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Sensational Victoria

Vancouver’s Monkey Puzzle Tree Obsession

by Eve Lazarus on March 24, 2018
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We probably have more monkey puzzle trees in BC than in all of their native Chile. The quirky trees started arriving in gardens in the 1920s.

In 2012, I wrote a book called Sensational Victoria and one of my favourite chapters was Heritage Gardens. I visited and then wrote about large rich-people’s gardens like Hatley Park, and smaller ones like the Abkhazi Garden on Fairfield road built on the back of a love story. There was Carole Sabiston’s beautiful garden on Rockland Avenue anchored by a 100-year-old purple lilac tree, and the garden Brian and Jennifer Rogers created around their century-old Samuel Maclure designed horse stable. (Brian is the grandson of BT Rogers, the Vancouver sugar king, and another ardent gardener).

Nellie McClung at her Ferndale Road home in 1949. Courtesy Saanich Archives

On the back cover of the book, there’s a photo of Nellie McClung standing in front of a giant monkey puzzle tree at the house she retired to at Gordon Head in 1935.

Lurancy Harris, the first female police officer in Canada, built her house on Venables in 1916. When I went to photograph it, the now two-storey house was dwarfed by a monkey puzzle tree that she’d planted in her front garden.

Lurancy Harris built 1836 Venables in 1916 and planted herself a monkey tree.

I’ve always had a thing for monkey puzzle trees—they seem to go particularly well with turrets, old houses and great stories. But I’ve never given them much thought until I was chatting with Christine Allen this morning about her upcoming talk for the Vancouver Historical Society next month. Christine—another Australian transplant—is a master gardener. She tells me that there was a huge craze for monkey puzzles trees here in the 1920s and 1930s.

“People were very proud of their monkey puzzle trees. It was so Victorian, they loved that kind of odd ball stuff,” she says. “There is a tiny post-war bungalow in my neighbourhood (Grandview) where somebody planted two massive ones on the south side of the house. That house gets no sun ever.”

Christine says the trees got their name because even a monkey would find it a puzzle to climb.

Bowen Island Inn in the 1930s with a massive monkey puzzle tree. Courtesy Vancouver Archives

Christine says that another reason why these Chilean pines were so popular is because of Vancouver’s mild climate that allows us to grow anything from arctic tundra plants to palm trees.

But it’s not just people, towns are proud of them to. The tiny town of Holberg on Vancouver Island boasts the world’s tallest monkey puzzle tree. I have no idea how tall it is now, but in 1995 it was measured at 77 feet—that’s higher than a seven-storey building.

Nellie McClung’s home was known as Lantern Lane after the books she wrote in her upstairs study. Courtesy Saanich Archives, 1960

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

 

Emily Carr’s James Bay

by Eve Lazarus on March 3, 2018
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This is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria that includes a map of James Bay, then and now photos, and a walking tour of Emily Carr’s neighbourhood in 1913. 

More than 12,000 people visit Emily Carr House every year. Eve Lazarus photo, 2011

Her name adorns a university, a school, a bridge, and a library. She is the subject of several documentaries, museum exhibits, books and plays. In 2009, her painting Wind in the Tree Tops sold for more than $2.1 million, one of the highest-priced Canadian paintings ever sold at auction. Tourists visit her family home, seek out her sketching places along Dallas Road and Beacon Hill Park and walk over the memorial bridge paid for by her sister Alice. Her grave is the most sought-after in the Ross Bay Cemetery.

Emily Carr’s presence in Victoria is pervasive. Yet for most of her life, she was shunned by the Victoria of her day, and for all of her fame, locals still seem a bit stunned by the attention. It wasn’t until the fall of 2010—65 years after her death—that Victoria honoured the artist with a $400,000 statue on the lawn of the Fairmont Empress Hotel.

Emily was born at Carr House in 1871, and died a few blocks away at the James Bay Inn, 74 years later. For most of her life, she lived in James Bay and wrote extensively about the area and her family’s homes.

James Bay is the oldest residential area of Victoria and takes its name from Governor James Douglas. Douglas built his house in the 1850s on the current site of the Royal BC Museum. Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken married Douglas’s daughter and built his house next door. His house is still there and is now a provincial museum.

Emily Carr
Map of James Bay walking tour created for Sensational Victoria by Ross Nelson, 2012

Until a causeway was completed in the early 1900s, Government Street was made up of Carr Street (named after Emily’s father Richard), Birdcage Walk, and the James Bay Bridge—a wooden bridge that crossed the mud flats and continued downtown.

