There were a few people that kept very much apart. They were the people that thought that because they came from the Old Country that they were a little better than anybody.
—LUCILLE HEMMINGSEN
THEY ARRIVED JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1913—two women and a man. Their clothing was posh and their accents county. They checked into the Lakeside Hotel, the Riverside being in one of its periodic slumps. They were lucky to have found accommodations at all, because most of the rooms were rented to bachelors from up the lake. Everyone knew the bachelors were there to celebrate Christmas, but no one knew for sure why the Ashburnhams and Mrs. Farrer were there.
The official reason for their presence was the recent purchase of property upon which they intended to build a hunting lodge. And to this end they would soon be joined by their master of hounds, a certain Mr. Baskerville. But that did not explain why such grand-looking people found it necessary to leave England in order to set up housekeeping. Or how they could have bought the property without ever having seen it, solely on the recommendation of Mrs. Ashburnham’s cousin.
Mrs. Ashburnham’s husband, Lawrence, was the son of Sir Anchitel Ashburnham, eighth baronet of Broomham Sussex and heir to the ancient Barony of Grandison. The title dated from 1166, when King Henry II rewarded the first baronet for discharging faithfully his duties as commissioner of excise and victualer of the navy, a pattern thus being set for subsequent generations of Ashburnhams to be bureaucrats and churchmen.
Being the fourth son, Lawrence “Tufty” Ashburnham was unlikely to inherit the title. Thus denied that source of revenue and prestige, he had to look for other ways to give his life meaning. Despite the blood of generations of useful men coursing in his veins, he possessed few marketable skills. An observer said of him that “he knew horses, hounds, and pheasants.” He knew how to dress well and to live well—and had very little money with which to do either. His wife, Rosalie Winifred, who was accompanied by her personal maid, knew how to give parties and buy new clothes.
The other member of this ménage was a recent widow, her husband having died almost two years before of “softening of the brain.” Marjorie Farrer excited much speculation, as young widows often do, but the people at Cowichan Lake had to content themselves with rumours to explain why she had left England with her friends, why she had come at such an inclement time of year, and why her two children were not with her.
Speculation credited the Ashburnhams with having a daughter as well, but there were no children to be seen: just three adults looking surprised at the situation in which they found themselves. Not that they disapproved of their fellow guests in the hotel. In many ways the motley collection of remittance men and voluntary exiles were kindred spirits—it being possible to say of the majority of them that they were from “good families.” But they were celebrating Christmas with such gusto that it seemed the best thing for the women to do was to avoid the drunken Yuletide festivities altogether. Marjorie and Winifred kept to their rooms behind locked doors for three days, while Tufty made many trips up and down the stairs carrying their meals to them on trays.
When it was safe to come out, they hired a launch to transport them up the lake to Brinkwood, the furnished house they had rented near their new property. Their luggage included “steamer trunks by the dozen,” loaded not only with clothing but with bedding, linen and silver—the accoutrements of a civilized life.
The name of the rented house sounded civilized enough, but as the launch approached the shore and Brinkwood became visible, the two’ storey log structure looked more rustic than they had been led to believe. Once inside, they were shocked to see that the entire compie’ ment of furniture consisted of one old wood cook stove, one kitchen table, three wicker chairs and two iron beds. The stove had no fire box, the table was missing one leg, the chairs were decrepit, and the bedsprings were broken. The entourage retreated to the Lakeside until the place could be made liveable with furniture bought in Victoria.
The Ashburnham land lay between McKenzie Bay and Honeymoon Bay on the south shore of the Lower Lake. Winifred’s cousin had described it as “500 acres of rolling lands with fifty acres of flowering peach trees on a gently lapping lake.” In reality, they had purchased “a roadless wilderness and not a peach tree for twenty miles.” Much of the land had been cleared of trees by the previous owner in order to raise beef cattle. The only connection with civilization, if that is how the village at the Foot could be described, was by boat across six miles of lake or on foot over six miles of forest trail. But there was game in the surrounding forest and fish in the sparkling stream that flowed through the property, and there were a few neighbours: to the east, a mysterious German aristocrat named Lengnick; to the west the McVitties at Sutton Creek and the Marches on Honeymoon Bay; half a mile away in a little shack, the penurious but well-educated Sandy Archibald; and directly across the Lake a retired British army doctor, Dick Stoker, and his wife, Susan.
For a man unused to strenuous activity, Tufty Ashburnham was surprisingly efficient in the arrangements for the building of his house. And the people at the lake had never seen a house like it. It was Ε-shaped, with arms that reached towards the lake. In one wing were the bedrooms, bathrooms and lavatories of the three adults; in another, the nurseries and nannies’ bedrooms; and in the middle, a sitting room and a combination dining room and hall that looked out across a wide verandah to the lake. The ground-level nine-foot basement elevated the house and gave it a commanding presence. Huge furnaces fuelled by wood drove hot air into the rooms; there was even a hot water heater, a rare luxury at the lake.
The house was ready for occupancy in late May or early June. A week later, villagers who happened to be lounging on the verandah of Scholey Brothers’ Store saw a large car bounce and shudder along the road and come to a stop nearby. Two young girls leaped out of the car and raced down to the landing behind the store, their pell-mell progress unchecked by a uniformed nanny in hot pursuit.
Someone yelled, “Come out, you chaps. There’s a nanny, a real nanny.” Doors of floathouses flew open. A throng assembled. No one in the village had seen anything like it. There were not one but two nannies shepherding three children: Miss Doreen Ashburnham, recently turned nine years old, said to be in delicate health, and about to prove the doctors wrong; Miss Marcia Farrer, also nine years old, and a match for Doreen in almost every respect; and Master Anthony Farrer, a six-year-old who, with his sister, had just recovered from whooping cough.
Life in the new house banished any remnants of ill health. The children could swim all day, if they wanted, and explore along the many trails. There were animals to hunt and fish to catch; nannies to watch over them and a succession of Chinese cooks to prepare meals and endure Mrs. Ashburnham’s demands. There was Fred Reid, the hired man, whom they all perversely called “Willy,” to keep everything running smoothly, and soon there were ponies to ride.
