My father's family, England to Canada
Five stories well-known to Valley residents born in the 1940s
Stories my contemporaries told when I was growing up in the Alberni Valley often went along these lines:
1. We are from here. Our ancestors were living on the west coast of Vancouver Island for thousands of years before European explorers, fur traders and settlers started arriving in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
2. My grandfather was a five-dollar man. He arrived in Canada with the minimum he needed to get past immigration authorities. Stories that follow this line are about the kind of working-class men portrayed in the semi-autobiographical novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Published in 1914 under the pen name Robert Trussel, it’s set in the fictional town of Mugsworth, thought to be based on the actual town of Hastings on the south coast of England. Its central characters work in the building trades when pre-WWI Britain is deep in recession. They find it nearly impossible to find work and they struggle to stay out of workhouses. Desperate men such as them from all over Europe fled to Canada in the early twentieth century. Desperate women fled to Canada too but their best bet was to become engaged to a desperate man, send him on ahead and tell the authorities he’d be waiting to marry them when they arrived.
3. My grandfather was a remittance man. He was a liquor-soaked, good-for-nothing bum and an embarrassment to his family. They bundled him off to Canada with a promise to send him an allowance, but only if he lived up to his parting promise: he’d stay put in Canada and never return home for so much as a visit to his dying mother. Remittance men and women were from comfortably well-off families and they often chose to live alone in isolated places. If so, we called them hermits. There were a few in the Alberni Valley and some squatting on beaches along the outer coast of Vancouver Island, where they had houses made of driftwood hidden in the bushes behind the beaches. Some were surprisingly sociable and seemed happy for the company if you camped near them. Sitting by your campfire late into the night they had stories to tell. One lesson they had to teach was, man or woman, not showing up at your own wedding gets you free transportation to the exotic locale of your choosing plus a modest allowance to support you.
4. My grandfather was FILTH. That may be an acronym for “Failed in London? Try Hong Kong!” but it applies equally to anyone who failed anywhere else and thought they’d give Canada a try. Canada and the USA both had policies that allowed immigrants to choose new names as they arrived. This allowed them to leave their histories and reputations behind and start afresh. It also made them hard to track down by anyone from their past lives.
5. My family were Displaced Persons (DPs). We left the bombed-out ruins of Europe and arrived in Canada knowing nothing about the country. Canada’s Department of Employment and Immigration sent us to wherever workers were needed. They were needed in the Alberni Valley because the forestry industry was booming. You were a chef back home in Rotterdam? Here you pulled freshly cut lumber off a green-chain and stacked it for drying.
Walter Adams and his family in southeast London
My paternal grandfather, Walter Adams, was born in Greenwich on the 25 December 1886. Walter’s father moved from job to job, all involving work with metal. Sometimes he was a hammerer assisting a blacksmith. Sometimes he was ironworker employed by engineering firms that made ships and locomotives for trains. Walter’s mother took in laundry and did house-cleaning.
Walter was the eldest of two sons and the second of six children. He completed his sixth grade at age 12 and became a plumber’s apprentice. He soon switched trades and became a painter and decorator. He was 25 years old when, on 1 May 1912, he boarded RMS Royal Edward in Avonmouth, downriver from Bristol. Arriving at Quebec City on 8 May, he boarded the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) train that took him across the continent to Vancouver.
To the knowledge of his eventual four children, Walter never saw his parents or siblings again but he corresponded with at least two of his sisters. Those two had once sent each of the four children their own Bible for Christmas. “Did they think we did not have Bibles out here in the colonies?”
Nellie Marlow and her family in southeast London
My father’s mother, Nellie Marlow, was born in Peckham, a neighbourhood of Southwick, on 6 October 1888. Her family was more securely established and prosperous than Walter’s family. Her father, Arthur Marlow Senior, had once owned his own butcher shop and then his own green grocery shop before he became a wholesale butcher with a shop near the cattle yards in Lewisham. There he slaughtered and prepared whole, half and quarter carcasses for sale to retail butchers.
Nellie’s mother, Ellen Marlow, owned a shop called Ellen Marlow’s Underclothing near the commercial centre of Lewisham. Name notwithstanding, the shop sold a full range of women’s and children’s clothing and hats. To run the shop and keep it well stocked Ellen employed twelve women as her shop assistants and her garment and hat makers. Most of the twelve worked in their own homes and delivered their output to Ellen’s shop.
