8 - Wednesday, July 10, 1985 - North Shore News

Canadiana finds for fact aficionados

id you

know that Charles Dickens’ third

son, Francis Jeffrey, was a bum, aad that
he was a Mountie in the days when Moun-
ties really were Mounties? But that he was still a

get this
straight

by Doug Collins

It is so. The fact is includ-
ed in England: The Cana-
dian Guide to Great Britain
a fine little book that pro-
vides a lot of information
on Canadian connections
with and in the U.K., and if
you’re going that way it
would pay you to take a
copy with you. There are
bits of Canadiana all over
the place and this book tells
you where to find them.

Dicken’s wayward son
landed on these shores in
1874 and, through pull, was
appointed a sub-inspector in
the North West Mounted
Police. Those were the

glory-days of the Empire, of
course, and it wasn’t too
difficult for Francis Jeffrey's
mother to whisper a word in
the right ears. Also, it didn’t
hurt to be a Dickens. The
name was magic, and Dad
wasn’t long dead.

Alas, the younger
Dickens distinguished
himself in nothing. He in-
herited none of the old
man’s talent for writing, and
by the time he got to Canada
had already failed at
everything. he’d tried. He
dropped out of medical
school, couldn’t pass the
Foreign Office entrance ex-

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ams, and had a booze pro-
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a booze problem indeed,
considering the competition
there was in those days).

Authors Jeffrey Simpson
and Ged Martin write that
Dickens’ superiors in the
NWMP ‘‘considered him to
be lazy, alcoholic, and unfit
to be a senior officer.’” He
messed up everything he did,
and nearly managed to get
himself and his men wiped
out by Indians in what is
now Alberta. He quit the
force in 1886, ‘complaining
about the size of his retire-
ment payment,’’ and died in
the U.S. not long after-
wards.

He may have come to this
country because Dickens
Senior had been here 40
years previously and liked
most of what he saw. An ex-
ception was ‘the wild and
rabid Toryism of Teronto,”"
which the old man found
“appalling. You have to
remember, of course, that
Dickens Pere wus a
dedicated do-gooder and had
no sympathy for the likes of
sensible old Scrooge, who
only wanted to get his mitts
on the money that wasters
had borrowed from him.

Dickens Senior also seems
to have had an interest in
prisons. Kingston, Ont., he
found to be ‘‘a very poor

town, rendered still poorer
in the appearance of its
market place by the ravages
of a recent fire. Indeed, it
may be said of Kingston that
one-half of it appears to be
burnt down, and the other
half not to be built up.’’
But, he wrote, the place had
an ‘admirable jail’. The
new prison in Toronto was
OK, too.

There’s a ‘nt of anecdotal
stuff like this in the book,
but there are many more
concrete things. One of the
more obvious ones for
British Columbians is King’s
Lynn in Norfolk, where
Captain Vancouver was
brought up (and where

stupid planners have allowed
the house in which he was
born to be torn down.
Nevertheless, there is a
statue to him, plus other
memorabilia.

The village of Tolpuddle,
in Dorset, was home to the
Tolpuddle Martyrs, who
were exiled to Australia in
the 1830s for trying to found
an agricultural union. Par-
doned, the seven men settled
in Ontario, and died there.
And then there's
Brookwood, the magnificent
military cemetery near Wok-
ing, where more than kalf of
the graves are Canadian.

See U.K
Page 11

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