This is the pre-edited version of the following article:
Imagining Victoria:
Tourism and the English Image
of British Columbia’s Capital
David A. Smith
Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Volume 103, No. 2
(Spring 2012): 67-83.
1
Introduction
The now widely accepted image of Victoria, British Columbia, as a quaint, “jolly good”
capital—more English than England itself—has its origins in the city’s colonial past and grew
in large part out of tourist propaganda. Victoria’s early years as a Hudson Bay Company fort
and colonial town looking outward toward the Pacific, especially toward England, contributed
to its English identity. Throughout the “tourist” years from 1920 to the present, Victoria’s
boosters promoted an image of British Columbia’s capital that appealed to American and
eastern tourists. These visitors came with expectations of “Englishness” that the City of
Victoria and its business citizens were eager to meet. Led by the tourist promoters and their
literature, a dynamic circle of identity was created with those residing in Victoria anticipating,
usually quite accurately, what tourists wanted to see and then tailoring their city to fit these
requirements. Tourist advertising, that “magic system”1 used to endow potential destinations
with the aura of a rewarding and unique experience proved remarkably potent in Victoria as
the city’s Chamber of Commerce and government agencies combined their efforts to sell B.C.’s
capital as “a little bit of old England.” Borrowing insights and observations from tourism
scholars, this article provides a narrative overview of the tourist industry’s development in
Victoria, from its colonial days to the present, with a particular focus on the construction and
selling of the city’s self-image as an English fragment on the far edge of North America.
People of many cultures, it would seem, have sought an escape from the pressures of
everyday life by temporarily experiencing a simple and mythical version of another time and
another culture. Maxine Feifer has observed that as far back as the first century, Seneca wrote
that “Men travel widely to different sorts of places seeking different distractions because they
are fickle, tired of soft living, and always seek after something which eludes them.”2 Recent
2
years have seen an increasing interest in scholarly ventures into tourism. Serious studies of
this sort can provide us with a wealth of knowledge about a culture, social relations, and
economics. Anthropologist John A. Jakle has argued that no activity shared by large numbers
of people, regardless of whether or not they are viewed as superficial or frivolous, should be
ignored. Jakle and other anthropologists emphasize that tourism serves as a means through
which people see the world and define their own sense of identity. Tourists assess differences
and confirm the world beyond their everyday existence, exploring their own role in life as it
compares to other people in other places.3
Cultural historians who explore the subject of tourism examine both the experience of
travel and the motives for it. Questions such as: Why did tourists pick a particular destination?
What was their reaction to it? What influenced their reaction? Such studies involve in part the
exploration of how travel publications shaped the trip for travelers, and how these
encouraged them to take on certain images about their destinations. Sometimes recognition of
what makes a place so appealing can enable historians to use travel accounts to look past this
attachment and at the reality of the subject area itself. But in many cases the myths about an
area can tell us at least as much about it as the realities. What made certain perceptions
dominant about any travel destination and why were tourists willing to accept them?
This study provides an overview of Victoria’s tourist past and attempts to shed some
new light on the selling of its English image, particularly over the last half century. I owe a
debt of gratitude for the groundwork laid by the authors of two previous works who also
explored the history of tourism in Victoria. Four decades ago, Kenneth Lines’ innovative MA
thesis, “A Bit of Old England: The Selling of Tourist British Columbia” (1972) traced the
development of Victoria’s successful commercial image from colonial times through the 1960s,
with a special emphasis on those individuals most responsible for promoting and maintaining
3
the “Old England” image of BC’s capital. More recently, Michael Dawson’s carefully
researched and engaging study, Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 18901970 (UBC Press, 2004), provides us with a look at the evolving ways in which marketers
created and supported the province’s tourist industry—first as a way of attracting settlers and
investors to the province, and later more in the view of tourists as consumers. My own study
takes elements from these two earlier works: specifically, Lines’ focus on the tourist image of
Victoria as the “most English” of BC’s places, and Dawson’s emphasis on attracting visitors to
spend their money in an “exotic” land, and explores several new issues as well. Using primary
sources from the City of Victoria Archives, British Columbia Archives, popular magazines,
and tourist literature, and borrowing insights from secondary resources on tourism studies,
this essay provides the first narrative of Victoria’s tourist history that takes us past the 1960s
and up until the present day. I also engage new questions, such as: What role did Victoria’s
colonial roots play in these Anglophile tourist images? What impact has English-themed
tourism had on the portrayal of Aboriginal and minority heritages in that city? To what degree
has the image been accurate or imagined? How has Victoria’s English identity been portrayed
over the last four decades? Does Victoria have any counterparts in the world for its “More
English than the English” claims, and how do these compare? And, in retrospect, what
benefits and drawbacks has this projected tradition brought to the City of Victoria and its
residents over time?
Visions of Victoria from its Colonial Beginnings to 1900
From the time of its naming in the 1840s, Victoria’s image possessed a red rose scent.
Due to its fine harbor, a new Hudson Bay Company fort’s location was chosen on the southern
end of Vancouver Island (the Island itself received its name from the intrepid Royal Navy
4
Captain George Vancouver who had made the first comprehensive charts of the Northwest
Coast from 1792-1794). When construction began in 1843, the HBC Council of Northern
Development had resolved “That the new Establishment to be formed on the Straits de
Fuca…be named Fort Victoria” for the reigning monarch of the British Empire. Unfortunately,
controversy soon followed when the chief trader Charles Ross mistakenly assumed that the
fort was to be named for Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, not the sovereign herself,
and went ahead with renaming the new settlement Fort Albert. Before long a message from
London arrived stating that that name would not do, and after the appropriate ceremonies and
firing of salutes, the small outpost was officially renamed Fort Victoria. The adjacent town site
laid out in 1851-52 was likewise given the majestic name of Victoria. 4
Early Victoria resident Robert Melrose’s diary indicates that during the town’s earliest
years it had quite a ways to go to achieve its later flourishing image of Victorian England. In
his entry for January 1, 1854, Melrose records: “New Year’s Day, a day above all days for
rioting in drunkenness, then what are we to expect of this young, but desperate Colony of
ours; where dissipation is carried on to such extremities…the grog-shops were drained of
every sort of liquor, not a drop to be got for either love or money….it would almost take a line
of packet ships, running regular between here and San Francisco to supply this Island with
grog, so great a thirst prevails amongst its inhabitants.” The first Governor of the Colony, Sir
James Douglas, was not at all amused by the activities of suppliers for these “scandalous
drunks,” and characterizing them as “blood suckers, who are preying upon the vitals of the
colony.” Douglas’ rapid imposition of hefty licensing fees was a key ingredient of the broader
colonial process. 5
In his instructions to Douglas, the London Secretary of the HBC stressed that “the object
of every sound system of colonization should be to transfer to the new country whatever is
5
most valuable and most approved in the old.”6 During the mid-nineteenth century, Douglas
and other British colonists in the Pacific Northwest had three main objectives: to encourage
permanent settlements, increase European populations, and shape these newcomers into
responsible colonial subjects who were said to be required for the social stability and economic
advancement of the region. Given that early Victoria’s elite dominated much of the social
scene, meeting the definition of “responsible” or “respectable” was no easy accomplishment
for many of the town’s residents—especially when the British Columbia gold rush of 1858
brought a growing number of miners and working-class types to town.
Robert A.J.
MacDonald describes the narrow definition of respectability that Victoria’s upper-class men
attempted to instill: “To be ‘respectable’ was to be of good character: pious, sober, honest,
industrious, and self-sufficient…and, in this fragile society with its newly formed and polyglot
population, to be of white and of British or American background.” The promotion of middle
and upper class British values, in particular—through social activities, literary societies and
libraries—was intended to contain and shape the working-class Victorians into refined reliable
and productive colonial subjects.7 Though the elites’ efforts had mixed results, the impression
of Victoria as a town which upheld the traditions of the Empire became widespread and
endured. Diplomatic tensions in the region would prove to cement these images even further.
After the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, Britain’s sole west coast colony was
hemmed in by the Americans on its northern and southern borders. This external pressure on
British Columbia was intensified by the rapidly growing population of the Washington
Territory. Royal Engineer, Colonel Richard Moody, feared that sections of the BC colony “will
be an American County before long, if not neutralized by the presence of many Englishmen
coming out at once.” In this tense milieu, as historian Tina Loo has observed, the American
and his style of Western expansion came to serve as “the foil against which [European British
6
Columbians] structured their identity and actions.” BC’s colonial leaders now became more
determined than ever to use a transplanted British culture and the rule of law to confirm their
own civility in face of “the savagery of American manifest destiny” with its perceived
byproducts of disorderly “recklessness,” violence against Native peoples, and moral
“degradation.”8 This perceived threat of a political and cultural takeover by the United States
and the intensified efforts at establishing an English-British identity in the region and—
especially in BC’s new capital city of Victoria—helped lay a foundation for the cultural
identity that would emerge later on. Politically, it was these very same fears of American
annexation and its accompanying “californization” (to employ the contemporary phrase) that
were the key motivation for Britain to finally declare sovereignty over the Pacific Northwest.9
From there, once the London government herself stated clearly that the home government
favored the union of BC colonies and Canada, the wheels were set in motion for the territory’s
Confederation in 1871.10
Efforts at transplanting a little home away from home in Victoria received direct,
practical assistance from the motherland as well. The establishment of the British North Pacific
naval base at Esquimalt in 1865 provided, commercially, a new outlet for local business and,
politically, both a tangible reminder of the Imperial connection and a substantive deterrent
against the ongoing threat of continental absorption from the Americans. Regular visits of
men from the “home” country kept Victoria residents in touch with the goings on back in
London thereby helping to ensure cultural continuity. Interestingly, by the 1870s and 1880s,
Americans themselves were beginning to discover that a visit to Victoria also offered an
exciting opportunity to visit Britannia’s “foreign” ships just three miles away via a pleasant
three-mile drive through the forest.
