FINDING FRED: Part II

Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, British Columbia

Research on Fred Bagley begins not on the prairie but on Vancouver Island with my mother's half brother and his wife--Dale and Penny Bent. Penny has been researching Fred pre-Mountie; my mother, brother, and I post-Mountie.

So I got onto the ferry at Tswaassen for the 2-hour trip across Georgia Straight. This was my first time to Duke Point on the Island, which is up about 100 miles from my familiar turf and Victoria. I found it not so interesting.

So I got a binder of my research from the jeep below deck, hoofed it up three flights of stairs, and hunted down the cafeteria where I began re-aquainting myself with what material I had while eating very bad scrambled eggs and not very good sausage.

Dale and Penny moved out from London, Ontario, and I found their new abode on a hillside overlooking Departure Bay. Ferries go in and out all day; on clear days you can see Vancouver across the water. It's just about the nicest place to live I can imagine. But the view paled in comparison to my visit with my Bagley side. To be with Dale, going through Penny's many boxes of stuff, getting treated to the sights and fine dining, and seeing my cousin Elizabeth (who also moved out ) far outranked the view. Even if Dale was on a roll with his humor that had Penny and I rolling our eyes.

If I start with my grandchildren, Penny's research goes back eight generations to Col. James Bland, born in 1793, a retired officer in the Royal Imperial Navy, finishing out his final days on the Island of Jersey in the English Channel. Fred remembers visiting his grandfather when he was only two, being carried by his mother. The memory is vivid, he wrote, because they'd arrived in a storm, with heavy waves crashing up over the board walk. If he was two, this would have been 1860, just when the Civil War in the States was getting under full swing.

To begin, though, Fred was born in the West Indies. His father, Richard Bagley, was an Irishman who'd enlisted in the British Imperial Navy and been sent to Jamaica. Here he met Catherine Ann Bland, daughter of Col. James Bland and wealthy widow of a Dr. Gordon Baker. She defined herself as Scottish, but was born and raised in the West Indies.

Just where Fred was actually born is in dispute: My lost-and-found grandmother, Leona, insisted he was born in Kitts. Her sister Kate insisted St. Lucia. Or was it the other way around? The two of them, Penny says, used to go around and around on this. But their mother wrote down Jamaica, and so Penny and I voted to go with what his mother said. For all intents and purposes, then, Fred was born in Jamaica. Too, articles printined in Banff's Crag & Canyon list his birthplace as Jamaica and he didn't bother to dispute this--something he usually did I've come to realize.

When his parents married, it appears that Richard came into Catherine's wealth and acquired the doctor's sugar plantation--perhaps part of the much larger "Gordon" estate that comes into the story later. Fred's earliest memories were of crying and being shushed with a sugar cane, given him by a black nanny. He writes that it turned him off sugar for life.

Me? I'm a little disconcerted to find that I have family who had servants who no doubt used to be slaves. Particularly since earlier research reveals that slavery in the West Indies had been over-the-top brutal. This is a "skeleton" I'm not happy to discover.

A second picture of Catherine Ann, the widow, with her eldest daughter Nell, however, suggests to Penny that perhaps there is some black lineage in the blood line. I'm far more accepting of this. I rather enjoy the idea of perhaps being something more nutritional than WONDER bread. Perhaps, after all, there is a bit of rye or oats in me. At least whole grain!

Before Fred was two years old his father had gone through all of his wife's money and they moved back to Devon, England. This is probably when Fred visited his grandfather on the Island of Jersey.

The next ten years saw the Bagley family bouncing from town to town, Richard opening up taverns and moving on, poor Catherine always having babies every two years in a different part of the country. A daughter writes that they helped out with the work, though they were very small. Times were different then. Three-year-old children were often put to use serving beer. Five-year-olds in just about every Dickens novel I've ever read certainly knew how to scrape plates and muck out a stable! But what was all this moving around really about? Was Richard running from creditors?

Canada confederated in 1867. This is the turn of Richard's outgoing tide. He immigrated as a Chelsea Penshioner, stationed in Kingston, Ontario, and here he served as part of the British military presence in the brand new country--a very necessary deterent to the aggressive eyes of a post civil war America. Canadian census records show him here in 1870, a year or more before his wife; English census records show her having yet another baby in England in 1871. Penny wonders why this is. Yet I know that on my Goodfellow side, Walter and the older children immigrated before Isabella the younger children. Perhaps this is true of the Bagleys as well. Immigration could be a pricey venture. For a large family?

The Army schooled the Kingston children up through fourteen years of age. When Fred reached the end of his schooling, he joined Kingston's Battery "A"as a bugler and enrolled in the gunnery school. But when recruitment notices from the newly formulated Mounted Police Force went up, he hightailed it down to the recruitment office, thinking he could lie about his age.

Ah, but here he ran right smack dab into none other than the commadant of his school--Col. French, Commissioner. Worse was to come. His father got wind of it all and, according to some reports, there was quite a row. Col. French and Capt. Bagley, old comrades from their Imperial Navy days, up against a fifteen-year-old boy determined to sign on.

Aa self-confessed student of James Fenimore Cooper, he coveted the chance to save the Indians out west from the dastardly American whiskey traders and envisioned himself "hobknobbing about with dusky Indian princesses."

The truth of the matter was that he was running away from home. Richard was a harsh man. To punish his boys, he took them out to the gym and boxed them, then beat them with a belt. Around the girls he managed to keep his fists to himself; nonetheless, they feared the lash of his tongue. So there must have been a hard fight. Finally Dick acquiesced. "Go ahead and take the lad! He'll get over his fascination for buffalo and redskins in short order, I reckon. If nothing else, it'll make a man out of him." But on one condition. "He can only enlist for six months."

"Agreed." Yet Col. French had to know this was a one-way ticket with no nanny to bring the boy home.

When the Force pulled out of Kingston in June, 1874, Fred's mother bid him adieu amidst the fanfare, reminded him to say his prayers each night, and gave him a watch and chain and the diary that helped us find him a hundred years later.

Poor Catherine didn't see him for another fourteen years. The occassion, it seems, called for this remarkable photo with his younger siblings.

I'm not sure how I would have fared if I'd been adopted out. I have always been conscious of the various aspects of my personality reflected in not just my family of origin but in my extended family. Oh, I am behaving just like Auntie Vi! I might say. Or, I think I'm standing just like Grandma used to." To have the missing pieces visibilized is a rare gift.

And for this treat I owe a special thanks to Mum for spotting her grandfather in the Fort Macleod Museum, to Uncle Dale for negotiating my eventual meeting with his and Mum's mum, and to Aunt Penny for her years of research that tell me a little bit more of who I am.

Thanks et merci.