Boom & Bust: The Resilient Women of Historic Telegraph Cove

By Jennifer L. Butler

Received Honourable Mention for the 2019 Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Historical Writing

Telegraph Cove, one of Vancouver Island’s most visited tourist destinations, has humble origins as a one-shack telegraph station, established a century ago. The community grew, first with a salmon saltery and sawmill, then with new industries developed by the ingenuity of the Cove’s inhabitants. From the 1920s, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, German, Danish, Italian, and English community members, along with other old and new Canadians, were neighbours in a place accessible only by boat.

In this book, more than 25 women tell their own stories and memories of life in the Cove. They faced down the impacts of isolation, hazardous terrain, war, occupation, immigration, internment, social change, economic development, community decline, and environmental degradation—remarkable, given that Telegraph Cove’s population peaked at 60. From these lives come stories of resilience, resourcefulness, heartbreak, humour, and triumph. Boom and Bust draws the reader in for an intimate view, accompanied by never-before-published archival photographs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771512992

Jennifer L. Butler

Jennifer L. Butler has been a sound engineer, school teacher, swing dancer, theatre buff, caterer, and wordsmith on many platforms, including technical writing for the Canadian academic research community and blogging her travel adventures. She lives in Vancouver surrounded by an overgrown collection of plants and books, plotting her next escape.

Book preview

I dedicate this book to my mother, my grandmother, and to all women, heard and unheard, who have shown resilience in challenging times.

Telegraph Cove in the mid-1920s. Courtesy of the Wastell family.

Contents

Preface

Part I: The Pioneer Women of Telegraph Cove

Chapter 1 — Mary Elizabeth Mame Wastell (Sharpe)

Chapter 2 — Emma Wastell (McCoskrie)

Chapter 3 — Unknown Women Who Died Young: The First Two Wives of Charlie Nakamura

Chapter 4 — Rin Ogawa (Yawata)

Chapter 5 — Hideko Okura (maiden name unknown) / Nancy Hatsumi Okura (Hashimoto)

Part II: The Professional Women of Telegraph Cove

The Telegraph Cove School

Chapter 6 — Schoolteacher: Margaret Fleming (Griffiths)

Chapter 7 — Schoolteacher: Doris Dorie Laura Grey

Chapter 8 — Schoolteacher: Grace Agnes D’Arcy (Ryall)

The Other Schoolteachers of Telegraph Cove

Chapter 9 — Postmistress: Mary McDonald (Easthope)

Chapter 10 — General Store Shopkeeper: Thelma Lorraine Burton (Campbell)

Chapter 11 — Bookkeeper: Dorothy Ashwin (maiden name unknown)

Chapter 12 — Bookkeeper: Annabelle Wardlaw (MacLeod)

Part III: The Postwar Women of Telegraph Cove

Chapter 13 — Viola Farrant (Wood)

Chapter 14 — Eva Berta Vinderskov (Trottner)

Chapter 15 — Elisa Lisa Carmela Ziggiotti (Pieropan)

Chapter 16 — Evylen Evie Farrant (Retzlaff)

Other Postwar Women of Telegraph Cove

Part IV: The Whale-Watching Women of Telegraph Cove

Chapter 17 — Donna Jean Mackay (Ptolemy)

Chapter 18 — Anne Borrowman (Grenon)

Chapter 19 — Mary Borrowman (Campbell)

Afterword

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE

My great-grandparents, Mame and Duke Wastell, bought and named Telegraph Cove and its surrounding 300-plus acres of wilderness in 1911/12, and my grandparents, Emma and Fred Wastell, co-established the first businesses there in the 1920s with partner Charlie Nakamura. My mother, Bea, and aunt, Pat, grew up there during the 1930s and 1940s. Often asked about my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s experiences creating and developing the village of Telegraph Cove, I was never asked about the contributions of my grandmother, great-grandmother, or the other women who lived there. The presence of strong, multi-faceted women in Telegraph Cove ensured that this isolated community on northern Vancouver Island was different from other logging camps and lumber mill communities that sprouted along Canada’s West Coast in the early 20th century. Women’s lives throughout history have rarely been accorded the same attention as those of men. This book aims to help redress the balance.