7
A key part of colonial and post-Confederation BC’s Anglification process also relates to
portrayals of and policies directed at Aboriginal peoples. From the outset, efforts to promote
the notion that Victoria was English in origin failed to take into account that the Coast Salish
peoples were the first to reside there. In the view of Aboriginals, it was the English and others
from abroad who were newcomers to the land. During the early fur trade days of Fort
Victoria, from 1849 through the 1860s, the most numerous group of tourists to the town were
northern Aboriginals who came by the thousands from as far away as Haida Gwaii. Under
James Douglas’ administration, however, a policy of “benevolent assimilation” governed these
relations with Aboriginals—a policy which aimed at compelling them to, as the Governor put
it, “be trained in the habit of self-government and self-reliance.” Of course, Aboriginals had
already been self-governing their affairs and relying on themselves for thousands of years.
What Douglas meant was a more British style community integrated into the expanding new
colonial society. Future, less paternalistic governors such as Joseph Trutch, however, rejected
the idea that Aboriginals were even capable of integrating into the “superior” British society
and followed up with hostile policies that pushed growth and development of the city at the
direct expense of Aboriginal people who were displaced from their home villages through the
constant threat of violence.11
Despite the regional tensions with the U.S. and, increasingly, Native peoples, the
completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 linking California to the East sparked a
mini-boom for Victoria tourism. From San Francisco Bay, tourists still possessing a thirst for
adventure might embark on an invigorating journey northward to Puget Sound, Victoria and
Alaska. The northern destinations were especially popular with tourists during mid-summer
when cruise ships bound to visit “Seward’s Folly,” Alaska, made usual stopovers in Victoria.
Interestingly the 19th Century imperialist identity-shaping, while intending to show Victoria’s
8
distinctiveness from the United States, also appears to have made the capital a more attractive
destination for west coast American tourists. According to existing pioneer accounts, even
these early tourists were mystified by the Old World appearance of the small “English” town.
Kenneth Lines tells us how one the first of many thousands of California visitors, FW
Van Reynegon, got misty-eyed over Victoria’s “picturesque charm, the fresh greenness
imparted by its moist Pacific climate, and the English character of its homes, gardens, pleasure
and places of business.” Van Reynegon was smitten right away with the calm, quietness of
Victoria as compared to the restless and busy atmosphere of Pacific towns and cities in the US.
Van Reynegon observed that Victoria’s residents “’seem to live for the sake of enjoying their
journey through this world instead of rushing through existence like a rocket.’” But if the
English image of Victoria was already beginning to set in, there was a certain lingering
bitterness among early American visitors as well. During the 1870’s and 1880’s, some
American tourists to the town could not understand why Victorians could possibly prefer
kowtowing to the English Crown as opposed to an equal partnership within a democratic
republic. A few were convinced that Victoria’s residents and all Canadians would see the light
sooner or later, but others, less patient, viewed this reluctance to break with the Imperial Brits
as subservient, childish, or even downright perverse behavior. In one of the earliest travel
guides covering the region, Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands (1874), author
Charles Nordhoff described Victoria as geographically “beautiful,” “picturesque” and
“delightful” but then turned nasty when he came to the subject of the boundary. Nordhoff
maligned the “stupid pertinacity of these English in clinging to the little island of San Juan”
and griped: “You will wonder the more…when you reach Victoria, and see that we shall
presently take that dull little town too, not because we want or need it, but to save it from
perishing of inanition.”12
9
Victoria’s early years as a Hudson’s Bay Company fort, colonial town, Royal Navy
base and commercial city that looked outward toward the Pacific, and in particular toward
Britain, all contributed to its sense of English identity in the nineteenth century. With the
arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) at its western terminus of Port Moody near
Vancouver in June 1886, however, Victoria’s outward-looking commercial economy would be
significantly undercut. In 1890, Victoria shipped six times the value of exports abroad as
Vancouver; but by 1903 the tables had been completely reversed, with Vancouver exports
outstripping Victoria’s by a margin of three to one.13 The capital city’s boosters soon realized
that they needed to cultivate a new type of enterprise to replace the industrial base which was
relocating to the Lower Mainland. As a result, throughout most of the twentieth century,
Victoria’s English image would continue to build upon its nineteenth century imperialist
identity-shaping but would be driven by motivations that differed from earlier colonial and
territorial concerns: namely, the development and growth of what would emerge as the city’s
most lucrative industry—tourism. Using Americans’ own promotion techniques and its
advantageous position on the shores of the Pacific, Victoria’s clean orderliness and slowmoving pace of life would be projected into a desirable tourist objective: a kind of foreign land
on the West Coast.
10
Looking across Victoria’s Inner Harbour a century ago, in 1912, and toward the Parliament Buildings
(foreground). The greeting “Imperial Unity,” appearing on the lawn, was a favorite phrase of the Victoria
Tourist Association’s first leader, the Empire-conscious and energetic Herbert Cuthbert. This imperialist
slogan must have also excited the imagination of many American visitors who held visions of their own
enlightened empire at the turn of the century. (Photo courtesy Paul A. Smith’s Collection, Victoria, BC)
Victoria as “A Little Bit of Olde England” in the Early Twentieth Century
As John A. Jakle, Michael Dawson, and other scholars have pointed out, like a mirror,
tourism both reflects and distorts the true character of a city or region. To some degree, this
character is reflected by the tourists themselves in their own reasons for choosing a destination
and the impressions that a region makes on them. At the same time, a location’s character is
exaggerated or distorted in large part by tourist industry promoters. Typically, once the City’s
Chamber of Commerce learns that a certain feature attracts tourists, every effort is made by
that community to preserve or to extend it. With its “old English atmosphere” and quiet, slow-
11
paced life, Victoria epitomizes the tourism experience. “If any Canadian city has a clearly
etched image,” Peter Baskerville has observed, “it is that of Victoria: a bit of nineteenthcentury England transplanted and nurtured on a unique slice of Canadian real estate where
the snow falls rarely.”14 The fact that many residents and tourists alike so readily bought into
this vision is, in large part, because they wanted to.
Since southern Vancouver Island features Canada’s mildest climate in winter, similar in
many ways to that of southern England, a large number of English settlers gravitated to
Victoria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kenneth Lines explains that
between 1901 and 1961 a near constant ratio of 80% British Nationals to the total population
persisted—reinforcing the English image in the minds of tourists visiting the city [vii].
Credible, durable tourist images would make the “imagineered” Victoria even more
persuasive, in some respects, than the reality.15
Victoria’s location has always been an important factor in its success as a tourist town.
While the city is insulated by water and mountains, this is part of the city’s appeal and it is
easily accessible from many major tourist markets. The city is situated within a 2,400 kilometer
radius of the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, the lower mainland of B.C. and the
cities of Edmonton and Calgary, all of which have large and travel-prone populations.
Throughout the twentieth century, American tourists have been key to Victoria’s tourist
industry success. One study undertaken in the late 1960s revealed that approximately 45
percent of Victoria’s tourists came from the United States (mostly from Washington and
California); 30 percent from other areas of British Columbia; and 25 percent from other
Canadian Provinces and Territories. A 1989 exit survey of those returning to the US and
Canadian mainland revealed that 81.3% of American visitors were focusing on Victoria alone,
12
while Canadian visitors (43.9%) were much more likely to be visiting other parts of Vancouver
Island as well as Victoria.16
The first major personality who helped set the tone for Victoria’s tourist identity was
Herbert Cuthbert. A Yorkshireman, Cuthbert arrived in Victoria in 1891 as part of the steady
flow of immigration from the British Isles which constantly renewed Victoria’s English image
for Victoria’s tourists. Determined to play a lead role in the promotion of Victoria as tourists’
paradise, he served three terms as a City alderman and was a highly active member of the
British Columbia Board of Trade. Ten years after his arrival, Cuthbert was successful in
heading the efforts to create a Tourist Development Association with himself as its Secretary
and Travelling representative. For the next fifteen years he worked with much diligence to
attract tourists to Victoria. Not long after the beginning of his first term, local efforts began to
gain a first-class hotel accommodation for Victoria visitors, culminating in the construction of
the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Empress Hotel later in that decade. Cuthbert proudly printed
the accolades of the Duke and Duchess of York who said after their visit in early October 1901
that Victoria “was the most beautiful city we have seen on our trip around the world.”
(During the visit, Victoria’s The Daily Colonist reported that: “Thirty thousand loyal citizens
shouting a hearty British welcome” had all shown up in the capital city to greet the future
monarchs “to show the son of Britain’s flag that here was to be found a city of loyal and
dutiful subjects, ready to do or die for the Empire”).17 Cuthbert’s portrayals of the city
represented what he believed to be the best of Victoria: its homes featured castle-like
architecture as opposed to modest homes and sheds and its gardens were gorgeous without
exception. Taken together the city seemed void of any meanness, squalor or poverty. This
selective and romanticized image was also a pleasing one that would be significantly
13
enhanced by Victoria’s later tourism pitch-men and, ultimately, establish the “Englishness” of
Victoria as its unique tourism signature on the Pacific Coast.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, tourist literature and films about
Victoria almost all emphasized the “City of Sunshine, Beauty and Gardens” theme. Early
promotion films invariably had titles and subtitles such as “Victoria—City of Sunshine and
Flowers,” and “Victoria—The Sunshine City” (1912), which might have made some wonder if
the Island had undergone a dramatic climactic shift. A quotation from celebrated author and
international traveler Rudyard Kipling, who was obviously taken with Victoria during his
1908 visit, soon appeared everywhere in the tourist literature. A few hours before he became
ill with drink, he wrote off to his family that:
To realize Victoria, you must take all that the eye admires most in
Bournemouth, Torquay, the Isle of Wight, the Happy Valley at Hong
Kong, the Doon, Sorrento, and Camps Bay; add reminiscences of the
Thousand Islands, and arrange the whole around the Bay of Naples,
with some Himalayas for the background.18
Naturally, civic, business and tourist officials were elated by these impressions and took
full advantage of the old imperialists’ words by quoting Kipling at every opportunity. The
“English Victoria” image began to play a factor in early twentieth century tourism with the
publication of booklets such as “Victoria: An Attractive City on the Pacific Coast,” subtitled:
“A Bit of England on the Shores of the Pacific” (see cover illustration). During the first decades
of this century, though, the primary emphasis was still on Victoria’s geographic beauty—an
angle that was even promoted through music and a song written by J. Douglas Macey and N.
