Catherine shows a man in his prime, casually posed but with a strong suggestion of latent power and virility. It would be interesting to know more about that man. The book, unfortunately, has some flaws, some of which probably would not have occurred had there been a single author or, at least, a strong editorial presence. Considering that there is not as much information about John Rae as one would like, it's unfortunate the book does not contain endnotes, index or bibliography. There are some internal references to sources but these are too unspecific to be useful. There are too few dates; at times one has to go back or forward numerous pages to discover the times of events being described. Also, at times, in their enthusiasm for Rae, the authors fail to acknowledge others who had travelled and mapped in areas before Rae; particularly the slight reference given to Dease and Simpson's mapping of the coasts of Victoria and King William Islands years before Rae appeared. Finally, although the ethnographic chapter on Rae's collecting provides information about Rae's activities, the text does not mention that the Admiralty also required its officers to collect native artifacts, part of the scientific activity that was required of all HM ships of the period. Despite these omissions, which can probably be attributed to the nature and purpose of the book, No Ordinary Journey is a welcome addition to the scarce published material on John Rae and one hopes that it may be a harbinger of many more to come. Maurice Hodgson Maurice Hodgson is a member of the English Department, Douglas College. Tangled Webs of History: Indians and the Law in Canada's Pacific Coast Fisheries Dianne Newell. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993. 306 p., illus. Cloth $60, paper $23 Dr. Newell appears to have entangled herself in her recent publication Tangled Webs of History. She declares a desire to make a scholarly contribution to the debate on fishery politics by publishing her research, having found the courtroom "an inadequate, even hostile, environment for explaining the tangled webs of history." Her attempts to inform public opinion through the judicial system were not impressive. Under cross-examination in court she was unable to answer simple questions on fishing technology. Although claiming to be an historian of technology, Dr. Newell's inability to master the basic mechanics of the industry is evident in this work. Her descriptions of purse seine nets and gillnet and seine drum technology are riddled with mistakes. To those unfamiliar with the subject, Tangled Webs appears to be a good synopsis of the historical development of Indians and the law in Canada's Pacific coast fisheries, but this work is in fact an example of what much history and anthropology have become when dealing with aboriginal topics - clieTTFceTvfred scholarship. The research is geared to the need to document one side of an argument, either for court cases (the reason, I believe, for this book's publication) or for broader propaganda purposes such as reading material for university courses. Dr. Newell's introductory observation that "the state and its administrative agencies and courts, backed by private industry and non-Indian fishers characterized Pacific Coast Indian fishing traditions as destructive and demonized Indian food fishers as predators" is simplistic, biased, and provocative. Throughout the book Newell builds her arguments on some questionable premises: that the marginalization of natives in Canada is a result of political (rather than economic) activity and that pre-contact natives were actually conservationists. In her introduction, for example, Dr. Newell states that there is no evidence of Indian overfishing or of large illegal sales of Indian-caught food fish. In fact, for the lower Fraser area there is strong and extensive evidence of this, especially for the post-1920 period. Recent court evidence states that up to ninety per cent of Indian-caught food fish is illegally sold in the lower Fraser area. Dr. Newell acknowledges the Department of Fisheries as a major factor in this debate but makes little use of the department's records in the research for this book, probably because she realized it would not support the native claims. She selects only evidence of the DFO's failures to preserve certain salmon resources, but fails to mention great successes such as the Fraser's sockeye stocks and the Alberni spring stocks. Her use of the word "industrial" rather than "commercial" for the modern commercial fisheries and providing her own definition of "exchange commodity" (all the while ignoring other scholastic work on export commodity theory, which would not have supported her thesis) indicates a desire to manipulate established terminology to fit native claims for fish. Another example of either ignoring the historic record or of selecting information is her claim that seine licenses were not granted to Indians before the 1920s as a matter of departmental policy. Such is simply not true. Dr. Newell claims that cannery operators preferred the Japanese as fishermen because they were more "dependable and cooperative," rather than the fact that as a racial group, Japanese gillnet fishermen were by far the most productive. Dr. Newell downplays the importance of mechanization in salmon canneries after 1900, which I believe is misleading, and when discussing the Babine Barricade Agreement she neglects to mention that the