Nellie was the third of four children and the second of three daughters. (She’s held by her father in the photo, taken in 1894 or thereabouts.) She completed her sixth grade at age 12 and entered an apprenticeship as a shop assistant and garment maker for her mother. She was 24 years old when, on 16 October 1912, she boarded the RMS Royal Edward in Avonmouth. She arrived at Montreal on 23 October. The arrival manifest said she was bound for Vancouver on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and she was destined to marry “W. Adams, painter.”
Walter and Nellie Adams in Vancouver and Fort George
Walter Adams was married to Nellie Marlow in Vancouver’s First Presbyterian Church on 2 November 1912. The evidence suggests members of Walter’s family were sometimes Methodist and members of Nellie’s family were often Baptist so I suppose they chose First Presbyterian because it was convenient.
Nellie found a job as an operator at a Vancouver telephone exchange while Walter travelled north, where he tried and failed to establish a commercially viable brick-making business in Fort George (now known as Prince George). He ran into two problems, lack of suitable clay and lack of willing customers. He had guessed that the people of Fort George would rather have solid brick buildings like those he was used to back home in London but that turned out not to be so. In Fort George, unlike in London, lumber was readily available and inexpensive.
With his business floundering, Walter contracted rheumatic fever. Delirious, he wandered out of a hospital and collapsed in the snow. He lay unconscious for some considerable time before a nurse found him. Recovering from the fever, he was left with severe hearing impairment for the rest of his life. By the time I knew him, hearing aids had improved but a conversation with my Grandpa Adams was still a shouting match.
Walter claimed he could hear grown men’s voices but not those of women and children and he guessed that, since he had trouble hearing us, we must have trouble hearing him so he turned up his volume. He was six feet five inches tall and, with his booming baritone voice and inability to hear, he was better at broadcasting than receiving messages.
Walter, Nellie and the Marlow family in Saanich
In 1914, after the Fort George catastrophe, Walter and Nellie moved to Saanich at the southern end of Vancouver Island. There they settled on Arther Marlow Junior’s farm. Arthur Marlow Junior had emigrated to British Columbia in 1912, too. He apprenticed as an electrician in southeast London and he found a job as an electrician with British Columbia’s Provincial Government in Victoria. Once established in his job, he bought a farm close to Victoria, in Saanich.
Also joining Arthur Junior in 1914 were his and Nellie’s parents, Arthur Senior and Ellen, and their older sister Alice. Their younger sister Lillian emigrated to Canada that same year but she’d got off her CPR train in Kaslo in the Kootenay District of southeastern British Columbia. Her betrothed, a carpenter named William Charles Percival Bennett, was waiting for her. (He left England as William Hooper but exercised his right to arrive in Canada with a more impressive name.) Lillian and William moved in with his widowed mother (still a Hooper) and siblings (still Hoopers) in a small town called Zwick. He worked as a carpenter in a local lumber mill while Lillian opened a general store and became Zwick’s postmistress. Zwick was soon renamed Nashton. Today, it’s a ghost town on an abandoned railway line nor far from Kaslo.
Walter and Nellie moved to Saanich because, at the outbreak of World War One, he found a job working at Yarrow’s Shipyard to the immediate east of Saanich, in Esquimalt. Throughout the war, he was a foreman overseeing the painting and decorating of old and new ships for the Royal Canadian Navy and the merchant marine. He continued in that job after the war until he was caught trying to unionize the shipyard workers.
Fired and blacklisted, Walter was unable to find a job with another company. He consulted with Arthur Junior and they came up with a plan. They would move the whole family to the Alberni Valley where Arthur Junior could afford to buy a bigger farm. This would generate enough income that he could become a full-time farmer. As for Walter, he had found a business partner, Andy Anderson, an immigrant from Scotland. They would build a lumber mill somewhere close to Arthur Junior’s new farm.
By the time the Marlow-Adams party was ready to move, Nellie had given birth to three children. My future father Ted was born on 26 September 1915, my future Aunt Dot was born on 13 February 1917 and my future Aunt Irene was born on 11 September 1919.
The Adams and Marlow Families in the Albern Valley
The Marlow-Adams party made the move early enough in 1920 that my father always said he was four years old when they arrived at their new Alberni Valley home. It was far out towards the end of Beaver Creek Road, some fourteen kilometres beyond the city limits of Alberni. It was not far from where, today, you can find a Marlowe Road, named after Arthur Marlow Junior but with the “e” added. .
When I was a child, Dad was in the habit of taking his wife and two sons for Sunday afternoon drives. One of his favourite destinations was the farm way out Beaver Creek way. Once there he would say something along the lines of, “You should have seen the look on the women’s faces. They came all the way from London and here they were, out in the back of beyond. Welcoming them was nothing but a roughly built farmhouse, the beginnings of a farm and acres of wild woodland to be cleared, rocks to be moved and fences and outbuildings to be put up.”