The social graces were not neglected, however. “[W]e were never allowed to lower our manner of living,” said Marcia Farrer, who often spoke in italics. “We changed to formal dress for dinner every night and learned all the social graces.” A certain level of education being desirable, their parents engaged a tutor in the person of their neigh’ bour, Sandy Archibald. The appointment had taken a lot of persuasion, Mr. Archibald having already observed how badly behaved the three children were.
The tutor’s appointment and the idyllic summer did not last long—the former being terminated when Sandy told the parents that the children were incorrigible and would learn nothing, the latter ending with the roar of guns in Europe.
Nearby, at Sutton Creek, the McVitties had their thirteen-year-old nephew Bruce Hutchison staying with them for the summer. Vivid in his memories would be the day a launch came up from one of the hotels with the news that Canada, and more importantly, Britain, was at war. Marcia would remember that they were picking berries to make jam when Willy Reid came racing up the trail to tell them the terrible and exciting news.
The war changed many people’s plans. Mr. Baskerville joined many resident expatriate Englishmen who left the lake to join the British armed forces. Jack March enlisted as soon as he was old enough. The women in the village expanded their regular bridge and whist afternoons into weekly fund-raising events for the Red Cross. Soon every community social occasion, from turkey shoots to dances, added to the funds needed to provide comfort bags containing tobacco, sweets, scarves, socks and pyjamas for Canadian fighting men. Visitors from Victoria, guests at the hotels, loggers from the camps—all were urged to contribute.
Two large logging companies, which had only recently begun operations at the lake, shut down most of their operations on the mistaken assumption that the war would be bad for business. And twenty-four men too encumbered by family responsibilities or too old to enlist joined the Cowichan Lake Volunteer Corps and paraded at the railway station, weather permitting, to the encouraging shouts of their wives and sweethearts perched on the fence rails.
The instructor of that motley band was one Lt. Col. Andrew Charles Parker Haggard, DSO, former commander of the Egypt Army, survivor of the Battle of Tamai and the Investment of Suakim, fisherman and author. The sixty-year-old Haggard had lived for the past decade in a modest log house on the river. There he and his American wife, Ethel, whom he had married in middle age following the death of her first husband, lived a solitary life, she to proofread his manuscripts and pine for the company of others; he to fish, write books and articles, and expound on his dislike of Americans.
Andrew had been born in Bradenham Hall, a remote Norfolk estate that his family had occupied for over a century. His nearest sibling in age, Henry Rider Haggard—Sir Henry as he would become, world famous for his King Solomon’s Mines and She—was his dearest friend and his greatest rival. And although Andrew Haggard would never achieve fame anywhere nearly as widespread, he had written a continuous stream of articles on travel and sports, and twenty-eight books of poetry and historical fiction.
Very few people at the lake had any idea that Andrew Haggard was a writer. He had given his next-door neighbour, Louisa Green, a manuscript for safekeeping, but she put it in her attic and forgot about it. Haggard made a sporadic impact only on the tiny community that lay upriver from his home, restricting his associations to other fishermen and appearing in an official capacity only when he made his annual address to the schoolchildren on Empire Day. Usually he passed his time quietly at Camp Haggard, surrounded by his collection of Sudanese and Egyptian brassware and Oriental objets d’art, writing his books, and practising the art and science of fly fishing.
It was to fish that Haggard had first come to the river, and it was to fish as often as he could that he chose to stay. His catching of a twelve-pound salmon warranted a mention in the Victoria Daily Cofonist. His invention of the “Haggard Fly” in its three manifestations—No. i, Rainbow and No. 2—and its subsequent successful use by others gave him some fame among those who fished with a casting rod. His lyrical descriptions in English sporting magazines of the transparent green of the river in late August, when the warm water was shallow and so clear that he could see every pebble on the bottom even in the rapids, spread the fame of the river as a mecca for people who loved to fish.
Not long after he and his new wife became permanent residents along the river, Haggard told his readers in The Field of a battle with a three-and-one-quarter pound rainbow trout, a large fellow for his spe’ cies still brilliantly coloured from a sojourn in the salt water, and the welcome vanguard of the fall invasion of that fighting species of fish. In passionate prose, he honoured the rainbow, who “put up an uncommon good fight in any sort of current,” and whose “maddening rushes” made him “quite as good fun to catch as any salmon killed on a heavy rod.”
Even in 1907, when the fishery was in its prime, Haggard fussed as he waited for the fish to make their annual return to the river: “Where are the big fellows which we remember so well in days gone by?” In 1907 it was only a matter of being patient for a few days until the fish came up from the mysterious places where they spent their summers. But sportsmen like Haggard wanted to be sure that the rainbow would always be there to rise boldly from behind a rock and send a line whizzing off a six-inch split cane rod. So when the Dominion Ministry of Marine and Fisheries established the only hatchery for sporting fish in the entire country and chose Lake Cowichan for its location, Andrew Haggard must have had a great deal to do with it.
Credit for the hatchery established at the lake in 1910 went to Ralph Smith, then a Liberal member of parliament in the Laurier government. But Andrew Haggard was the man who watched closely as the buildings, dam and ponds were developed near the Riverside Hotel on land bought from and adjacent to the Oliver house; he noted the introduction of Atlantic salmon, speckled char and three kinds of trout—Kamloops, brown and lake. It was to Haggard that the deputy minister wrote to announce that no coho would be distributed in the river one spring because they were destroying the other sporting fish. And it was Haggard who informed his member of parliament when illegal Indian weirs seemed to be preventing Atlantic salmon from returning to the river to spawn.
The people who fished the river and the lake were not always men, nor were they always sporting, nor did they always fish for trout. The presence of women with fishing rods in hand was frequent but considered sufficiently exotic that it always caused comment and even a head count. It was not infrequent that fishers, whether men or women, ignored the regulations, catching far too many fish and using illegal bait. And if the catching of a trout could occasion rhapsodic prose, the killing of a salmon required epic explanation.
