A Born Crusader
(“Wild Roses at Their Feet” - a story of pioneer women of Vancouver Island by Elizabeth Forbes)
It was no use asking Mrs. James MacLachlan to remain cool and and detached when she was fighting for better conditions for women and more especially 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 humour, very impatient of what she scathingly called “red tape”, and extremely bad tempered when balked in what she believed was a worthwhile idea. Consequently, she 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 MacLachlan 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 hopes of getting returns from the yearly harvest. When the trees languished, she would say angrily “those darn trees. what is the matter with them?”
Then as 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.
The next 35 years, this tall energetic woman was in the forefront of many public welfare projects, as promoter, organizer and author. She helped launch a South Saanich Anti-Tubercular Society and was secretary of that group when it furnished a room at Tranquille Sanitarium near Kamloops. Local Council of Women held her interest and she campaigned on behalf of women's suffrage on Vancouver Island. During the First World War she she was named the secretary of the Women;s Institute, 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 to 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 '30's” Dr. Henry Esson Young, then Provincial Medical Health Officer, persuaded her to rally the Institutes a to assist in organizing free 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 hospital for crippled children, it was Mrs. Mac who influenced Women's Institute 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, though 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 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 helplessly in a sick bed.”
*(Given credit as co-founder of the Queen Alexandra Solarium, Mrs. MacLachlan's picture has an honoured place beside Dr. Wace's portrait in the entrance hall of the building at Gordon Head.)
