Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 38

Vancouver’s Buried Houses

A few weeks ago, Michael Kluckner ran a painting of a Kitsilano house on his FB page. I googled the address and was astonished to find that the house was still there on busy 4th Avenue, buried behind an ice-cream parlour. Michael tells me that only a handful of these buried houses remain, and he kindly wrote this story illustrated by his paintings from 2010 and 2011 that appeared in Vanishing Vancouver: The Last 25 Years.

By Michael Kluckner

In the interwar years, Vancouver’s commercial streets filled in with single-storey shops, many of them simple boxes with no decorative trim. They were the utilitarian independent stores of the “streetcar suburbs” like Grandview’s Commercial Drive and the West End’s Robson Street. A typical Vancouver commercial street, right up until the 1970s,  was a mix of shops, a few apartment buildings, and houses.

Especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, owners of these houses tried to make their properties viable by adding commercial storefronts in what had been the houses’ shallow front yards.

Just east of Arbutus, 2052 West 4th Avenue (above) is a 1905 house with a 1927 addition on the front. Over the years it has housed a dry cleaner, a build-it-yourself radio shop, and a poster store catering to the hippies in nearby rooming houses. It was nicknamed The Rampant Lion, after the tenants’ rock band.

Visible only from Fraser Street and the back lane, the 1897 house at 708 East Broadway is hidden behind a storefront built by W.M. McKenzie. Later, an electrician named John Grumey, converted it into “Launderama.” It has been further subdivided with a tailor occupying half of the storefront.

708 East Broadway, where W.M. McKenzie operated a grocery store from 1932 to the 1950s. Michael Kluckner, 2010

​The best set of buried houses in the city are on Renfrew just south of 1st Avenue. The houses were built in 1937, 1921 and 1926 respectively, indicating the slow settlement of Vancouver east of the old city boundary at Nanaimo Street. A small retail hub developed there due to the Burnaby Lake interurban line stop which ended service in 1952.

Renfrew houses at East 1st. Michael Kluckner, 2010

There are other buried houses on West Broadway near Balaclava, on 4th Avenue just west of Burrard, and Granville around 13th.

Buried house at West 4th Avenue near Burrard, 2017

A buried house, probably built in 1907 with a horrid concrete-block shop/factory front attached to it is still at 350 East 10th Avenue, directly behind the Kingsgate Mall and next to a Telus parking lot.

350 East 10th Avenue. Michael Kluckner, 2010

Until a few years ago, a 1904 house was built at the back of its lot to allow for shops in front on the northeast corner of Broadway and St. Catherines. The shops were demolished a generation ago, the house a few years back. Townhouses now occupy the site.

Broadway and St. Catherines. Michael Kluckner, 2010

The most visible buried houses are the set on Denman Street just up from the beach.

A row of buried houses on Denman near Davie, 2017

Houses, just like other buildings, adapt or die. There is not a lot of old Vancouver, at least on the commercial streets, that can adapt to the new reality of land prices, taxes, the desire to densify, and the changing retail landscape.

Michael Kluckner is a writer and artist with a list of books that includes  Vanishing Vancouver and Toshiko. His most recent book is a graphic novel called 2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery. He is the president of the Vancouver Historical Society and a member of the city’s Heritage Commission.

 

 

The Navvy Jack House: Past, Present and Future

Navvy Jack House, 1957. Photo courtesy West Vancouver Archives

Jane Williams kindly gave me a tour of her parent’s house at 1768 Argyle Avenue last week. Her father, Lloyd Williams died in April at the age of 96, and she was getting ready to hand the keys over to the District of West Vancouver. Lloyd and Jane’s mother Bette paid $50,000 for the house in 1971, before the seawall was installed and when the next-door John Lawson Park was still a field with a few scattered houses.

Lloyd and Bette Williams, 1990s. Photo courtesy Jane Williams

The District has owned the “Navvy Jack” house since 1990 when the Williams’ made a deal in exchange for life tenancy. It’s the last one following a council decision in 1975 to buy up the 32 houses along the Ambleside waterfront between 13th and 18th either through land sales or expropriation. With the exception of the Silk Purse, the Ferry Building, and the Navvy Jack house, the others have been bulldozed back to nature.