A fisherman writing to the Cowichan Leader, identified only as “Angler,” was prepared to take on anyone who said island salmon would not take a fly. Angler protested that if the water was right and the fly properly presented, salmon would take it. It was all a matter of casting at a forty-five degree angle, for “no self-respecting salmon w[ould] look at a line with a big bulge.” Angler presented as evidence the record of one Mr. Galbraith who, between 1894 and 1912, had killed several thousand salmon on the fly in the Cowichan River. No wonder Colonel Haggard must have felt a hatchery was needed.
It was not just army officers or aristocrats or Mr. Galbraith who caught fish. The men in the floating logging camps moored in various locations around the lake caught fish too, but not necessarily with as much finesse. Expediency won out among men who wrestled giant logs for a living. Many a huge fish was caught from a cookhouse float, not with fancy rods or lures but with a hunk of beef on an ordinary fish hook attached by a stout line to a small sapling. If the fish proved too large or too feisty, a well-administered blow with a gaff would ensure that there was fish for dinner.
Fishing took a temporary back seat in Colonel Haggard’s life as the war focussed the world’s attention on Europe. Although in failing health, Haggard established the Veterans’ Club of British Columbia in Victoria to provide accommodation and help to returning soldiers. His need to be nearer the club and his chronic bronchitis, which had begun to require closer medical supervision, caused him to move to Oak Bay for the winter. It was a thin and noticeably aged Andrew Haggard who stood on a quay in Victoria with his wife, the two of them surrounded by distinguished citizens, journalists and the merely curious, as the S.S. Niagara steamed into the harbour from Honolulu bearing his famous brother on a mission for the Royal Colonial Institute. Sir Rider could spare only a day and a night to visit Andrew in his “pleasing little house” before he set himself up in the Empress Hotel to receive delegations.
The pleasing little house was the best that Andrew Haggard could afford. His financial situation, tenuous since his early retirement from the army, became more distressed as the war dragged on to its conclusion. In 1919, having spent a few weeks fishing the river, he sold Camp Haggard to an anonymous buyer through an agent. In the fall, having also sold his mementos of an illustrious and much-decorated military career, he returned to England.
Although Andrew was a dying man, the joy of being home, and the alleviation, by his brother, of his financial worries, briefly restored his energy. But the English rivers the brothers had cast together as younger men had been empty of fish since before he left for Canada, and so when he wrote about fishing, as he continued to do, it was about fishing the Cowichan River. The bronchitis began again to worsen. When his publisher delivered the proofs for his most recent book, Haggard was too weak to correct them. He died in May of 1923 in St. Leonards on the East Sussex shore of the cold, grey English Channel, far away from the river he loved and its warm green water.
A place where the fishing is good, where a little old-country money goes a lot further than it does at home—Andrew Haggard was not the only person who found what he needed at the lake. Capt. Charles E. Henry Lengnick arrived at about the same time as Colonel Haggard did, and he too had a military past. But there the similarities ended. The German expatriate, who bought land at the foot of Little Mesachie Mountain on the south shore, was so flamboyant that legends grew up around him like noxious weeds: he was an ex-officer in the Kaiser’s army; he came from German East Africa, where he had been growing sisal and had killed a black worker; he had been exiled from Germany for duelling; he was the natural son of the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. So persistent was the rumour that Lengnick was some kind of German aristocrat that he was called “the Count” by everyone at the lake just in case. It was obvious the Count had money when he arrived. He bought land, and he built a house that looked like a Bavarian lodge and surrounded the property with a wire fence.
And he set about making himself unpopular with the owners of the Lakeside Hotel. In 1909 the syndicate that had recently bought the hotel had deemed the rooms to be “hideous” and the hotel “an eyesore.” The syndicate’s man on the site, lawyer William Oliver, hired an architect to effect a transformation. Included in the renovation was the addition of a store on the eastern side behind the bar. The store was also to serve as a post office.
A year later, the owners heard that the Riverside Hotel was trying to wrest official post-office status away from them. Someone was spreading the rumour that the post office was located in the bar. But the postal inspector, a reasonable man, simply warned them to be careful to stamp all mail properly, especially that of Count Lengnick, who always reported the slightest deviation in procedure directly to Ottawa.
The Count may have been a stickler for proper procedure, but he was dependent on his mother for all his comforts, financial and otherwise. She sent a young woman to be his housekeeper—a junior maid, the local gossips said. The Count did the honourable thing and married the young woman, but all semblance of fair treatment ended with that magnanimous gesture. Johanna Magdalana Else Lengnick continued to perform all the duties of a servant with none of the advantages of independent employment.
Their neighbours, the Ashburnhams and the Farrers, ate their first Cowichan Lake Christmas dinner at the Lengnicks’. Else served a lavish meal on a table laid with exquisite glass and heavy silverware while the stuffed heads of African animals stared sightlessly down from the walls of the ersatz German hunting lodge. Arrows and short stabbing spears filled the spaces on the walls; rifles stood in the corners. The host presided over the scene with relish. The hostess, when she had finished serving the meal, ate hers alone in the kitchen as was her custom.
As the war with Germany wore on and the Count’s funds disappeared with no hope of replenishment, his tiny wife became the only source of revenue for the household. The presence of an enemy alien couple at the lake necessitated that official measures be taken. A soldier removed the Count’s firearms. The Lengnicks were ordered to report every week to Henry March in his capacity as justice of the peace. Since they lived five miles away from the benevolent March and had no launch, he visited them instead, bringing them food from the farm.
Winifred Ashburnham, whose social life in Victoria required an extensive wardrobe, asked Else to sew for her. She included an extra parcel for the Lengnicks when she ordered food from the Hudson’s Bay Company in Victoria, the groceries available at Scholey Brothers’ Store having been deemed unacceptable by her. That the Ashburnhams seldom paid their bills complicated this largesse somewhat and may have explained why Winifred didn’t shop in the village. Her creditors included Else who, though unpaid, was too timid to refuse the honour of being her seamstress.