In 1908, the James Bay mud flats were hidden underneath the spanking new $13-million Empress Hotel. By the 1940s, houses had taken over all the land. Postwar development hit in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s and ‘70s—as in Vancouver’s West End—many of Victoria’s superb heritage houses were bulldozed to make room for apartment buildings.

Emily Carr
Emily with her animals in 1918. Courtesy Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

Yet with all these changes, the Victoria Heritage Foundation still lists over 150 buildings on its heritage inventory, some like Helmcken’s, that date back to the 1850s.

Emily started writing in the late 1920s and had seven books published during her lifetime and after her death. She wrote extensively about James Bay and her family house in The Book of Small, and about how much she hated being a landlady in The house of All Sorts.

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Mother Cecilia bought the hotel in 1942 and ran it as St. Mary’s Priory. Emily died here in 1945. Eve Lazarus photo, 2011

What was great, at least in 2012 when I was putting this tour together, was that most of the houses that involve Emily—including the home where she was born on Government Street, the “House of All Sorts,” known for all the different people who boarded there, two of her sister’s houses, and James Bay Hotel (Inn) built in 1911, are all still there.

So, the next time you’re in the area, grab a copy of Sensational Victoria from Munro’s Books, and take a walk around Emily’s James Bay.

Emily Carr
Carr family, 207 Government St, 1869. Courtesy Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

 

 

Jim Munro (1929-2016)

by Eve Lazarus on November 26, 2016
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I was so sad to hear of Jim Munro’s death last Monday. Jim was a huge promoter and lover of books, heritage buildings, art and authors, including of course, his first wife the Nobel prize winner Alice Munro.

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He was also a lovely man. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim a few years back when I was researching Sensational Victoria. Because my book was about the stories of people filtered through the houses where they lived and the heritage buildings where they worked, I was fascinated by both Jim Munro’s home and Munro’s Books, the building that he turned into a destination.

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Jim told me that in 1966 he fell in love with a house in Rockland that was asking $33,000, and likely designed by the infamous Francis Rattenbury. The house had been turned into a duplex and was in rough shape, but Jim could see the potential, and managed to get the owners down to $20,000. Alice wrote Dance of the Happy Shades, a 1968 Governor General award winner in an upstairs room, and followed that with her bestselling Lives of Girls and Women. The Munro’s divorced in 1972 and Alice moved back to Ontario.

Rockland Avenue house
Rockland Avenue house

In 1977, Jim married textile artist Carole Sabiston in what the family called the “chapel” because of the stained-glass effect Jim had painted around the windows and for his old pump organ that still sits under the staircase. Jim played Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary on the organ before the wedding.

“I marry artists,” Jim told me “and I love heritage buildings.”

Margaret Drabble, Ian McEwan, Vikram Seth, Jane Urquhart, Carol Shields and Simon Winchester, were just a few of the literary greats that have visited the house.

Carole kindly showed me through the house and garden. Both are beautiful and quirky. There is a wall of wearable art—everything from straw hats to top hats. One corner of a room has a key collection—big iron keys to tiny clock keys collected from flea markets around the world. Another corner has a collection of carpet beaters. Out in the garden, Carole created the Philosopher’s Walk for Jim with a bust of Voltaire.

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Carole added a studio that’s connected to the house by a glazed passage. It was here that she created the dramatic five-panel work of mountains and ocean that hangs in Government House, as well as perhaps her most publicly accessible work: eight large banners depicting the seasons that hang in Munro’s Books on Government Street.

In 1984, Jim bought the Royal Bank building, designed by Thomas Hooper, the same architect who designed Hycroft in Shaughnessy, the Victoria Public Library, Roger’s Chocolate building and Christina Haas’s Cook Street Brothel.

“No one wanted a used bank building except me,” he said. “People thought I was insane because in those days there weren’t huge bookstores like there are now, but people who buy books also appreciate art and beautiful buildings.”

In December 2012 Jim invited me to have a Victoria launch at Munro’s and hang out with a bunch of local authors that included Kit Pearson, Sheryl McFarlane and Bill Gaston. Two years later he retired and handed over the keys and inventory to four long-time staffers. That same year he received the Order of Canada.

RIP Jim.

The Curve of Time: national bestseller after more than 50 years

by Eve Lazarus on August 30, 2014
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It’s been incredibly exciting seeing Sensational Vancouver claim the top spot on the Best of BC list for the past four weeks, and it’s made me pay close attention to the book section in the Vancouver Sun.

What I’ve noticed is that M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, has ranked in the top 10 on the National Bestsellers list for the past seven weeks.

This is absolutely phenomenal. Not only is the book written about Vancouver Island, but it was first published over half a century ago.