The Hollyburn General Store, post office and Navvy Jack’s house at 17th and Marine Drive in 1914. Photo courtesy Vancouver Archives

Depending on the source, the Navvy Jack house was built between 1868 and 1873. It was shifted from its original location at 17th in 1921 to allow for the opening of Argyle Avenue. While it’s not the oldest house in Metro Vancouver, it’s pretty darn close.

Originally from Wales, Navvy Jack (John Thomas) came to Canada to seek his fortune in the gold fields. Instead, he operated an unscheduled ferry service in 1866. The following year he bought 32 hectares of waterfront land from 16th to 22nd Street and founded a gravel hauling business on the Capilano River (a sand and gravel mix is named for him).

Navvy Jack’s house on the wedding day of John Lawson’s daughter in 1914. The house was white with a veranda that ran the entire width held up by Victorian brackets on turned columns. The exterior is moulded cedar siding.  Courtesy West Vancouver Archives

Navvy Jack married Rowia, granddaughter of Chief Kiepilano and raised four children in the house. By the 1890s he was broke and lost the house in a tax sale.

John Lawson, who was known as the “Father of West Vancouver,” and namesake of the John Lawson Park, bought the house in the early 1900s. It changed hands a few more times until the Williams’ moved in.

Jane standing in the kitchen. Bette made a  kitchen hutch and a fireplace from the hatchboards from schooners that washed up on the beach. Eve Lazarus photo, 2017

Lloyd was born in Kitsilano in 1921. He met Bette at Kitsilano High School, and later became a salesman for Simonds saws. Jane says her father’s passion was the garden that faced the ocean and overflowed with sweet peas, roses and vegetables.

According to the Statement of Significance, Lloyd’s uncle Alfred lived in West Vancouver in 1891. He was rescued from drowning at the mouth of the Capilano by Navvy Jack’s son.

How fitting that a couple of Vancouver pioneers would buy a house filled with so much history and then become its caretakers for over half a century.

Eve Lazarus photo, 2017

The house is in rough shape. Over the last 140+ years it has been renovated, changed, and neglected. While it’s on the heritage inventory, it is not on the very small list of designated properties, which means that it has no protection. Hopefully that will soon change.

The District’s Jeff McDonald tells me that while nothing is confirmed, the plan is to turn the house over to the West Vancouver Streamkeepers Society to be run it as a nature house.

Navvy Jack house in 1988. Courtesy West Vancouver Archives

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

West Vancouver’s Ambleside: Then and Now

If you live on the North Shore, chances are that you spend at least some of your summer at Ambleside. Did you know that you are sitting on reclaimed land? Prior to 1965, much of this land was a swamp.

Ambleside Beach in 1918. Photo 0002.WVA.PHO

In 1914, Ambleside was subdivided into 17 lots and filled with makeshift homes and a few businesses. Because much of the area was often under water, many of the structures, including Overington’s barber shop, were raised on stilts, and most comprised little more than a floor, some wooden sides and a canvas top.

Ambleside East of 13th, taken from Sentinel Hill in 1910. 423.WVA.THO

In those days, a large slough cut through Ambleside and ran between Capilano River and 14th Street, and boats moored on the north side of Marine Drive. In the winter, residents skated on the frozen slough, in the summer they fished for cod, and shot pigeons and ducks on the surrounding marsh.

Ambleside was designated as a park in 1918.

The Ambleside slough, mouth of the Capilano River and the Capilano Fog and Light Station in 1921. 0461. WVA.RAH

Just across from the sports field at Ambleside Park is a building that houses the Ambleside Youth Centre. Before that it was home to the West Vancouver Rod and Gun Club, and before that it was one of 18 huts built by the Department of National Defence with four-gun emplacements and anti-aircraft guns to defend the harbour entrance below the Lions Gate Bridge during World War 11.

Ambleside Beach, 1932. 3411.WVA.PHO

After the war, the huts were converted into housing for war vets and their families. Officially, the housing development was named the Ambleside Park Village; unofficially locals called it “Diaper Lane.” The huts were built on low land that flooded several times a year, and at those times, food and supplies were brought in by rowboat.

Ambleside War Assets Corporation Huts in the 1940s. Photo courtesy West Vancouver Archives

The playing fields and pitch-and-putt are built on sawdust, bark and wood waste from a North Vancouver sawmill. The duck lagoon was created by dredging part of the slough, while Ambleside beach is a product of 85,000 cubic metres of sand and gravel hauled from the sandbanks west of Navvy Jack Point.