De Bertrand Lugrin. The first verse of “Victoria, My Homeland,” went as follows:
There’s a little place I’m knowing
By the sunny western sea,
14
Where the hills are softly glowing
And the winds are blowing free.
And the lilac and the roses
Ah they woo the heart of me.
To Victoria my homeland,
Fair Victoria by the sea.
Like so many other places in the North American West—Phoenix with its turquoise skies and
“tissue mending sunshine,” Colorado with its Rockies “a-tingle with vital forces” or San Diego
where “stars…venture out tentatively, like hesitant children”—popular culture and travel ads
emphasizing Victoria’s climate and geographic grandeur were typically based on romantic
and regenerative themes. While these sentimental emphases on Victoria’s warmth and
physical beauty continued on in the tourist literature and other venues throughout the
twentieth century and into the twenty-first a shift toward an even more “English” emphasis
occurred with the changes to the city’s transportation infrastructure, demographics and the
arrival of the new Commissioner in the 1920s. 19
IMAGE UNAVAILABLE for ONLINE VERSION
The front cover of Victoria: An Attractive City on the Pacific Coast, published by the Tourist Association of
Victoria c1915, foreshadowed future tourist promotion themes by trumpeting BC’s capital as a “different”
city and “A Bit of England on the Shores of the Pacific.” Along with the more typical early descriptions of
an “unequaled climate” and opportunities in the mining and fishing industries, this booklet also
15
emphasized that Victoria’s sports, architecture, flowers and shrubbery would “make you feel that you have
been transplanted 6,000 miles to the Old Land.” (Courtesy of City of Victoria Archives, Victoria, BC,
Accession #2006-0401)
The Interwar Years
Early tourists traveled to Victoria in search of sunshine, gardens and “a bit of olde
England,” but also had to concern themselves with such practical and mundane matters as
transportation. The First World War demanded new techniques in mass production and these
brought with them lasting implications for postwar travel. By 1920, car makers such as Henry
Ford and General Motors had begun to produce new models of comfortable and reliable
automobiles at much more affordable prices than those of the prewar years. Almost overnight,
it seemed, North Americans were out on the road. In addition, the economic boom of the
Roaring Twenties’ would see a broader distribution of increased wealth and significant rise in
leisure time for many North Americans. With so much apparent potential for an influx of
tourists on wheels, Victoria’s business community tested out a new accommodation facility:
the auto camp. This predecessor of the motel was essentially a lot with basic cooking and
washroom facilities. No longer were the wealthy the only class who could arrive for a visit.
Victoria’s Tourist Trade Group and the Chamber of Commerce combined their efforts and on
May 16, 1923, opened the six-acre Victoria auto camp. By September of that same year, 1,509
cars had been registered, 1,227 of which had come from the United States.20
Another international tourist link between Vancouver Island and Washington State was
accomplished when the Sidney-Anacortes car ferry service began in 1922 (that same year,
coastal BC ended its status as the last North American region where vehicles travelled on the
left side of the road). This was in addition to the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company’s
16
ferries which had connected Seattle, Port Townsend and Port Angeles with Victoria since 1903.
The latter service was enhanced considerably in the second half of the twenties decade by the
entry into service of the steamships Princess Margeurite and the Princess Kathleen.
Together, these evolutions in transportation technologies, along with increases in
disposable income and recreation time, would contribute to a substantial increase in the
number of visitors to Victoria from the 1920s onward. Travel to BC’s capital now became
feasible for many who could not have made the trip before and this very fact increased the
incentive of the tourist bureau to find inventive ways to attract this new breed of tourist. In his
classic study of The Image, Daniel J. Boorstin identifies another important structural shift of the
Interwar tourist era. Boorstin observes that unlike the upper-class European traveler of the
nineteenth century, who had left home in hope of adventure and the unexpected, American
(and presumably Canadian) vacationers of the post-World War I era head out with precise
goals and a carefully structured itinerary. When tourists set off in their cars, trains, planes or
boats, they seek to find places they can already describe in great detail—for Victoria, as we
shall see this has meant the regal Empress Hotel, Butchart’s Gardens, or English Woolen
shops—and if the destination differs too much from the familiar, the explorers are
disappointed. North American tourists hope to find the predictably unusual, to “discover”
what they already expected to find.21
Just as the post-World War I potential for a tourist market to Victoria was increasing, the
perceived need to develop such service industries in the region did as well. Historian Jean
Barman explains that the exodus of manufacturing and industries from relatively isolated
Victoria to the better connected Mainland, which had begun in the 1890s, now intensified into
a steady stream during the 1920s. With this industry went a good portion of Victoria’s
working class population. In their place, many retirees from other parts of Canada, and
17
Britons, were attracted by the capital city’s climate and services along with its growing
reputation of old ‘Englishness’. With immigration numbers on the rise nationwide, the need
for the city to generate revenue, and a new person at the helm of the Publicity Bureau,
Victoria’s conscious construction of an English ethos to attract visitors (and potentially, new
residents) went into high gear.22
The key person behind the promotion of new technologies and services to take
advantage of the rising tide of tourism was George I. Warren, who would serve as Publicity
Bureau Commissioner for almost four decades, from 1922 to 1960, and as Chamber of
Commerce manager from 1922 to 1954. Kenneth Lines notes that “throughout his long tenure
of these offices, Warren worked diligently to make the name of Victoria synonymous with
‘olde English’ enchantment in America.”23 Significantly, though, during Warren’s nearly four
decade tenure he never once travelled to Britain itself.
George Warren arrived in Victoria (from his birthplace of San Francisco) as a young man
in 1912 and decided to stay. With imagination and vigor he and his assistants conjured up a
plethora of advertising slogans and publicity stunts and produced large numbers of tourist
brochures and maps. More than any other individual in the twentieth century, Warren
recognized the potential in and played up the North America’s-England approach that would
have a spiraling effect on Victoria tourism, especially in the years following World War II. His
efforts to emphasize Victoria’s English attributes and slow pace of life—some the very same as
those attributed to Victoria by some of the first “foreign” visitors—were key in setting the city
apart from the commercialism and bustle of its biggest potential tourist rival, Vancouver.
Under Warren’s leadership, the ferry service from Sidney (just north of Victoria) to Anacortes,
Washington was established in 1921, bringing approximately 400 vehicles to the island that
18
first year. When he stepped down as commissioner in 1960, ferries were bringing 234,000 cars
to Vancouver Island annually.24
During the 1920s, a series of questionnaires developed by the Vancouver Island
Publicity Bureau (VIPB) to acquire insights into why tourists chose Victoria as a destination
convinced George Warren and other local promoters that the city’s perceived ”Englishness”
was a major attraction. By 1928, Warren and the VIPB were working overtime to convince
Victorians to promote their city’s Englishness. In his attempts to make the most out of the “Bit
of Old England” theme, though, Warren ran into a couple of snags. First he tried
unsuccessfully to have gas station operators replace the word “gasoline” with “petrol” on
pumps and signs, convert their buildings to Elizabethan architecture, and fly Union Jacks. He
also wanted street cars to be referred to as “trams” but this too failed to catch on with local
citizens. During the Great Depression, however, Warren and his staff received some key
support from several influential locals for his Anglo-visions for Victorian tourism.25
In April 1932 former Victoria mayor, Herbert Anscomb, now President of the VIPB,
wrote a influential opinion piece in Island Motorist magazine offering advice on the most
effective approaches to keeping American visitors returning to the Island. Anscomb was
convinced that tourists from the US, especially Pacific coastal cities, provided Victoria with its
most lucrative market. To rope the Americans in, Victoria residents needed above all else to
provide them with what they wanted: a “different” tourism experience made possible by
enhancing Victoria’s English features. “Let them see the Union Jack flying,” Anscomb wrote,
and “English inns,” would give these Americans “something to talk about.” More “bowling
greens, tennis lawns, cricket and archery grounds” along with two other favorite Old World
pastimes—fishing and shooting—would provide a boon for local restaurants and hotels. For
the icing on the cake, native-Victorians and their Vancouver Island neighbors were told to lay
19
it on thick with the two other common symbols of British imperialism— “flowers and
shrubbery.” Two readers whose attention was caught by the Anscomb article were the
enthusiastic chair of the BC Liquor Control Board, H.B. Thomson, and the long-time Victoria
resident and BC Premier himself, Simon Fraser Tolmie. 26
Five years after Mayor Anscomb provided support for Warren’s objectives, E.H. Adams,
president of the Evergreen Playground Association (EPA) of Oregon, Washington and B.C.
added more grist to the mill. “Too often,” Adams asserted, “we Americanize our attractions
under the mistaken idea that the tourist from across the line will feel more at home.” But this
is not what those from south of the border want, he said; rather they travelled to Canada in the
hope of feeling like they were in a foreign country. Adams held up both Victoria and Quebec
City as examples to the rest of the nation of cities that had worked to maintain and promote
their “quaint atmosphere[s]” and their histories.27 The EPA drove this message home in pricey
advertisements placed in six major California newspapers in May of 1936. “Nobody hurries,
nobody worries in Victoria,” the large, heavily illustrated spread began. “Small wonder
visitors love it—the whole tempo of life is so casual, relaxed.” A fictional “Family Next-Door”
then explains what happens upon arrival:
As our ship docked in this foreign-looking little harbor, Dad said: “It’s like
the capitol of some old world kingdom!”….Real English “bobbies” direct
traffic; interesting English types everywhere. Next came a marine drive lined
with beautiful homes and sea-girt gardens. Billy made us stop and watch a
cricket match and “bowling on the green.” Afterwards Dad treated us to tea
at a cozy little shop. But the climax was Mr. Butchart’s sunken Gardens—a
fairyland of fine lakes, exotic trees, shrubs and flowers set in a cultivated
wilderness.”28
During the interwar period, the most popular bus tour touted by the Bureau was
without a doubt (and remains to this day) the 19 kilometer drive up to Butchart Gardens—a 25
20
acre property on the west shore of the rural Saanich Peninsula. Opened in 1908, this former
limestone quarry had been transformed by Robert and Jennie Butchart into a series of sunken
gardens filled with a lavish assortment of flowers meant to simulate traditional English Rose,
Japanese, and Italian gardens. Within a decade of its opening the garden had attained
international recognition and, before long, the Butcharts’ added a tearoom and a souvenir and
seed package counter.