The Count was not popular with the people at the lake, but since they prided themselves on being neighbourly, they made sure the Lengnicks didn’t starve. The Count was too proud to show gratitude. One week the parcel from the Ashburnhams contained spare ribs, which Lengnick returned to them with a note saying, “Am I a dog to be offered bones?” He refused offers of work, preferring instead to rely on Else to earn income with her sewing in addition to doing all the physical work involved in their survival.
Else’s attempts to catch fish often led to near disaster. Her practice was to row their boat out onto the lake, having tied the fishing line around her ankle so that both her hands were free. On at least three occasions, when a fish took her lure, the line around her ankle pulled her into the lake, where her water-heavy clothing and line-enwrapped ankle, the latter attached to a fighting fish, threatened to drown her. The Count responded to one of these incidents by saying, “What do you suppose happened to me? My Else almost drowned herself.”
On the one recorded occasion when the beleaguered Else struck out, it was not at her husband. She was in the post office just after the November 11 armistice in 1918. In response to some unknown provocation she insulted first the flags of the Allies and then Mrs. Pourier, the assistant postmistress. Verbal assault being insufficient to dissipate her rage, the meek little woman then physically assaulted the robust postmistress. Given the diminutive size of her assailant, it may have been only a coincidence that Mrs. Pourier left for Victoria soon afterward for several months to undergo medical treatment.
Else’s indolent husband inadvertently made himself useful by providing plenty of material for the storytellers. The Count was a large man, Falstaffian, some said; he wore a bizarre khaki costume that resembled, depending on who told the story, either a kilt or a dress open in the front to reveal a hairy chest. “Siwash” moccasins encased hairy legs; a beret adorned his shaven head. As often as not, he wore nothing at all, preferring the sensation of fresh air on his entire body and requiring visitors to warn of their approach by ringing a bell at his dock and waiting five minutes before walking up to the house, a rule that the Ashburnham and Farrer children sought to break at every opportunity.
When the Lengnicks fled naked from their burning house on a frigid December night, they had to cover themselves with sacks from the barn before they could be rescued. In the aftermath of the fire, the people at the lake came to their assistance: more women hired Else to do sewing; an English colonel from Duncan sent some almost new jodhpurs, the legs of which Lengnick cut off, and some sweaters; logger Carl Swanson, a man with many irons in the fire, towed over an old houseboat for them to live in until they could replace their home with one covered in galvanized tin. Swanson hired Lengnick to do carpentry work for him, an exercise that turned out badly.
Far away from the wasteland that was postwar Europe, the war had left its mark on Cowichan Lake. Some of the evidence was banal: the front window of Miss Ethel Johnstone’s confectionery in the village displayed bits of bell metal from a shattered cathedral, pieces of shrapnel, fragments of a German shell—souvenirs from the front alongside the candy and cigars. Some of the evidence was sinister: obituaries in the newspaper, crippled men in the streets, and empty houseboats and cabins around the lake.
Thomas Neill McKinnon was a Scot and a man of some means, being the owner of properties in Victoria and a houseboat and launch at the lake. At the beginning of the war, when he returned to Britain to enlist, he entrusted the key of his houseboat to Henry March. Sometime later McKinnon went missing in France. Just after the end of the war, his missing-in-action status unchanged, various items belonging to McKinnon, including three guns, a fishing rod and a panther skin, appeared on the premises of one Archibald Tidrington.
Tidrington and his two motherless children had arrived at the lake just before the war, his reputation murky for his having beaten an embezzlement charge in Walla Walla. Murky reputation or not, Tidrington was elected to the first school board, an honour bestowed more for the fact that his two children provided a substantial addition to the student body, whose numbers daily threatened to shrink below the minimum number of ten set by the Department of Education, than for his suitability as an educational overseer. After the war, Tidrington became known in Lake Cowichan as a man who could provide illegal alcohol for a price—a piece of local knowledge that in no way diminished his newfound respectability. During British Columbia’s brief period of compliance with national prohibition, bootleggers provided what many citizens thought was a necessary community service.
But theft was less tolerable. The provincial police constable from Duncan, William Keir, set about proving that Neill McKinnon’s belongings had found their way into Tidrington’s home by illegal means.
On a March afternoon in 1919, Archibald Tidrington was returning to Duncan from Nanaimo by train, having just been acquitted on a charge of owning a still and other appliances for the manufacture of spirits without a licence. Keir was waiting for him. When he arrested Tidrington for the theft of Neill McKinnon’s belongings, the prisoner produced a key he said McKinnon had left with him, giving him permission to take anything he wanted. “I took the goods to save them from being damped,” he told the constable. “They’re plainly visible in my house.”
The case went swiftly to trial in Duncan before a large number of spectators. Tidrington denied everything. When called to testify, his sixteen-year-old son Fred was less sure of his evidence. The judge found the accused guilty and sentenced him to six months’ hard labour at Oakalla penitentiary, a lighter sentence than anyone expected. As soon as the trial ended, Constable Keir took Tidrington before a magistrate who sentenced him to an additional three months on another charge of distilling spirits, to which Tidrington had already pled guilty.
At the completion of his sentence, Tidrington returned to Lake Cowichan, bearing his fellow citizens no ill will and settling into the life of the village once more. And he prospered. The following year he paid for the hall where the New Year’s Eve party was held. By 1923, he owned two of the five cars in town and operated a stage service. Twice a day, he crammed his rotund body into the passenger seat of one of the cars to accompany whichever of his two children was driving passengers to Duncan. By then the family also owned the Union Restaurant.
The restaurant building was nothing more than a shack with living quarters in the back, but it stood on a hill and had two big windows that looked west up the lake. Word around town had it that the people at the Union Restaurant would sell a customer a beer with his meal if they knew who he was. One morning two strangers came into the restaurant and ordered breakfast with beer from the young woman in charge, one of them saying he knew her brother-in-law in Vancouver. She served them each a bottle of beer and sold them an additional six to take away with them.