Ambleside Beach 2017. Photo courtesy Eyoalha Baker

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

 

 

Saving History: The Lost Scrapbooks from the Marco Polo

By Tom Carter

Tom Carter is an artist, a musician, a historian, and a private collector. He has kindly agreed to write a guest blog about one of his most exciting finds.

There are some “holy grails” out there in Vancouver entertainment history—stuff we fantasize about that still exists somewhere. I still can’t believe I landed one of the biggest of them—the owner’s scrapbooks from the Marco Polo!

The Marco Polo, a club deep within Chinatown, was one of Vancouver’s legendary nightclubs. In the ‘60s it was considered one of the “big three” along with The Cave on Hornby and Isy’s Supper Club on Georgia. While posters, cards and ephemera are pretty common from The Cave and Isy’s, the Marco Polo has long been shrouded in mystery.

Over the years there have been rumours of scrapbooks kept by Victor Louie, manager and one of the Louie brothers who owned the club. They had become a legend among collectors like Jason Vanderhill and Jim Wong-Chu who have been hunting them for years.

What we knew was that Victor Louie had loaned the scrapbooks to Jason Karman when he was researching a film about Harvey Lowe in the early 1990s. Lowe was a yo-yo champion, owner of the Smilin’ Buddha and  a staple of the Chinatown entertainment scene with connections to the Marco Polo.

After Karman returned the scrapbooks they  vanished!

Then, last year, they miraculously resurfaced when a dealer I know bought the scrapbooks from a picker who had pulled them out of the garbage behind a warehouse in Chinatown. (A “picker” is someone who combs through junk in alleys, dumpsters, etc. looking for things of value to sell to antique dealers).

The dealer told me he planned to dismantle the books and sell off the bits—effectively destroying their historical value.

Instead, I bought everything.

When I got the scrapbooks home, I discovered photos of musicians on stage and chorus girls. There were menus and handbills and all sorts of letters from clients. Harvey Lowe had produced and emceed the opening show, and I found his script. There was even a handwritten listing of every act that played the club from 1964 to 1968!

These scrapbooks form a more-or-less complete history of the Marco Polo from 1960 when the Louie’s took over the Forbidden City and renamed it, through to 1982 when the original Chinatown club closed and moved to North Vancouver.

Everything is now photographed, and with the assistance of BC PAMA  and the UBC School of Library Archival and Information Studies, the entire contents of the scrapbooks will eventually be online.

Tom Carter  has been painting historical views of Vancouver for many years with artwork in prominent private and corporate collections. Tom serves on the boards of the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame, Friends of the Vancouver Archives and the Vancouver Historical Society. You can read more about his work in Vancouver Confidential “Nightclub Czars of Vancouver and the Death of Vaudeville.”

The East Cordova Street Murder Factory

When I was going through John Vance’s personal files for Blood, Sweat, and Fear, a small article torn from the pages of the long defunct Vancouver Star caught my eye. Vance’s handwriting dated it October 23, 1931 and it mentioned the murder of Naokichi Watanabe. Vance had clearly kept the clipping because he had testified that blood found on the suspect’s clothing was human.

I looked up other stories around that date to find out more about the case and was intrigued to find that it was much bigger than one murder and revolved around a house that still exists on East Cordova Street, about a block or so over from the former Japantown.

Historical Map-Guide, Japantown. Courtesy Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

In the heart of the Depression, Shinkichi Sakurada, a 40-year-old Hastings Sawmill worker, set himself up as a medicine man and started a private hospital in the six-room East Cordova house. Problem was, people would enter the hospital, take out an insurance policy, name him as their beneficiary, and shortly after, die.

629 East Cordova Street. Eve Lazarus photo, 2017

The scheme began to derail when Watanabe’s body was found by Sakurada behind the American Can Company. Sakurada told police that Watanabe lived at his house and when he had gone out that night and not returned, he had became worried and went to search for him.

Watanabe, had injured his back on the job the previous year and was about to receive a cheque from the Workmen’s Compensation Board. He planned to return to Japan the following week. Knowing that if Watanabe left the country he would never recover the money from his insurance policy, Sakurada became desperate and hired Tadao Hitomi to kill him.