Like so many other major tourist destinations in North America, Victoria’s developing
more English than the English image was based on a selective past, especially as it related to
Native peoples and minorities. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, EuroCanadians belief in their own cultural superiority and the false conviction that Aboriginal
people were a dying race caused the city’s first tourist promoters to shun Aboriginal imagery.
By the mid to late twentieth century, as attitudes toward Aboriginal peoples became more
inclusive, the most “forceful demands for the increased use of Native lore” as something
unique came not from Victoria but from up-Island and, in particular, from Vancouver.29
While in Victoria, Aboriginal themes would too become part of the city’s tourist appeal at
places like Thunderbird Park, the tall totem at the Trans Canada Mile Zero maker in Beacon
Hill Park, and the Cowichan Indian Sweater shop on Government Street, it is only very
recently that First Peoples presence and influence on the Victoria region has been seriously
acknowledged. In celebrating the Englishness of Empire at mid-century there was likewise a
failure of George Warren and the city promoters to mention that many of the city’s early
industries and infrastructure depended on non-European laborers—Chinese, Indo-Canadians,
Japanese and Aboriginals—who were denied full Canadian citizenship until 1949-1960.
Victoria, historically, was an Aboriginal space, a fur-trade post, then a gold-rush town, next a
substantial industrial port—but post-1920 tourism while emphasizing its colonial past and
21
early English residents—has little to say about any of these phases. The English image of
Victoria had its roots in the colonial assimilation process of the nineteenth century, then
employed what Michael Dawson describes as a kind of “selective amnesia” by normalizing
British control of the land and its resources, and encouraging both residents and their guests
to imagine the “resettlement” of the city and province “as benign, comforting, and
consumable fare.”30
For most of the twentieth century, other minorities such as Asians were also
marginalized or separated out from the “real” Victoria of the tourist pitchmen. The city’s
Chinese district, for example, has a rich history as Canada’s oldest Chinatown and, after San
Francisco, the second oldest in North America. Chinatown contributed significantly to the
area’s economy and its character. But for decades the bulk of Victoria’s official tourism
literature merely described this area as a kind of segregated “mini-kingdom creating its own
cultural oasis in the midst of a transplanted British way of life.”31
The travel boom of the 1920s was followed by the dramatic decline in world travel
following the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. Whether the English theme which permeated
tourist promotion can be attributed to its success or not, the Great Depression did not hit
tourist travel in Victoria as hard as it did many other North American tourist towns. But it did
have its effect. While major cruise lines continued to dock at Victoria, the outlook became
increasingly bleak by the winter of 1932-33. Fortunately, the city got a much needed boost in
1936 from the completion of U.S. Highway 101, which allowed Americans to motor all the way
from the Mexican border beyond Seattle and to the ferry terminals for Victoria over a paved
highway. EPA advertisements colorfully illustrated the increasing awareness of regional
planning and transnational travel in the Pacific Northwest with images and maps depicting
the land and water highway linking the “vacation paradise” of Victoria with Vancouver, Port
22
Angeles, Olympia, and Seattle.32 After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941,
however, the flow of tourists petered out once again—except for the regular visits from
tourists in uniform. A number of British servicemen, some of whom were stationed in the
area, took such a liking to the tranquil city of borrowed Englishness that they returned as
permanent settlers after the war’s conclusion.
The Olde England Inn invites tourists to “Take a Trip into the
Past” in what was touted as “Victoria’s only [my italics]
23
Authentic Bit of Olde England.” (Reprinted from The Victoria
Visitor, Vol. 9, No. 5 [1977]: 18; author’s collection)
The Postwar Era: “Come Behind the Crumpet Curtain”
In his study of popular Seminole tourist sites in Florida, Jay Mechling explains that
postwar Americans, and other Westerners, increasingly tried to escape from modern anxieties
of a highly industrialized society, the fear of nuclear war, and fears of deadening conformity.
The desire to look back to a simpler past has also proven to be a major stimulus for the
creation or reinforcement of ethnic stereotypes ranging from the Seminole of the Everglades to
Nova Scotia, a province that “became Scottish” during the mid-twentieth century. Travelers
and new residents to Victoria likewise embrace simplified representations of the city’s most
visible ethnic group.33 This kind of “image creation” typically takes place in cities that do not
have industry: university and government towns like Victoria or in economically depressed
locales such as the Maritime Provinces and the swamplands of Florida.
As a case in point, Kenneth Lines writes that ex-RAF squadron leader Sam Lane and his
wife Rosina arrived in Victoria from England in 1946 with a hefty load of valuable antiques
and period furniture. Before long they purchased a Tudor-style home set on a five acre ridge
which overlooked Esquimalt Harbour. A team of workmen quickly descended on the
structure, transforming it into a hostelry unique in Victoria (or for that matter, anywhere else).
The Olde England Inn opened its doors to the public in 1947. Guests who entered immediately
found themselves surrounded by crests and armor (“dented by musket fire”) once displayed
by English knights and their families, along with an array of antique tables, high backed
chairs, and an open hearth fireplace. Elizabethan antiques including canopied four-poster
beds bedecked the bedrooms upstairs and the Lanes liked to impress their guests by telling
them these antiques were old even before the Pilgrim Fathers planted their feet on Plymouth
24
Rock. The “medieval atmosphere” created was perfect for the 1947-era tourist in search of
something “different”—and all of this was enhanced by the imitation Elizabethan wenches
who served roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, tea and trifle in what a recent tour book describes
as “true English style.” Lane, the same Victorian who had modified a Cold War phrase when
he invited Washingtonians to “Come behind the crumpet curtain and see Victoria,” believed
that most of his guests were anxious to escape modern life and all its trappings. “Modern
gimmicks,” he insisted, “would put me out of business overnight. You might say I live in the
past. And you’d also be surprised how many people love it, by Jove.” Significantly, proprieterLane estimated that two-thirds of his guests were Americans. By the 1960s, the Olde England
Inn had grown or mutated into something more resembling a village, complete with copied
versions of Harvard House, Garrick Inn, the Ark of Tadcaster, Anne Hathaway’s Thatched
Cottage and, next to the parking lot and trash bins, a replica of William Shakespeare’s
birthplace. In the mid-1970s, the addition of several “grandiose king’s rooms” to the Inn itself
allowed guests in one of them the chance to sleep on a bed that its owners insist once belonged
to King Edward VII. 34 A 1994 pamphlet for this “Village” still boasted that guests may spend
the night “surrounded by the authentic atmosphere of English royalty.” An added touch of
salesmanship instructs would-be visitors: “Don’t miss the Olde Curiosity [gift] Shop!”
While most-British style attractions were noticeably on the rise as Victoria approached
mid-century, the “bobby” attraction ran into trouble in 1946 when the Police Union demanded
and received American-style uniforms to replace the old London-style outfits. “George I”
Warren responded with an intense effort to have constables retain the uniform of the bobby
for the edification of US tourists. With the support of the mayor, he met with some success
when one of the tall-helmeted gents was placed on patrol at the Inner Ferry dock during the
tourist season: a practice which continued at least until the end of the 1950s.
25
The author’s grandfather, Constable Henry J.
Smith, wearing his London “bobby” uniform poses
with a tourist in Downtown Victoria, 1941.
(Courtesy Jack R. Smith, Victoria BC).
Victoria received the royal treatment in a colorful profile by Holiday magazine,
“Canada’s ‘City of Gardens’” in September 1948. Author Ronald John Williams took a
favorable view of Victoria which he declared was “as English as Exeter” and full of retirees
from the British forces whom, according to Williams, “might have stepped directly out of the
pages of Kipling, Maugham, or even their own favorite journal, Punch.” Entering the Empress,
26
Williams gushed, was “like going into Durham Cathedral.” And the “stately dowagers” who
daily attended their afternoon tea and crumpets there were, “in the words of one enchanted
Seattle girl, ‘something straight from the world of Queen Victoria.’” Williams described
Victoria as an “anachronism…unlike any other city in the far west” where residents typically
“revere English traditions and all things English.” George Warren and the TAV were naturally
delighted by this oozing coverage from such a widely distributed American tour magazine. In
fact, Warren himself had a direct hand in shaping its contents. But trouble followed.35
A journalist for Victoria’s largest newspaper, The Daily Colonist quickly challenged
George Warren’s public assertion that there was no distortion in the Holiday spread. The
reporter revealed correctly that the article’s large opening shot of Victoria’s mayor and his
associates “interrupt[ing] a business conference for traditional afternoon tea” was staged.
Under cross-examination, Warren conceded that the tea cups were empty. The next day, an
unnamed editor for The Colonist railed about the incident in print. The editor found the whole
Holiday story and Warren’s defense of it: “nothing short of grotesque. Where,” he asked, “is
the greatness in dwelling on legendary characteristics so out of date as to be fit for a
museum?” Stating that the Holiday reporter had simply been shuffled around Victoria to see
“synthetic sights” while being carefully “shepherd[ed] away from reality” the editor fumed:
“What sort of eyes are they that see in Victoria only crumpets and tea, English china and
dowagers, and all the faded folderol that masquerades under the name of publicity?....Victoria
has charms aplenty without hiding behind the façade of a mouldy fantasy.” But if the
responding letters to the editor were any indication, most Victorians liked the image
portrayed by Holiday, and were proud of their English connections, preferring the “legend” to
what the unnamed editor saw as “fact.”36
27
Tellingly, it was George Warren’s successor, William Hawkins, who caused a popular
uproar when he attempted to promote a new image for B.C.’s capital a dozen years later in
1960. Dumping the tried and tested “Olde” England routine, Hawkins attempted to
encompass the whole of Vancouver Island with his new slogan—”Victoria: Gateway to
Canada’s Treasure Island.” His scheme featured “Captain Discovery,” a made-up jewelhunting hero. But the attempt failed miserably as angry residents attacked the new campaign
as a “sham” and a “hoax.” More trouble followed when Hawkins tried to replace the London
“bobby” and the crumpet man in the harbor with a colorful Chinese greeting. Before long, the
English symbols were back in service and Hawkins found himself having to defend against
the charge of being an Anglophobe.37 Remarkably, the process of “selling” Victoria has
resulted in many of the city’s own residents buying into the same myths of Englishness being
conveyed to outsiders, even to the point that local Victorians have become, in some respects,
“tourists” themselves.38
The idea of “invented tradition,” a term first introduced in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger’s work, The Invention of Tradition (1983), has been employed across many disciplines
and is directly relevant to the creation of urban identities tied to other places and times
including the “English” tourist image of Victoria. Hobsbawm’s original idea was as follows:
The term ‘invented tradition’ is used in a broad but not imprecise sense. It
includes both ‘traditions’ actually invented, constructed, and formally
instituted and those emerging in less traceable manner with a brief and
dateable period—a matter of a few years perhaps—and establishing
themselves with great rapidity….It is evident that not all of them are
equally permanent, but it is their appearance and establishment rather
than their chances of survival which are our primary concern.