The two strangers were provincial police constables. Tidrington was found guilty of selling illegal alcohol again. The judge gave him seven months; he filed notice of appeal and was released on bail, but his freedom was short-lived. By the time his appeal was heard he had been sent to jail on another theft conviction. But Tidrington had a way of attracting benevolent judges. At the appeal on his illegal alcohol charge, the judge reduced his sentence to three months, saying that it was the first time Tidrington had been sentenced under the beer and near-beer section of the new act; besides, the judge was impressed with the Tidrington children. All in all, things worked out quite well—besides drawing a tolerant judge, Archibald Tidrington, as usual, drew a big crowd of tolerant onlookers.
Tolerance was a necessity in Lake Cowichan, small and isolated as it was. Tidrington wasn’t the only bootlegger in the village. The first school-board chairman, Robert Beech, sold illegal booze to the patrons of his dancehall. He and his wife, Cassie, had built the hall shortly after they came to the lake to work for the E&N. Despite the Beeches’ slightly disreputable air, Cassie sipped tea on a regular basis with the “very best” women in the village. There weren’t enough year-round residents for people to be too fussy about who belonged to which social class. On a Saturday night in the dancehall, when the specially laid floor bounced in time to a host of dancing feet, or on a cold winter night at Grant’s Lake, when the whole community gathered to skate in the illumination of a huge bonfire on shore, there were no lines drawn among the permanent residents between a bootlegger and a postmaster, a logger and his boss, a woman of substance and a boardinghouse cook.
In such an egalitarian environment the plight of the transient schoolteacher stood out in contrast. A succession of young women who had trained at the Normal School in Victoria and accepted the teaching position at the Lake Cowichan school resigned in the middle or at the end of their first year. The small number of other women, the lack of eligible husband material and, most of all, interference by the school board isolated them and drove them away.
Even more isolated was the Chinese laundry man at the Foot. No one in Lake Cowichan remembered for sure how long Woo Chung and his two sons had been there, or even if it had always been Woo Chung who owned the laundry that hid from the rest of the village amid stumps and fallen logs on the far side of the E&N tracks. But Syd Scholey remembered that every Christmas—”never missed”—Woo brought Syd’s store-owner father a tin of ginger, a Chinese lily bulb and a bag of lychee nuts. Frank and Louisa Green’s son, Trevor, who has been at the lake all his life, can’t remember a time when the laundry wasn’t there. His mother sent her soiled sheets and towels to Woo in the summer when she had guests staying at their tourist camp at Greendale. The linens came back wrapped in newspaper, one of several packages bundled in a huge sheet and borne on the back of the small man as he went about the village making his deliveries.
Trevor went to school with Woo Chung’s sons, whom the other students called Big Woo (because he was tall) and Little Woo (because he wasn’t). But Big Woo and Little Woo had real names, and although the local newspaper correspondent was never able to get them quite right, their names, or versions of them, were recorded for posterity when the boys were promoted and when the younger placed third in the junior grades on prize day.
In a student body that averaged seventeen in the early 1920s, Dora, Lena and Walter (a.k.a. Moody) Pappenburger were the only First Nations children. They lived with their parents near the old shake mill in the area known to the rest of the villagers by the pejorative “Siwash Bay.” Trevor remembers the little silver earrings worn by the two girls and the braid of thick black hair that hung down Dora’s back the year she sat in front of Trevor in school. That braid was tantalizingly close to his inkwell. With just the smallest push of his Maclean straight pen, he thought he might be able to dip the braid into the ink. Tom Sawyer had done it; why not Trevor? Just as he was sure of success, Dora turned around and hissed “You go to hell.”
And my upbringing had been that you didn’t talk like that … and I expected her to disappear in a puff of blue smoke but she didn’t. She sat there large as life.
To survive in Lake Cowichan, a person had to be tough. Twenty miles from the nearest town in the midst of a mountainous and heavily forested wilderness, Lake Cowichan was a difficult place for the lonely or fainthearted. Local residents moved from one place to another by boat or on foot on a series of trails. All that connected the village to the outside world in 1915 were one telephone line with two outlets (one at Empire Lumber and one at the Riverside), a railroad devoted exclusively to the transportation of logs, and a road notorious for its roughness.
Each of the two hotels, besides providing a post office, offered another essential service—that of being the only places where liquor could be purchased legally. And despite a casual atmosphere that allowed drinkers to stand up at the bar and children to come inside with their parents, the hotels were not allowed to sell liquor to be consumed elsewhere, a piece of government logic that gave bootleggers an essential role even in non-prohibition times.
To compound the problem, the summer people objected to drinking alongside the permanent residents. In Ottawa, an anonymous member of parliament sought to solve everyone’s problems when he proposed that the Liquor Act allow the consumption and sale of alcohol off the premises of summer hotels such as the ones at Cowichan Lake, where the drinking of alcohol involved “associations with loggers and such persons.” The local member for Cowichan-Newcastle, Mr. Charles Dickie, denied any connection with the offensive amendment and Parliament defeated it. The citizens of Lake Cowichan, according to the Leader, remained indignant.
Cowichan Lake Road did not differentiate between social classes. No more than a narrow settler’s trail, whose course had been set thirty years before not to follow the wisest course but to avoid stumps and large trees, the road was a true test of fortitude. Stage drivers carried shovels to fill in the worst holes. Drivers and passengers frequently had to cut their way through fallen trees. Regular summer visitors could be forgiven if, as they set out each year for the lake, they said a prayer that some of the tighter curves and steeper hills might have been eliminated.
After the war, the regular visitors represented a more varied spectrum of society. They were mining bosses from Nanaimo and lawyers from Victoria. They were Empire Day excursionists from Duncan and British army officers on leave. But the famous and the illustrious continued to visit as well: John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mary Pickford; Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., his bride and her Pomeranian; British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s daughter and her husband, Lt. Comdr. Huntington-Whiteley; the governor-general of Canada, the accountant-general for Burma and the governor of the Bahamas. They camped in tents, they filled the hotels, and they stayed with friends in the summer homes along the river.
