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Residency in Victoria, British Columbia on author Cicely Fox Smith


  • Charley Noble
    Feb 14 7:40 PM 2006
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    On the Trail of Cicely Fox Smith


    Cicely Fox Smith was resident in the Victoria, British Columbia, area from 1904 to 1913. She earned her living, as she described, by "thumping a typewriter, first for the B.C. Lands Department and then working for an attorney" in downtown Victoria, British Columbia. Much of her many volumes of poetry and short stories drew inspiration from her stay. In the evenings she would walk along the wharfs and engage the shipkeepers and other nautical denizens in long conversations. She collected many fine yarns, traditional sea shanties and other sea songs, and became a master at recreating "the sailor's voice" in her poems and short stories.

    Unfortunately, whatever personal journals Smith kept have not resurfaced, and she was certainly the kind of person who would have kept a comprehensive journal. There is a manuscript of some of her pre-1920 poems that did survive, thanks to her sister Margaret Scott Smith, and it's now safe in the hands of an ardent admirer and traditional style singer, Danny McLeod of the UK. Whatever she did while she was in residence in B.C. can only be surmised from her many descriptions in her poems and passages from her other books.

    This summer (2005) I too walked the streets of the Victoria waterfront, with short forays to the City of Vancouver and neighboring Steveston Village. Standing at the site of one of her favorite haunts Victoria's old Outer Wharfs, now identified as Shoal Point, I too watched the "old sunset glory setting all the clouds aflame" and "the snow-crowned peaks that gleam" of the Olympic Mountains across Juan de Fuca Strait. What a heavenly sight! And the sight is still to be enjoyed by anyone who walks there. However, as she feared "The ports I knew grown strange" is an apt description for what has happened to Victoria's working waterfront. Most of the old buildings have been torn down and replaced with high-rise hotels and condominiums. Only a dozen or so remnants survive of the buildings she would have remembered from where she worked as a typist.

    She described her law office as being "up two flights of stairs in Wharf Street", "next door but one from a ship-chandler's establishment." One of those shops nearby during her residence was most likely McQuade's Ship Chandlery Shop, 1250 Wharf St., now part of the building occupied by the famed Chandlers Sea Food Restaurant. The cross references would be Yates Street and Bastion Square. Some of the other buildings she described in the neighborhood that she used to see during her lunch break included the Occidental Hotel, the Panama Saloon, and the junk shops in nearby Chinatown. Further north down Shore Street was likely one of her other favorite haunts the Rock Bay Lumber Mills, where she'd watch the longshore crew loading lumber into tall ships. This arm of the Inner Harbour was also where the tugboats would berth and the old sealing schooners she was so fond of were moored. Just below Wharf Street were warehouses and the shipping offices for many single ship firms such as the clipper ship Antipode, identified by their modest white on black sign boards. And on her block there was an abundance of wholesale grocery shops, hotels and saloons, including the Ship Inn (one of Victoria's first drinking establishments).

    In Vancouver, there was the famous Hasting Lumber Mill, the subject of her poem "Hastings Mill," located at the foot of Dunlevy Street along the waterfront of Burrard Inlet, adjacent to the "rowdy" Union Steamship Company Wharf; the mill office was salvaged and floated in 1930 on a barge to a park on English Bay, 1575 Alma Street, where it now serves as a small museum owned and maintained by the Native Daughters of B.C.

    In the Village of Steveston, now part of the bedroom community of Richmond, I could find no trace in their archives of a "Steveston Lumber Mill," one that Smith explicitly mentioned in her poem, "Lumber." In the early 1900's there were over a dozen salmon canneries along that waterfront and a boat building yard but no evidence of a saw mill. Nor could I find, while searching the B.C. archives, a Steveston Mill elsewhere in B.C. However, I have subsequently learned from Jon Bartlett of the VFFS Shanty Crew that:

    "The CP line from Vancouver to Steveston, built in 1902, passed through the new mills at Eburne (now South Vancouver), allowing it to ship lumber south to be loaded at Steveston onto sailing ships bound for Europe."

    There is a reference to Steveston in another poem "Port o' Dreams":

    She went missin' many a year since bound from Steveston home with deals.

    "Deals" are inexpensive planks. So at the very least there was lumber being shipped out from Steveston during the period when Smith was resident in B.C.

    Cheerily,
    Charley Noble (10/30/05)
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