British Isles
by Kevin Griffin
As grim news about the German advance across Norway filled the front pages of the newspapers in late April, 1940, local English-Canadians gathered to celebrate St. George’s Day, in honor of the patron saint of England. They started with a religious ceremony. On Sunday, the 21st of the month, scores of members of various local English societies marched confidently into Christ Church Cathedral carrying flags of famous English battalions, St. George’s red cross Standard and the Union Jack while singing “Land of Hope and Glory.” Two days later about 300 Vancouverites of English descent gathered in a hotel ballroom for the annual banquet held by the Royal Society of St. George. As the evening’s ceremonial highlight nothing could top the Parade of the Roast Beef. Leading the procession was the chef and two helpers who bore 20 kilograms of the steaming sacred meat above their heads. They were followed by a trumpeter and another man carrying almost five kilograms of flaming plum pudding.
At the banquet that evening, the guests ate 68 kilograms of roast beef, many square metres of Yorkshire pudding and 225 grams of prepared mustard. Sated with traditional English fare, the crowd waited for Howard Coulter, the chief toastmaster, to give a speech. Surrounded by the familiar face of King George VI, whose portraits hung on the walls of the ballroom, Coulter looked out on a sea of red roses, the traditional flower associated with St. George. He warmed up the crowd by referring to that “little man with the ridiculous moustache whose real name is Schickelgruber.”
“We are not effete,” Coulter told the audience, “we can still say to a waiting world that there is a basis in the legend that St. George was the son of God, and the dragon he fought with the evil tongue and fiery breath was the epitomized evil of the world. Again St. George is mounted and out to do battle.”
When Coulter gave his inspirational speech in 1940 there were numerous English county, city, regional and cultural organizations in Vancouver. They included: the Royal Society of St. George, the main English-immigrant society in the city and the one which started holding an annual St. George’s banquet in 1894; the Vancouver Lodge of Sons and Daughters of England; the Birmingham and Midland Counties Association; and the Shropshire Association. In the 1920s, for example, St. George’s Day festivities were preceded by a Shakespeare festival and special city-wide appeals to fly the Union Jack. At the Lancashire Society annual dinners before World War II, more than 350 people could be counted on to attend a Lancashire feast of potato pie and red cabbage. And starting in July, 1940, when the Channel Islands became the only British territory occupied by Nazi Germany, the Channel Islanders’ Society became extremely active in holding fundraisers to help refugees from Guernsey and Jersey. When the war was over Channel Islanders held several liberation banquets and feasts, including a garden party where local actors performed Down Goes the Swastika, a play about the liberation of Guernsey written by the society’s president P.W. Luce.
But by 1955 the thriving pre-war network of English societies and associations had declined. Most eventually merged with the Royal Society of St. George. A similar pattern occurred among those of Scottish, Irish, or Welsh descent in the region: growth in the number and activities of organizations as immigration swelled, then declined as immigrants became Canadians.
In many ways it is almost impossible to write a traditional “ethnic” history of the people of the British Isles in the Lower Mainland. Since the English-speaking people from Great Britain and Ireland were never a minority, except for a brief period when native people outnumbered Europeans in the 1860s, they were never an ethnic group outside the dominant culture. They were the dominant culture. Through weight of numbers people from Great Britain and Ireland were able to establish a cultural hegemony over all other ethnocultural groups. They created a colonial settler society with British norms and values, English as the language of commerce and public life and British law and forms of government. Only immigrants who spoke another language or didn’t have a British cultural heritage became ethnic groups and had to find accommodation with the dominant British settler society.
And while the English-speaking peoples from the British Isles may not have been an ethnic group in the traditional sense, they certainly had an ethnicity, even if there were very few occasions when any explicit mention was made of it. Those references usually occurred on major festival days: for the English on St. George’s Day on April 23; for the Scots on St. Andrew’s Day on November 30 or Robert Burns’ Day on January 25; and for the Welsh on St. David’s Day on March 1. Because the political and historical situation in Ireland divided the native Catholic Irish and Protestant Ulster-Scots, the days when their ethnicity was marked were St. Patrick’s Day on March 17 and the Glorious Twelfth on July 12 respectively. But save for those annual feast days, or during periods of conflict in Great Britain and Ireland, newspaper accounts and histories almost never referred to the ethnicity of members of the dominant groups.
