Gassy Jack
by Donna Jean MacKinnon
Vancouver’s earliest name came thanks to a saloon keeper. John “Gassy Jack” Deighton, born in Hull, Yorkshire, on the North Sea near the mouth of the Humber, started out as a steamship operator in the late 1850s, but bad health (painful swelling of his legs and feet) forced him to take up another line of work. He opened a bar in New Westminster that thrived on the traffic going to and from the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1862.
By 1867 the rush was over and the businesses that had profited from it began to close down. Meanwhile, on the south shore of Burrard Inlet, Captain Edward Stamp was managing a new sawmill. In September Deighton rowed to the Stamp’s Mill site with his native wife, “with little more than $6 in his pocket, a few sticks of furniture, a yellow dog and a bottle of whiskey.” He was 36. With the help of the thirsty sawmill workers, for whom the nearest drink was nearly 25 kilometres away in New Westminster, Deighton built the Globe Saloon within 24 hours of his arrival. The small wooden shack stood just west of the mill at what is now the intersection of Carrall and Water streets, where Vern Simpson’s statue of Gassy Jack stands today. “I can assure you it was a lonesome place when I came here first,” he wrote his brother, Tom, in England. “Surrounded by Indians, I dare not look outdoors after dark. There was a friend of mine, about a mile distant, found with his head cut in two.”
Business, despite such perils, was very good, but to discourage competition Jack let on that things were tough, something he got away with for more than a year. Soon enough, there were a number of other saloons and hotels in the area, but Jack’s saloon continued to be the busiest and most popular. Jack attracted the custom of the loggers and longshoremen, even if he was strict at kicking them out each night at 10:30, telling them they had to get their sleep. But he was always ready for a story and, it is said, got his nickname because of his own gift of the gab.
The little community that grew up around Jack’s saloon had to be torn down when a townsite called Granville was established and a five-corner intersection was laid out, but he bought a nearby lot and built a hotel (with bar) called Deighton House. It became so busy that he invited his brother to come out from England and work with him. Around the same time, following the death of his first wife (whose name is not recorded), Jack took up with her 12-year-old niece Quahail-ya, also known as Madeline or Matrine. In 1871 they had a son, Richard, who was quite simple-minded and came to be derisively nicknamed the “Earl of Granville.”
Jack’s brother Tom and sister-in-law Emma came out from England, but Jack and Emma didn’t get along. His personal difficulties and an improvement in his health persuaded Jack to move to New Westminster, where he returned to steamboating on the Fraser on the vessel Onward. Tom and Emma were left in charge of the hotel, and an 1874 advertisement in the Mainland Guardian makes reference to the “newly constructed and commodious Hotel ...The establishment is replete with all the comforts of a home. The large and comfortable parlors, single and double bedrooms, extensive dining-rooms are furnished in every respect with care, and are under the experienced management of Mrs. Thos. Deighton.”
During a visit to Granville another round of furious name calling between Jack and Emma was the last straw. Emma ended by throwing hotel china at Jack, saying he didn’t have it in him to have been Richard’s father (as an indignant Jack wrote to a friend, “She hated the little Earl of Granville, you know, and she spread the rumor that I didn’t have the tackle to father him"), and scorning him because of his own illegitimacy. ("I was my father’s son by another woman.") After that incident Tom and Emma moved to Victoria and never returned. Jack took charge of the hotel again and made renovations in anticipation of increased business from the construction of a new road, but fell ill again and died soon after at the age of 44 on May 23, I875. Qua-hail-ya was disinherited, and Richard died before Jack’s meagre estate (about $300) was probated.
Jack’s body was transported to New Westminster, where it lay in an unmarked grave for 37 years until the Gassy Jack Memorial Fund was established and a headstone erected in 1972.
(3)
Recent Comments