Whitecap Books published a 50th Anniversary edition in 2011. Steph Hill, publicist, was equally mystified, and couldn’t tell me why a regional book is doing so well on the national scene after such a long time in print.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s certainly worth a read. In 1922 “Capi,” her husband Geoffrey and their five kids moved out to Vancouver Island from Montreal. They bought a house on property near the Swartz Bay Ferry.

Five years later Geoffrey took out their boat one day and never returned.

Widowed at 33, and the sole support for five children aged between two and 14 in an economy teetering on the brink of the Depression, Capi survived by renting out her house for the summers, packing up the kids and Pam the Irish Setter and sailing around B.C.’s rugged coastline.

Vancouver Sun's National Bestseller List for non-fiction August 30, 2014
Vancouver Sun’s National Bestseller List for non-fiction August 30, 2014

The book is an account of those trips.

“Destiny rarely follows the pattern we would choose for it and the legacy of death often shapes our lives in ways we could not image,” she writes in The Curve of Time.

In 1949, Capi and her son David built a small house on the cliff of their property.

I wrote about Capi, her house, her boat and her kids in Sensational Victoria in 2012. The current owner bought the property in the early 1990s and gave me a tour of her house.  It’s a beautiful place with an amazing view, but what I loved is that while the house has been remodeled and enlarged over the years, they have built the house around Capi’s livingroom and two bedrooms. The cedar that she and David hand-hewn to make the cathedral ceiling and the walls, as well as the original rock fireplace, remain unaltered.

Capi's house on Tyron Road, Eve Lazarus photo, 2012
Capi’s house on Tyron Road, Eve Lazarus photo, 2012

The truly tragic thing was that Capi Blanchet was found dead at her typewriter shortly after her book was published, never knowing the success that her book would enjoy.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

 

The Titanic’s British Columbia Connection

by Eve Lazarus on April 13, 2013
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To mark the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this week’s blog is a story about Mabel Fortune Driscoll who survived the disaster, moved to Victoria and lived there until her death in 1968. The full story appears in Sensational Victoria.

Mabel Helen Fortune was 23 when she set off for a tour of Europe with her father Mark, mother Mary, younger brother, and two older sisters.

Charles, 19, had just graduated from high school and was planning to attend McGill University. Alice, 24, and Edith, 28, were shopping for bridal trousseaus for their upcoming weddings, and young Mabel had fallen in love with Harrison Driscoll, a jazz musician from Minnesota . Her father, a wealthy real estate speculator and city councillor from Winnipeg, disapproved of this potential son-in-law and thought an overseas trip might distract her.

Titanic survivor
Mabel Fortune Driscoll with Fuji. Photo courtesy Mark Driscoll

The Fortunes were among 50 Canadians booked on the Titanic. At 11:40 pm on April 14, 1912 the ship hit an iceberg. As the ship started to take on water Mary and her three daughters were placed in Lifeboat 10 along with a “Chinaman, an Italian stoker, and a man dressed in woman’s clothing.” Of all the occupants of this lifeboat, only the stoker could row. Alice, Edith and Mabel took turns at the oars.

The women survived, but Mark, 64, and Charles were among the 1,500 people who died that night, their bodies never recovered.

1630 York Place, completed in 1908. two full-time gardeners tended the grounds, which included a formal rose garden set around a sundial, a cutting garden for fresh flowers, a vegetable garden and an aviary. Photo courtesy Oak Bay Archives

Mark Driscoll, Mabel’s grandson and a West Vancouver realtor, said Mabel only talked to him once about the disaster when he was a teenager in the 1960s. “She started crying and just said that it was a horrible experience, that she remembered the last time she saw her father, and when she was out in the boat she was crying and calling for her father and for her brother,” he says. “She suffered from pretty severe depression, especially as she got older and she never wanted to talk about it.”

Alice married Charles Holden Allen, a lawyer, in June 1912; and in 1913 Ethel married Crawford Gordon, a banker and Mabel married Harrison. They had a son, Robert, but the marriage didn’t last. Mabel hooked up with Charlotte Fraser Armstrong, a widow with a young son from Ottawa. They moved to Victoria and bought the Francis Rattenbury–designed house at York Place and just under three acres of garden.

Swimming pool at 1630 York Place in 1926. Courtesy Victoria Archives

The house was already huge, but soon after buying it, Charlotte and Mabel hired Samuel Maclure to add another wing, build a balcony off the second-floor bedroom, extend the maid’s quarters, add two more bathrooms, design a large terrace with stone walls, a greenhouse, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. In 1930, the house got another facelift when Charlotte and Mabel hired architects James and Savage to extend the dining room, and build a garage to hold two matching Cadillacs and quarters for the chauffeur.