Hobsbawm went on to describe this invented tradition phenomenon as being regulated by
“overtly or tacitly accepted rules…of a ritual or symbolic nature” whose repetition suggests
28
“continuity with the past.” The emergence of the English image of Victoria provides a vivid
example of invented tradition in the realm of tourism and local identity.39
The 1960’s would witness many changes to the Victoria tourism scene. Heavy
investment in transportation infrastructures—roads, bridges, and highways—during the
W.A.C. Bennett years began reaping benefits for the tourist industry. When the Roger’s Pass
section of the Trans-Canada highway was opened in 1962, B.C. saw a notable increase in
traffic from the Prairie provinces. However the greatest contribution to the provincial tourist
industry, which was especially beneficial to the capital region, was the inauguration in June
1960 of a rapid ferry service between Swartz Bay, 30 kilometers north of Victoria, and
Tsawwassen, 35 kilometers south of Vancouver. Initially, each ferry carried 106 cars and
crossing time on the new route was just one hour and 40 minutes. The voyage was a pleasant
break from continuous driving and for those in a hurry, additional air transportation from
Vancouver to Seattle was also made available.40
29
This ad from the early 1960s offering a BC vacation kit
appeared in Sunset magazine, published in San Francisco.
Here the appeal of the province’s “different” British
elements—as epitomized by its capital city of Victoria—were
directed at American families with young children.
(Reproduced from Sunset, 128:5 [May 1962]: 93)
Gimmicky tours, attractions, restaurants and shops fully took hold during the sixties
decade. Along with the more conventional Grayline bus tours, visitors had their choice of
touring the city in a “Tally-Ho” horse-drawn carriage; the traditional red double-decker
London buses; or the “Tweed Line” tours which used odd looking vehicles to attract business
for their trips out to Butchart Gardens. Along with the ever-popular Gardens, Anne
Hathaway’s Cottage, and Madame Toussaud’s Wax Museum, tourists could choose from a
wide range of tacky new off-shoots including “The Royal London Wax Museum,” the “Crown
30
Jewels of England,” and “Safari-Land”—the latter of which was put out of its misery within a
year. Among the most popular restaurants in the 1960s and 1970s were: the Coach and Four,
an “old English steak house”; the Dingle House Restaurant, located in an old Victoria heritage
home and specializing in “Olde English faire”; King Arthur’s Round Table, featuring
“English” roast beef served in yet another “Old English” atmosphere; the Oak Bay Beach
Hotel with its “Tudor” decor and “traditional English cuisine”; the Princess Mary Restaurant
Vessel, a restaurant built into the super-structure of a coastal steamer; the city’s favorite Tudor
tearoom, the Blethering Place (named for the Scottish word for “voluble senseless talking”) on
Oak Bay Avenue; and, for those on a budget, London Fish and Chips and Old British Fish and
Chips.
PHOTO UNAVAILABLE for ONLINE VERSION
Ten of Victoria’s “slightly different” signs appeared in Sunset’s 13 page spread
showcasing BC’s capital city in August 1966. “In Victoria,” the tour magazine
observed, “you will see traffic signs, retail signs, package labels, shop names,
hotel names, and advertising…all either echoing or spoofing the Englishman’s
England.” (Reprinted from Sunset, 137: 2 [August 1966]: 48)
In his study of “Tourism in Victoria, British Columbia,” completed in 1968, Ian P. B.
Halkett undertook a survey of attitudes toward Victoria held by both residents and visitors.
When asked, “In what way is Victoria most different from the area in which you reside?” the
31
following visitors’ responses were typical of those given: “Quiet and peaceful” (Toronto);
“Lamp posts, Old England, flowers, old-fashioned atmosphere” (Toronto): “Much smaller and
cleaner. Rural and city life so close together...” (Los Angeles): “English architecture as opposed
to Spanish. Beautifully green” (San Francisco); “Quaint” (Tacoma and Vancouver)”
“Comfortable, leisurely” (San Diego); “Ethnic background differences noticeable. Dauphin is
Ukrainian—here you English [sic] vegetation and environment” (Dauphin, Manitoba); “British
atmosphere” (Penticton and Tacoma): and, from someone who had apparently taken the
publicity slogan to heart, “A little bit of Old England” (Seattle). The reactions to Halkett’s
questionnaire were overwhelmingly positive, except for the occasional complaint of a “dead”
Victoria night life, and the mixed impressions of one San Franciscan who advised others “By
all means visit, but not on a Sunday—the bars are closed.” Halkett concluded that “visitors
were most impressed by the beauty of the city, the English atmosphere, and the slower pace of
life; references to all of these recurred many times in the interview and the [Victoria Visitor’s
Bureau] guest book.” He found similar impressions dominant among Victoria residents as
well.41 Notably, some of these tourist reactions to Victoria as a laid back paradise appear to
have changed little since the days of FW Van Reynegon and Charles Nordhoff in the 1870s.
Since the 1920s, the city’s tourism industry had worked tirelessly to maintain and enhance the
Victoria image; in fiscal terms, as the steady rise in tourism numbers and responses to these
surveys would attest, these efforts had paid off in spades.
32
The 1970s and Early 1980s
PHOTO UNAVAILABLE for ONLINE VERSION
The “British invasion” of Washington State about to get underway with the
inaugural run of the newly-Anglified Princess Marguerite leaving from Victoria
for Seattle on June 1, 1975. On board were BC Premier Dave Barrett, Washington
State Governor Dale Evans, and about 1,000 passengers. (Photo courtesy
Beautiful British Columbia Magazine)
Throughout the twentieth century, the BC provincial government took an active role in
promoting Victoria as “Canada’s best bloomin’ city.” In 1975, the 25 year old Canadian Pacific
steamship, Princess Marguerite was purchased and pressed back into service by the BC
Government for runs between Victoria and Seattle. Stylized Union Jacks were painted on the
funnels and—in the bicentennial year of Paul Revere’s ride—the opening ad campaign
forewarned Seattleites: “The British Are Coming!” According to Beautiful British Columbia
Magazine, the BC Department of Tourism’s official quarterly publication, “the regal lady,
resplendent in white and gold and proudly wearing the Union Jack…could indeed come right
out of Gilbert and Sullivan.” Two years later, a provincial tourist promotion article similarly
lured passengers onboard with the promise of “the experience of a bygone era,” and a special
bonus: “The McQuilland Brothers, entertainers who last year led thousands of passengers in
British singalong pub music, will be back for another season of merry-making.”42 By far the
33
most durable Marguerite sales-pitch featured a jingle sung by a heavily accented, limey gent.
The catchy number ran on American radio and TV for a decade: “Take a princess to sea. Have
a crumpet and tea. There’s fun aboard all the way. Sail away for the day, hey, hey, hey. Let’s
go to Victoria, with Princess Marguerite!”
Not long before the new Princess set sale, an advertisement campaign for the C.P.
Empress Hotel, that epitome of transplanted Englishness, likewise hastened its American
audience to “Come to the Other England now. It’s blooming wonderful.” Apart from high tea
with scones and clotted cream, one of the most conspicuous long-term mainstays at the
Empress is the Bengal Room. Built in 1926 as a men’s den for smoking cigars, drinking brandy,
reading, writing and conversation, the darkly paneled lounge remains to this day a British
colonial style drinking establishment which the Empress’ current website states: “draws
inspiration from Queen Victoria’s role as the Empress of India.” In an article published in the
Seattle Times in 1999, travel writer Scott Mccredie referred to the Bengal Lounge as possibly
“the most politically incorrect bar in North America.”43 The lounge’s centerpiece is a giant
Bengal tiger skin hung above the fireplace (a gift bestowed to the Hotel from a Maharajah of
India in 1960—before the species became endangered) and, until recently, house drinks
carried names such as the “Ivory Hunter.” The two Punka fans on the ceiling, which resemble
giant elephant ears, are of the same type once operated with ropes by “Punka boys.” Given
these observations, one cannot help but believe that had that “prophet of British Imperialism,”
Rudyard Kipling, been able to visit Victoria’s Bengal Room he might never have left.