The number of summer homes along the river grew as word of the beautiful surroundings and splendid fishing spread throughout the drawing rooms of Oak Bay and Victoria. Among the earliest of those to build a riverside getaway there were the James Dunsmuirs.
It had been James Dunsmuir, former premier and later lieutenant governor of British Columbia, who had bought Camp Haggard through an agent in 1919. Dunsmuir was in the last years of a life begun on an immigrant ship bound for Vancouver Island, but his father, Robert, had parlayed the discovery of the Wellington coal seam into a vast fortune that made him the richest man in British Columbia. By the time James and his wife, Laura, bought Camp Haggard, the family was in decline, the victim of extravagant daughters and wastrel sons. In those days, when a family’s future depended upon a male heir, the Dunsmuirs’ last hope had been a young and unproven son who had drowned when the S.S. Lusitania succumbed to a German torpedo in 1915. Since then, James Dunsmuir had pined for his lost boy and sought solace in fishing. The family continued to live in regal comfort, however, maintaining themselves in high style at Hatley Park, their mansion in Victoria, and spending several weeks each summer on the Cowichan River.
The modest log house that had suited the Haggards’ reduced circum’ stances would not do for the Dunsmuirs and their numerous daughters and grandchildren. They enlarged the kitchen and added bedrooms, bathrooms and a wide verandah, part of which was screened. They installed hot and cold running water and electricity. Their daughter Marion and her husband, Col. Percy Stevenson, DSO, built a cottage on the property downriver from the main house. When, shortly after, Stevenson died suddenly in Paris and Marion stayed on in the French capital to pursue the frantic lifestyle of the haut monde, their cottage became the guest house for the Dunsmuir estate.
Dunsmuirs had been visiting the lake for at least fifteen years before James bought the property; they came to fish, usually accompanied by distinguished guests, and often descending the river to Duncan with Billy Thorne and his assistants in their Kowutzan canoes. The family member who visited most regularly was Capt. Guy Mortimer Audain, the husband of Byrdie, James and Laura’s eldest daughter. He was a charming Irishman, a career army officer who had given up the life he loved in India when his much younger bride was unable to adjust to the climate and the loneliness. By way of compensation, his father-in-law, who had just been appointed lieutenant governor, offered him a life annuity and the position of aide-de-camp and fishing companion. After James resigned the vice-regal post, Guy took up a restless existence, leaving Victoria for extended periods, with his wife and only son in tow, to spend spring in the south of France, summer in Ireland and winter in Switzerland.
The war years found Guy in the British army, his son, James, in a British public school and Byrdie in Victoria. When the Audain family was reunited in that city in June of 1920, James Dunsmuir was alone at the Cowichan Lake compound. Before Guy could visit his former fishing companion, Dunsmuir died of a stroke. Five years later his daughter, Byrdie Audain, died as well, leaving a son in his midtwenties and a sixty-year-old widower “brimming with health” and ready to pursue pleasure wherever it could be found.
Guy Audain always said that fishing would stand a man in good stead no matter where he travelled. Father and son spent many hours fishing together on the Cowichan River, the son watching in admiration as his dashing father demonstrated his skill with a fly rod. “He could catch a fish when no other human I have ever met could even stir one,” James would recall.
James Dunsmuir’s widow, Laura, had no interest in standing in the river for hours trying to outwit a wily trout or trophy salmon, but she continued to spend several weeks each summer on the river throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The daughter of a North Carolina gentleman farmer of modest social status, Laura had braved the rough coal mining towns that were her early marital homes to become the chatelaine of a castle. In her widowhood, when her health was good enough, she held court for a steady stream of guests at the Dunsmuir enclave, which had become an extensive estate with a guest house separated from the main cabin by an expanse of lawn and a caretaker’s cottage.
Upriver from the estate and right next door was Greendale. The Greens were not typical river dwellers—they were not wealthy and they lived there year round. Like most full-time residents they kept a cow and chickens, and it was by selling the Dunsmuirs milk and eggs that they had become acquainted. Louisa Green was invited to tea on occasion, and her younger son, Trevor, was allowed to come too, if he promised to observe the “No children on the porch until teatime” rule.
The Dunsmuirs intrigued young Trevor. He had heard about the cantankerous old man who had died at the house; he had seen the maids going in and out dressed in traditional black with white caps and aprons; and he had observed the arrival and departure of numerous well-dressed city people, the children, grandchildren and friends of the old lady.
Mrs. Dunsmuir’s second-youngest daughter, Kathleen, and her husband, Seldon Humphreys, were frequent visitors at the estate. Mrs. Humphreys was a vivacious blonde and her husband a dapper little man, charming but “weak as water.” They lived on her fortune and had a reputation for giving long and lavish parties in their Victoria home.
When in residence at the lake, the Humphreys children, three girls and one boy all with names beginning with “J>“ required playmates. Teen-aged Trevor Green was a reluctant recruit invited, or commanded, to play with the two oldest children, the barely school-aged Master James and Miss Joan, while his mother took tea with the grownups.
Trevor went off to high school in Victoria, and Kathleen Humphreys tired of her husband. She took her children and what was left of her fortune to Hollywood, where she attempted, at the age of forty, to pursue a movie career. A producer with an eye for a good thing persuaded her to invest in his production company. He produced a series of movies, the most infamous of which, The Crimson Paradise, was shot at Hatley Park and the Dunsmuir estate on the Cowichan River. Kathleen provided meals for the cast and crew and coerced several members of her family to take nonpaying bit parts. The film was not successful.
