A Born Crusader
Personally, I do not believe in “re-inventing the wheel”, so when I find an excellently written article on an early Women's Institute activist, I use that material. Such is the case with this article.
Elizabeth Forbes was a writer of note in the Victoria area, particularly in the years 1970 and later. She wrote a pamphlet entitled Wild Roses at their Feet -- Pioneer Women of Vancouver Island later. I particularly liked her summary of the efforts of Mrs. James (Vangie) MacLachlan, which I am duplicating here. “It was no use asking Mrs. James McLachlan to remain cool and detached when she was fighting for better conditions for women and more especially for children. She was always emotionally involved in her “causes” and worked personally, day and night, to see them through.
This was a woman with a tremendous social conscience, coupled with a quiet sense of humor, very impatient with what she scathingly called “red tape”, and extremely bad tempered when balked in what she believed what was a worthwhile idea. Consequently she made bitter enemies as well as many staunch friends.
Born Evangeline Shaw in 1878 at Kentville, Nova Scotia, and trained as a teacher there, she travelled west to Victoria in the early 1900's to become the first principal of McKenzie Avenue School in Saanich.
In 1906 she married James McLachlan and they lived in an old farmhouse, surrounded by two acres of ancient fruit trees on Glanford Avenue. “Mrs. Mac”, as people soon began to call her, believed a living could be made from that acreage and in her enthusiastic way she set out to prove it. She became an authority on breeding and raising goats. There were English chestnut and walnut trees on the place and she coddled them in the hopes of getting returns from the early harvest. When the trees languished, she would say angrily “those darn trees, what is the matter with them?”
Then, as the children were born (a boy and two girls) she developed a keen interest in healthy babies. That's when her first crusade was organized, to have a Well Baby Clinic established at Royal Oak, on the Saanich Peninsula, a few miles from Victoria. That clinic later developed into the Royal Oak Health Centre.
In the next 35 years, this tall, energetic woman was in the forefront of many public welfare projects, as promoter, organizer, speaker, and author. She helped launch the South Saanich Anti-Tubercular Society and was secretary of the that group when it furnished a room at Tranquille Sanitarium near Kamloops. The Local Council of Women held her interest and she campaigned on behalf of woman suffrage on Vancouver Island. During the First World War she was named secretary of Women's Institutes for the Province and a few years later, was appointed Superintendent of Institutes, a position she held until 1946.
Rural communities and the women and children in and around them were her special concern. In depression years she learned to spin, weave and hook rugs from rags, then went out and taught the women these handicrafts, also how to make a little money from them.
In “the dirty thirties” Dr. Henry Esson Young, then Provincial Medical Health Officer, persuaded her to rally the Institutes to assist in organizing dental clinics in British Columbia.
Schools were used as “depots” where the children came to have their teeth checked. When the program started on the Lower Mainland Mrs. Mac was “shocked and appalled” at the high incidence of dental caries (untreated) in the youngsters, so she rolled up her sleeves, figuratively speaking, and in her determined way went at it hammer and tongs, until dental clinics were set up in nearly every part of the Province.
When Dr. Cyril T. Wace first unfolded his dream of a hospital for Crippled Children, it was Mrs. Mac who influenced women's institutes to support him and who worked through these institutes to make the dream a reality. Result was the Queen Alexandra Solarium, first established at Mill Bay and now in the Gordon Head area of Saanich.
One of her most important contributions, she always believed, was the completion of the Othoa Scott Fund for crippled children. That fund was born in 1922, some time before the Solarium opened at Mill Bay on March 1, 1927, through an appeal for help from the Hornby Island Institute for a crippled child there. Money was raised and the child was placed in Vancouver General Hospital.
With donations left after little Othoa Scott was helped back to health, a trust fund was set up to assist other little ones like her. This fund reached its objective of $10,000.00 in 1946, just before Mrs. Mac retired as superintendent of institutes.
Retirement years were spent at Hope, where she established a craft cottage, originated the first Burns Supper there, worked with the Hope Institute to raise money for the hospital and grew the finest tulips in the district.
Eventually, when she was slowing up and unable to accomplish all the things she wished to do, Mrs. Mac became very impatient, irascible and extremely difficult to live with. She died in September 1958. “Her heart just stopped”, a daughter, Mrs. T. G. McCallum (Renie), said, “and what a mercy! She would have hated losing her independence and lying helpless in a sickbed.”
My thanks to Elizabeth Forbes for this account of Mrs. Mac's life – and thanks to whoever it was who channeled this copy of it me.
Yours For Home and Country, Ruth Fenner, Provincial Historian, British Columbia Women's Institute