34
(Reproduced from Sunset, 148: 6 [June 1972]: 34)
Victoria’s dominant image remained mostly fixed and static through the latter part of
the twentieth century. When the Saturday Evening Post paid a visit to Victoria in the 1980s, its
author Susan Vreeland, touched upon many of the very same themes that its sister-magazine,
35
Holiday, had back in 1948: the English tweeds, prim gardens and flowering baskets hanging
from the lampposts, the bagpipes playing on the legislature lawn, the London double-decker
buses, cricket and lawn-bowling, and the insistence of the “tea and crumpet school” whose
local members insisted that “Victoria is still more British than Britain.” Why did people still
visit the place? According to Vreeland, for the same reasons as in George Warren’s day: “Some
come to buy woolens, English bone china or sculpture. Others come to glory in the
anachronisms of a vanished empire. But all come to drink some tea.” Near the end of the
piece, though, The Post’s travel writer expanded her horizons somewhat when she commented
that the totem display at Thunderbird Park and works of Emily Carr have “created a more
complex Victoria” today that celebrates Aboriginal culture. Ms. Vreeland could not escape
some old stereotypes of Aboriginals, however, by mystifying them and describing “their
symbols” as “curious,” “strange” and “beyond our comprehension.”44
Playing on the city’s English roots both real and imagined, a perusal of the Victoria
travel literature suggests not only tourism promoters’ penchant for selectivity and
exaggeration but, at times, a willful disregard for reality. In terms of the latter, it is worth
noting that Victorians did discern between “right” and “wrong” fabrications. While they had
rejected the “fake” and generic Captain Discovery in 1960, no one questioned such re-creations
as Anne Hathaway’s “English” Cottage—built halfway around the world from and more than
three centuries later than the original. Travelers bought into them out of a desire to believe
that such a place existed. During the last half of the twentieth century, Victoria’s cultural and
ethnic makeup changed considerably but her image did not. Tourists continued to flock there
to see the “England” of days past. To find what they searched for, they had to use their
imaginations as they traveled, not only to look at reality but to look for the images of Victoria
already impressed upon their minds by the popular media.
36
“Devil’s Bargains”
Not everyone, of course, bought into the positive, lotus-like image that dominated
popular descriptions of Victoria. Alan Fotheringham, columnist for Maclean’s Magazine and
the Vancouver Sun, has characterized Victoria as “God’s waiting room, floating adrift on a
fantasy island, oblivious to real life.” The Victoria as the “Vote No,” “City of Cranks” theme
has re-emerged frequently as well in the popular press. The Financial Post once complained
that “only in Victoria” would a city council allow “a decrepit, alcohol-sodden parrot to hold
up a building development (because its later owner willed it).” And journalist Edward Gould
tells the story of a visit by the acid-tongued editor of the New York weekly, the Village Voice,
to Mayor Peter Pollen’s office in the late ‘70s. After a day of sightseeing around the city, she
grumbled to Pollen, “What have you got here, anyway? A lot of dirty, old buildings, a filthy
harbor, nothing to do in the way of theater or arts, and the worst bunch of schlock tourist traps
I’ve ever seen.” When Pollen responded that Victoria also had plenty of fresh air, places to
walk, and excellent facilities for recreational sports, she looked out the window and remarked:
“Doesn’t it ever stop raining?”45
These anti-myths aside, evidence does point to the fact that the dominant positive image
of Victoria since the 1920s and related financial success of its tourist industry has come at a
cost to the city’s residents. Indeed, in terms of the nature and quality of life there appear to
have been several trade-offs resembling what tourism scholar Hal K. Rothman refers to as
“devil’s bargains.” Property costs throughout Greater Victoria have skyrocketed over the last
several decades with the average cost of a single family dwelling having gone from $63,733 in
1978 to $629,925 in 2010. In a city known for its parks and green space, the latter has been
squeezed in many parts of the city due to the rapid growth in population and the
37
accompanying spike in demand for housing, services and businesses. Surrounded by water on
three sides, and hills on the other, Victoria has little room to grow, traffic jams have become
commonplace, and, in 2006, BC’s capital was named by Maclean’s magazine as the country’s
worst sewage polluter. This said Victoria is still rated very highly as compared with other
North American cities in terms of its overall quality of life and for its recreational and
educational opportunities. Today almost four million tourists visit the BC capital every year
spending in excess of a billion dollars. But those who believed that Victoria could benefit
economically from a tourist industry boom—which it clearly has achieved—while at the same
time keeping their city quiet, clean and slow-paced, may not have been prepared for the actual
results.46
Post-Modern Tourism and Victoria in the Twenty-First Century
The search for the colorful, the ‘foreign’, and the different, to escape one’s own daily
routine, continues in the present. Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post,
describes how he can envision Paris to be the city he expects it to be largely because he speaks
no French. “Everywhere I go, the city is precisely what I want it to be and people are saying
precisely what I want them to say. Because I understand nothing, I invent everything....In this
way, Paris remains idealized, a city out of books and even articles about those books.”47
Cohen’s self-reflection reveals a modern attitude about travel that would seem peculiar to the
latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Unlike previous times, the popular image
may no longer be regarded as being quite so close to the reality as it once was. We often seem
surprised when the images held in our minds actually appear to be real. Two decades ago,
while visiting some popular sites in Japan, this writer was somewhat astonished to find that a
number of the sights really were just like the pictures.
38
Maxine Feifer has characterized what she refers to as the “post-modern tourist.” Tourists
of the postwar period have become very conscious of the fact that they are tourists. They
expect to run into other tourists, wait in line, and pay exorbitant prices. They happily
participate in the commercialization of travel, buying postcards, coffee mugs, t-shirts and dish
towels. But post-modern tourists still long for a romanticized past—they are just more aware
of the fact that they are doing it. Vending machines, cuckoo-chirping crosswalks, and modern
transportation cannot help but put distance between us and the past, reinforcing the sense that
the vision is not genuine. In “romantic” Charleston, South Carolina, visitors can still ride
horse-drawn carriages around the Battery; likewise, in Victoria, the “Tally-Ho” rides carry
tens of thousands of visitors a year around the Inner Harbour and Beacon Hill Park. But
periodically the horses must pull aside to let cars pass them, making it rather more difficult to
imagine that one is really in the “Old South” or “Nineteenth Century Britain.”
Awareness that the milieu created for tourists is partly imagined also stems from a
growing consciousness of Victoria’s increasingly diverse ethnic makeup. No historian could
seriously dispute the influence of the City of Victoria’s colonial beginnings or the important
role that people of English ancestry have played in Victoria’s history; the enduring claim that
the city is “More English than England,” however, is based on some flawed assumptions.
Over the first half of the twentieth century, an almost constant flow of settlers from the British
Isles, and in particular England, were drawn to Victoria. As Ken Lines notes, between 1901
and 1961, the Dominion Census showed that an average of over 80 percent of the city’s
population identified their ethnic origins as British—a fact which served both to maintain and
to reinforce the English stereotype held so firmly in the minds of Victoria’s visitors. By 1981,
60 percent of the population still identified their ethnic origins as British. In one very
important respect, however, these figures are deceiving. As early as 1901, 51 percent of the
39
city’s population was Canadian-born. Also during the 1920’s the proportion of British-born in
the city began to decline, and continues to do so to this day. In 1921, those born in Great
Britain made up about 38 percent of the population and ten years later this figure had
dropped to one third. Today, the percentage of “born in U.K.” residents stands at less than ten
percent of the population and, in a reversal of earlier decades, this is not even half of the
proportion of those born in the United States. Meanwhile, the percentage of “non-British”
ethnic groups continues to grow—with immigrants from Northern Europe and East Asia now
making up the largest percentage of new settlers. In Victoria between 1991 and 1996, for
example, 44 percent of immigrants were Asian while European immigration dropped to 25
percent.
48
Today, Victoria’s Chinatown is on a tentative Canadian list to become a World
Heritage Site and along with some of the Aboriginal contributions to the city’s history,
celebrated as a vital part of the city’s multicultural character. This more inclusive approach
has been a long time coming and gradual. The gentle inclusion has almost certainly been given
impetus by changes in public knowledge and attitudes about the Aboriginal past, promotion
of multiculturalism in Canada at the national level, and the fact that locally, in the periods
covered by the 2001 and 2006 Canadian Census’, there have been five times as many Asian
born immigrants who have become residents of Victoria as those who registered their place of
birth as being in the United Kingdom.49
As we have observed, Victoria’s remarkable success as a tourist destination has
generated considerable wealth for the city for almost a century. At the same time, the very
popularity of the vision of Victoria as an English city tied the community to a narrow and, in
some respects, frozen in time image, has made it more difficult for Victoria to come to terms
with its growing modernity, ethnic and cultural diversity, and its Aboriginal roots. In
addition, its fiscal achievements and growth have created some unforeseen problems which
40
together have pushed the city’s fixed image as a quaint, slow-paced, “jolly old capital” further
away from reality.
Since the mid-1980s, the image of Victoria as a bit of nineteenth century England has
faded… somewhat. A 1986 report by the Business & Industrial Development Commission of
Victoria acknowledged that BC’s “Old England” image was on the decline due to modern
immigration patterns and that this was reflected in recent architectural designs in the city. “At
the same time,” the report contended, “much of its charm still relates to our earlier phrase of
“a non-North American image” and such features as gas-lit squares, brick-lined alleys,
classical old buildings, and afternoon teas “can still contribute greatly to that European
perception.” Also, the report’s recommendations to the Commission hardly seemed
innovative when its authors state that “the common element of HERITAGE should be
encouraged…such a list could include the Oak Bay Beach Hotel, the Old England Inn,
Murchie’s Tea & Coffee” along with “horse-drawn carriage rides,” neighborhood pubs, tours
of “stately homes and gardens,” and, especially, the promotion of “bed and breakfasts”: a term
that “in Britain…has always been a familiar one.”50
In recent decades, the Oak Bay Tea Party (an annual summer fair) has turned into a
hodgepodge of events that hardly pass as English, the Bengal Room’s “Ivory Hunter”-like
names for drinks and dishes have been replaced by gluten free, microbiotic menus, and the
Blethering Place Tea Room was recently converted into a modern bistro. But those who
announced the near-death of Victoria’s “little bit of England” image more than a decade ago51
were mistaken. The Tally-Ho, bagpiper and a town-crier continue to greet tourists at the Inner
Harbour, high tea is more popular than ever at The Empress, tourists still frequent the tartan
and English “sweet” shops, and the Empire clock which hangs above the atrium at the Bay
Centre Shopping Mall features the prominent inscription: “Westward the Course of Empire
41
Goes Forth.” Since the 1970s, more men and women in Victoria have worked in tourist-related
activities than in any other kind of occupation, including government service.52 Overall,
observers may be more amused at the “quaint” images of the Victoria-for-tourists than in
previous years, and the travel industry has added more complexity to the overall image with a
heavier emphasis on multiculturalism (in particular with respect to Aboriginal influences), but
Victoria is still envisioned first and foremost much as it has been since its founding and most
certainly since its English image was positioned front and center in the 1920’s. As a 2011 tour
book of the region puts it, Victoria “remains quintessentially British.”53 And certainly, in the
eyes of the Ministry of Tourism at least, the image has worked only too well—even surpassing
the hopes of Victoria’s early Anglophile promoters.