So when Malcolm McLean was elected the city’s first mayor in 1886 little was made of the fact that he was from the island of Tyree in Argyleshire, Scotland, spoke Gaelic fluently and had beaten another Scot from Edinburgh, Richard H. Alexander. Or that McLean became the first president of the St. Andrew’s and Caledonian Society, the oldest Scottish organization in the city, while being a strong supporter of emigration from Scotland. Nobody thought it odd either that of the 11 council members elected on that first council, three were born in Scotland, one in England and three in Canada of Ulster-Scots descent; the remaining four were born in Ontario or the Maritimes of British stock (or had last names that certainly suggested they had British origins).
From Vancouver’s inception as a town in the only British colony on the west coast of the Americas, the British played the pre-eminent role in shaping the region. In many ways the history of the British in Vancouver is the history of the city itself. After the Colony of British Columbia was proclaimed November 19, 1858, at Fort Langley, the Columbia Detachment of the Royal Engineers under Col. R.C. Moody arrived to turn a colony that existed only on paper into a living reality. Sent by the Colonial Office in London the 165-man unit built roads, enforced the colony’s laws, laid the groundwork for a civil service and even printed postage stamps. Looking for a capital for the new colony Moody picked a spot on the north side of the Fraser River--named after the Scottish explorer Simon Fraser--so that it might more easily be defended in a war against the Americans. He wanted Queensborough but others thought Prince Albert and Prince Edward more suitable names. To settle the dispute colonial secretary Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton asked Queen Victoria for her opinion. She chose “New Westminster.”
The surveying done by Moody and the Royal Engineers laid the backbone of the city’s extensive park system by setting aside (for naval purposes) huge chunks of land on Burrard Inlet, including 44.5 hectares at Jericho which became Jericho Park, 315 hectares in Point Grey which became Pacific Spirit Park and 143 hectares on a peninsula by the Downtown which became Stanley Park. A year before the Royal Engineers were disbanded in 1863, three lads from England, John Morton, Samuel Brighouse and William Hailstone, were dubbed the Three Greenhorns for buying 218 hectares in what is now the West End for $550.75, thus becoming some of the first European settlers in what later became know as Vancouver. The city’s grid system and recognizable pattern of east/west avenues and north/south streets were based on the work of Lauchlan Alexander Hamilton, a member of the first city council, native of Ontario and grandson of an Ulster man.
As Vancouver grew and prospered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became more British, not less. In 1891 one in five people were born in Great Britain; by 1911 the percentage had increased to one in three. Vancouver’s reputation as a British city was so well established that real estate developers marketed the city as the Liverpool of the Pacific or the Glasgow of the northwest. British values and sensibilities also helped shape the region’s urban, residential, garden-like landscape. Developers and politicians of British descent were responsible for promoting and building an abundance of affordable single family dwellings, many in an English Tudor or cottage style, for working people rather than apartment buildings as in eastern cities.
While the Canadian Pacific Railway played a major role in shaping the residential look of the city through its vast land holdings, also important was the influence of the B.C. Electric Railway Company. Sold in 1897 to a London-based firm, it became one of the largest privately owned electrical railway companies in the British Empire. By increasing trackage in Vancouver from 21 kilometres in 1900 to 170 kilometres in 1912, the BCER opened up vast chunks of undeveloped land for single family housing. Control of the city’s streetcar company in England also symbolized the huge presence British firms had in the life of the region, especially in raising capital for mining and exploration. Even when companies were controlled in B.C. many found it necessary to have a British corporate identity to attract capital. The British link was so strong that regional business people often travelled to London to personally pitch their plans to potential investors or used a British relative for credibility. In 1901, for example, 44 per cent of the heads of major businesses and companies in Vancouver were born in Great Britain and Ireland.