Dad’s youngest sister Mavis was born on 15 January 1923.
The short, unhappy life of a small lumber mill (1920-1929)
Walter and his business partner Andy were quick to discover unforeseen challenges as they put in long days of hard labour getting their lumber mill up, running and bringing in money from sales. The timber rights to most of the Valley’s undeveloped land belonged to investors in the E&N (Esquimalt & Nanaimo) Railway. These investors had deals with and shares in larger and more well-established lumber companies. Such companies had the added advantage of good political connections at local, provincial and federal levels. Walter and Andy were naïve newcomers.
This was a time in British Columbia’s history when large operators in the forestry, fishing and mining industries were allowed to bring in cheap labour from China, Japan, India, the Nordic countries and the Orkneys and put them up in barracks and cabins right next to their operations. When I was in elementary school, I had a friend whose family lived on acreage beside the site of the old Sproat Lake Sawmill, active in the 1920s. On the site we found the ruins of a camp and in the ruins we found crockery and other artifacts we guessed to be from India.
Despite the challenges, Walter and Andy were beginning to turn a profit when the stock market crash of 1929 drove them into bankruptcy. By then the five members of the Adams household were living in their own house within Alberni city limits. This location put Ted, Dorothy, Irene and Mavis within walking distance of all the schools that could take them from grade ones through twelve.
The Great Depression years (1929-1939)
Blacklisted and hearing impaired and with jobs scarce during the Great Depression, Grandpa Adams could find no work better than clearing brush from the sides of roads under a government make-work programme. Grandma Adams brought in more income than Grandpa Adams did by making and mending garments and cleaning houses for those few who could afford her services.
Grandma Adams’ clients included the Bruce Farris family. Bruce Farris was co-founder of the King-Farris Lumber Company, which owned a large lumber mill on the Fraser River near Vancouver. In 1925, King-Harris joined with Bloedel, Stewart and Welsh Limited to establish a large lumber mill at Great Central Lake, some 20 kilometres northwest of the City of Alberni. Farris became Manager of the mill, King sold his interest and the two companies became one under the name Bloedel, Stewart and Welsh. Its President was Prentice Bloedel, an American based in Seattle, and its vice president was Bruce Farris.
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, Vol. 1 by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press, 1989) talks about the folkways of different regions of Britain and how they became the folkways of different regions of the United States. One folkway that particularly interests me is the practice of “putting out” children when they reach a certain age. In the not-so-distant past, twelve was the age that many British parents found jobs or apprenticeships for their sons and daughters and negotiated contracts with employers that met the demands of both parties to the contract, the parent and the employer. Some of the harsher provisions of the contracts were ones insisted upon by parents who wanted to make sure their child went to church every Sunday and refrained from gambling, drinking, attending political rallies, and anything that might lead to romance, sex or sexually transmitted disease. Once agreed and signed, the contract was in torn half and one half was given to each of the two parties. The terms “indentured labourer” and “indentured servant” refer to the teeth along the tear.
Both of my two sets of grandparents were known to make what most of us today might consider arbitrary decisions about their children’s futures. My Grandpa and Grandma Adams may have consulted with each other but they did not consult with their children before telling them they were leaving school and taking jobs that were waiting for them. And so it was that:
In the spring of 1930, Ted finished grade 10 and became a personal assistant and stock clerk for Bruce Farris. He was not yet 15 but suddenly he was the number one breadwinner in his family during the Great Depression. He stayed with Bruce Farris’ company, seeing it through its several mergers and acquisitions and name changes, until he retired in 1975.
In the spring of 1932, Dot finished grade 10 and became an assistant butcher at Williamson’s Meat Shop. Ten years later, she moved to Victoria, worked as a store clerk, and met Cliff, the welder she married in 1944. Soon after they married, they moved to Campbell River, on the east coast of Vancouver Island. There Cliff bought a logging truck and became an independent contractor while Dot worked as manager and bookkeeper for a shop that sold dinnerware and miniature glass and porcelain figurines. Don’t ask me about Tennessee William’s play, The Glass Menagerie, because I had one of those courtesy of Christmas gifts from my Aunt Dot. Dorothy had no children of her own.