so-called agreement was never signed. One final example of slanted analysis is Newell's account of a case in which she claims that an Indian community's attempt to expand its involvement in the herring spawn on kelp industry was blocked by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Pacific Fishermen's Alliance through a federal court sympa- B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 38 BOOKSHELF thetic to the latter. Having also been involved in that court case (Reid vs. HM the Queen, 1990), I cannot find either in the transcripts or in my recollection of events any prejudice toward either side by the trial judge. Newell neglects to inform her readers that this community was trying to expand its role in this fishery at the expense of a neighbouring Indian community and that the spawn on kelp industry already has the highest participation of natives of any Pacific fishery. The book does raise some interesting points, one being that the federal assistance programs tend to help the Indian fishers who are already doing well, and she gives a good exposition of the different objectives of various Indian groups. I would recommend this book not for its content, but as an example of a new type of history that is being written for political correctness, that is a heavily biased interpretation of the historic record, tailored to the political needs of a particular interest group. While it may be one way to survive as an historian, let us hope that a balanced and scholarly work on this subject will be produced one day. _ Duncan Stacey Duncan Stacey, a former fisherman and now an industrial historian, has done curatorial work for the National Museums of Canada, Parks Canada and the Vancouver Maritime Museum, and is also an expert witness for the Department of Fisheries on aboriginal fishing claims. Wilderness Wandering on Vancouver Island Walter Guppy. Tofino, Grassroots Publication, 1993. 136 p., illus. $9.95 A better title for this self-published book would be "Wilderness Prospecting" because it is not about wandering in the real sense of the word, but about an endless odyssey of climbs, hikes, sorties, mainly afoot, by the author, all in the interest of the search for minerals on Vancouver Island's west coast. The incredible hardships, the mind- boggling difficulties, the many dangerous situations faced by Guppy in the years between the Dirty Thirties and 1993 overwhelm the reader, yet are reported in an almost ho-hum, downplayed manner. Many a movie has been made of a less dangerous situation than that in chapter six, where men are landed from a float plane on a sandbar at the mouth of the Tsitika River. They are cut off from land by a tidal slough and the tide is coming in. The chapter on bears and chronicles of other wildlife could be made into a documentary. (Though Guppy bear- proofed his cabin with steel rods and steel bedframes, the bears still got in.) This could be called a comprehensive history of mining in the area, for along with telling of the claims staked, there are countless details of early mines from a century ago to the present day. Also in this telling one learns of the immense differences between prospecting before the Second World War and today. In the early days it was feet, and sometimes horses; today it is helicopters, instant communication with the outside world, drops of food and supplies. Many maps give insight into the territory explored, but only those familiar with the formidable terrain of the Island's west coast, its central area, can appreciate the "wanderings" here detailed. Yet much of the detail is repetitious and the chapter on Guppy's sojourn in Scotland seems out of place. The pictures, however, are excellent. One is left in awe of the wanderings of this man. He has no modem counterparts in today's packsack and hiking-boot crowd for he was born into the Depression era which denied him extensive education and training. He made up for the lack of both with grit and determination. It is fortunate he chose to publish this book. Its contents will be invaluable as an information source regarding mining history on Vancouver Island in the years ahead. Kelsey McLeod Raincoast Chronicles 15: Stories and History of the BC Coast Howard White, ed. Madeira Park, Harbour Publishing, 1993. 80 p., illus. $10.95 Raincoast Chronicles Fifteen will not disappoint the wide audience who have come to look forward to the latest edition of our coast history. The coloured back and front covers alone are so evocative of our coast they bring nostalgia: boats and more boats. The spectrum of stories is wide, ranging from the fantasy (truth?) of sasquatch encounters and a tale of Paul Bunyan to matter-of-fact reportage of the lifestyle of twenty-four colonels at Shawnigan Lake and an intern at Bella Bella. There are tales you can choose to believe, or not, such as Visitors, with its eerie quality. There is a sample of logging tall-tales humour in One-Arm Willy and the tongue-in-cheek story of The By-Pass Valve by Alan Haig-Brown is an entertaining sample of West Coast life and humour. The styles of the storytelling are as varied: Grizzlies and Sasquatches is in the slightly fractured English of Clayton Mack, whose stories they are, while Voice From the Inlet, telling of the telephone in B.C., is prosaic. Summer Intern at Bella Bella, 1947 should be compulsory reading for the segment of today's professional whin- ers whose specialty is medical services. (Aside from that, doubtless the medical services available to the Raincoasters in the past helped develop the wry humour displayed in many of the stories here.) Much of the coast is covered - from Dollarton to Bella Bella, from the Gulf Islands to Shawnigan Lake. The pictures are excellent. The one addition that would make the book more enjoyable to those not familiar with coast geography would be a map showing the exact locations of places mentioned. This Raincoast Chronicles Fifteen is a worthy addition to those that have preceded it. Don't miss it! Kelsey McLeod Kelsey McLeod is a member of the Vancouver Historical Society. 