Celebrating Rupert's 97th with a familiar voice

The Daily News did a bit of reminiscing on Wednesday, with a special article on one of the city's most familiar historians.

Phyllis Bowman who has written many books on Rupert over the years and still contributes to the Daily News a historical piece weekly was interviewed from her home on Vancouver Island.

While many will celebrate the city's history on Saturday, few will have actually lived as much of it as the always well researched and articulate Ms. Bowman.

City approaching milestone as its 97th birthday looms
By Monica Lamb-Yorski
Special to the Daily News
Wednesday, March 07, 2007

When Prince Rupert celebrates its 97th birthday as an incorporated city on March 10 long-time Rupert booster Phylis Bowman will be reflecting on the city’s history from her home in Langford, one of Greater Victoria’s cities.

Bowman has lived on Vancouver Island since 2000 when she left her home in Port Edward but most of her life was spent on the North Coast.

Toda,y she continues to write a weekly column for the Prince Rupert Daily News about local history, stemming from a lifetime spent gathering information about the area, working in the tourism sector and as a reporter. She has written several history books and continues to be interested in the goings-on of her old home town.

From Langford she said: “I still talk about Rupert like I’m there.”

Born in l920 in Prince Rupert, one of Sid and Erna Hamblin’s two daughters, Bowman speaks of her childhood fondly.

“We played games with the Eby kids and others in our neighbourhood on Fourth Avenue East. When it snowed, we would sleigh ride down Sixth West, right on McBride all the way down to McClymont Park or left on McBride and down to Cow Bay. We had to walk all the way back up but we didn’t mind.”

The CN had its ships the Prince George and Prince Rupert sailing on Thursday and Saturday nights and people from town would go down to see the boats leave.

The company distributed rolls of coloured paper. The passengers would toss one end out to spectators on the dock. As the ship left the paper would unroll and there’d be different coloured ribbons breaking and floating along the water.

“We didn’t need anything in those days we made our own fun,” she said.

She attended Booth School up to Grade 8 and remembers lining up outside with her classmates and asking Principal John Wilson to tell them about his experiences in the First World War. The longer they asked him questions, the longer they could stay outside. From there, she attended the old King Edward School on Seventh Avenue East.

“It was torn down and a new school built there. Is that building still standing?” she asked.
Bowman’s father was one of the city’s pioneers, arriving in Prince Rupert in l907 from Kent, England. From a family of 11 sons, he quit school at 12 and like so many, later left for Canada.
When he arrived, Prince Rupert was just beginning to carve itself out of the wilderness. The surveyors had set up camp on Kaien Island in May of l906 to begin working for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. From the beginning Hamblin viewed Prince Rupert as a “very community minded little town”.

One story he told his daughters was about a man who slipped on the boardwalk and his food went flying. With the help of bystanders and the laying down of some wooden planks he was able to retrieve his food from the muskeg.

Bowman described her father as a man with magical fingers. He could grow beautiful gardens, with vegetables in the back yard and flowers in the front.

“There were three lilac bushes in the front yard — two purple and one white. People would stop to talk to my dad about his garden and leave with a bouquet in their hands. The more he gave away, the more they grew.”

During the Depression, the Hamblin family never went hungry, there was always fresh food.
“My German grandma had berries growing in her back yard that my sister Eileen and I would go pick to sell to people on Fourth Avenue and the cafes downtown. She also had chickens so we would get eggs from her,” Bowman recalled.

When the laundry that Hamblin was working at laid him off during the Depression he built his own laundry on to the back of his house and called it Peerless Laundry. Bowman worked as her father’s book keeper.

On Sundays, the family would often hike along the tracks to North Pacific Cannery to visit Uncle Paul and Aunt Freda. They’d stay for dinner and take the train back to Rupert.

“We’d phone up to Haysport to see if the train was on time. I can still remember the guy at the other end saying Haaaayyyyysport. He’d let the conductor know that there were people wanting to get on the train at North Pacific.”

Bowman said the city was transformed quickly during the Second World War when soldiers arrived from all over Canada and the United States.

“It was strange because everything had always been so peaceful and now everyone was preoccupied with watching for the enemy.”

Billeted Canadian soldiers would pass the Hamblin home and stop and talk and eventually started coming in for a cup of coffee.

Soon the Hamblin girls were attending dances hosted by the Canadian soldiers on Saturday nights.

“We’d dance from 9 to 12, no wonder my legs are going out on me now. My sister Eileen would sing and I would recite Robert Service poems.”

Bowman was hired by the United States Engineering Department when they built the road to Port Edward.

“I was dispatching their trucks and some days I’d go out on the skunk — a little train they had — to see how the road was going.”

When her mother died and her sister married a U.S. soldier, Bowman decided to make her own life and enlisted and the army and was stationed in Victoria.

“It wasn’t as busy then as it is now. I look out my window and see windows looking back at me. It’s a far cry from the view of Ridley Island my husband Lloyd and I had from our home in Port Edward.”

Bowman chuckles when she hears discussion of Prince Rupert and its port.

“I heard that when I was in the cradle,” she said.

When asked about her columns and what she chooses to write about next she replied: “things are always falling in my lap. The other day I was having tea at the Empress Hotel and afterwards was waiting in my wheelchair for my friend to come around with the car. A tall blonde lady walked by, stopped and said I looked familiar.”

It turns out the two women had known each other in Prince Rupert 25 years ago. Bowman plans to write about her in a Daily News column.