In the spring of 1936, Grandpa Adams informed Irene that she had a job at the Nootka Packing Company’s cannery on Nootka Island far to the north and west of Barkley Sound. At the cannery, she met Herman, the Swede she married in 1939. In 1940, she gave birth to their only child, Vernon. Vernon had Downs Syndrome and was born with no inner ears, so was profoundly deaf. For the rest of his working life, Herman was foreman at fish packing plants up and down the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Mainland. The plants were isolated and the settlements around them were tiny but the people who lived there got to know Vernon well and were very kind to him. The downside was that Herman drank heavily and was sometimes abusive.
Born in 1923, Mavis was the only one of the Adams children who stayed in school throughout the Great Depression. She graduated from Grade 12 and boarded with the family of her best friend while working in Alberni’s post office and then in a Port Alberni shop called Waterhouse and Green. There she learned about sales and bookkeeping and the post-Depression joys of having money to spend and nice clothes to spend it on. She moved to Vancouver in 1942 and worked for Boeing Airplane Company until World War Two ended in 1945. Then she worked in administration at the University of British Columbia. Intelligent, attractive and sociable she found it easy to meet men. She married the one she chose and she gave birth to their first child in September of 1947. My brother and I have only ever had two cousins by birth and two cousins by adoption. Of the two by birth, Mavis’ son is the only survivor. He’s given her two grandchildren but, since he and his family are very much alive, I’ll say no more about them.
Depression-era tensions and a failed marriage
The evidence suggests that, by liquidating their assets, my great grandparents, Arthur Marlow Senior and Ellen Marlow, provided most of the financing for their family’s migration to and resettlement in Canada.
Ellen Marlow was the family’s matriarch and she was a hard-nosed businesswoman when she had to be. She was not the happiest mother-in-law in the world as she watched my Grandpa Adams’ repeated business-failures and she had little patience for his gradual slide towards chip-on-his shoulder socialism. She was probably not familiar with the phrase “due diligence” but I can almost hear her shouting, “Why didn’t you do a little homework before you set out to become the kind of business tycoon you now profess to despise?” She was not best pleased by her daughter’s behaviour either as she watched her daughter’s marriage slide into a take-no-prisoners war.
Collateral damage, Grandpa and Grandma Adams’ four children had four unique experiences and four unique understandings of what had happened. After my father and Aunt Dot died, I wanted to learn more about the Adams-Marlow side of my family. I dared to write down what I thought I knew and share the results with Aunt Irene and Aunt Mavis. They were both surprised and sometimes appalled by what I wrote but they were also surprised and sometimes appalled by each other’s comments. We all learned from this experience and I revised my account of two people we all agreed could both be difficult.
After the Adams family moved into town, my teenage father contrived to continue spending as much time as he could on the farm way out Beaver Creek way. It was apparent to me that he was fond of his Grandpa Marlow and acquired certain attitudes from him, including an allergy to religion of any kind. When she grew older, teenage Mavis often chose to sleep over at her best friend Lillian’s house, where she was made to feel welcome.
Grandpa and Grandma Adams had little choice but to stick out their marriage until 1942, when they relinquished their house to my newly married parents. Why little choice? Because, in those days, divorce required an Act of Parliament and was a luxury reserved for the rich and well-connected. Also, there was no social safety net that might have seen to the needs of a single parent with children. Besides, they were responsible adults and everyone expected them to behave as such.
After the separation
Grandpa Adams moved into the boarding house where he continued to live until he died of sudden kidney failure on 24 March 1963 at age 76. That was just two days before my 17th birthday. I had been to visit him as he lay dying in West Coast General Hospital and one of his few friends happened to be there. I was taken aback when he took my hand in his, held it in a tight grip and told his friend, “This is my grandson.” He seemed to be proud to have me as a grandson.
As the Great Depression drew to an end, Grandpa Adams got a job working for the Alberni District School Board as a painter and decorator. When I was sitting in a classroom, Grandpa might be seen outside scraping and painting the window frames. A teacher sometimes observed that he was a proper English gentleman and he was my grandfather. I was proud of that. He was six foot five with huge hands and feet so his clothes and shoes were custom-made, carefully maintained and frequently repaired. He was well known as a faithful fan of the Valley’s semi-professional basketball team and high school basketball team. He had never had a car of his own but he followed the teams around British Columbia on buses during tournaments.
He was in the habit of walking the two miles from his boarding house to our house every Saturday night, always being sure to arrive after we’d had our dinner. His visits were unannounced because he had no phone but they were always expected. My Dad was very respectful of his Dad. I liked listening to his monologues about the old days in the Alberni Valley and to his highly eccentric, seemingly inconsistent and very decided opinions on almost any subject you cared to bring up. He read a lot but somehow his reading always brought him back to Rosicrucianism.