Mabel and Charlotte’s sons were packed off to boarding school. Robert became a mechanical engineer and moved to Montreal.

Mark said when his grandmother and Charlotte came to visit; they stayed at the Ritz Carlton. And, even with all those rooms on York Place, when the family went out west to visit Mabel, they stayed at the Oak Bay Beach Hotel.

It wasn’t until after Charlotte’s death, and his father’s early retirement in 1965, that Mark and his family moved in with Mabel, Sing the Chinese cook, his bilingual budgie, and Madge, the long-time maid.

Mabel left the property to Robert, and the house stayed in the family until Mark’s mother sold in 1989. The house is still there, but the land was subdivided and now has an additional six houses on the property.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

James Bay – Then and Now

by Eve Lazarus on January 8, 2013
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Old photographs can really tell the story of your house
132 South Turner Street ca.1903

Some of my favourite pictures in Sensational Victoria are the then and now ones in James Bay. There’s a fabulous archival shot of Carr House on Government Street taken in 1869 and a current photo that doesn’t look all that much different—143 years later. Another find is of the Queen Anne house on South Turner Street built in 1889.

Derek Hawksley, a set builder and his wife Maureen MacIntosh a prop builder, moved into this funky James Bay house in 1984. The old house had suffered through some horrible renovations over the years and Derek wanted to see what it originally looked like. “When we bought it, the walls and the floors were all going in different directions. We signed the papers on the table in the living room, and I put down the pen and it rolled right off,” he told me. “We both decided it’s the kind of place you’d want to come home to.”

Skene Lowe and James Hall, two well-known photographers of the era, had built the house as a rental property. Through the city directories Derek found that nearly a hundred people had lived there at one point or another, but mostly they were renters and few stayed for more than five years. The few former residents he located weren’t able to help and there were no archival photos on record. Then one day he found an old photo of his house taken around 1911 and its inhabitants left in his mail box. “The person who was standing on the porch was a gardener at Butchart Gardens where I worked for years and years doing the fireworks, so there was a connection there.”

Over 100 people have lived here over the years
132 South Turner Street

The photo of Derek’s house was given to me by Barb Little. She tells me that her husband’s grandparents (Matthew James Little and Mary Jane (Parsell) Little) lived here for four years following their marriage in 1903. The folks on the porch, she says, are Mary Jane’s brother Robert Parsell, an engineer with BC Cement with his kids Ella May (1899) and Thomas Norman (1900).

Old pictures can really help tell the story of your house. There are thousands of historical photos available through libraries and archives, many are available online. In Vancouver, Special Collections at the VPL has over 90,000 historical photographs. BC Archives has an impressive collection of five million photographs, the City of Vancouver Archives about 1.5 million and most municipal archives also have collections. Don’t just stop at your house address though, check under the name of the house if it had one, the street and names of previous owners. It’s worth checking nearby parks, commercial buildings, hotels, schools and other landmarks as early photographers such as Philip Timms and Leonard Frank used to roam the province shooting streetscapes and may have caught your house.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

House Stories

by Eve Lazarus on December 24, 2012
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Robert James Parsell with Ella May and Thomas Norman ca. 1903
132 South Turner Street, Victoria

Ever stood in front of an old house and wondered what went on inside those walls? Who lived there, how they lived their lives and what events happened behind the front door? I admit it’s a weird kind of voyeurism, but I’ve spent a lot of the last decade skulking around in people’s hedgerows asking those questions. Because in my view, a house has a genealogy, much like a person, and comes alive through the stories and mysteries that took place inside its walls.

Taken in the front garden of the Rockland Avenue house
Alice Munro, 1968

I’m fascinated by the deep connection people have to their houses. David Foster grew up with his six sisters in a modest house in Saanich that his father built.  Spoony Sundher built a house on Bellevue Road before going on to open the Hollywood Wax Museum and found a family dynasty. Alice Munro wrote two of her best selling books from her Rockland house, and Susan Musgrave’s North Saanich house has a 190-foot Douglas Fir tree growing out of the living room. Susan says she doesn’t understand people who move into “key ready houses devoid of personality.”

I’ve talked to home owners who have unearthed everything from a murder in the family kitchen, to resident ghosts and celebrities. Others have found evidence of brothels and bootlegging, and one woman found that her house was once a Chinese sausage factory.

My father’s childhood home in Ballarat, Australia had its own odd history. My eccentric grandmother physically had the bedrooms lopped off the house when her children left home. I never found out why, but at least the current owners eventually learned who left them a number of doors that led nowhere.