39 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 BOOKSHELF The Unknown Mountain by Don Mundy, including Behind the Unknown Mountain by Angus M. Gunn Expanded edition. Lake Louise, Alberta, Coyote Books, 1993. 275 p., illus. $17.95 One of the classics of mountaineering literature is The Unknown Mountain, an account of Don and Phyllis Munday's attempts to climb Mount Waddington. From 1925, when the Mundays first sighted the peak of an unknown mountain in the Coast Range of British Columbia, until 1936, when the narrative ends, they were obsessed by the desire to reach it The Unknown Mountain, published in 1948, was not only about mountaineering but about exploration of the almost unknown fjords, valleys and glaciers of coastal British Columbia. As such, it had a wide appeal and soon went out of print. It was not readily available until 1975 when The Mountaineers, Seattle, reprinted it. Now Coyote Books had reproduced exactly the text of the original 1948 edition and expanded it to include an eighteen-page introductory essay, Behind the Unknown Mountain, by Angus M. Gunn, which fills in many details of their lives and evaluates the many contributions they made to Canadian life. A three-page appendix contains a comprehensive list of articles and books published by the Mundays. Coyote Books is to be commended for publishing this expanded edition of a mountaineering classic. Elizabeth Walker Elizabeth Walker, an avid mountaineer, is a member of the Vancouver Historical Society. A Century of Sailing 1892-1992: A History of the Oldest Yacht Club on Canada's Pacific Coast Terry Reksten. Victoria, Orca Book Publishers, 1992. 242 p. Terry Reksten is one of the best social historians writing in Canada today, She combines excellent research with an eminently readable style that melds the best features of academic and popular history. The Royal Victoria Yacht Club chose well when she was commissioned to write A Century of Sailing to commemorate the centenary of the club's foundation. What could have been a hack hagiographic exercise only of interest to the membership is, in fact, a portrait, like Cromwell's "warts and all," that shows the club and its relationship to Victorian society through the past one hundred years. The club was founded rather late in comparison to others in eastern Canada and the United States, which is quite surprising considering that regattas had been a feature of the Queen's Birthday celebrations since the 1860s. The founders were men who made their living from the sea, such as sealing captains, officers of the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company and ships' chandlers, who were galvanized into action by the challenge of American yachtsmen from Puget Sound. This connection to the sea has been maintained to the present day, and one of the themes throughout the book is the tension between those who are yachtsmen because they love sailing and the sea and an element who look upon the yacht club as merely a vehicle for demonstrating social position. The clubhouse may be physically located in the Uplands, but that is more an accident of history than the defining factor of the club's place in Victoria. Indeed, the relations between the club and its neighbours have not always been easy. As an example of warts which have not been hidden is the colourful story of the connection between the yacht club and rum running. The club earned a handsome profit supplying gasoline to the rum runners until sales were stopped due to the objection of private firms in the fuel business. Commodore Harry Barnes and other prominent members had to avoid long-distance races to avoid crossing into American waters where their boats would have been seized by authorities. The book will be of value to both those of a nautical bent interested in boats and sailing as well as those interested in the social history of Victoria. The relationship between the club and the society in which it has existed is well presented. The illustrations are a carefully chosen mix of portraits of the major figures in the history of the club, pictures of boats and braces, and related images which catch the eye of even a casual browser. Due to the nature of its origin, the book is not footnoted but anyone familiar with the author's other works will realize that A Century of Sailing is the product of thorough research and can be trusted for accuracy. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the history of Victoria. Michael EH. Halleran Michael Halleran is a member of the Victoria Historical Society. ALSO NOTED: Cariboo-Chilcotin Pioneer People and Places. From historical files and the memories of those who were there, pioneer days in Williams Lake, Dog Creek, Likely, Soda Creek, Horsefly, Riske Creek, 150 Mile and other areas of Central Cariboo-Chilcotin Irene Stangoe. Surrey, Heritage House, 1994. 