My quest to locate and interview those women who had lived in Telegraph Cove and their families was not without difficulty. Having spent my childhood summers in Telegraph Cove, I was in the privileged position of knowing all the families who lived there during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. However, people move, die, and disappear. Women’s names often change with marriage. Many times I felt I was trying to catch a shadow, often arriving at an address too late and finding an obituary instead. Those I was lucky enough to find shared their memories with me. For others who had passed away, their children, grandchildren, and/or siblings were generous in furnishing material. After many months of face-to-face interviews, letters, emails, and telephone conversations, I have tried to represent their memories and perspectives both faithfully and sensitively. What struck me was how deeply many world events and formative Canadian experiences throughout the 20th century directly affected this tiny village with a population of 60 people at its peak. Life in the Cove, however isolated, was dramatically impacted by the Depression, the Second World War, Japanese internment, postwar social change, waves of immigration, the baby boom, and the transition from a resource-based economy to tourism and environmental industries.

When my grandparents were young they owned a camera, which was then new technology. As a result, my family has drawers full of old black-and-white prints and negatives recording the growth of Telegraph Cove from its early days. In addition to sharing their stories, the women included in the book, as well as their families, were kind enough to open their photograph albums, supplying visual material that illustrated their lives in the Cove. The sizes of the photos I collected vary greatly, and have been reproduced here to maximize their print quality; the size of the photo in no way reflects the significance of the woman’s contribution.

Where possible, I have interlaced the women’s biographies with the first-hand reminiscences of those daughters and granddaughters who had also lived in the Cove. Although the women’s biographies are written in the third person, I made a conscious choice to use the first person for the daughters’ and granddaughters’ reminiscences as it became clear that growing up in Telegraph Cove elicited collective experiences and emotions, regardless of the different decades spanned. By deliberately not attaching a name to each of the daughters’ and granddaughters’ individual statements, my intention is to find the truth that lies at the intersection of mothers’ and daughters’ memories and to highlight the universality of these women’s memories and shared experiences, across generations.

It is easy to fall into nostalgia with a place as pretty as Telegraph Cove, but lives there were challenging at best. Honouring the women who lived there with authenticity is something I hope this book achieves. Their candid, honest, and often courageous stories would never have been shared, even over a kitchen table, in my grandmother’s day. Sharing truths, whether with a family friend or the world, is still not always easy or smooth. My thanks to the women of Telegraph Cove for taking the time to sort through their memories and share their stories, perceptions, and photos, and for working with me to review and edit the text.

Although I earn my living writing for Canada’s academic research community, this is my first book. Being factual without losing sight of an overall narrative arc is important to me. By talking to as many of the women who lived and worked in Telegraph Cove as I could, I aimed to record their unique stories against the contextual backdrop of the times, and also reflect on the universal truths that connect all women, whenever and wherever they live.

Emma (left) and Mame Wastell, circa 1928. Courtesy of the Wastell family.

PART I

THE PIONEER WOMEN OF TELEGRAPH COVE

The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886 brought prosperity, as well as real estate speculators and settlers, to the West Coast. A building boom meant demand for lumber, and fish to feed the growing population, so logging, fishing, and canning become the three big industries.

The West Coast further opened up when ships operated by the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Union Steamship Company of British Columbia started to deliver men, women, goods, and mail to remote logging and mining camps and communities. On the way up the coast as far as Prince Rupert there were weekly stops at Telegraph Cove, and biweekly stops at Alert Bay on Cormorant Island, and at Englewood.

In 1912, the Dominion government established the first telephone-telegraph line running north from Campbell River, and Telegraph Cove was named. A 12- × 18-foot shack was built for the lineman who ensured the functionality of the telegraph line. The line moved soon after this to Alert Bay and the next activity in Telegraph Cove was a fish saltery and sawmill built in the mid-1920s. At this time, most West Coast mill camps were predominantly made up of men, with drinking, gambling, and fist fights the most common recreations. The presence of strong women kept these activities from emerging in Telegraph Cove.

