Left to right: Mary, Thomas with Ada, Annie, Mrs. Skinner with Emily, and Constance.
IMAGE B-00182 COURTESY OF ROYAL BC MUSEUM, BC ARCHIVES
Left to right: Mary, Thomas with Ada, Annie, Mrs. Skinner with Emily, and Constance.
IMAGE B-00182 COURTESY OF ROYAL BC MUSEUM, BC ARCHIVES
Thomas Skinner [was] . . . a genial gentleman, a sort of liberal conservative, Bailiff of the Puget Sound Company’s farm at Esquimalt. He liked the smell of fox and to follow the hounds; but preferred this to being the fox.
One evening toward the end of May in 1864, Thomas Skinner sat at his oak desk in the library at Oaklands, his home for the past eleven years.
He gazed out of the window at the sloping land leading down to the cove and the waters of Esquimalt, and thought again about the momentous decision he had recently made. Tomorrow he would be leaving this all behind: the house, his wife’s beloved garden, the giant oaks under which his children had played, and all six hundred acres of rich, fertile farmland he had grown to love with a passion.
When he had uprooted his family from England back in 1852, he had thought that once settled in the new colony, he would never again have to dramatically change the lives of his loved ones. That move had been a good one and he had established an excellent life for them all at Oaklands. But now the time had come for more change. It had proved necessary to move on once again and he wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time, whether he was making the right decision.
He sighed as he picked up his elegant, gold-rimmed spectacles and placed them firmly on the end of his nose, curling the rather fragile wire loops securely behind his ears. The wording on the velvet spectacle case, which read “T. Rubergall, Optician to His Majesty, of Coventry, London,” was yet another reminder from his past. Similarly, an old, gold-embossed invitation card propped against his inkwell reminded him of a happy occasion from his more recent past when Admiral Bruce of the Royal Navy had “requested the pleasure of the company of Thomas and Mary Skinner” to dinner aboard the Monarch. “A boat will be in waiting at 5:30.” Would such occasions still be a part of his family’s life once they had removed themselves to the unchallenged wilderness of the Cowichan Valley, he wondered?
Two days later, the gunboat Grappler carried the Skinners away to that new life in the remote settlement. Thomas Skinner need not have concerned himself about his decision. It turned out to be a good one, and he soon established a new and prosperous life once again for his family in the Cowichan area. His children would all marry well, especially his daughter Constance, who was destined to become the wife of BC’s seventh premier, Alexander Edmond Batson Davie.