Naokichi Watanabe’s body was found lying across the CPR tracks behind the American Can Company at the foot of Princess Street. Hastings Sawmill  is visible. Photo courtesy Vancouver Public Library, 1926

The koroshi (killing) was reported widely in the Japanese papers, but the mainstream press took little interest until police called Sakurada’s modest house “a murder factory,” and the Globe and Mail ran a national story headlined “Murder Syndicate Collects Insurance on Victims’ Lives.” The newspaper reported that police suspected an “organized assassination ring” operated in Japantown and was responsible for as many as 20 deaths.

Sakurada and Hitomi were quickly dispatched to the gallows on December 30, 1931 at Oakalla Prison Farm.

You can read the full story in Blood, Sweat and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s First Forensic Investigator, it’s one of the ten chapters in the book that follows individual crimes that Inspector Vance helped to solve during his 42-year career as head of the Police Bureau of Science (1907-1949).

What was there before? The Courthouse

The Vancouver Courthouse, bordered by Georgia, Hornby, Howe and Robson, was designed by celebrity architect Francis Rattenbury in 1907 and completed in 1911. Since 1983, it has been home to the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Pamela Post wanted to know what sat on the site before. What she found was nothing and everything.

By Pamela Post

The answer surprised both me and the archivist at Vancouver Archives, as we peered at the old city map from the 1890s to early 1900s.  Apparently, nothing.

Prior to 1911 the square block bordered by Georgia, Hornby, Howe and Robson was a blank space on the map, save for the prosaic descriptor: Block 51, District Lot 541.

Until men and their horses plowed the sod for the courthouse in 1909, it was nothing but a vacant lot, lumpy clear-cut CPR land that was bought by the province to build the courthouse that would replace the 1888 structure at Hastings and Cambie.

Clearing the land in 1909. Courtesy Vancouver Public Library

Upon its completion in 1911 the Vancouver World gushed that the building “is one of the finest in the Empire!” While a local judge told a reporter that it equaled the new Strand Courts in London, England. The colonial fervor reached its height in 1912 at the official opening ceremony which was attended by the Duke of Connaught—Canada’s Governor General.

Christ Church Cathedral Georgia & Burrard, 1890s. Stephen Joseph Thompson photo.

Over a century later, on this controversial Canada Day 150, the question ‘What was there before?’ demands a much deeper answer viewed through the lens of over 10,000 years of indigenous history in a place where Coast Salish peoples lived and thrived for millennia.

The opening of the Courthouse in 1912 with the Governor General in attendance

In 1996, Gitsxan artist and elder Doreen Jensen spoke to that question in an essay she wrote for an exhibition of contemporary First Nations art that she co-curated for the Vancouver Art Gallery.

“Just 112 years ago, a powerful rainforest covered the place where the Vancouver Art Gallery now stands. Trees rose 312 feet into the coastal sky. Streams made their way through the woodland where bears, beavers, wolves, elk and other animals made their homes. First Nations people were part of this complex ecosystem. They harvested trees for lumber, cutting slabs from the standing trees in a way and a season so the trees could continue to thrive.”

For decades, she writes, indigenous peoples and their cultures were treated with contempt within the walls of the Vancouver courthouse and later the VAG.

LaxHösinsxw is an important word in the Gitxsan language, writes Jensen, explaining that it means honouring and respecting others, place and space.

“In this city, at this site and at this time in history, it is a word we might learn from. The place and space in which the Vancouver Art Gallery stands, physically and metaphorically, is a contested one. Here, where a city has been incompletely exchanged for the forest and newcomers have incompletely replaced the aboriginal inhabitants, LaxHösinsxw may be key to the creative process and to our future.”

Currently, the new $9.6 million dollar plaza at the VAG showcases a very European Monet poster. I would have preferred to see the invocation Jensen wrote about that site:

“The past creates an energy in the present, whether we know it or not. The ancient forest and its metamorphosis into timber, then real estate, is still part of this place.”

Pamela Post is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster and creative writer. She teaches journalism at Langara College. She was born and lives in Vancouver’s West End and is Tsimshian First Nations from Kitsumkalum on her father’s side.

 

 

 

 

The Chinese Labour Corps: One of BC’s Best Kept Secrets

 

Robert Ashton kindly sent me this photo of hundreds of Chinese men standing on a hill with rows and rows of white army bell tents in the background.

Photo courtesy Vancouver Archives Mil P194, 1918

He also found a 1920 copy of Pacific Marine Review with this story.