Mary Elizabeth Mame Sharpe as a young woman, circa 1890. Courtesy of the Wastell family.

CHAPTER 1

Mary Elizabeth Mame Wastell (Sharpe)

Lived in Alert Bay and occasionally at Telegraph Cove 1909–1951

One might imagine that a woman named Mary Elizabeth and one called Mame would look considerably dissimilar. But when one looks at her portrait, a romantic, ethereal, intelligent Mary Elizabeth and a ballsy, no-nonsense Mame are there in equal measures. Both names fit her like a white calfskin glove.

Mary Elizabeth Wastell christened her only son Charles Adam after his two grandfathers but always called him Fred. It was not until he died in 1985 that his birth certificate revealed his true name to everyone, including his two very surprised daughters. But that was Mame. She would often make a decision and then change her mind the next day. Perhaps she had wanted to name him Fred all along but her husband, Duke, preferred Charles Adam, and she got her own way by calling him Fred. Duke, however, called his son Bill. This says as much about Fred’s parents as anything could.

In 1909, Mame’s husband, Alfred Marmaduke Duke Wastell, was offered the job of managing the British Columbia Fishing and Packing Company’s Alert Bay sawmill on Cormorant Island. So off went Duke, Mame, and nine-year-old Fred, from their home in New Westminster. They arrived on the Union Steamship Cowichan, which they nicknamed The Cow, to find themselves back in the time of coal oil lamps and no telephone, or even telegraph. Duke, small, slim, quiet, and bespectacled, was the most un-Duke-like person imaginable, and he also seemed an unlikely pioneer, but he truly loved being where things were new and wild.

The economic hub of Cormorant Island was the village of Alert Bay, at that time home to approximately 100 members of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation and another 19 people from three or four white settler families. It was a humdrum, peaceful little place. Mame was happy in her new world. Not a feminist in the classic sense, she certainly would have been if she had lived where her voice and rights weren’t respected. In Alert Bay she was in her element. She loved boating and swimming, and the British Columbia Fishing and Packing Company supplied her with a nice house, the old Pidcock house, which came with a tennis court, a garden, and a Chinese cook. Alert Bay already had five tennis courts by 1909. Badminton was played at the Anglican Church hall. Settlers were friendly with the First Nations people, and some became good friends, but they lived separate social lives, with their own parties and traditions. Nineteen settlers were enough to provide a busy calendar that included singing, regular bridge games, and a dance every two weeks or so, which attracted other settlers from nearby islands. These dances went on well into the night, and attendees would have to row themselves home in the wee hours, in the dark, regardless of the tide or weather. The best orchestra was in Sointula, on Malcolm Island. There was no alcohol served at these dances, ever, nor at any other local dances. If some fellow did drink, the women just wouldn’t dance with him. Everyone knew everyone else, and the word got out if someone wasn’t exactly temperate.

Mame wore her grey hair in a bun and always wore a dress, maintaining that women who wore trousers were of loose morals. Despite doing as she pleased, she was straitlaced, and looked like any other respectable lady going to church and giving tea parties because that’s what respectable ladies did. She liked nice things and bought her clothes at the best stores in Vancouver. She felt justified in buying expensive handbags and shoes because she only ever spent her own money, as Duke kept losing his. Though more appropriate for the opera than Alert Bay, Mame’s peacock-feather fan, beaded purses, leather pocketbooks, and embroidered dresses were paraded proudly to parties and dinners. A bit of a social climber, Mame worked her way into any group with her charm, humour, stylish clothes, and character, and by the time she was living in Alert Bay, she was used to being listened to.

Playing lawn tennis at the Wastells’ house in Alert Bay, circa 1912. Courtesy of the Wastell family.

