Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw maintained an active medical practice in addition to serving as the medical director of Canada’s first birth control clinic until 1966. She helped change public opinion on the issue of planned parenthood. When she reluctantly retired at age ninety-five, still serving fifty patients, Dr. Bagshaw was the country’s oldest practising physician. She celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday with the release of a National Film Board movie about her life.[3] She died at the age of 100.
A trailblazer in Canadian medical history, Dr. Bagshaw received widespread recognition for her accomplishments before her death. The lengthy list of honours includes the Order of Canada, the Governor General’s Persons Award, Hamilton’s Citizen of the Year (1970), the naming of the Elizabeth Bagshaw Elementary School, a guest lectureship in her name at Hamilton Academy of Medicine, and an honorary doctorate from McMaster University. In 2007, Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
Quote:
“There was no welfare and no unemployment payments, and these people were just about half-starved because there was no work, and for them to go on having children was a detriment to the country. They couldn’t afford children if they couldn’t afford to eat. So the families came to the clinic and we gave them information.”[4]
Mary ˝Bonnie˝ Baker.
Bonnie at the Bat
Mary “Bonnie” Baker
1918–2003
She stole fans’ hearts as deftly as she stole bases, becoming the face of women’s professional baseball and helping shatter the notion that only men could play in the big leagues.
Baseball was in Mary Baker’s blood. When scouts for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) came calling, she jumped at the chance to play ball. Not only did she love the game, but the league paid an incredible $55 to $100 a week at a time when women in the workforce were earning as little as $10 a week. Not to mention that a few top players, like Mary, were said to have received at least one $2,500 signing bonus.[1]
Mary Geraldine Baker (née George) was born in Regina on July 10, 1918, to parents of Hungarian descent. Baseball was hot on the Prairies when she was growing up; the star athlete remembered that there wasn’t much to do “except play ball and chase grasshoppers.”[2] By the time she was in elementary school, Mary had set a record for throwing a baseball 105 metres.
After Mary married Maury Baker she continued to play softball on a team sponsored by the Army and Navy department store where she worked. At the outbreak of the Second World War, her husband joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and left to fight overseas. Meanwhile, American chewing gum magnate P.K. Wrigley — the owner of the Chicago Cubs — came up with the idea of creating a women’s professional baseball league to fill the stadiums during wartime.
Mary Baker was astounded to read about the league in the Regina newspaper one morning, and thrilled to receive a call from scout Hub Bishop that same afternoon. She’d already passed up a chance to play pro softball for a Montreal team in 1942, because her husband refused to let her sign up. But this time Maury was on the other side of the world, and Mary’s mother-in-law encouraged her to go to the tryouts at Wrigley Field in the spring of 1943.
Mary was chosen as one of the sixty players who would make up the four founding teams in the league, and the first women to play professional baseball. Of the 600 young women from across North America who would eventually play in the league, more than 10 percent were Canadian, half of those from Saskatchewan, like Mary.
Many of the new recruits were shocked to discover the stylish, but impractical, uniforms they’d be wearing: one-piece skirted tunics with satin shorts worn underneath the short skirts preserved modesty but did nothing to prevent painful “strawberries” when the players slide into base on bare skin.[3] Wrigley and his staff made it clear that they wanted the women to play ball like men, but look feminine and stylish.
There were many rules and regulations for team members. The “girls” — the common term of the era — would be strictly chaperoned. They were forbidden to smoke or drink hard liquor in public. A curfew required them to be in bed within two hours after the games, and all social activities had to be approved in advance.
Eager to hire attractive girls who would draw fans, the AAGPBL insisted on femininity.[4] During the spring of 1943, Mary and the other new recruits were required to attend charm school, conducted by beauty salon founder Helena Rubenstein. Even after the charm school was discontinued in later years, the women still received a beauty kit and a manual that explained the ideal for players: “The All-American girl is a symbol of health, glamor, physical perfection, vim, vigor and a glowing personality.”[5]
According to sports historian M. Ann Hall, Mary was the most outstanding Canadian player because of her skill and longevity as well as her enthusiasm for the game.[6] She was a natural beauty, as well as charming and well-groomed, and quickly became a popular cover girl and spokesperson for the league; the press often referred to her as Pretty Bonnie Baker. In 1945, she was featured in Time magazine, the Canadian who became the embodiment of the All-America girl, playing professional ball. Mary’s husband returned from the war that same year, proud of her success. He had initially accepted her career with the condition that she quit when he came home; he changed his tune when he realized how miserable she would be.
Though initially hired to play softball, the “girls” were soon playing baseball like their male counterparts. The schedules for the women were gruelling: games six nights a week, as well as double-headers on Saturday or Sunday. The talented and feisty Mary “Bonnie” Baker was a fan favourite and played more games than any other player in the league: 930 regular games and eighteen playoff games.
