User:JennieM/History

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I was born 24 October 1916 in Eburne, Vancouver, in British Columbia. Eburn changed its name to Marpole in 1916, and became part of Vancouver in 1929. My father had immigrated to Canada in 1910, and my mother followed with my two older sisters six months later in 1911.

My parents came from Gateshead on the banks of the Tyne River across from Newcastle, and sailed from Liverpool. They left Northern England because of the fear of consumption/tuberculosis that was rampant in the area. My sister, Margaret or Little Meggie as she was called, died in about 1910 of the croup and this prompted my parents to move.

I moved to Kelowna at the age of nine months, and this is the one place on earth I love the most. I was a plump baby, discribed as looking like Queen Victoria. Shortly after our arrival in Kelowna a best baby competition was held. My sisters entered me in the competition and I won second prize.

As a child I made a doll house from the leaves of the birch trees. I would rake them into rooms and bring my dolls outside to play. I used to visit our neighbours regularly and talk to their flowers.

In the mornings I would tell my younger sister, Dot, about my adventures at night on a magic carpet. Dot would beg me to be allowed to come with me, but she could never come on these journeys because she was never old enough. Just after her birthday, when she should have been old enough, I told her that they had raised the age.

I remember that when I was five years old, I was picked up into a buckboard to sit between Mr. Davies and my father. We went up to Mr. Davies farm where my father, a butcher, slaughtered a flock of sheep. He took each sheep put its head on a log and cut its throat. There was no attempt to shield children from these facts of life.

In Kelowna we didn't have a sewage system when we first moved there, but relied on an outhouse. Mr. Copland drove the honeywagon which came by regularly about once a week in the early hours of the morning. The wagon was filled with waste from the fruit packing houses. The wagon was pulled by four beautiful percheron horses. The wheels were hard, and the wagon could be heard at a long distance. We would sing the following vulgar welcoming song: "Hokus, Pokus, a penny a lump, The more you eat, the more you dump."

Mr. Copland was a handsome man with a Van Dyke beard who-when he wasn't working-dressed very well, but he was shy and seldom came into town.

School Life

When they arrived in Kelowna, my two sisters invited their teacher, Mr. Taylor (tail-er), for tea one day. I crawled up on his lap and asked, "Where is your tail?" I also commented on his bald head, for which I was called into the kitchen by my mother who repremanded me. Determined to correct the situation, I returned to the living room and stroked Mr. Taylor's head and said, "You're not bald, you have lots of hair." which was obviously not true.

My sister, Mollie, took me to the first day at school. There were two bicycle sheds one for the boys and one for the girls. The two sexes were separated when they played during recess. Opposite the bicycle sheds there was space for logs that were used to fire the furnaces.

My first teacher was Miss Woods, who dressed like a Victorian lady with skirts down to her ankles. One day she put her hand on my head and said to me, "My, Jennie, you don't seem to grow." I replied, "No, Miss Woods, I grow the other way, like you do."

Always interested in theatre, I insisted my friends and I put on a play of Robin Hood and Maid Marion. We took all of the used Christmas trees to make a forest on the stage, but the trees wouldn't stand up and the trees were loosing their needles. Unfortunately the problems with the trees caused Maid Marion (Kay Pepman nee Hill) to get the giggles and our drama turned into a farse.

Because my older sisters were 10 and 13 years older than I was, when I was quite young they had boyfriends call on them and would chat to them outside the house. I would climb upstairs, and spit on these boyfriends from the open window.

My father wouldn't darken a church door, although my mother attended the Anglican church. I was baptized when I was 12 years old, because my brother, Harry, wanted to sing in the St. Michaels and All Angels (Anglican) Church Choir. My brother, my younger sister, Dot, and I were all baptized at the same time.

Mr. Carter was an Irishman who taught manual training (industrial arts) at the school. He could play the fiddle like no one else and taught me and seven others Irish dancing so that we could participate in the Okanogan Music Festival. Harry went out with his daughter, Eileen, but they never married because she was a catholic and he a protestant.

On Saturdays my brother Harry would take me on the bar of his bicycle to the Kelowna (movie) Theatre. Most of the boys had to do this. Some of my favourite films from the period include works featuring Charlie Chaplin, Our Gang, and Mary Pickford. A few years later I enjoyed Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn starring Jackie Coogan. One of the films that I was not allowed to watch was The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino. However, I defied authority and managed to see it. Later on I especially remember the film It Happened One Night.

Work and Early Adult Years

My sister Milly worked at Spurriers Sporting Goods Store in Kelowna run by Joe and Goldie Spurrier. She was American, he was French Canadian. Sporting goods was just one part of the store, and it might be better to say that it was a variety store. Before the public library was built, Spurriers had the first library in Kelowna, Customers would come in borrow books and return them. In addition, there was a book section, magazine and newspaper stand. Tobacco supplies including pipes and tobacco, cigarettes and cigars. It was also a stationery store, selling ledgers and other supplies businesses needed. I worked in the library at first after school and on the weekends, from the age of 14. After a bit I worked more and more with the sporting goods. In the winter we sold skiing and badminton equipment, skates, hockey sticks and pucks, some snow shoes and the odd toboggan, sleigh. In the spring golf was important. Fishing equipment was important most of the year, except the winter. Hunting equipment was also sold most of the year, rifles and shotguns and shells for them. Towards summer we had tennis equipment. In the fall we sold school supplies: text books on order, pencils, scriblers, etc. The store didn't sell clothing for any of the sports. This was left to the clothing stores.

