Tom Hawthorn Archives

This is an occasional series that asks people who love history and heritage to tell us their favourite existing building and the one that never should have been torn down.

603 Manchester Road in Victoria’s Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood

Patrick A. Dunae is a Victoria-born historian. A past member of the City of Victoria Heritage Advisory Panel, he is currently president of the Friends of the BC Archives.

Favourite Building:

One of my favourite houses is an unprepossessing, colonial-style bungalow on Manchester Road. The house was built in 1908 by Charles Deacon, who had emigrated from England with his family six years earlier, and became the foreman of a Rock Bay sawmill. I like the design and proportions of the house; and I applaud the current owners for painting the exterior a warm yellow, a colour that was popular when the house was built. This is an unfashionable part of Victoria and old houses like this are at risk. Kudos to City of Victoria Heritage Planners, who have recommended that the 600 block of Manchester and adjacent Dunedin Street, be designated as a Heritage Conservation Area. The proposal still needs to be approved by homeowners. Fingers crossed.

The Coburn family home at 2640 Blanshard, an Italianate-style house built in 1898.

The one that got away:

In the 1960s when “urban renewal” was popular and local authorities were eradicating “blighted areas,” Victoria City council used the program to demolish nearly 160 houses in its Rose-Blanshard Renewal Scheme. This “blighted” area consisted of houses built in the 1890s and early 1900s. Rose Street was its centre and North Ward School (1894), a four-storey brick structure, was a landmark. The school and neighbouring residences were demolished so that Blanshard Street could be widened to benefit motorists travelling from the new BC ferry terminal. Properties were expropriated, and occupants who refused to leave their homes were forcibly evicted. The Coburn family home was the last house standing when it was bulldozed in March 1969. It was replaced with Blanshard Court, a “low income housing estate,” now called Evergreen Terrace.

The Royal Bank building at 1108 Government St. in Victoria photographed in 1949 (BC Archives I-02169). The building was in disrepair when purchased by bookseller Jim Munro in 1984. The carved lettering in the granite facade above the entrance now read Munro's Books of Victoria. — The Royal Bank building at 1108 Government St. in Victoria photographed in 1949 (BC Archives I-02169). The building was in disrepair when purchased by bookseller Jim Munro in 1984. The carved lettering in the granite facade above the entrance now read Munro’s Books of Victoria.

Tom Hawthorn is a reporter, author and bookseller who lives in Victoria. His latest book The Year Canadians Lost Their Minds and Found Their Country, will hit bookshelves this May.

Favourite Building:

My daily workplace is a magnificent former bank building. The Edwardian-era former Royal Bank of Canada at 1108 Government St. was in terrible disrepair when purchased (against his banker’s advice) by Jim Munro in 1984. He returned the structure to its former glory, notably removing a suspended ceiling added as part of a modernizing renovation in the 1950s. Today, tapered pilasters and a cast-plaster coffer ceiling attract tourists from around the globe eager to visit a bookstore co-founded in 1963 by future Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Designed in 1909 by local architect Thomas Hooper as a Temple Bank in the Classical Revival style, with an all-granite facade including two impressive Doric columns, Munro’s Books remains a temple to a commerce less pecuniary than literary.

Exhibition Building, Willows Fairgrounds, Oak Bay (Victoria) (BCArchives H-02390)

The one that got away:

In 1899, a grand exhibition hall with an adjacent horse racing track was built on farmland in Oak Bay. The roof stood 56 feet above the ground with central octagonal towers reaching to a height of 100 feet. An open cupola topped the impressive building, which dominated the Willows Fairgrounds like a manor house amid verdant lawns.

Among the visitors to the exhibition hall, which boasted 20,000 square feet of floor space surrounded by galleries, was the future King George V.

The building and the streetcar connection, that now extended from Royal Jubilee Hospital to the fairgrounds, spurred the growth of Oak Bay, which incorporated as a municipality in 1906. Alas, the building was destroyed by fire in 1907, to be replaced by a warehouse structure of little merit. The site of the fairgrounds was subdivided into housing after the Second World War with 10 acres reserved for Carnarvon Park.

Emily Carr's Oak Bay cabin on Foul Bay Road. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012 — Emily Carr’s Oak Bay cabin on Foul Bay Road. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012

Eve Lazarus is a journalist, author and blogger who has a passion for unconventional history and a fascination with murder. She is the author of Cold Case Vancouver.