Mame’s father was astute, and before he died he set up each of his sons in a business and left money to each of his daughters. Mame’s money came in the form of several houses in North and West Vancouver, which she rented out for income. Two of her younger brothers, Jim and Fred Sharpe, probably built the houses and would inspect them between tenants and fix whatever needed fixing. Mame came to Vancouver twice a year to check on things, staying with her youngest brother, Fred Sharpe, who owned houses he’d built near the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver’s West End. Mame talked over business and made plans with him. Over time, and due to her husband’s lofty disregard for the necessity of earning a living, as she described it, Mame started to purchase houses in Alert Bay, also for rental income, and then to build new ones. While women in cities were denied access to bank mortgages, Mame was able to plow ahead with her plans in the North. Woe betide any man who even suggested she had to follow someone else’s rules.

Mame was not a religious woman, nor even a spiritual one. She did go to church, but this was a social necessity and part of life’s routine. She was raised Methodist in Ontario and switched to Anglicanism when she married, as it was more common on the West Coast. Pious only in a social sense, Mame attended every Sunday and raised money for the church, but if the minister gave a sermon she disapproved of she refused to contribute to that week’s collection plate. That’s not to say Mame wasn’t without a high moral code, especially when it came to dogs. If she saw a dog she thought was being abused she would bring it home and give it to someone who would appreciate it, such as one of the local missionary ladies. Duke often had to go and sort out matters of canine ownership. The only person who could do no wrong in Mame’s eyes was her son. Fred was the smartest, handsomest, bravest man according to her. Fred, who was indeed handsome and charming, took great delight in teasing his formidable mother at every opportunity. In a 1916 letter to his maternal grandfather, Captain Sharpe, he takes shots at his (practically teetotal) mother:

All that is wrong with Mother is that she is drinking too much wine, beer, ale, stout, etc. etc. I can’t make out what has got into her lately. She never used to drink much anyway; but now since she hears everyone talking of prohibition she has started wholesale. I don’t know what is going to become of her if the country doesn’t soon go dry. You talk about getting a twinge in your tooth; but a bottle of ale is only a primary for Mother. It sometimes takes two primings to get her started but once she is started she is off. Dad has sent for a quart of calsomine for her nose. She is getting on fine now feeling quite well again. I think she would be as good as new only for the drink habit.

This would have sent Mame into fits if anyone else had written it about her, but because it was Fred she just put her head back and laughed.

Mame was close to all her siblings, but not to their mates, never deeming they measured up to her family. She adored time spent with all three of her sisters, Rhoda, Mabel, and Kate—one had married a missionary and the other two were nurses. All three of her brothers, Fred, Jim, and Adam, were extremely competent, each carrying tools with them in their boat or in their car’s trunk just in case they were needed, which they often were. While Adam and Fred remained in Vancouver, Jim Sharpe moved to Alert Bay soon after Mame and Duke did, and built a boatyard. In the early 1920s, he built the Wastells a small pleasure yacht, the Klinekwa, lightning in Kwak’wala. A barrage of tourists and friends from the Wastells’ days in New Westminster had started to filter up the coast after the First World War ended in 1918, and the Klinekwa was constantly in use for boating parties and picnickers exploring every interesting beach, point, and abandoned village. When picnics on long-deserted First Nations village beaches were rained out, picnickers moved into the empty longhouses to play bridge.

Fred had been too young to take part in the war, but was well set to take advantage of the opportunities and pleasures that came during the Roaring ’20s. When it was time for him to attend high school, he moved to Vancouver where he lived with two of Mame’s sisters, Kate and Mabel Sharpe, both young, lively nurses who showed him a good time in the city. He was encouraged to go to university, and in 1921 he attended the University of British Columbia (UBC), which was a year from moving to its current site and still operating in the Fairview shacks, near the relatively new Vancouver General Hospital building. He returned to Alert Bay without having completed even one semester, let alone a degree, but with an automobile, the first in Alert Bay, undeterred by the fact that Alert Bay had no road. Mame was disappointed and made excuses for her son by maligning an educational institution that obviously did not know what a genius it had in Fred. Fred was relieved to be able to give up any further education. He kept his Chevrolet 490 in a lumber shed, and once in a while, for something to do, he would fire it up and drive it along a grass track or around the millyard. If he put his foot hard on the gas and aimed where the millyard slanted downward, he could get up to a rollicking 40 miles per hour, which made Mame shudder.