I’m delighted that Sensational Victoria is getting a good reception with the locals. I hoped it would, but I really wrote it with mainlanders in mind, people like me who are not from there, but love the city, love history, old houses and Victoria’s quirky characters and eccentricities.

Chester Pupkowski spent 40 years in Essondale after murdering his wife
Clarence Street, James Bay

Emily Carr figures prominently in the book. That wasn’t intentional she just kept getting in my head, and I was intrigued with her Oak Bay cabin, a tiny house that she kept to herself for all those years. It’s Emily who shows readers what James Bay would have been like in 1913 and she shares another chapter with other formidable women from Victoria’s past. There’s a chapter on madams and their brothels, another on gardens, murders that span a century, haunted houses and some of the writers, entertainers and artists who come from Victoria.

Much of the information comes from their relatives and the current owners, who are all fiercely proud of their homes. They are the custodians—sometimes for just a few years, other times for decades—who add their own stories to the homes and in turn play a vital part in the ongoing story of Victoria.

Originally the cabin was at 494 Victoria Drive
Emily Carr’s Oak Bay cabin

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

The Sinking of the Princess Sophia

by Eve Lazarus on October 23, 2012
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On October 23, 1918– six years after the sinking of the Titanic—the SS Princess Sophia sailed out of Skagway, Alaska. Four hours later the ship slammed into a coastal reef killing all aboard. These men and women formed the backbone of the North and it was a devastating tragedy for the Pacific Northwest. More than 60 people are buried at Mountain View Cemetery. This is an excerpt from my book Sensational Victoria. 

I first heard about the Princess Sophia in 2004 when the Vancouver Maritime Museum held a memorial service for the 350 passengers and crew killed in 1918. The Museum had recently acquired the ship’s bell from Betty Mantyla. Betty was given the bell by her grandmother, who was given the bell by a diver.

When the Princess Sophia sailed out of Skagway 94 years ago, it was the final voyage of the year before the big freeze set in and she was jammed from cabin to steerage. There were pioneers of the gold rush, riverboat captains, 50 women and children, and newly enlisted soldiers on their way to fight in the Great War. Lulu Mae Eads was aboard, the same Lou that Robert Service wrote about in The Shooting of Dan McGrew. There were 24 horses and five dogs in the hold.

The Princess Sophia stuck on Vanderbilt Reef, October 25, 1918
The Princess Sophia stuck on Vanderbilt Reef, October 25, 1918

Captain Leonard Locke, 66, had spent his life at sea and had made this voyage many times. But four hours after setting sail, the Sophia slammed into Vanderbilt Reef. The Sophia wasn’t taking on water and Locke felt that the ship could float free off the reef at high tide. But the wind increased and the snow thickened, and after almost 40 hours the Sophia slid backward off the rocks and went stern-first into the sea. The boilers exploded. Those passengers not trapped inside the ship, suffocated in the oil from the fuel tanks.

Those bodies that were recovered returned to Vancouver on the Princess Alice on November 11, 1918—the day the war ended.

The sinking of the Princess Sophia was a devastating tragedy for the Pacific North West
Captain Leonard Locke

An inquiry found that the ship was lost through “peril of the seas” and not through the fault of Captain Locke. Newspapers blamed him anyway.

Legal battles stretched on until the early 1930s. Emily, Locke’s widow received $2,249.99. The passengers’ relatives got nothing.

There have been books written about the Sophia, but unlike the Titanic which had little effect on the Pacific North West, most people have never heard of the disaster.

I met Syd Locke, the grandson of Captain Locke at the memorial service. He lives in Seattle. His father Frederick, was one of Locke’s five children with wife Emily. Born in 1891, he was with the Canadian Engineers during WW1 and drowned in a tugboat accident in Seattle when Syd was 11.

1005 Cook Street was built for Captain Locke and his wife Emily in 1906. Photo courtesy Victoria Heritage Foundation

“All of my ancestors have drowned as far back as anybody remembers. My mother wouldn’t let me go to sea. ‘It’s going to end here,’ she said.”

Although Syd never met his grandfather, what upsets him most is that accounts of the shipwreck don’t address the human side of the tragedy. There was Walter Gosse, for instance, a lookout and the younger brother of second officer Frank Gosse. Both brothers were at a dance. Frank made the sailing, but Walter was left behind. And there was Archibald Alexander, chief engineer from Victoria, who stayed behind because his twin daughters were seriously ill with Spanish flu. “How did he feel when all his friends went down?” asks Syd.

The shingled Edwardian house at 1005 Cook Street in Victoria that Locke built in 1907 is still there. The house is now a commercial building and has a heritage designation.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

 

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