Mary was an outstanding catcher and baserunner, stealing 504 bases during her nine seasons with the league. With a career fielding average of .953, she was one of the top backstops in women’s baseball. A two-time All Star, she played backcatcher for Indiana’s South Bend Blue Sox from 1943–50. Fifty years after the Blue Sox disappeared, she still dominated fans’ memories: “Remember Bonnie Baker …”[7]
In 1950, she was traded to Michigan’s Kalamazoo Lassies as a manager, becoming the only woman in the league to ever work full-time as a manager. She missed the 1951 season to give birth to her daughter, Maureen. Mary spent the following year toting the baby to practices while playing with the Lassies, after the league introduced a sexist motion to prohibit women managers. The AAGPBL disappeared in 1954, but not before the first professional women’s baseball league had made history and entertained nearly a million fans a year at its peak.
Back in Regina, Mary managed the local curling club for twenty-five years and became Canada’s first female sports broadcaster at Regina’s CKRM from 1964 to 1965. The gutsy baseball pioneer was inducted into both the sports and baseball halls of fame in Saskatchewan. In 1998, the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame honoured the Canadian members of the AAGPBL, and its American counterpart finally recognized the league after relentless lobbying by Mary Baker and some of her teammates. The movie A League of Their Own paid tribute to the women with characters inspired by the remarkable true story, featuring Geena Davis in the starring role of Dottie Hinson — who resembled the famous Pretty Bonnie Baker.
When Mary “Bonnie” Baker died in December 2003, she was remembered as “one hell of a woman.”[8] Mourners celebrated her by singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Quote:
“I was ecstatic. I knew I was on my way to what I’d dreamed of.”[9]
— Mary’s reaction on being invited to try out for the AAGPBL.
Mary and Catherine Barclay working on hostels, 1920–1923.
Glenbow Archives, NA-2468-58
Adventures in Hostelling
Catherine Barclay
1902–1985
Mary Barclay
1901–2000
They turned their passion for travel and the outdoors into building hostels.
Travellers who explo
re Canada and stay in hostels can thank the Barclay sisters, Mary and Catherine. The Calgary schoolteachers established the first youth hostel in North American in 1933, then worked together with family and friends to develop Canadian hostelling.
Having spent much of their early childhoods in the country, Mary and Catherine liked tramping around the Alberta foothills and the Rockies. The Barclay children were all born in Illinois: Mary in 1901, Catherine in 1902, and their brother, George, the following year. When their father’s business failed, George Barclay and his ailing young wife, Elsie, decided to homestead in Canada. In 1905, after a long journey in a crowded Canadian Pacific Railway colonist car, the Barclays arrived near Lacombe, Alberta.
Despite the hardships of homesteading, the girls loved country life and their long walks to school through the woods and meadows. Times were tough and the Barclays went bankrupt. After the foreclosure of their home in 1913, they settled in Calgary, where they rented a house at 212 12th Avenue North West; the building would later also serve as the headquarters of the Canadian Youth Hostelling Association.
Mary and Catherine completed their schooling in Calgary, attending a high school whose principal, William Aberhart, would one day become premier of the province. Mary always felt overshadowed by Catherine, who was charming and witty, beautiful as well as intellectual. But both girls followed the same career path, attending Normal School to become teachers, then working in country schools at the outset of their careers.
Mary, always eager to improve her skills, studied at the University of Chicago for a year. During the Second World War, she obtained a degree from the University of Toronto. She worked as a principal at several schools, pioneering what is now called outdoor education.[1]
Once Catherine could afford to continue her education, she attended the University of Alberta, where she studied English literature and French. She was very enthusiastic about learning and teaching French, becoming a champion of bilingualism in Canada decades before it became official government policy. She also helped create student exchanges between Quebec and Alberta.[2] She attended courses at the Sorbonne to improve her French, and later received her master’s degree at Columbia. It was Catherine’s interest in travel, student exchanges, and foreign languages that led her to the idea of youth hostels.
“We actually blundered into it,” remembered Catherine.[3] She thought it was beneficial for young people to have the opportunity to travel, but the costs were often problematic. She met a man in Calgary who promised discount travel rates to England if twenty young people would sign up. He suggested that running an essay contest, with a free trip as the prize, would be an incentive. After the man disappeared, Catherine and the other contest organizers had $19 in contest entrance fees, but faced the formidable task of raising money to pay the winner’s trip costs.
Catherine read about the English youth hostel system, which seemed to present an ideal means of providing low-cost accommodation for the contest winner. The youth hostels were named after the German Jugendherberge, which had been established by Richard Schirmann in 1907. The concept was to provide a system of carefully placed shelters where young people could stay while cycling or hiking between them. By 1919, German’s first hostelling committee had been organized, and the International Youth Hostel Federation was created at a conference in Amsterdam in 1932.
With some knowledge of the growing hostel movement overseas, Mary, Catherine, and some other single, working women in Calgary decided to form a hiking club in 1933. After the group had spent a few weekends in the nearby Bragg Creek area at a small lodge, Mary decided to create a hostel by pitching a tent and charging users twenty-five cents a night. She was excited about this means of providing city folks with an inexpensive place to enjoy the great outdoors. As Mary had hoped, her sister provided the $19 from the essay contest as a start-up fund; the fees paid for transporting hikers to the hostel.