Mame, Duke, and Fred Wastell dressed for a casual day out boating, circa 1912. Courtesy of the Wastell family.

While Fred was enjoying his return to life in Alert Bay, his father, Duke, continued to establish himself in the community. Despite his lack of formal education, he became a small debts Stipendiary Magistrate (the kind without a stipend, he’d say with a smile), a judge over the court of juvenile delinquency, and a Justice of the Peace. Duke’s curriculum vitae described him as a practical man and a thorough mechanic . . . upright, honest . . . very attentive to business, but he was a terrible judge of character. He regarded himself as an English gentleman and would compare everyone he met to his concept of English gentry, which was ridiculous in Alert Bay, but he believed everything he was told and was constantly taken advantage of. Mame, on the other hand, was a very good judge of character and couldn’t understand why her husband kept getting duped so easily. Coming home after purchasing yet another certificate of shares in a gold mine probably defunct before he even walked in his front door, he would be greeted with a familiar refrain: Duke, you jackass!

One day Duke declared that he had bought out a bad loan on some land across the Johnstone Strait. Three hundred and seventy-six acres, to be precise. This land had belonged to a man by the name of John Cowdry, who had bought it and had it surveyed in 1910 for logging, which meant it was unlikely to be considered suitable for a town site or for a fishing station. Already in financial difficulties, John Cowdry soon sold the logging lease to Duke, who hired someone to log the standing timber and form booms, which the Klinekwa towed to Alert Bay to be sold to the sawmill. In 1914, the Imperial Munitions Board ordered Duke, who had bought the land by this time, to focus his logging solely on stands of spruce. Spruce was valued for its strength and lightness and, with a war on, airplanes built with spruce were needed as fast as they could be built. After the First World War, Duke continued logging the place, which he himself had named Telegraph Cove, in 1912, when he introduced the spot to government officials seeking a suitably protected site to install the new telegraph line.

When John Cowdry defaulted on his loan only a year or two after purchasing the land, the Royal Bank of Canada appealed to Duke’s vanity, referring to him as a leading pillar of the community. It worked like a charm and he bought out the debt. When Mame first heard her husband had actually bought the land, she was furious. Duke, I told you that man didn’t make a good investment and it was a bad buy, and now we’ve lost all that money! You are such a jackass!

If Mame had been a religious woman this might have motivated her to pray for guidance.

But Mame, it cannot be stressed enough, was not a religious woman. In fact, she never really had much use for Alert Bay’s Columbia Coast Mission nor for its missionaries. The Mission boat and its transient doctor may have lessened infant mortality substantially, but that did not excuse them, in Mame’s eyes, for shaming the young First Nations girls by not recognizing marriages made through the potlatch system. Mame disliked officious men stepping in on girls’ or women’s affairs and beliefs.

The British Columbia Fishing and Packing Company was renamed B.C. Packers Ltd., and in 1928 the company decided to use cardboard boxes instead of wooden boxes, which meant the Alert Bay sawmill Duke managed was closed. One year later, the Western world was plunged into the Depression. Duke was now without an income or the prospect of one, as getting another job was impossible for a man approaching his 60s. He decided to do the least helpful thing possible and went off to England to deal with his family’s affairs. Mame moved into a smaller house in Alert Bay, but kept the Klinekwa as it proved itself useful.

The Wastells lived in the old Pidcock house, Alert Bay (top left), 1909–1929, with the B.C. Packers millyard in front. Note Christ Church, the Anglican church, far right, which still operates today. Courtesy of the Wastell family.