Favourite Building:

Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in 1913, and according to a story built the cottage “nail by nail” with the help of “one old carpenter.” After a bit of digging it turns out the carpenter was Thomas Cattarall, who built Craigdarroch for the Dunsmuir family and worked on Hatley Castle. In 1995, new owners wanted to build a house on the property but didn’t want to destroy the little cottage. Terry Tallentire stepped in, paid the city $1.00, spent another $4,000 to move it to her house, and it now lives behind a Samuel Maclure designed house on Foul Bay Road. (The full story is in Sensational Victoria).

The Wilson mansion at 730 Burdett Avenue, Victoria

The one that got away:

There are many reasons why Victoria should have saved the Wilson Mansion, but perhaps the best one is because its social history is just so eccentric. There’s the overprotective father who surrounded it with high walls, Jane, the daughter who kept exotic birds in the attic and owned a 100 pairs of white gloves. And there’s the beneficiary of her will in 1949—Louis, a macaw parrot from South America, who was then in his eighties. Jane named Wah Wong, the Chinese gardener as trustee and parrot keeper, and the terms of the will stated that the property could not be sold while the birds were still alive. The feathered tenants managed to stave off developers until 1966, when it was bulldozed to make way for the Chateau Victoria Hotel.

For more on the series see:

As a journalist it always fascinates me where my colleagues find their passions. For me it’s how people connect with their houses, for Tom Hawthorn it’s their deaths. And, while some of the people featured in Deadlines: obits of memorable British Columbians are well known, most often it’s the ordinary life that’s the quirkiest and most colourful.

In Deadlines, Tom, a veteran newspaper reporter and obituary writer (there really is a Society of Professional Obituary Writers) features 38 people who died between 1988 and 2011 divided into sections that run the gamut from “eccentrics” and “trailblazers” to “warriors” and “innovators.”

The stories are beautifully crafted and highly entertaining. Most appeared in the Globe and Mail between 1988 and 2011, and they share two traits–the subjects have some kind of connection to British Columbia, and they’re all dead.

“An obituary is a profile in which the subject cannot grant an interview, so we obituarists behave as newsroom jackals, rending bits of reportage and quotation from reporters who have come before,” he writes. “Perhaps it is for this reason the obituary desk is considered the lowest spot in the newsroom hierarchy. It is a job most typically assigned to cub reporters and burned-out veterans, recovering alcoholics and those who still seek inspiration in the bottom of a bottle.”

If that’s true, then Tom has elevated the profession–and those of us who write history are reaching for our next drink.

I first learned about Spoony Singh (Sundher) from a mention in the Victoria Heritage Foundation’s This Old House series. Tom read about him in a paid obituary notice in the classified section of his newspaper. Before founding the Hollywood Wax Museum in 1965 and a string of other businesses, Spoony, who leads the book, was wonderfully eccentric. He went to school in Victoria, worked in a variety of businesses, married there, and once rode an elephant down Hollywood Boulevard. There is Harvey Lowe from “Entertainers,” who was born in Victoria in 1918, and by age 13 was touring Europe as the world yo-yo champion wearing a white tie and tails. He met Amelia Earhart, the Prince of Wales and Julie Christie along the way.

Born in 1914, Margaret Fane Rutledge founded the Flying Seven, a legendary group of pioneer women from Vancouver, who as Tom writes: “showed a woman’s place was in the cockpit.” Under “athletes” there is Jimmy [baby face] McLarnin, born in Strathcona in 1907, and who twice won the world welterweight championship. Those are a few of my favourites, no doubt you’ll have your own.

You can read the stories chronologically, but I read the book as Tom suggested, as short stories from a newspaper, read in front of the fire and just before bed, chosen at random.

I wish I thought up the title–credit goes to Kit Krieger. Tom says the ‘also rans’ were “Last Writes” and “B.C. R.I.P.”—almost as clever, but deadlines really nailed it.

Deadlines: obits of memorable British Columbians, by Tom Hawthorn.

Heritage Streeters from Victoria (with Patrick Dunae, Tom Hawthorn and Eve Lazarus)

Favourite Building:

The one that got away:

Favourite Building:

The one that got away:

Favourite Building:

The one that got away:

Deadlines–obits of memorable British Columbians

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Favourite Building:

The one that got away:

Favourite Building:

The one that got away:

Favourite Building:

The one that got away:

Support

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