But as English-speaking immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland made Vancouver more British in the early 20th century, they also made the city and region less tolerant of different ethnocultural groups. By stressing the white, Christian and British nature of the dominant groups in the city, Vancouver politicians and community leaders played prominent roles in lobbying for restrictions on Asian immigration from China, Japan and India, and on pressuring Victoria and Ottawa to pass laws discriminating against Canadians of Asian descent. It wasn’t that people of British ancestry were any more racist than others; the difference was that in the Vancouver region their control over government, police and the courts meant they could give their prejudices the force of law.
Although the British as a group played a key role in shaping the Lower Mainland, the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish also have their own separate histories. The Scottish St. Andrew’s and Caledonian Society, for example, first met on September 13, 1886, in “Gold’s House” at 66 Water Street. For the first year of its life the society met several times in the civic office of Scottish-born Mayor Malcolm McLean. A year after its inception on November 29th, 1887, the society held a grand St. Andrew’s Ball in McDonough Hall at the southeast corner of Hastings and Columbia. One newspaper called the event, without a hint of irony in a city barely a year old, “the most brilliant affair in the history of the city.” Of the 1,000 people who lived in Vancouver at the time an estimated 400 people braved a rainstorm to attend the ball, which started with dancing at 9:00 P.M. and a dinner two hours later. One account of the ball wryly noted that “what the majority of the dancers did not know about a Scotch reel, would fill a Gaelic prayer book.” The annual St. Andrew’s Ball became one of the major events in the city’s social calendar although not every banquet went off without a hitch. In 1895 the ball committee felt it got a very raw deal and passed a motion that the “supper at the Hotel Vancouver on November 18th was one of the worst the society has ever had since its formation.” Because only one-third of the guests got their dinner they vowed only to pay a portion of the bill. Eventually a mediator helped settle the dispute.
By the 1930s, however, the annual Robert Burns Night had overtaken St. Andrew’s Day in importance. Local newspapers regularly gave Burns Night considerable positive coverage, including almost a whole page in 1939. That year more than 700 Scots crowded into the Commodore for the annual feast where they heard the haggis (a sheep’s stomach stuffed with minced mutton, oatmeal and spices) piped into the hall and addressed with the words of Burns: “Fair fa’ your honest sonsie face/Great chieftain o’ the pudden race ...” Behind the head table stood a statue of Burns flanked by the Union Jack and the flag of St. Andrew. Locally the influence of Robert Burns became so widespread that the Chinatown Lions Club eventually organized an annual Burns dinner, complete with haggis served with a sweet and sour sauce.
Another Scottish society which played a prominent role was An Cumunn Gaidhealch, The Highland Association. For several years starting in December, 1935, the Highland Association held the B.C. Gaelic Mod, the first annual Gaelic-language music and literary festival outside of the British Isles. Affiliated with the National Mod in Scotland, the B.C. version regularly attracted entrants from all over North America. In 1938 CBC broadcast Scots- Gaelic folk songs from the mod across the country.
Although Scottish sports, language, piping, dancing and cultural groups started locally in the late 19th century, the Scottish community wasn’t able to build a community hall until many years later. The first attempt occurred in 1890 when H.O. Bell-Irving formed a building committee of the St. Andrew’s and Caledonian Society and put a down payment of $350 on two lots at Cambie and Dunsmuir. But the attempt failed and it took Scottish-Canadian groups 65 years until they opened a community hall. On St. Andrew’s Day in 1955, 21 Scottish Canadians groups finally opened the United Scottish Cultural Centre at Fir and 12th Avenue in Vancouver. In July 1986, the centre moved into a new home at 8886 Hudson in Marpole.
The Welsh first started arriving in the region in the 1860s when agents in Liverpool distributed booklets in Aberdare, in South Wales, touting the riches to be had in the Cariboo Gold Rush. In the Lower Mainland the first Welsh society started in 1912 with formation of the Cambrian Society, named after the Cambrian Hills in Wales. In 1929 society members managed to build a community hall at 215 East 17th Avenue, believed to be the only hall built and operated by a Welsh society in North America. Acoustically designed to bring the best out of choir singing, the hall became the home of the annual Eisteddfol, a competitive singing and reciting festival, and the Gymanfa Ganu, a hymn singing festival. The hall is also one the few places in the region where you can hear Welsh being spoken at its bilingual non-denominational Christian service held once a month.