When I was eighteen or nineteen I left Spurriers and went to the English Woolen Shop run by Hazel Buck. She sold high quality ladies woolen dresses, coats, scarfs. For the summer we sold quite a number of silk, cotton and linen goods. We also sold leather gloves, handbags, belts but not shoes. We also had costume jewellry. We didn't sell lingerie. That was left to the dry goods stores.

When I started work I paid board to your parents. It cost me $20 a month, which was probably about half rent. During the depression, Ted Willoughby, the son of a wallpaper baron from Liverpool, rented a room from my parents. He had been sent out to Canada to straighten him out. He was a likeable person, but a bit of a scoundral. I think he moved back to England, and I often wonder what happened to him. Jack Bowles also rented a room. He was more of a stuffed shirt. He became a policeman.

Bruce Page was the first person in Kelowna to waterski. We went surfboarding first, then took up water skiing. However, I found it hard on my arms so I gave it up quickly. Gordon Finch had a nice boat and took us out.

Both my sister, Mollie, and I were diagnosed with Tuberculosis peritonitis, which is a non-pulmonary form of tuberculosis. This required an operation to remove some intestinal tissue. I was discharged from hospital just before my 21st birthday.

I participated in a lot of sports, but skiing was my favourite. Max Deiffer, who was from Switzerland, taught us how to ski. Max, his wife Alice and their two year old son would come up with us. We began skiing on the golf course at Glenmore (The Kelowna Golf Club), but we soon off to Joe Rich which had ski hills. Afterwards, we went up to Silverstar near Vernon, and were possibly the first to ski on it. I used barrel staves and my brother's old clothes first, then I got a pair of pine skis from Spurriers for Christmas 1934. Afterwards I got some Swedish skis with lignestone edges, which was made out of an exceptionally hard wood.

Joe Spurrier taught me how to fly fish. He also gave me fly fishing equipment. I usually went up to the Beaver Lake chain near Winfield, but also went to Pillar Lake, between Peachland and Summerland back in the hills. We were usually after rainbow trout. People would come into Spurriers to sell their hand-tied flies and I would use these.

I started hunting when I was 16 or 17. Spurriers rented out guns. They had one that had belonged to the Countess Bubna Litite of Austria. This gun had an engraved stock. It was a 12-gauge shotgun with a light load. So I was able to use this on my hunting expeditions. The countess started the Eldorado Hotel in Okanogan Mission. I used to hunt pheasant, ducks and grouse. My favouite hunting dog was Chief, owned by Don Ellis. Chief was a pointer. He would wait patiently until told to "put it up." He would then flush out the bird. We went hunting on Joe Rich and the Belgo area.

I also rented rifles, usually a Lee Enfield .303, to hunt white tailed deer. We went up towards Beaverdel. We were usually four people who went out together. Don Ellis's sons were often with me.

War Years

While many of the men joined up right away when the war started, such as David Chapman, who spent time in Africa, and met his wife there, I waited until July 1941 to sign up. Edgar McLellan was a recruiting officer who came to Kelowna, and who enlisted me. We all went to the Aquatic Dance held every week in the summer on Wednesday and Saturday. Evelyn Ward (Jones) who worked for the Royal Bank had one too many boys to take her to the dance so she convinced to go with "the other joker." So Chrisie Burt (Leathley), Evelyn Ward and I went off to the dance with Monty Jones, a doctor from the recruiting group, and my future husband Edgar McLellan. After the dance I took the doctor and Mac out fishing to Beaver Lake at 4 am. I ended up chased Mac from the Pacific to the Atlantic and he couldn't swim.

After joining up I had to travel by train to Vancouver for a medical and to "sign on the dotted line." I returned home to Kelowna and waited to be called up. When I was called up I reported to Vancouver where we were shipped out by train to Ottawa. After a few days I was sent to Y depot in Halifax. This was a huge area of barracks in an H shape. There was a Wall of Jericoe separating the boys from the girls. We took our training there, which lasted a couple of weeks, and we had to take tests. I worked as a plane plotter in the airforce. I was assigned to fighter operations, and was sent onwards to Torbay in Newfoundland. Most of our work was spent plotting fighters crossing the Atlantic, finding the location where planes were ditched and sending out co-ordinates so that the pilots could be rescued. Marg Kennedy, Kay Armstrong (MacAskil), Peggy Davidson (Ludasher) were my friends at the time.

When we sent letters home they ended up looking like doileys, they were so cut up from the censorship.

A lot of the men were going out of their minds. They had joined up to fight and ended up doing meaningless work. When the weather didn't permit flying, we women could always knit or do embroidery, but most men couldn't and felt very frustrated.

My father was conscripted during the war to travel around the province to teach younger butchers how to cut meat to make more efficient use of it. This was because he had his training from England which used different cuts compared to the Canadians.

On 28 August 1942 I was married at the home of our friends Jack and Alice Higgins, 42 Rennie’s Mill Road, St. John’s Newfoundland. They had three Children: Gilbert, Mary Margaret and little John. Since Mac was not baptised, the Anglican church refused to marry us. A United Church minister officiated at our wedding. Marg Kennedy was witness.