PHOTO UNAVAILABLE in ONLINE VERSION
Queen Elizabeth II has visited “the other England,” Victoria (named for her great-great,
grandmother), six times since the early 1950s. In this photo from the July 1959 Royal Visit, BC
Premier W.A.C. Bennett escorts the Queen and Prince Philip (rear) as they pass armed forces
personnel in front of the British Columbia Parliament Buildings. In a city with a population of 53,000,
more than 80,000 residents and a record number of tourists lined the route or gathered on the
Legislature lawn to get a glimpse of the monarch. (The Daily Colonist [July 17, 1959]: 1; Photo
courtesy City of Victoria Archives, Photo No. M04330)
42
Tourist Victoria has historically been a place where invented traditions and deodorized
visions of the past have flourished and perception has frequently trumped a more complex
reality. In the early 1960s, Lenny Bruce liked to tell his audiences that: “Even if you are
Catholic, if you live in New York you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to
be goyish even if you are Jewish.”54 Of Victoria, he might have said: If you are from Lubbock
or Taipei and you live in Victoria, BC, then you’re English.
For all of Victoria’s reluctance to come to terms with a diverse past and tourist
“schlock”, though, the success of its promoters in building up the city’s popularity as a tourist
destination and highly desirable place to live and retire is undeniable. When touring
Californians or Minnesotans went to Hollywood they would see movie and TV stars, when
they went to Tombstone, Arizona they would see gunfighters facing each other down in a
Western town; in Victoria they came looking for castles, woolens and crumpets—and found
them all (as one New Yorker once put it, “This town is so bloody English it brings tea to your
eyes”). Paralleling the historic promotion of the English image, tourism as an industry became
a major force in Victoria during the 1920s and increased steadily to the point that, by 1986, the
tourist industry was the city’s number one economic activity. For Victorians, tourism is as big
a part of daily life as it is for the residents of Honolulu. By the early 1970s, over 2.5 million
tourists flocked to Victoria every year, and by 1999, this number had increased to 3.6 million
generating an estimated one billion dollars in tourist revenue. This number has continued to
grow with encouragement from sources such as the upmarket travel magazine, Conde Nast
Traveler, which has twice placed Victoria on the Top 10 list of world city destinations, along
with the development of countless websites. Person per person, British Columbia’s capital
attracts more visitors than any other Canadian city.55
43
As the editors of Myth and Southern History, Patrick Berster and Nicholas Cords, point
out while myths may be historically false, they are psychologically true. Due to their historical
errors myths can be negative, but they also serve a more positive purpose by providing us
with a unifying experience. These scholars view history as a dual product of recorded
documentation and imagination. This is as true of the City of Victoria as it is for other tourist
destinations which emphasize a mythic past, as suggested in this quotation from an American
Automobile Association Tour Book of the American South:
More than buildings are preserved here. The clopping of horse-drawn
carriage on a cobblestone lane, a street vendor’s musical calls, and even
the fragrance of the city’s famous gardens seem to recall times past. It
can even be said that Charleston is a way of life preserved. Once a
cradle of southern gentility, Charleston is now one of its last
bastions....Charleston epitomizes the gracious air of the Old South. Life
here moves at the languorous pace of a stroll under the palmettos
along the Battery.56
Like Charleston, the myth of Victoria is dominant in both tourists’ and some of the residents’
attitudes about that city. It may not be a balanced or accurate image in many respects, but it
cannot be brushed aside.57
The Other, “Other England”
Victoria’s identity and tourist image is not unique. While Tourism Charleston’s official
website also proclaims it as the city “where history lives,” Victoria’s most serious rival in tour
industry claims of overseas “Englishness” is arguably not that American bastion of “Southern
gentility” but rather a city located about as far away as possible from the mother country
herself: Christchurch, New Zealand.
44
Located in the province of Cantebury with the Pacific Ocean as its eastern border and
the Southern Alps to the west, Christchurch’s ongoing characterization as “the most English of
New Zealand’s cities” dates back to 1856 when it was established as a home primarily to
English and Anglican settlers by the New Zealand Company. As opposed to the rough start
for the founders of Fort Victoria, Christchurch’s pioneers “dreamed of founding a happy,”
“transplanted” and “well regulated Church of England community…possessing English
ideals and English institutions.”58 Though this attempt to form a homogenous English
settlement failed—and the real city growth came from immigration organized later by the
central government—a city myth of Christchurch was formed that has shaped the city’s image
and, responsively, the efforts of tourism promoters up to the present day. Christchurch’s
English tropes and “Garden City” movement emerged directly from modernist reformers such
as Ebenezer Howard, who at the turn of the century had imagined a modernist reformation of
industrial urbanism through extensive town planning. In Christchurch he and others hoped to
transcend the polluted, overcrowded, noisy and overworked excesses of Victorian England
with the creation of a romanticized town inclined toward rural life and the countryside. In an
era fraught with anxieties about the effects of rapid industrialization, these “utopian” ideas
about Englishness, far removed from the ugly urbanization of Victorian England, were
intentionally created in an effort to import the Mother country’s “best” features, while leaving
behind its “worst.”59 This milieu served to enhance the so-called “transplant” of many English
features into the new Kiwi environment, including: a substantial dose of Gothic architecture;
“English” parks and gardens filled with imported flora and fauna; whole social, educational
and religious institutions; place names; and, in the words of the editors of the New Zealand
Geographer, even “a bit of English snobbery.”60
45
Patrick Bonazza observed in 1995: “Christchurch…seems to have been rebuilt stone by
stone—with its shops, its museums, its cathedral—on the model of a little English provincial
town.”61 The city’s invented and selective history include its number one symbol, Cathedral
Square, modeled on those found in English country towns, its “historic” tram car, the
“overwhelmingly English” Botanic Gardens of Hagley Park, cobbled paved malls, the
Oxbridge-style public Arts Center, selective preservation of old buildings, horse drawn
carriages, and a town crier, “the Wizard of Christchurch,” who is paid by the City Council.
62
In some respects, the parallels to tourist promotion in Victoria are unmistakable. Like Victoria,
tourism marketers have long realized the potential of the English image for Christchurch
tourism and this is very evident on the “City of Gardens” website today. But New Zealand’s
geographic isolation has also made it more challenging for Christchurch to generate the kind
of tourist dollars that Victoria has raked in with its vast urban tourist markets of major
American cities along the Pacific Coast. And most recently the February 2011 earthquake, a
phenomenon which residents of the Pacific Northwest, including Victoria, are also highly
conscious of, has crippled the city’s tourist industry. Relatedly, the ongoing drive by
Christchurch’s founders and later tourism promoters to make this much more isolated city a
kind of experiment, “better” than England itself, as opposed to something “foreign” or
“different” like Victoria (with its especially keen sense for attracting American visitors), has
resulted in different emphases in promoting New Zealand’s as opposed to Canada’s “most
English” of cities.
Conclusion
Hal K. Rothman has perceptively observed that “Tourism offers visitors a romanticized
vision of the historic past, the natural world, popular culture, and especially of themselves.”63
46
The impression of Victoria as “more English than England itself,” the city of sunshine, flowers,
eccentric types, and fish and chips, was an agreeable idea so it became popular and spread—in
large measure thanks to an enterprising and opportunistic Chamber of Commerce and Tourist
Bureau looking southward and to the east. Certainly, as we have seen, not all visitors held the
same images of Victoria in their minds to the same degree. In fact some totally dismissed
them. But the tourist literature, the popular media, and reactions of the visitors themselves
reveal that certain themes repeatedly re-surfaced which heavily overshadowed the city’s
complex reality. Even people who had never visited Victoria, or read any tour books on the
city, were likely to come into contact with a stereotyped England on the Pacific image. For
almost a century, businesses and government agencies which have stood to profit from these
portrayals have been only too happy to oblige the potential tourist: first by selling the image,
and then providing visitors with exactly what they expect to see with no unpleasant surprises.
Today, in the twenty-first century, the tourist continues to want to flee from their own
anxieties, and the regular, dull routine of daily life and to transport him or herself to a more
appealing place and time of benign monarchs, tartans, gardens, estates and horse-drawn
carriages. We are often suspicious and cynical of overblown myths of past grandeur, beauty
and romance, we want to debunk all of the sentiment, but at the same time we are still drawn
to those very same romantic and oversimplified images of Victoria as “a little bit of Old
England.” By fulfilling precisely what tourists sought, Victoria’s tourism promoters have
successfully cultivated an economically beneficial self-image which, for good or ill, has made
it difficult to view B.C.’s Capital in any other light.
47
In “Oak Bay Goes Green,” Times-Colonist cartoonist Adrian Raeside mocks the Greater Victoria
municipality most renowned for its “borrowed Englishness.” (Courtesy Raeside Website, February
10, 2008, ©raesidecartoon.com)
Acknowledgements
The author extends thanks and appreciation to Professor Keith T. Carlson of the University of
Saskatchewan and to Professor Robert A.J. McDonald of the University of British Columbia for
their invaluable recommendations and edits to this manuscript. Thanks also to Sarah Rathjen
of the City of Victoria Archives for her advice and help in locating key documents, my
daughter Emily for her research assistance in locating photos and images promoting BC’s
“jolly good” capital, and to the University of Saskatchewan Library for providing financial
assistance for aspects of this research conducted at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
48
Endnotes
Quotation from cultural critic Raymond Williams in Michael Dawson, Selling British Columbia:
1
Tourism and the Consumer Culture, 1890-1970 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004): 10.
Seneca quoted in Maxine Feifer, Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present (New York:
2
Stein and Day, 1985): 2.
John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln, NE: University of
3
Nebraska Press, 1985): 22.
4
G.P.V. Akrigg, British Columbia Place Names (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997): 285-286; Ibid, 282.
W.K. Lamb, ed. “The Diary of Robert Melrose,” British Columbia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 7 (1943):
5
199; Ibid, 120.
Quotation in Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto:
6
University of Toronto Press, 1991): 56.