“During the last five months, almost 50,000 Chinese coolies have passed through the port of Vancouver on their way from work in the European war zone back to their homes in China. At times the congestion at the Williamshead quarantine station has been very great. For instance, at the end of the second week in March there were over 8000 coolies housed at that point. On March 14 the steamer Ixion sailed with 3625 of these Chinamen and during the same week the steamer M.S. Dollar took 4300 and the Bessie Dollar took those remaining or about 1400. As the steamship companies got $55 each for transporting the men across the Pacific, it can readily be seen that these vessels will net a nice little sum out of this work.”

Robert wanted to know if anyone knew where the photo was taken. And, so did I.

Members of the Chinese Labour Corps at William Head . BC Archives EO-6996, 1917

William Head, it turns out, is in Metchosin, just outside of Victoria. It was a quarantine station from 1872 to 1959 designed to stop the spread of smallpox, leprosy and meningitis. The station was equipped to handle 800 people in a 42-building, 106-acre facility.

Between 1917 and 1920 more than 84,000 Chinese were held there in quarantine.

The men were part of the Chinese Labour Corps, a secret division formed under the British Army during the First World War. More than 90,000 “volunteer” workers from China and Mongolia were told that they were being recruited to work as labourers in non-combative roles.

The Chinese boarded ships in eastern China, crossed the pacific and were quarantined at William Head. After a brief stay they were put on guarded trains and taken to the east coast where they sailed to France.

According to author, Peter Johnson* when the Chinese landed at Dunkirk they were fired at, gassed and thrown into whatever war-time horrors were happening on any given day.

Aerial photo of William Head Prison from Wikimapia

The former quarantine station and some of the buildings were incorporated into the William Head Institution—a minimum-security prison that opened in 1959 and houses 180 inmates.

*Peter Johnson is the author of Quarantined: Life and Death at William Head Station: 1872-1959, Heritage House Publishing, 2013. 

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

Italian Heritage Month – meet the East End’s Angelo Branca

 

One of the best parts about messing around with history, especially criminal history, is digging up connections. Angelo Branca appears as a Canadian middleweight boxing

Angelo Branca in the 1930s

champion in the 1930s, and as the scrappy East End (Strathcona) lawyer and defender of madams and bookies in At Home with History.

In Sensational Vancouver, he is defence attorney to notorious brothel owner Joe Celona during the Tupper Royal Commission into police corruption. In another chapter, he pops up as a patron of former VPD detective Joe Ricci’s West Coast Central Club, and in another, he is boss and close friend to Tosca Trasolini a pilot and member of the Flying Seven, Canada’s first all-female aviator club.

In Blood, Sweat, and Fear, Branca swaps sides in 1935 and defends 17 VPD officers suspended for corruption. Every one of them got their job back. Ten years later he is defending a soldier accused of murdering a young woman in English Bay in 1945. It’s one of the few cases he loses in his career.

Angelo Branca boxing in the 1930s. Courtesy Ray Culos

During his career, Branca defended 63 people on murder charges, and only one, Domenico Nassa, received the death penalty in 1928. Branca told his biographer that he had no quibble with that decision, but he didn’t think the soldier deserved to hang, and he fought the verdict all the way to the British Columbia Court of Appeal. He often took on pro bono cases.

Angelo Branca with client Joe Celona. Province photo, 1955.

Branca was born in 1903 and grew up at 343 Prior Street with parents Teresa and Filippo, two brothers John and Joseph and sister Anne. Filippo ran the grocery store on Main Street and he and Peter Tosi and Sam Minichiello were the three biggest importers of California grapes in the area.

West Coast Central Club, Main Street, ca.1950. Joe Ricci far left. Photo courtesy Louise Ricci

My favourite story comes from Ray Culos whose grandfather was Sam Minichiello, and says that the joke in the neighbourhood was that wine was a family affair. Filippo would sell the grapes to the bootleggers, his son John, a detective with the dry-squad would arrest them, and his other son, Angelo, would get them off in court.

343 Prior Street, Vancouver 2017. Photo Google maps.

The Canadian Lawyer magazine wrote that Branca was the most famous criminal defense lawyer in Canada’s history. In 1963, he became a Supreme Court judge. Branca died in 1984.