Dunsmuir stories made for good gossip in the village. Everyone in Lake Cowichan had one story, usually involving tightfisted wealth or illustrious visitors mostly observed from a distance. When Evelyn, Lady Byng, wife of the governor-general of Canada, stayed with Mrs. Dunsmuir in 1925, the villagers watched from the sidelines as the titled woman, whose interest in fair play had prompted her that very year to donate a trophy to the National Hockey League, was taken by launch around the lake to visit the few people considered worthy of such an important guest. After stopping to visit the rhododendron gardens of the Stokers and the Simpsons near Marble Bay, the launch crossed the lake to visit the Ashburnhams and their daughter, Doreen, who had just made her debut in London at the Court of St. James.
The twenty-year-old Doreen was certainly entitled by breeding, if not by wealth, to curtsy to King George and Queen Mary, but she did not have to rely on her ancient pedigree. Doreen had earned the right to be presented on her own merit by having become the youngest female recipient of the Albert Medal, a decoration for gallantry. She had proved herself brave and selfless nine years before, when she and Tony Farrer defended themselves against a starving cougar.
In later life Doreen Ashburnham carried around with her a reputation for being a liar or, at the very least, having a vivid imagination. After her death in 1991, an editor of the London Times, in an aside to an acquaintance, said that Doreen had been almost incapable of telling the truth. She invented a persona for herself that included completion of her education at the Sorbonne (even though she had not finished high school), ferrying military aircraft from the United States to Great Britain during the Second World War (she didn’t even have a pilot’s licence), and driving sports cars until the year before her death (she died at the age of eighty-five, extremely overweight). Her description of herself as a young person at the lake evoked the image of a fearless mountain woman:
I used to think nothing of getting up at five o’clock in the morning. I’d go over to Bald Mountain in the boat, climb the mountain, shoot a deer, dress it down, put it on my back, carry it down, put it in the boat, row home and think nothing of it. I used to stand on springboards and fall trees. I used to run the McGregor saw.
Lucille Gillespie, an impressionable villager ten years younger than Doreen and worlds away in experience, might well have endorsed Doreen’s image of herself. Lucille watched Doreen whenever she came down the lake in her canoe, rode through the village on her horse or sped away in her car.
Oh yes, she was quite a gal. She interested me. I can remember her flying up the road on horseback and her flying down in her topless—her convertible—car, and all that sort of thing and very flamboyant.
Doreen worked hard at her image and told outrageous stories, but the only one that rang true was the one about the cougar.
It was during the war that it happened: September 23, 1916. Two years in the British Columbia woods had made hardy, adventurous individuals out of the privileged Farrer and Ashburnham children. On that particular day, Doreen and Tony were walking the trail to Bear Lake looking for their horses. The two youngsters were carrying bridles, big ones with snaffle bits. It was hot, as September often is, and they were lightly clothed—Tony in shorts and a shirt, Doreen in a little cotton dress.
They had almost reached Bear Lake when they looked up to see a cougar lying on the trail facing them. Suddenly it sprang. Doreen must have turned away, because the animal landed on her back, knocking her to the ground. The force of the fall sent an excruciating pain through her left shoulder. The cougar began chewing and clawing at her back and kicking backwards with one of its feet, removing a large chunk of flesh from her hip.
At this moment, eight-year-old Tony began to beat the animal over and over again with his bridle. The cougar moved off snarling and clawing. The two children advanced, brandishing their bridles, forcing the cougar back, back down the trail, ten, twenty, fifty yards—then suddenly the animal sprang forward again, this time catching Tony by his forehead with its front paw, ripping his scalp, then his shoulders, his hips, his legs into ribbons of flesh.
Doreen watched in horror. The cougar had Tony down with its head right next to the boy’s. She was afraid to risk hitting the animal lest she hit Tony.
So I jumped on his back and I reached around and put my arm in his mouth—you can see where I got nicely chewed up in a few thousand places—and I managed to scratch a little bit [sic] his eyes and it finally let go.
Years later the New Yorker and the children’s publication Chatterbox each told Tony and Doreen’s story. But their fame began to build immediately after the cougar attack, as Doreen recovered from blood poisoning and Tony from the multiple lacerations all over his body. A congratulatory letter sent by former American President Teddy Roosevelt was just one of a flood.
And then the most fantastic fuss was made … letters from all over the world—soldiers, sailors, marines, civilians—and they sent us presents. I have candlesticks and inkwells and you couldn’t believe … “Dear brave children” sort of thing.
That winter, when the Ashburnham/Farrer entourage went to California, as was its custom, the millionaire son of hotelier Mark Hopkins offered the three children a year’s tuition at the special school he ran. Prince Hopkins believed in teaching children everything they needed to know. Doreen said it was a wonderful year, but she hated jujitsu. She said her nose was broken three times. But she said she used the jujitsu many times throughout her exciting life …
It would be wonderful if all Doreen’s stories had been true. The young woman with the good imagination had had a genuine adventure at the age of eleven, and she spent the rest of her life trying to measure up to it. It didn’t help Doreen to keep her feet on the ground when the Duke of Devonshire actually came to Victoria in 1917 to award her and Tony the Royal Albert medal, second class. Sixty years later her bravery as a child qualified her for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal too.
Tony Farrer wasn’t around to receive the second reward. The youngest ever recipient of the Royal Albert medal joined the Canadian army when he grew up. He was on manoeuvres with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in Manitoba when he was killed accidentally, having inexplicably walked in front of a group of soldiers during rifle practice. He was twenty-two years old and had been married only a few months.
Doreen didn’t marry until she was well into her thirties. She used to say she was going to go back to England and dance with the Prince of Wales. Lots of young women said that then but Doreen really did it—or so she said. She used to flirt with Charlie and Jack March, too. But Jack died in a logging accident and Charlie married somebody else. It was Charlie, however, who shot the old and partly blind cougar that had mistaken the children for easy prey.
Four years after the celebrated attack, Marjorie Farrer took her children to Victoria, where she married Dr. Charles Denton Holmes. The two’family household at the lake had struggled to make ends meet almost since the day they arrived. If the hunting lodge idea had ever been seriously considered as a source of income, it had long since been abandoned. For a while it actually looked as though Tufty might inherit his family’s title, as two of his elder brothers died in turn without issue. But his third brother, Fleetwood, spoiled Tufty’s chances by siring three sons.
