Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer

2. Mother

2 Mother I n the same year, 1977, as my visit to the Beckwith ancestral haunts of Old Lyme, Connecticut, Grace Dunn, my mother’s English cousin, paid me a visit in Toronto. The previous year had seen the first Parti Québécois victory in the Quebec provincial election, and Ms Dunn said: “John, what is all this about Quebec? They don’t seem to like us.” It was difficult to persuade her that both francophones and anglophones in Canada considered themselves Canadians and that there was no longer any strong feeling of “we/us” bonding the anglophones to their long-ago imperial motherland. Ms Dunn lived her whole life (into her early nineties) in the small Hertfordshire village of High Wych, serving the local county family, the Buxtons , and doing volunteer work for the local Anglican church. The church is not old as English churches go; it was constructed in the early nineteenth century in the religious upsurge following Waterloo. High Wych is a short distance from Cambridge, and only about an hour’s journey by car from London, but Ms Dunn travelled seldom. Her two or three trips to Canada were visits to her brothers and their families. The churchyard has markers on the graves of her parents and other close relatives. Two of her uncles had emigrated to Canada in the 1880s—George Ironside Dunn (born 8 October 1863) and Thomas Ironside Dunn. A generation later, two of her brothers did the same. The recurrent middle name “Ironside” suggests a seventeenth-century connection to the followers of Cromwell. Sarah Dunn, my great-grandmother, was born Sarah Bunyan and evidently claimed descent from the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan. The Dunn brothers found employment in Winnipeg, and George was married there, it seems only briefly; details of this episode, and the fate 21 of Mary Jane Alexander, his wife, never formed part of the family story. In a sad recurrence of a familiar Victorian experience, she died of consumption on 31 March 1894, aged twenty-eight, having survived their infant son by only about six weeks.1 George Dunn returned to England and married Mary Richardson at Tunbridge Wells on 17 June 1896, following which the two of them—my future grandparents—sailed back to Canada and travelled by rail across the country to Victoria. They welcomed their first child, Margaret Alice, on 2 November 1898, and in fairly orderly fashion three more: Robert George (“Bob”), 1900, Mary Elizabeth (“Bess”or“Bessie”), 1902, and Agnes Emily, 1906, who being the youngest was called “Babes.” Like Dad’s parents, my mother’s parents were mature people in their early thirties when they married. On the evidence, they were resourceful and hard-working. My grandmother’s family, the Richardsons, like the Dunns, were small-town English: she was born (31 December 1863, eldest of thirteen children) in the village of Catsfield, Sussex, where her father was the local constable. One of her brothers, Charles (Uncle Charley) 22 • life, part 1 The Dunn family, Victoria, circa 1909. Left to right: Bob; Bessie; George Ironside Dunn, my grandfather; Agnes; Mary Elizabeth Richardson, my grandmother; Margaret, my mother. emigrated to Canada and farmed in the Fraser Valley. At the time of her marriage she was a lady’s companion, and my mother was named “Margaret Alice” after her well-to-do employer, Margaret Alice Rogers—perhaps in expectation of an endowment; if so, it never came. George I. Dunn seems to have been an entrepreneur of the same type as John L. Beckwith, though I imagine him as a less aggressive, less ambitious personality. At the time of Mother’s birth, he was manager of a travellers ’ hotel, the Occidental, on lower Johnson Street. In later days that part of Victoria became a rough waterfront district and during the Second World War was the locale of several brothels: Mother was always circumspect therefore in describing her earliest family home. Subsequently the Dunns moved to a house on Pembroke Street and then to a larger house on Fernwood Road, just a few blocks north of the Beckwiths. Their father was now running a classy tobacconist shop at 1116 Government Street for the Vancouver owner, E.A. Morris. The elegant storefront still survives, and the name “Morris” has been retained. I picture Mother in her growing years as brainy and athletic. Tall and long-legged, she excelled at both grass...