With Kiplingesque bravado, Sir Clive Phillipps-Wolley was a great
white hunter who epitomizes an era of British Columbian literature
that portrayed B.C. as a rough Eden that only required English
pluck and perseverance to be tamed. Born Edward Clive Oldnall Long
Phillips in 1853 in Dorset, England, Phillipps-Wolley was a distant
relative of Lord Robert Clive, knighted for his military and
administrative roles during the subjugation of Bengal in the 18th
century. As Phillips, he successfully petitioned for the
inheritance of his great-grandfather's estate, dropped the first
name Edward in favour of Clive, changed his last name to
Phillipps-Wolley, took up the study of law, married 16-year-old
Janie Fenwick, taught musketry and then managed to practise law for
less than a year. In 1881, he published Sport in the Crimea and
Caucasus, based on his time hunting in Russia. Trottings of a
Tenderfoot: A Visit to the Columbian Fiords (1888) is mostly about
his two-month hunting trip to B.C., mainly on Vancouver Island. "I
came across no place in America in which I would be so content to
stay as in Victoria," he wrote. He returned in 1886 on a game
hunting expedition, described in A Sportsman's Eden (1888), after
which he settled in Victoria in 1890. "You could not pay me to come
back to the old country," he said in an interview with the London
Mining Journal. Phillipps-Wolley followed his hastily written novel
about a remittance man on Vancouver Island, One of the Broken
Brigade (1897), with The Chicamon Stone (1900), a novel that
includes a heroic Tahltan named Siyah Joe who knows the secret
location of gold on McDame Creek. (Chicamon means gold.)
Phillipps-Wolley had some commercial success with Gold, Gold in
Cariboo (1894), a young adult novel, set in 1862, warning against
the folly of gold fever, and proved himself popular as a public
speaker, although he repeatedly failed in his attempts to gain
election as a politician. As a provincial sanitary inspector, he
described Nelson as a disaster area and criticized B.C.'s Chinese
as living cheaply in unsanitary conditions to compete in the labour
market. "Wherever I have been in British Columbia I have found
Chinamen living like sewer rats, a grave danger to white men's
health." He concluded, "Nanaimo Chinatown can be cured in only one
way-by fire." He equally despised Americans. "Canada's danger is a
moral, not a physical one," he decreed. "If you should allow your
newspapers to draw their news, as they copy their style, from the
Yankees, annexation will soon follow." Warning of an expanding
German navy, Phillipps-Wolley began urging Canada to build warships
for England in 1908. At his own expense, he published a pamphlet
containing his speeches, entitled The Canadian Naval Question.
Phillipps-Wolley's son Clive Jr. was killed as a young soldier in
1914, days after England declared war on Germany. Phillipps-Wolley
was knighted in 1915. Two years later he dedicated the poems in
Songs from a Young Man's Land to his dead son. Phillipps-Wolley
died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1918 and was buried in the St.
Peter's Anglican Church cemetery in Duncan. (abcbookworld.com)
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