Chas-

I did post what I know about Cochrane on your new thread.

Back to Cicely!

THE BOOKMAN literary critique also raises several questions which deserve more attention.

Which of Cicely's two brothers had ventured forth to Canada first and settled in Alberta. Was it her older brother Philip William Smith, or their eldest brother Richard Andrew Smith, or was it another relative such as her uncle Sidney Smith?

But there's a more major question raised by THE BOOKMAN article: how long did Cicely actually reside in Canada? Was it just "three years" immediately before World War 1 as stated in the article or almost ten years as our contemporary scholars, myself included, have assumed? It's stated in the 1911 British Census that Cicely was resident in Holcombe Cottage, Boothroyden, England at the time (before census day, which was 02 April 1911) with her sister and mother, although it's possible I suppose that she was only reported as being "resident." In a 1922 mini-biography of English authors it's also stated that "She visited Canada a few years before the Great War, living for a time at Lethbridge, Alberta, and Victoria, British Columbia." No historical support has surfaced for a residency in Canada from 1905 to November 17, 1913, when we see her name on a passenger list as arriving with her mother and sister at Liverpool on the steamer Teutonic from Montreal, Canada. In addition the fact that in 1909 she had published her 4th poetry book LANCASHIRE HUNTING SONGS & OTHER MOORLAND LAYS also mitigates against her being out of England. It was A. B. Blackmore who appears the original source suggesting a ten-year residency in Canada:

"During the next ten years (from 1905 to 1914) or so she appears to have travelled to Western Canada, studying sailing ships and their crews on the Pacific Coast," DEVON LIFE, May 1977, p. 28.

Cicely only provides in her own writing (from what I've reviewed) some clues about when she returned to England, a year or so before World War 1. She provides ample evidence that she resided in Alberta for almost a year before moving on the Victoria, BC, where she describes her residency in some detail but not its duration:

"Those were the times when I thumped the keys of a typewriter by day in the B.C. Lands Department, or else in a law office up two flights of stairs in Wharf Street (West side?). The law office had its points, in a way; it was next door but one from a ship-chandler's establishment (Peter McQuade & Son, Ship's Chandlery or possibly Marvin E. Boles & Co., Ship's Chandlery?), with blue-back charts in the windows and ship's sidelights and bunting and all the customary stock-in-trade of ship-chandlery the world over. And there was the Ship Antipode Company in white letters on a window name-board, and a junk store where they sold oilskins and cheap alarm-clocks and Chinese curios. ("Sailortown") That was on the street side; on the waterside you could see the last of the old sealing fleet mouldering away at their moorings, and hear the gulls mewing and calling, and once in a while catch a glimpse of a stately four-master moving up to the lumber mill wharf (Rock Bay Saw Mills) at the bottom of a street whose name I have clean forgotten (Store Street), where the sawdust lay under your feet as thick and soft as driven sand…" Excerpted from THERE WAS A SHIP, by Cicely Fox Smith, published by Edwin Valentine Mitchell, Hartford, Connecticut, ©1930, pp. 168-169.

We also have only found evidence in the local newspaper files of Cicely's short stories and poems being published in 1912. If she were in Victoria earlier, I'm convinced that she would have gotten something published for sure.

We are now in the process of searching the passenger lists from Liverpool to Montreal in 1911-1912 to see if we can pinpoint when she actually left for Canada, and who she was traveling with.

The search continues!

Cheerily,
Charley Noble