To read more about his remarkable life, check out:

Vincent Moore’s book: Gladiator of the Courts, Douglas and McIntyre, 1981

Ray Culos’s website

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

 

Inspector Vance and the Noir Magazines of the 1930s and ’40s

One of the many fascinating things that Inspector John Vance packed away when he retired from the Vancouver Police Department in 1949 were several true crime magazines. He appeared in all of them. Reporters were intrigued by this scientist who was able to convict criminals through the tiniest piece of trace evidence, or determine death by poison, or through his forensic skills in serology and firearms examination.

Reporters moonlighted for these magazines and had cozy relationships with police and sources that gave them access to information and photos unheard of on any crime beat today.

The early magazines ran fictionalized versions of sensational crimes. In one ironically called Real Crime Cases, Vance takes a starring role in a story called the “Mystery of the Missing Mrs. Millard” based on a 1914 murder investigation. The case is the first chapter in Blood, Sweat, and Fear, and it’s fascinating to read the “real” version in the magazine. In the magazine, Vance becomes a detective and is even given lines and solves the case. In reality, it was the first police case he worked on, and his job was to test a stain found on the carpet to see if it was blood.

A typical drugstore display of magazines in the early 1940s. Courtesy CVA 1184-3279

In another case that I wrote about in Blood, Sweat, and Fear, the story of two murdered police officers in Merritt written up in Master Detective was so detailed and accurate with accompanying crime scene photos that it resulted in a sharp warning from the trial judge.

Later Vance appears in Inside Detective with the headline “They couldn’t kill the crime doctor.” He appears again in Special Detective Cases in a feature called “He makes his own miracles,” and in May 1942, Vance is the subject of a three-page feature in Greatest Detective Cases “Vancouver’s Police Wizard: Inspector Vance.”

According to a recent Vancouver Sun story the Canadian market for detective magazines came to an end when “moral outrage led to a 1949 Canadian law banning pictorial depictions of the commission of crimes real or fictitious,” sucking all the fun from the articles.

Predictably, Canadian true crime was a lot milder than its US counterparts. These were more like soft porn that featured cartoon-like pictures of women bound and gagged.

Detective magazines had a longer run in the U.S., they lasted into the 1970s, True Detective, which launched in 1924, managed to hang on until 1996. While interest in true crime never waned, tabloid television replaced the magazine.

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

Chesterfield House

If you live in North Vancouver you may have noticed the old Tudor-style house at Chesterfield and Osborne in the upper Lonsdale Area.

It’s hard to see these days, because several years ago we allowed developers to build two large “carriage” houses, in what was once a magnificent front garden filled with hollies, laburnums, cedars, black walnuts, a cherry tree, a rose garden, and a large rhododendron.

Chesterfield House School, ca.1920. Courtesy Eric L. Williams

I was reminded again of its story this week when Eric Williams kindly sent me this photo of his father’s school class.

Chesterfield House became a boy’s school in 1913 after it moved from its first location at the corner of 14th and Lonsdale. The grounds covered several lots and included two buildings—the main house with dorms, a dining room and offices, and the school house with classrooms and science labs. There was also a gymnasium, a swimming pool, and a stable for six horses.

Chesterfield School ca.1920. Cyril Eddowes Halsey Williams is front row fourth from left. Courtesy Eric L. Williams

As Eric points out, you can see the British influence in everything from the style of the

Chesterfield House, courtesy NVMA 4528

building to the clothes worn by teachers and the boy’s uniforms.

“My father doesn’t seem to be particularly happy at that moment, but subsequently delighted in relating anecdotes concerning the pranks the boys played on each other,” says Eric.

Eric’s father, (Canon) Cyril Eddowes Halsey Williams went on to study at the Anglican Theological College (now Vancouver School of Theology) at UBC. After graduating he was posted to the Yukon and later to the interior. He wrote a book called Archdeacon on Horseback, a year before his death in 1992.

Chesterfield house now a rental apartment building peaking out between two “carriage houses.” Eve Lazarus photo

According to Sharon Proctor’s story in Express, Chesterfield operated in the British tradition with male teachers and ties to the Anglican Church. “Its goal was to prepare boys for entrance to Universities, Royal Naval and Military Colleges, and business.” The Chesterfield Boy Scout program consisted of 20 boys who were frequently dispatched to fight local forest fires.

Chesterfield House from Osborne Road West. You can reach out and touch the wall of the “Carriage” house. Eve Lazarus photo.

The school closed in 1942 and was converted into an apartment building. It’s the only part of the school that still exists.

  Thanks to Tom Carter for “stitching” the very large photo into one piece.

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