128 p., illus. $11.95 A collection of some of Irene Stangoe's "Looking Back" columns from The Williams Lake Tribune. A CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEA Send a subscription to a friend - only $12 to any address within Canada. $17 outside the country. Send your cheque today with the giftee's name and address to: _ _ ^Margaret J^fatovfch Subscription Secretary B.C. ^Historical News 6985 Canada Way Burnaby. BC V5E3X6 B.C. Historical News - Fall 1994 40 THE BRITISH COLUMBIA HISTORICAL FEDERATION HONORARY PATRON His Honour, the Honourable David C. Lam, CM, LL.D. Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia HONORARY PRESIDENT J. Arthur Lower 4040 West 35th Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V6N 2P3 OFFICERS President First Vice President Second Vice President Secretary Recording Secretary Treasurer Members at Large Past President Alice Glanville Ron Welwood Marjorie Leffler T. Don Sale Arnold Ranneris Doris J. May Wayne Desrochers Melva Dwyer Myrtle Haslam Box 746, Grand Forks, B.C. VOH 1H0 RR #1, S22 C1, Nelson, B.C. V1L 5P4 516 Willow St, Parksville, B.C. V9P 1A4 262 Juniper St, Nanaimo, B.C. V9S 1X4 1898 Quamichan St, Victoria, B.C. V8S 2B9 2943 Shelbourne St, Victoria, B.C. V8R 4M7 8811 - 152nd St, Surrey, B.C. V3R 4E5 2976 McBride St, Surrey, B.C. V4A 3G6 Box 10, Cowichan Bay, B.C. VOR 1N0 442-3865 825-4743 248-3431 753-2067 598-3035 595-0236 581-0286 535-3041 748-8397 COMMITTEE OFFICERS Archivist B.C. Historical News Publishing Committee Book Review Editor Editor Margaret Stoneberg Box 687, Princeton, B.C. VOX 1W0 Tony Farr Anne Yandle Naomi Miller Subscription Secretary Margaret Matovich 125 Castle Cross Rd, Salt Spring Island, B.C. V8K 2G1 3450 West 20th Ave, Vancouver, B.C. V6S 1E4 Box 105, Wasa, B.C. VOB 2K0 6985 Canada Way, Burnaby, B.C. V5E 3R6 295-3362 537-5398 733-6484 422-3594 522-5049 Historical Trails and Markers John Spittle 1241 Mount Crown Rd, North Vancouver, B.C. V7R 1R9 988-4565 Publications Assistance Jill Rowland (not involved with #5 - 1450 Chesterfield Ave, North Vancouver, B.C. V7M 2N4 984-0602 B.C. Historical News) Contact Jill for advice and details to apply for a loan toward the cost of publishing. Scholarship Committee Anne Yandle 3450 West 20th Ave, Vancouver, B.C. V6S 1E4 733-6484 Writing Competition (Lieutenant Governor's Award) Pamela Mar P.O. Box 933, Nanaimo, B.C. V9R 5N2 (NOTE: All phone numbers listed use the area code 604) 758-2828 The British Columbia Historical News P.O. Box 5254, Stn. B Victoria, B.C. V8R 6N4 Publications Mail Registration No. 4447 fr ADDRESS LABEL HERE ^\ ^r J BC Historical Federation WRITING COMPETITION The British Columbia Historical Federation invites submissions of books for the twelfth annual Competition for Writers of B.C. History. Any book presenting any facet of B.C. history, published in 1994, is eligible. This may be a community history, biography, record of a project or an organization, or personal recollections giving a glimpse of the past. Names, dates and places, with relevant maps or pictures, turn a story into "history." The judges are looking for quality presentations, especially if fresh material is included, with appropriate illustrations, careful proofreading, an adequate index, table of contents and bibliography, from first-time writers as well as established authors. NOTE: Reprints or revisions of books are not eligible. The Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Historical Writing will be awarded to an individual writer whose book contributes significantly to the recorded history of British Columbia. Other awards will be made as recommended by the judges to valuable books prepared by groups or individuals. All entries recieve considerable publicity. Winners will receive a Certificate of Merit, a monetary award and an invitation to the BCHF annual conference to be held in Chilliwack in May 1995. SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: All books must have been published in 1994 and should be submitted as soon as possible after publication. Two copies of each book should be submitted. Please state name, address and telephone number of sender, the selling price of all editions of the book, and the address from which it may be purchased, if the reader has to shop by mail. SEND TO: B.C. Historical Writing Competition P.O. Box 933, Nanaimo, B.C. V9R 5N2 DEADLINE: December 15,1994. LATE ENTRIES: Three copies of each book must be submitted and must arrive before January 31,1995. Please phone (604) 758-2828 to clarify shipping arrangements for late entries. There is also an award for the Best Article published each year in the B.C. Historical News magazine. This is directed to amateur historians or students. Articles should be no more than 3,000 words, typed double spaced, accompanied by photographs if available, and substantiated with footnotes where applicable. (Photos will be returned.) Please send articles directly to: The Editor, B.C. Historical News, P.O. Box 105, Wasa, B.C. VOB 2K0 fc^il%i#ii^^
Titled "British Columbia Historical Association Report and Proceedings" from 1923-1929; "British Columbia Historical Quarterly" from 1937-1957; "BC Historical News" from 1968-2004; and "British Columbia History" from 2005 onward.
Periodicals
FC3801.B72 H44
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Original Format: University of British Columbia. Archives.
British Columbia--History
British Columbia Historical News
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