In 1928, Fred got married, and came home from his honeymoon to find he no longer had a job either. Young enough to be undaunted, he decided on a new venture. He had already incorporated the Broughton Straits Trading Company Limited in Vancouver on January 27, 1925, with $10,000 capital, largely from Mame, divided into 100 shares. With partner Charlie Nakamura, he had developed a fish saltery in Telegraph Cove, and a small sawmill to provide boxes for the fish as well as lumber for local needs. In 1929, Fred, his wife, Emma, and baby daughter, Patricia (Pat), permanently left their new house in Alert Bay and set up home in the vacant telegraph lineman’s shack in Telegraph Cove, adding rooms when they could.

Duke returned to Alert Bay to find Mame and Fred had everything sorted out, as he had hoped. Almost every day, Mame and Duke went out together on the Klinekwa to source logs for the Telegraph Cove sawmill by visiting camps and buying booms. Mame loved being on the water and handling the boat. She was an excellent captain while Duke acted as engineer below, which worked fine as long as Duke paid attention to her calls and didn’t try to second-guess her. Mame found nothing unusual in a lady running a boat and running it well. Once Duke didn’t let the clutch out in time and the boat slammed into the dock. Mame was horrified, not because of any potential damage but because people would think it was her fault.

As soon as he had moved to Telegraph Cove, Fred persuaded his New Westminster school chum Alex McDonald to join him and manage the sawmill while he handled the deliveries on his boat, the Mary W, which was built in 1929 and named after Mame, who probably helped pay for it. Alex’s first undertaking at Telegraph Cove was to construct a tennis court out of planks at the edge of the woods by the millyard. Young college men from affluent families came up to visit, help out in the mill, and play tennis. In the winter, the tennis court would be flooded for skating. A huddle of houses was gradually added to the few saltery workers’ shacks. Most of these new millworkers’ houses were not so new, but dragged in from deserted logging camps. They were in terrible shape when they arrived. The cookhouse was probably towed in on floats from nearby Bauza Cove after someone’s camp had gone broke and it was dumped there. New houses were also built by Mame’s brother Jim Sharpe. He built saltery partner Charlie Nakamura’s house in the mid-1920s, two others in the late 1920s, and another house for himself in the late 1930s, when he was acting as the Cove’s millwright. He handed his Alert Bay boatbuilding business to his son Lyle, and moved full-time to Telegraph Cove with his wife, Eva, a glass-mostly-empty kind of person. Whenever Emma Wastell visited the Sharpes she would find Eva’s table littered with papers and dirty dishes. These were promptly shoved aside to make way for a couple of mugs of tea sloshed down while Eva recited a litany of ailments, none of which seemed to have any bearing on her robust energy or rosy complexion. Until, quite suddenly, Eva Sharpe died, and people thought, well, maybe she was sick after all!

Mame came into the Cove a couple of times a month. She put money into the business, probably more than anyone, and she liked checking in on her investment. Fred was always able to manipulate her into adding a bit more when needed. He would tell her repeatedly how the engine on the Mary W was unreliable and then casually mention he had seen a second-hand engine that would be okay, I guess. Mame would respond as he intended: Now, Fred, if you have to get a new engine I want you to get a good engine. And I will pay the difference.

There was never a shortage of wood for building, but money was always tight for anything else. New paint, for example, was expensive, so odd bits of leftover paint and stain were mixed together and stored in old jam and syrup tins, as were varnish and turpentine. Bookcases would end up a dismal mauve grey, and walls were shiny with sludgy brown marine paint. Wallpaper was bought to fit to the inch so no mistakes could be made. This was particularly hard on Fred’s wife, Emma (née McCoskrie). Mame was a jealous and domineering mother-in-law, and never felt Emma was good enough for her Fred, although Duke affectionately called her Daughter. When Emma was not well and had go to Victoria for her health, she would come back to find Mame had stepped in and completely redecorated her house.

