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British Columbia
Stephen Reid was born
in Massey Ontario (ON) on March 13, 1950. He is the author of two books but his
main claim to fame is that he belonged to Canada’s notorious Stopwatch Gang of
bank robbers. The gang which also included Lionel Wright and Patrick Michael "Paddy" Mitchell
who was the leader, was given its name because of the stopwatch Reid carried
during the robberies. The gang was also known for their politeness to their
victims and their non-violent methods.
During
the 1970s and 1980s the three men stole an estimated $15 million from more than
140 banks, gas stations, and shops across Canada and the United States. With
the help of an inside man they robbed the Ottawa, ON, airport of $750,000 in
gold in 1974. They were arrested but by 1979 they had all escaped from prison.
Stephen
Reid was arrested in Arizona in 1980 and returned to Canada where he began
serving a twenty-one year sentence at the Kent institution in Agassiz, B.C. He
started writing in 1984 and sent his manuscript to Susan Musgrave who, though
her home was on Haidi Gwaii off the coast of the B.C. mainland, was the
writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo at the time. They developed a
relationship and were married at the prison in 1986. Reid’s first book, Jackrabbit Patrol was published that
year.
When
Stephen was released on full parole in 1987 the couple lived in Sidney, B.C. where
he taught creative writing at Camosun College. He also worked as a youth
counsellor in the Northwest Territories. Unfortunately, he became addicted to
heroin and cocaine and returned to his old ways, robbing a bank in Victoria in
June 1999. This time he was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. In 2007, a
National Film Board of Canada produced a documentary film titled Inside Time about Stephen Reid’s life.
His second book, A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden: Writing from Prison, was published in 2012. It is a number of essays
about his life in prison and he won the Victoria Butler Book Prize for it in
2013. Reid was granted full parole in 2014. He lived on Haidi Gwaii with his
wife, Susan, until June 12, 2018 when he died from pulmonary edema and third
degree heart block.
Note: Patrick Mitchell wrote his autobiography
titled, This
Bank Robber's Life, while he was in prison. He died of lung
cancer on January 14, 2007 and his manuscript was published posthumously in
2015.
Lionel
Wright, was nicknamed ‘The Ghost’ because he had the ability to blend into a
crowd and disappear. He was released from prison in 1994 and his whereabouts are
unknown.
Emily Carr was born on December
13, 1871, in Victoria, B.C. She was the second youngest of nine children and
she and her siblings were raised by parents who kept the English customs they
had been used to in England. Their home had high ceilings, decorative
mouldings, and there was a parlour. Sunday mornings were for prayers, and there
were evening Bible readings. Emily’s mother died in 1886 and her father in
1888.
Emily’s father had encouraged her in her artistic pursuits but it wasn’t
until two years after his death that she enrolled at the San Francisco Art
Institute. She returned to Victoria in 1892 and over the next twenty years she
alternated between travelling to aboriginal villages in British Columbia to
sketch and paint their lifestyle and going to England and France to study art.
During that time she took a job teaching at the Ladies Art Club in Vancouver but the students didn’t like her
because she smoked in class and cursed them. She left after a month.
She continued to paint and even opened a gallery in Vancouver. However,
it was not a success so 1913, she once again moved to Victoria. For the next
fifteen years Emily ran a boarding house called the House of all Sorts. She continued to do a little painting and over
time her work was recognized by influential members of the art world and she
put on an exhibit at Canada’s National Gallery. She is best known for her
paintings on Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and later in life her
modernist and post-impressionist styles.
Emily Carr suffered heart attacks in 1937 and 1939. She had a serious
stroke in 1940 and another heart attack in 1942. These left her unable to paint
so she concentrating on her writing. Her first book Klee Wyck was published in 1941 and she won the Governor-General
Award for non-fiction for the book. The
Book of Small came out in 1942 and The
House of all Sorts, named after her boarding house which provided material
for the book, was published in 1944.
Emily Carr died from a heart attack On March 2, 1945. She had three
books published posthumously: Growing
Pains (1946); Pause, The Heart of a
Peacock (1953); and Hundreds and
Thousands (1966).
As an author, Emily Carr was one of the earliest story tellers of life
in the province of British Columbia.
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