Grandma Adams left the Alberni Valley with Dot in 1942. She lived with Dot and Dot’s husband Cliff most of the years until, at age 83, she died of cancer. She was famous for her knitting and lacework and often won prizes for them at Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition. She, too, was an enthusiastic reader and I would guess that reading was one of the interests that drew her and Grandpa Adams together when they were young.
I rely on Mavis’ son to tell me exactly what Grandma Adams read. I saw her mostly when, two or three times a year, Dot and Cliff brought her to visit us. During those visits they would invent an errand that required urgent attention, to leave her with us for an hour or so before returning. They were going to visit Grandpa Adams. Grandma forbade anyone to mention him in her presence, so everyone lied to her. She knew they were lying but let it pass.
Among my best witnesses
A year after my father’s family arrived in the Alberni Valley, the 1921 populations of the Twin Cities of Alberni and Port Alberni were 540 + 1,065 = 1,605.
A year before they amalgamated, the 1966 populations of the Twin Cities of Alberni and Port Alberni were 4,783 + 13,755 = 18,538.
Four years after amalgamation, the 1971 population of the City of Port Alberni was 21,063.
Three years after my father died, the 1986 population of the City of Port Alberni was down to 18,241. It has fluctuated up and down but hovered at around that level ever since. (Source: British Columbia Municipal Census Populations 1921 to 2021. Prepared by BC Stats, December 2023.)
My father and members of his family witnessed the rapid post-WWII growth, the 1971 peak, the decline , the changing demographics, the changing conditions in the towns and on the Tseshaht and Hupacasath reserves. They witnessed what my mother’s family seemed to be up to from the perspective of a non-indigenous family living in the Alberni Valley.
My father’s unique vantage point
When 15, my father became personal assistant and stock clerk for Bruce Farris, Vice President of Bloedel, Stewart and Welsh. “Stock clerk” does not begin to describe what he did for Mr. Farris. He learned to be a famously good scaler. A good scaler can walk through the woods, identify the species of every tree, determine the best use of that tree, and estimate the quantity and quality of lumber, plywood, shingles, and pulp that might result from processing that tree. He can do the same while walking across a boom of logs floating in the water. He carried a special scaler’s stick that helped him make these calculations as he took notes.
My father was interesting when he talked about trees, wood and what it’s good for and that made him good at sales. It did not hurt that he was well-spoken, well-mannered, self-deprecating and pleasant to talk to. He dealt with customers over the phone. Most were American and they asked if they could speak to him when they called. He helped them specify exactly what it was that would best fit their needs.
He was also good at placing an order with a crew, making sure it was properly filled and then dispatching it by train, truck or ship. Since the majority of the company’s customers were American, he became the one in charge of shipping by rail. Trains of flatcars and boxcars were pulled out of the Valley and through the mountains to ferry terminals on the east coast of Vancouver Island. There the cars were loaded onto ferries, taken across Georgia Straight to the Mainland, sorted and attached to trains that would take them to their destinations.
Bloedel, Stewart and Welsh went through a series of mergers and acquisitions and name changes and eventually became McMillan Bloedel (M&B). It was acquired by Weyerhaeuser, a Seattle-based company, in 1999 but for decades before that it was the largest Vancouver-based company and it was sometimes the largest forest-industrial company in the world.
From 1957 onwards the Company (as locals called it) had two lumber mills, a plywood mill, a shingle mill, and a pulp and paper mill lined up side-by-side along Port Alberni’s harbour. Thanks to the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce, Port Alberni became known as the Forest Industrial Capital of the World.
By the time I understood what my father did for a living, he was the senior one of two superintendents under the manager of the Somass Division, the larger of Port Alberni’s two lumber mills. Always on the short-list, it was sometimes recognized as the largest lumber mill in the world. As the senior one of the two superintendents, he oversaw the production the mill’s lumber, the taking of orders from American customers and the shipping out of those orders by rail.
The mill worked around the clock five days a week and shut down for maintenance and cleanup on weekends. Dad had three shift supervisors, several foremen and hundreds of millworkers under him. He put in ten-hour days, so he could catch the last hour of the night shift and the first hour of afternoon shift and spend time with all three shift supervisors, their foremen and their crews every day.
He knew who the Somass Division millworkers were, in terms of demographics, and had a good idea of who the workers were in all the company’s Alberni Valley operations. This allowed him to answer my mother’s or anyone else’s questions about how many indigenous people and displaced persons (DPs) were employed by the company, what kinds of jobs they had, what kinds of jobs they were best at, and what kinds of difficulties they might be experiencing.