History and governments, insecure husbands and bosses have never been all that kind to outspoken women, but Mame remained unfazed. She was always causing friction and then getting out of it with humour, making assumptions and telling people what to do. In Vancouver one very hot summer day, she was dressed to the nines in a new dress from Madame Rungé’s shop on Granville Street. When she returned to the Klinekwa, docked near Stanley Park, she stripped off her outer layers, replacing them with a huge apron. A fellow was coming to take a look at the boat, which Mame was constantly deciding she should sell, although she never did. As she guided him around the boat, she noticed he was smirking a lot. She started to resent what she thought was bad behaviour directed at her simply because she was a woman, and sent him on his way. About 15 minutes later she remembered she hadn’t put her dress back on, and the man would have been following her and seen her big underpants, corsets, and undershirt. She found this hysterically funny, and repeatedly told the story without any shame or embarrassment.

Duke was allowed to smoke a pipe, but no one else was permitted to smoke anything near Mame. When in the Cove, she would often stomp to the mill and make all sorts of comments, criticisms, and suggestions to whoever was in earshot. The men in the mill had a nickname for her, and it sure wasn’t Mame, recalled one of the millworkers years later, with a wink. Not prone to analysis, she would just shrug when something she had suggested turned out not to be feasible. Duke, however, was so gentle and non-interfering that it escaped everyone’s attention that he actually knew a great deal about running a sawmill. When told the mill’s planer had passed the point of utility, Duke quietly took it apart and reassembled it, and it worked just fine for years. More competent than anyone gave him credit for, he was remembered for his mistakes, including the time he misread a label and varnished a boat with Rogers Golden Syrup—not noticing until someone commented on the length of time it was taking to dry.

Mame ensuring clear seas ahead, in the Klinekwa. Courtesy of the Wastell family.

Throughout the 1940s, war or no war, Mame carried on sticking her oar in and causing havoc. Her granddaughters, now young ladies, were as smart and beautiful and brave in her eyes as Fred had ever been, but she had limits. Pat was quite keen on a young French-Canadian man who came from a different religious background. Despite her own unenthusiastic feelings about religion, Mame berated her daughter-in-law, Emma, for allowing this to happen, telling her in no uncertain terms that this was not an acceptable alliance. Pat, cut from a similar cloth as Mame, dragged her younger sister Beatrice along for moral support and told her grandmother to back off; she would go out with whomever she wanted.

A few years after the Second World War ended, Mame and Duke moved to Victoria for the winters, staying in the Beacon Lodge, or Bacon Lodge as Duke called it, and returning to Alert Bay and the Cove regularly. Beacon Lodge was on Douglas Street across from Beacon Hill Park, not that far from Emma and Fred’s house on McKenzie Street, which was used when they had business to conduct in town. In the late 1940s, Mame’s heart started to give out and she was sent to Victoria’s Royal Jubilee Hospital via steamship. The porters had a terrible time getting her stretcher into a stateroom, as she demanded. She was accompanied by Emma, to whom Mame merely gave a single nod of acknowledgement as thanks. In the hospital, Mame kept trying to sign herself out, but the heart specialist, who understood her well, would pass her room, open the door just a crack, and say without even looking, You get back into bed and stay there! Mame was irritated at this, but amused.

Mame died shortly before Pat married in September 1951. When told his mother was dying, Fred took a seaplane to Victoria, but Mame was gone by the time he got there. It was not a fight to the end as everyone expected it would be, just a fading away. After she died, Duke spent his winters mostly in Vancouver and the rest of the time he lived with Fred and Emma in Telegraph Cove, in their guest suite.

Duke was actually a little relieved when Mame died. She was not an especially loving wife and she controlled all the finances. He was quite looking forward to being able to scatter her money to various church groups in a magnanimous fashion. Living large had always been his dream. Mame must have anticipated this because she left her money to Fred instead, and put Duke on a small allowance, diminishing his dignity even after death.

Fred inherited his mother’s common sense, but unfortunately his father’s business sense; he preferred to hire friends with handshake deals to stand in for contracts. He hired a lawyer friend to settle