The Ashburnhams and the Farrers had survived by using their wits and other people’s money. When they could no longer afford Chinese cooks, Tufty and Marjorie had done the cooking. They borrowed money from many people, including casual acquaintances, and even from Neill McKinnon before he enlisted in 1915. Tufty took several years to pay that money back, justifying his tardiness by saying that since McKinnon was missing in action there was no one authorized to receive payment. But they continued to entertain—friends from Victoria, royalty from Britain—and they continued to spend their winters in California, one year returning to the lake with two cars and two fur coats.
The lake always pulled them back. Spring, summer and fall, year after year. Summer at the lake was hot and dry. There were often forest fires. On more than one occasion their home or the homes of their neighbours were in danger of catching fire. When the March home was threatened for several days in 1915, the three children milked all the Marches’ cows, helped Mrs. March prepare meals for the firefighters, and took turns sitting on the roof of the log house stamping out the sparks that rained down from the burning forest nearby. There were fires in 1922 and 1927 that threatened the Ashburnhams’ “pretentious house” directly, but each time it escaped unharmed. In November of 1930, however, the house burned to the ground. Nothing survived the fire but the three Ashburnhams. They left for California as usual but returned in April, just as they always had, this time to a small houseboat.
Their arrival and departure was duly noted each year in a column submitted to the Duncan weekly newspaper on a regular basis. The Lake Cowichan column had existed for years, recording in uninspired prose the comings and goings of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the famous and the infamous. But the column really began to shine when Lucille Gillespie’s Aunt Louise, who had come to the lake to take over the running of the telephone switchboard, took over the newspaper column too.
It was the romantic way Louise Marboeuf saw the world that made her columns distinctive. She had wanted to be a writer all her life, and she viewed the world with gentle hyperbole that enlivened the usual list of social activities. An afternoon game of bridge became “charmingly arranged, delightful in every detail”; the Saturday night regular dance “a gloriously jolly novelty” evening. A series of accidents became “a chapter of accidents” and a road ditch a “steep declivity.” The weather did not get cold so much as “King Frost held sway,” with the early morning “icy and shivery.”
Louise saw glamour in the everyday happenings of a very small community. A reader would have been forgiven if he assumed that the new Willamette Shay locomotive bound for the McDonald and Murphy logging company was the most important and beautiful piece of machinery ever to haul a load of logs.
In her capacity as telephone operator, Louise had her ear to the very heart of the village. She knew when an English aristocrat was due to arrive at the Riverside or when a Swedish logger died crushed between two logs at Camp Three Island Logging. She knew enough to write a hundred short stories, and she did. But the only thing she ever got published was her column. Someone who read her stories said they were hopeless, but perhaps her stories were about children who bested cougars, and fishermen who caught monster trout, and isolated lakes where millionaires and royalty visited. Perhaps they seemed too fantastic to be true.
Annie Green, cook and hostess for the summer of 1887, relaxes on the porch of the Riverside Hotel built by her brothers Charlie (second from left) and Alfred. *. B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE E-02541
If no trees had fallen over the narrow, twisting road, passengers in stagecoaches could make the seventeen-mile journey from Duncan to the lake m about four hours. * B.C. RECORDS AND ARCHIVES SERVICE HP-97684
A woman is dwarfed by the trees on the trail to Mesachie Lake. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 989.2.4
Still alone on the shores of the Upper Lake in 1913, the eight-room Wardroper house was the best one at the lake when it was built in 1890. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 992.1.11
R. A. Meade (centre front) and Ted and Sid Scholey (third and fifth from right, back row) join their friends in a 1911 birthday celebration at the Lakeside Hotel. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 987.1.1
Three summer residents clad in proper holiday dress converse on the porch of the Olivers’ log house, which overlooked the Big Pool and the new railway beyond. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 992.1.18
Villagers crowd in as photographers commemorate, in June 1913, the arrival of important dignitaries from Duncan on the first E&N train to the lake. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 983.5.19
“Rough and ready” Cassie Beech, who sits on an E&N velocipede, owned a dancehall with her husband, Robert, the first chairman of the school board. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 988.26.3
Just before the First World War takes most of the young men away, summer people in stylish clothing lounge around a floating boathouse on the lakeshore. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 993.49.58
Up until his premature death in 1921, William Edgar Oliver, former reeve of Oak Bay and summer resident at the lake, continued to exert control wherever he could. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE H-03720
At the Riverside Hotel, summer visitors were required to rub elbows with “loggers and such persons” if they wished to consume legally purchased alcohol during their stay. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 993.49.84
The beauty of their Honeymoon Bay farm in 1913 hides the hardships overcome by quiet and reliable Henry March and his gracious and resourceful wife, Edith. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 986.10.1
Doreen Ashburnham, eleven, and Tony Farrer, eight, having vanquished an attacking cougar and recovered from their wounds, became the centre of a “most fantastic fuss.” * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE A-07218
HRH Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, and the Earl of Pembroke, having disembarked from the launch Macushfo, pretend to throw Tony Farrer off the Ashbumhams dock. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE A-07207
In this photo, taken as the post-WWI era begins, only the large logs hint at the growing industry that lies behind the romantic setting. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 984.2.1Y
In 1917, the view across the Big Pool from the Hardings’ floathouses is of the devastation from a fire that came very close to the village. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 989.4.2
In front of the Riverside Hotel, a satisfied fisherman reclines beside his day’s catch, posing for a photograph designed to lure even more tourists to the lake. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE G-9292
Trout fishermen practise the subtle art that brought Lt. Col. Andrew Haggard to live on the river and to spread its fame through his articles in English magazines. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE ZZ-95051
Decades before a game reserve extending from the head of the lake to Shaw Creek was designated in 1923 to protect native elk, old-growth trees dwarf two human interlopers. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 986.1.I