On July 1, 1933, Mary, Catherine, and their friends loaded up the Barclay’s Model T with supplies. Mary later dubbed the car Faith, explaining that she needed “a lot of faith to drive her, and her passengers certainly needed it too.”[4] By nightfall, the team had constructed the first official hostel in North America at Bragg Creek.
It consisted of a twelve-by-fourteen-foot tent, which George Barclay had managed to rent for $7.50 for the month, complete with straw mattresses, a small stove, and dishes. There was a broken-down toilet nearby, with no door. Nothing fancy, but “it stood for an ideal,” Mary later wrote. “A right idea that once seen could never be destroyed.”[5] By the fall, the team had purchased a permanent tent from Eaton’s department store for $49 and installed a wooden floor. Membership fees of $1, and the twenty-five-cent nightly charges, provided revenue.
By the end of their first summer, the hostel team had big plans. Mary and Catherine, along with friends Ivy Devereux and Dorothy Allen, created the Canadian International Youth Hostelling Committee. They began offering recreational opportunities, such as horseback riding, to hostel guests, and, the following year, began planning the expansion of Canadian hostels based on new information about the system in Europe. The two sisters worked together, along with a growing network of supporters, to build more hostels between Calgary and Banff and in southern Alberta. By 1939, there were sixteen hostels in the province. After the Second World War, Mary managed to get huts from the Kananaskis prisoner-of-war camp moved to Banff to be used as hostels.
Mary Barclay (at left) tying a pack horse for a trail-blazing trip in the Seebe area, Alberta.
Glenbow Archives, NA-2468-44
The Canadian Youth Hostel organization was created in the Barclay’s Calgary home, and a national system slowly developed in the following years thanks to hundreds of keen hostellers across Canada. Mary and Catherine ceased active involvement in 1941, once the groundwork for a national organization was in place, but they remained supportive of the movement. The Canadian Hostelling Association, as it is now called, has hostels in every province and territory, which attract families as well as young adventurers.
In 1975, the International Youth Hostel Federation presented the sisters with the Richard Schirrmann medal, acknowledging them as the co-founders of youth hostelling in Canada. Both Mary and Catherine had long teaching careers and remained single. They enticed many of their pupils into hostelling, including activist and author Doris Anderson, who spent many an afternoon picking wool to make comforters for the hostels.[6] The sisters lived together in their Calgary home until Catherine passed away in 1985.
The E. Catherine Barclay Scholarship was established at the University of Calgary to support students interested in studying in France. Mary received the Order of Canada in 1987 in recognition of her achievement as co-founder of the Canadian Youth Hostelling Association. At the age of ninety-six, Mary attended the unveiling of an impressive $1.7-million addition to the Banff Hostel in 1998, which was named the Mary Belle Barclay Building in honour of the pioneer conservationist.
Quote:
“This is a far cry from sleeping on a plank of wood with canvas walls and apple box cupboards.”[7]
— Mary Barclay at the Banff Hostel, 1998.
Bound for Uncharted Waters
Frances Barkley
1769–1845
The first European woman to explore the coast of British Columbia, she circumnavigated the globe twice.
It was a whirlwind courtship. Just six weeks after Captain Charles Barkley sailed into Ostend, Belgium, he wed Frances Hornby Trevor. Less than a month later, the fair young bride with long reddish-blond curls set sail for the Pacific coast of America with her new husband.
Frances Barkley was born in Somerset, England, in 1769 — the same year as Napoleon. Her mother died when she was an infant, and her father, the Reverend Doctor John Trevor, moved the family to London, then Hamburg. Reverend Trevor became the minister of the Protestant Chapel in Ostend in 1783. Frances was educated in a Roman Catholic convent somewhere on the Continent. A brilliant student of French, the young wom
an completed her studies and joined her father in Belgium.
When she married British mariner Captain Charles William Barkley, a fur trader, he was twenty-seven and she was seventeen. The Barkleys departed November 24, 1786, on the Loudoun, which had been renamed the Imperial Eagle, flying the Austrian flag, to avoid conflict with the British East India Company’s trading monopoly.
Frances Barkley, depicted by Harry Heine.
Courtesy of Mark Heine
During the first few months of the voyage across the Atlantic, the Barkleys survived many storms. Crashing seas swept away some of their fresh food, including turkeys, chickens, and ducks. When Captain Barkley got rheumatic fever in December, it seemed that there was little hope of recovery without proper medical attention. The young bride cared for her husband while fending off unwanted attentions: “My situation was very critical at that time from the unprincipled intentions of the Chief Mate supported by the second Mate, who being a Lieutenant in his Magesties service ought to have had more honor.”[1]
Fortunately for Frances, Captain Barkley’s health improved and he resumed control of the ship. The Imperial Eagle stopped in Brazil before tackling the trecherous passage around Cape Horn. The Barkleys replenished their supplies in the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) and arrived on the west side of Vancouver Island in June 1787. They moored in Nootka Sound at Friendly Cove — just nine years after Captain James Cook became the first European to explore the area.
100 More Canadian Heroines Page 4
