Stories from the Graves

In loving memory of John Fingal Smith. Born Prince Edward Island 1846, died Cranbrooke, BC 1936. A faithful lover for 18 years and a devoted husband for 31 years.

The story connected to this grave has crisscrossed my life for decades. It started in the late 1960s when I worked at the Woodward Biomedical Library, and had a summer job filing government publications. One of them was a pamphlet that featured a cover picture of Mrs. Fingall Smith. I was stunned. For years, I had heard her name as I was growing up, and had often wondered if she could be real. With a name like that, who knew? My father usually told the story, and when his mother was present, she would nod and smile, yes, it is true.  I wish that I could recall whether it was my father who always said that Mres Fingal Smith was President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Society, or whether the pamphlet did. This would make a difference.

It also helps to know that my grandfather, Thomas Jackson Brown, and his brother Robert were well known in the town of Cranbrook for their home-made dandelion wine. My grandfather would get it started in the springtime, and then leave it to ferment in glass carboys till at least winter. In the years between 1912 and 1919, he was often away from home for long periods of time as he worked as an engineer supervising the repairing of the rail lines for the CPR. On one of these times when he arrived home after a lengthy absence, he discovered that the wine was a bit fushionless, as his wife would have said. Since it needed to be goosed up a titch, he added a bottle of whiskey -or whuskee as my Grandma pronounced it in her Scots-Irish accent. 

This particular time, his brother Robert had also turned up on the scene and had also noted the same deficiency in the wine. With neither brother consulting the other, each of them added a bottle of whiskey. Then came the visit of Mrs. Fingal Smith, a visit that was not out of the ordinary. Both women shared a love of music, and my Grandmother was in possession of a fine piano which she had brought over from Ireland. Visiting was informal by old country standards, and Mrs. Fingal-Smith, a generation older than my grandmother, lived nearby on 14^th Avenue, near Baker Street, and was a frequent visitor.

At the start of the visit, my grandmother’s visitor announced that she was feeling a touch liverish. My grandmother proffered the usual solution to such problems, Would you be after having a bit of tonic, then? After a small tot of the home made brew, Mrs. Fingal Smith pronounced on its success, I can feel it doing me good. The various versions of the family story are not in total agreement about the final tally of glasses imbibed before Mrs. Fingal-Smith allowed as how she was starting to feel quite queer.  Something odd seemed to have happened to her legs, and her head  - well, everything was spinning.


One of the nearby children was immediately dispatched to fetch Mr. Fingal-Smith, who arrived post-haste with his horse and carriage to cart his poor wife home. As my Grandmother would always say in her version of the tale, she was definitely indisposed.
That was the sum total of what I knew about Mrs. Fingal-Smith until the spring of 2003, when I was at the archives in Victoria, which in turn lead me that summer to the graveyard in Cranbrook to seek out the enigmatic inscription that she had engraved on her husband’s grave: A faithful lover for 18 years and a devoted husband for 31 years. Initially with I read this with my feminist, late 20^th century sensibilities, and was totally off track. It turns out that the story behind this grave marker is a love story.

Adelaide Bailey was born in San Francisco in 1857, the first-born child of Benjamin Bailey and Sarah Margaret Paterson. The family was swept into BC on the wave of the gold rush and consequently young “Addie” grew up in Yale, a small town in the Fraser Canyon. By age seventeen, she had qualified as a school teacher and subsequently taught in Fort Hope, Yale, Lytton and Fort Steel.

She was a young, tall, angular woman when she taught at Fort Steel, and John Fingal Smith lived in a house in the next block to her cottage. In no time at all, he was smitten, likely by her physical fearlessness, her lively intelligence and her forceful personality. It is said that he made porridge every day for breakfast, and took a hot bowlful of it to her every morning. 

Teaching was her passion, and Addie knew full well that if she married John, she would have had to set it all aside long. The fifteen live children that her mother bore may also have had something about her decision to defer marriage. Whatever was the dominant reason, they finally married after an eighteen year courtship in 1905, when Addie was forty-seven years old, and safely past her child-bearing years. Clearly John had earned the inscription: A faithful lover for 18 years and a devoted husband for 31 years.

Before their marriage, Miss Adelaide Bailey had been known to come to school with one buttoned boot, and one laced book, much to the disdain of one of her pupils. Clearly, she was not a slave to convention. After her marriage her fashion sense included wearing feather boas. She was also known for joining twelve year olds in the Cranbrook pool where she belatedly learned to swim, as well as for being in hot demand with teen-agers who took turns squiring her around the ice rink. Her opinions were legion. If husband had to play the bagpipes, which apparently he did, then he had to play them outside the house. It would seem that she sided with Oscar Wilde on the matter of bagpipes: Thank god there is no odour. It would also seem that after waiting for eighteen years, this was a small price for John Fingal Smith to pay for the contentment of their ensuing thirty one years.

Adelaide Fingal Smith died in 1949 in the company of her sister, Mrs. Sinnot of White Rock, and is buried in the Surrey Centre Cemetery, where the inscription reads: Susan Adelaide Smith 1847-1949.

It may be that my grandmother got her drunk, which is where my childhood knowledge of her began, but what matters more is that she lived her entire life as a progressive and independent woman, was one of BC’s finest pioneering teachers, and was also a woman who not only found love in her life, but lived to enjoy it.