7
Sections of this paragraph have been paraphrased from Heather Dean, “’The Persuasion of Books’:
The Significance of Libraries in Colonial British Columbia,” Libraries and the Cultural Record, Vol. 46,
Issue 1 (2011): 50, 56; Robert A.J. McDonald quoted in Ibid, 56.
Tina Loo, Making Law, Order, and Authority in British Columbia, 1821-1871 (Toronto: University of
8
Toronto Press, 1994): 150; Ibid, 151.
9
Colonel Richard Moody quoted in Barman, The West Beyond the West, 75; Ibid, 70.
10
Susan Dickinson Scott, “The Attitude of the Colonial Governors and Officials Towards
Confederation,” in W. George Shelton, ed. British Columbia and Confederation (Victoria: University of
Victoria and Morriss Printing Company, 1967): 143-164.
11
Keith T. Carlson, You Are Asked to Witness: The Stó:lō in Canada’s Pacific Coast History (Chilliwack
BC: Stó:lō Heritage Trust, 1997): 67; Ibid, 73.
49
12
Kenneth Lines, “A Bit of Old England: The Selling of Tourist Victoria” (MA thesis: University of
Victoria, 1972): 17-18; Charles Nordhoff, Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1874): 223
13
Dawson, Selling British Columbia, 24.
14
Peter A. Baskerville, Beyond the Island: An Illustrated History of Victoria (Burlington, Ont.: Windsor
Publishers, 1986): 7.
15
16
Lines, “A Bit of Old England,” vii.
Ian P.B. Halkett, “Tourism in Victoria, British Columbia” (Honours Essay in Geography:
University of Victoria, 1968): 33; Peter Murphy, 1989 Exit Survey (Victoria: Tourism Victoria, 1989): 21,
in the City of Victoria Archives, City Document #165.
17
Duke and Duchess of York quoted in the Tourist Development Association, Picturesque Victoria
(Victoria, 1902) in Lines, “A Bit of Old England,” 32; “Victoria’s Welcome,” The Daily Colonist, Vol. 86,
No. 98 (October 2, 1901): 1.
18
See Colin Browne, Motion Picture Production in British Columbia: 1898-1940 (Victoria: BC Provincial
Museum, 1979); Rudyard Kipling, Letters to the Family (Toronto: Macmillan, 1908): 66.
19
J. Douglas Macey and N. de Bertrand Lugrin, “Victoria, My Homeland,” Sheet Music with Lyrics
(Victoria, BC: J. Douglas Macey, 1922): 1-2, on the University of British Columbia—B.C. Sheet Music
Website,
<http://www.library.ubc.ca/music/bcmusic/htmpages/victoriamyhomeland.html#>
(accessed December 6, 2011); Elliott West, “Selling the Myth: Western Images in Advertising,” Montana,
Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer 1996): 41.
20
Lines, “A Bit of Old England,” 55-56.
21
See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to the Pseudo-Events in America (New York: 1972): 77-117.
22
Barman, The West Beyond the West, 305; Ibid, 239; Ibid, 193.
23
Lines, “A Bit of Old England,” 57.
50
24
Dawson, Selling British Columbia, 54.
25
For an excellent overview of Warren’s early efforts to promote Victoria in the 1920s see Lines, “A Bit
of Old England.”
26
Island Motorist article quoted in Dawson, Selling British Columbia, 70.
27
Adams 1937 address quoted in Ibid, 72.
28
The original ad is filed in the British Columbia Archives, Premiers’ Papers, Box 137, File 10, George
Warren to Premier Pattullo, May 11, 1936.
29
Dawson, Selling British Columbia, 165-166.
30
Ibid, 176.
31
“Put on Those Walking Shoes,” The Victoria Visitor, Vol. 9, No. 5 (1977): 26, in author’s collection.
32
See EPA ad in Dawson, Selling British Columbia, 57.
33
Jay Mechling’s analysis of the Seminole tourism appears in Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of
the Indian in American Popular Culture, S. Elizabeth Bird, ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996): 162-163;
also see Ian McKay, “Tartanism Triumphant: The Construction of Scottishness in Nova Scotia, 19331954,” Acadiensis, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring 1992): 5-47.
34
Beautiful Victoria: The Capital City (Victoria, B.C.: Stan V. Wright Ltd., 1985); Lane quoted in H.P.
McKeever, “’You Might Say I Live in the Past,’” Canadian Hotel Review and Restaurant (August 1960): 26;
“A Little Bit of Olde England,” The Victoria Visitor, Vol. 9, No. 5 (1977): 7, in author’s own collection.
35
Ronald John Williams, “Canada’s ‘City of Gardens,’” Holiday (September 1948): 91-97, 137-138.
36
“English Element Over-Emphasized; Top Picture Posed, Warren Admits,” The Daily Colonist
(August 27, 1948): 3, in the City of Victoria Archives, Newspaper Clippings Files--Tourism; Editorial
column: “What Sort of Eyes are Looking at Victoria?” The Daily Colonist (August 28, 1948): 4, in Ibid.
37
38
This little crisis is described in full in Lines, “A Bit of Old England,” 88.
Indeed in March 2012 the city celebrated the 40 th anniversary of “Be a Tourist in Your Own
Hometown”—with several Anglophile gardens and military museums dominating the lists of top
51
attractions.
See
the
Attractions
Victoria:
Be
a
Tourist
in
Your
Hometown
Website
<http://www.attractionsvictoria.com/bat> (accessed September 12, 2012).
39
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1983): 1.
40
Halkett, “Tourism in Victoria, British Columbia,” 13.
41
Ibid, 77-80; Ibid, 21.
42
Ginnie Beardsley, “The Princess Rules the Waves,” Beautiful British Columbia Magazine (Spring
1976): 3; “Cruising in Style,” The Victoria Visitor, Vol. 9, No. 5 (1977): 15.
43Scott
Mccredie, “Victoria BC—A Stroll Across the Quaint Façade—The Real Victoria Hides Behind
a British Mask,” Seattle Times (June 30, 1999). Online article.
44
Susan Vreeland, “Victoria: The Delightful Paradox,” Saturday Evening Post (April 1982): 106-109.
45
The Financial Post, October 5, 1963, also see Stephen Franklin, “The English Touch: Victoria,”
Holiday 35:4 (April 1964): 132; Village Voice editor quoted in Edward Gould, Only in Victoria, You Say
(Victoria, B.C.: Cappis Press, 1982): 3.
46
Historical MLS Statistics—Realtors of Greater Victoria, “Annual Summary of Single Family
Dwellings Since 1978” (December 2010); Joel Connelly, “Victoria Flushing Away Its Image,” Seattle PostIntelligencer (July 11, 2006) <http://www.seattlepi.com/local/Connelly/article/Victoria-flushingaway-its-image-1208675.php> (Accessed January 5, 2012); Hal K. Rothman considers this paradox in
his excellent study of tourism in the American West, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century
American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998): 10-28.
47
Richard Cohen, “The Existential Tourist, “The Washington Post Magazine, July 30, 1989.
48
Canada Census, 1901. 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941, 1951, 1981, 1991, 2001; Judith Lavoie, “The British
Aren’t Coming,” Victoria Times-Colonist (November 9, 1997) in the City of Victoria Archives, Newspaper
Clippings Files—Ethnic Groups.
52
49
Statistics Canada website, Canadian Census Analyzer, Profile of Census Subdivisions for Victoria,
BC, Language Immigration, Citizenship, Mobility and Migration stats, 2001, 2006.
50
Michael Ovenell and Kenneth Stratford, “Victoria/ Vancouver Island Tourism—The Packaged
Product: A Report by the Business and Industrial Development Commission of Victoria” (August 1986):
67, 68, 44.
51
See especially Ian Haysom, “This is not your father’s England,” Victoria Times-Colonist (November
4, 2001): D5; and Judith Lavoie, “The British Aren’t Coming,” Victoria Times-Colonist (November 9, 1997)
in the City of Victoria Archives, Newspaper Clippings Files—Ethnic Groups.
52
53
Barman, The West Beyond The West, 305.
Western Canada and Alaska, American Automobile Association (Heathrow, FL: American
Automobile Association, 2011): 194.
54
Lenny Bruce quoted in Mark Salber Phillips “What Is Tradition When It is Not ‘Invented’? A
Historiographical Introduction,” in Phillips and Gordon Schochet, eds. Questions of Tradition (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004): 3.
55
Statistics provided by the Victoria Visitor’s Bureau; New Yorker quoted in Franklin, “The English
Touch: Victoria,” 75; Ovenell and Stratford, “Victoria/ Vancouver Island Tourism—The Packaged
Product”: 66, City of Victoria Archives, City Document #208; Andrew A. Duffy, “No Accidental
Tourists: The Slick Sell of Our City to the Outside World,” (June 3, 2000) in City of Victoria Archives,
Newspaper Clippings File—Tourism.
56
Georgia/North Carolina/South Carolina TourBook, American Automobile Association (Heathrow, FL:
American Automobile Association, 1989): 101.
57
Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, eds., Myth and Southern History, Volume 2: The New South
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989): xiii-xv.
53
58
Quotations from E. Braithwaite in in Ben McBride, “The (Post)colonial Landscape of Cathedral
Square: Urban Revelopment and Representation in the ‘Cathedral City’,” New Zealand Geographer, Vol.
55, No. 1 (April 1999): 5.
59
Kevin Glynn, “Contested Land and Mediascapes: The Visuality of the Postcolonial City,” New
Zealand Geographer, Vol. 65 (2009): 9-10.
60
Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn, “Countercartographies: New (Zealand) Cultural Studies/
Geographies and the City,” New Zealand Geographer, Vol. 65 (April 2009): 1.
61
Patrick Bonazza quoted in Ben McBride, “The (Post)colonial Landscape of Cathedral Square:
Urban Revelopment and Representation in the ‘Cathedral City’,” New Zealand Geographer, Vol. 55, No. 1
(April 1999): 3.
62
Franklin Ginn, “Colonial Transformations: Nature, Progress and Science in the Christchurch
Botanic Gardens,” New Zealand Geographer, Vol. 65 (2009): 35.
63
Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 13.