Scots family drama set in a Canadian castle

Published on Wednesday 11 January 2006 01:15

IT WAS a long sail from Scotland to western Canada when the Dunsmuir family made the journey in 1851.

The Dunsmuirs - husband Robert, his pregnant wife Joan and two toddler daughters - journeyed around Cape Horn, enduring more than 200 days on the seas. The family was heading for Fort Rupert, some 480km north of Victoria, in what is now British Columbia. They stopped in Vancouver so that Joan could give birth.

Robert Dunsmuir, born in 1825 into a middle-class family in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, had taken a contract with the Hudson's Bay Company to mine coal. It was a last-minute decision, taken only after someone backed out.

As the couple made their lives in the settlement they couldn't have known that the future would bring for them eight more children (one would die), wealth and stature beyond their dreams and a castle that in the 21st century would attract many thousands of visitors a year.

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Craigdarroch Castle

The impressive Craigdarroch Castle, Gaelic for "rocky old place", rests on a hill that overlooks Victoria. It was built when Dunsmuir was the wealthiest man in western Canada but, sadly, he died before the mansion was completed. His estate was left to his wife, who after travelling in Europe, moved to the castle with three daughters and two orphaned grandchildren, and stayed for the final 18 years of her life.

Craigdarroch Castle, now restored as a museum, has a rich and colourful history. Robert Dunsmuir had the four-storey mansion on Vancouver Island built with a warm Scottish feel. In addition to using a lot of woodwork, the interior includes a bust of Scots novelist Sir Walter Scott and a thistle stained-glass window. It's not difficult to imagine a few men with their fob watches hooked into their waistcoat pockets standing round the fire puffing on cigars.

Life at Craigdarroch for the widow Joan was a far cry from what she and her family experienced at Fort Rupert. There, the husband mined for coal but the project bore little fruit. Hoping to have better luck, the family moved to Nanaimo, also on the island, with the company in 1854.

When Robert's contract ended he continued to work in mining. He had prospecting rights and one main customer, the Royal Navy. It became a lucrative move for him when, 10 years later, he found the largest coal seam on the island. An enterprising man, he expanded his business and secured a contract to build 125km of railway that linked the operation to the naval base.

The Dunsmuirs moved to Victoria in 1885. Robert began building his Victorian-era mansion two years later.

The more than two dozen rooms in Craigdarroch are dressed in Dunsmuir fashions of the day. Many of the antiques are originals, thanks to Bruce Davies, the museum curator who today searches the world for family pieces that were sold at auction after Joan's death.

"People love the woodwork and the stain glass," Davies says. "It's more the house - the bones if you want - that impress people."

The castle provides a fascinating glimpse into a home whose members could have been the soap opera family of their times: One daughter became engaged to a man who was already married with children, another spent much of her life in an insane asylum, and an alcoholic son had a mistress of 20 years who was unwelcome at Craigdarroch because she was divorced. And that's just for starters.

"I think the Dunsmuir I have the most curiosity about would be Effie," said Yvonne Sharpe, operations manager at Craigdarroch. One of the rooms interprets daughter Effie's room. She had a sad life and was institutionalized for most of it. "For me she reflects some of the sadness around the family story," Sharpe says. "And the quirkiness as well."

When he died, Robert angered his sons by leaving everything to his wife. It took several years for the men to get anything from their mother. When they did, Alex, the younger son who managed the sales and shipping part of the business, married his divorced girlfriend. He died six weeks after the nuptials while on honeymoon.The family fought again, this time over Alex's will. It was Joan and the daughters against the eldest son, James, then the Premier of British Columbia. The son and mother did not speak for years. When Joan died in 1908 she left her estate to her daughters, a son-in-law and three grandchildren, who agreed to sell the contents at auction.

After the matriarch's death the family decided to allow the public to purchase lots to buy Craigdarroch. The man who won the mansion lost it to the bank some years later for failing to pay debts.

Since then the castle has been used as a military hospital, a college and office for the city's school board, and the Victoria Conservatory of Music. In 1994 the city sold the castle to the non-profit Craigdarroch Castle Historical Museum Society, providing visitors from around the world a step back into the life and times of the Dunsmuirs.

For Scots, the Dunsmuir story is one of local boy makes good, notes Sharpe. "Here's someone who really took a risk in both coming to Canada and making a tremendous difference."

The entrepreneurship of Scotsman Robert Dunsmuir changed the face of Vancouver Island. He eventually owned a quarter of the land, and had he lived longer perhaps Craigdarroch Castle would have remained in the family, leaving visitors to only look through the gates in awe.

"It would totally have been a different outcome," Sharpe says.

A dramatic one, nonetheless.

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