One of the remarkable stories from the Welsh community occurred on April 12, 1941, when Bob Ito, a Japanese-Canadian boy under 10 years of age, won in one category and came second in another at the annual Eisteddfod. During a period of rising animosity to Japanese- Canadians and a little less than a year before Canadians of Japanese descent were uprooted from the West Coast and interned, Ito somehow managed to win a Welsh singing and elocution competition that can trace its roots back more than 1,500 years in Wales.
After World War II the Welsh community raised enough money to send a hand-carved bardic chair to the 1948 Royal National Eisteddfod in Bridgend, Wales. Presented annually to the winning bard at the festival, the chair was made from black walnut and white cowhide and combined traditional leeks of Welsh Eisteddfod design with a West Coast native design by Bill Calder.
One British group which once had a major public presence in the Lower Mainland were the Orangemen from Northern Ireland. From the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century Protestant Ulster-Scots held an annual Glorious Twelfth parade through the streets of Vancouver that regularly attracted thousands of people. The parade celebrated the victory of the Protestant King William III over the Roman Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1688. And while the day was a festive one for the Protestant Ulster-Scots from Northern Ireland, it was a symbol of sectarian intolerance for Irish Catholics. The Orange Order originated with the Ulster-Scots in Northern Ireland but expanded beyond that limited base in Canada to include many non-Catholic British who believed in Canadian unity under one flag, one language and one school system.
The earliest record of a Glorious Twelfth parade taking place is in July, 1888, when the Loyal Orange Association marched from their meeting space in Vancouver’s Keefer’s Hall to the wharves where they met fellow Orangemen from New Westminster and Victoria arriving by boat. Over the years the event kept growing in popularity to the point in 1922 when 40 Orange lodges from around the province and more than 5,000 people watched the parade and sports activities in New Westminster. Traditionally the parade was led by a marshall wearing a white plumed hat, sword and riding boots atop a white steed, which was meant to represent King William III when he led his troops in battle. In 1941, however, a minor scandal occurred when local Orangemen were forced to abandon that tradition because nobody could find a white horse. They ended up using a grey one instead. That July, which marked the 251st anniversary of King William’s victory, the parade wound its way from the old Cambie Street grounds along Georgia and then along Hastings to Hastings Park.
By the 1950s organizers tried to build interest in the annual event by moving the parade around the region, including holding it along Marine Drive in West Vancouver in 1950. In 1964 the Glorious Twelfth in Vancouver entered its final phase: that year King Billy’s white horse was finally replaced by a car. By 1971 interest in the annual parade was petering out as only a few hundred people took part.
An Irish family does hold the distinction of being the first Europeans to build a house on land that later become Vancouver. Hugh McRoberts from Northern Ireland become the first settler on Sea Island and later pre-empted land on the north bank of the Fraser on April 24, 1862. McRoberts’ nephews, Samuel and Fitzgerald McCleery from Killyleagh, County Down, built a cabin on the site that September.
The Catholic Irish have played a smaller yet no less significant role than their Protestant counterparts in the life of the region. Starting in the 1880s Irish immigrants, mainly manual and skilled laborers, settled in and around Vancouver after helping to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. But unlike Irish immigrant communities in the U.S., local Irish Catholic settlers never reached the numbers that could hold something as public as a St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Sometime either just before or after World War II Irish Catholic immigrants formed the Irish Society, a cultural and social group which remained the main Irish community group through the 1950s. The society held annual St. Patrick’s Day dances, picnics at the Peace Arch and fund raising dinners of bacon and cabbage for a dollar per person. Two of the longer lasting groups have been Stage Eireann, a theatrical group, and the Irish Sporting and Cultural Society. In the early 1980s local Irish Canadians managed to start an Irish Centre on Prior Street in Strathcona but political and financial problems forced the centre to close its doors in 1990.
People from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea have also had a presence in the Lower Mainland since early in the 20th century. The Manx Society became the first Manx organization in the country when it held its first meeting on New Year’s Eve, 1908. Society members would regularly gather on the day and sing about Ellan Vannin, the Manx name for the Isle of Man, or perform a play in Manx-Gaelic such as Yn Dooinney Moylee, (The Go-Between Man).
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