Wilson Duff

Coming Back, a Life

Robin Fisher

• Publisher: Harbour Publishing
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781550179767
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The fascinating origin story of Wilson Duff, the pioneering BC anthropologist and museologist remembered for his contributions to research on First Nations cultures of the Northwest Coast.

Wilson Duff was born in 1925 in the city of Vancouver and his turbulent early years were shaped by the Great Depression and the Second World War. An intelligent child, he quickly progressed in school. After one year at the University of British Columbia, he signed up for the Air Force. An analytic thinker, Duff excelled as a navigator on a Liberator bomber based in India. However, these years carried their own traumas—the omnipresent terror of war and the specter of death.

On his return from India, Duff recommenced his studies at UBC. There he began a love affair with anthropology and museum studies. As provincial anthropologist at the BC Provincial Museum from 1950 to 1965 and then at the University of British Columbia, he helped to shape Canadian and British Columbian understanding of First Nations' cultures. Forging relationships with Indigenous Peoples during field work, Duff was particularly interested in the Northwest Coast cultures and art, and authored important books including Arts of the Raven: Masterworks by the Northwest Coast Indian and Images Stone B.C.: Thirty Centuries of Northwest Coast Indian Sculpture. Hundreds of students left his classes with a greater understanding of Indigenous cultures and the consequences of settler colonialism in British Columbia. He devoted his life to understanding Indigenous people and cultures and communicating that understanding to newcomers, a subject of continued relevance today.

Duff struggled with depression for much of his life and died by suicide at age 51. In the end, he claimed he did not fear death because "the end is the beginning." He believed in reincarnation: that he would be coming back.

In tracing the story of Wilson Duff, biographer Robin Fisher reveals the evolution of anthropological studies, the history of a time and place—Vancouver during the Great Depression and war years—and the more recent changes taking place in museum and anthropology studies. Told with insight, and attention to the controversies and complexities of Duff's life, this story will fascinate anyone engaged in BC history.

1. Vancouver Boyhood

Just inside the front door of Roy Henry Vickers’s Eagle Aerie Gallery in Tofino there was once a magnificent screen print dedicated to the memory of Wilson Duff. The print was called Eagle—Full Circle. Its form was in the classic Northwest Coast style: black formlines, red features, split Us, ovoids and salmon-trout heads. The eagle’s head with a curved beak encircled by its wings is central to the image. Below the eagle is the face of a woman, a mother, for it is with her that we all begin. For the artist, the print represents how, in our journey through life, we continue to complete circles.¹ Wilson would have appreciated the form and, even more, the meaning of the image. It is an idea that he would have loved since he too would come to know that life is a cycle. As he put it himself in two lines that he called “Spirit Quest”:

When at last I got all the way there What I found was myself coming back.²

Wilson’s own spirit quest circle began and was completed in Vancouver, British Columbia.

For one so brilliant, creative and, in the end, complex, Wilson Duff came from ordinary beginnings. He grew up in a working-class family in the Cedar Cottage neighbourhood of South Vancouver. Born to the Northwest Coast, he lived most of his life there. There were sojourns away: three years across Canada and then to India as a young man, and a year at the National Museum in Ottawa as an anthropologist. But for the rest of his life Wilson lived on and loved the Northwest Coast. He devoted most of his life to understanding its First Nations people and communicating that knowledge to others.

Wilson, the Vancouver boy, grew up in a city of mostly British immigrants working to make their way on an economic roller coaster that, when it plunged, as it did in the 1930s, created much anxiety for the parents of a growing family. Wilson’s parents came to Canada from the Celtic fringe of Great Britain: his father from Ireland and his mother from Scotland. Wilson Duff Sr. was born in Liverpool in 1886, but his parents were from Islandmagee on the east coast of County Antrim, just north of Belfast. Like many Irish they had probably gone to Liverpool looking for work, but they returned to Islandmagee where Wilson Duff Sr. did most of his growing up. As a young man he apprenticed in the Belfast shipyards. Wilson’s mother, Annie (who was later known as Nan) Hislop, was born in 1894 in Stirling, on the southern edge of the Scottish Highlands, but she lived with her family in Edinburgh before coming to Vancouver.

Like many Vancouver immigrants at the time, Wilson’s parents both arrived while they were still single: Wilson Duff Sr. just before, and Annie Hislop just after, the First World War. They both came with other family members, and both had members of their extended family already on the West Coast, so while they were single, they each had family around them. Single immigrants often came to Vancouver from Britain for two reasons: for the potential for jobs and for marriage partners. Wilson and Annie found both. They met and courted while they were both living in the Jericho area of Point Grey. Wilson lived with his parents, Hugh and Martha, near Jericho Hill School, where Hugh was the head steward—Wilson was a plumber and pipefitter, working on new houses. Annie and her mother both lived and worked in the mansion home of the Spencers; the family owned a chain of department stores, including the big flagship store in downtown Vancouver. Annie worked as a seamstress for the Spencers. Wilson and Annie were married in the summer of 1921, when he was thirty-five and she was twenty-seven. They were of an age that they wanted to start a family, and so they set up house on Windsor Street in South Vancouver.

Their first son, Wilson Duff, was born on Monday, March 23, 1925. He was the middle child of the family: he had an older sister, Winifred, who was three years older, and a younger brother, Ron, who arrived two years later. Family memory has it that Ron was intended to be a boyhood mate for Wilson, but growing up and throughout his life Wilson was actually closer to his sister, Win. As the eldest son, Wilson was given the family name that he shared with his father, although it came not from his father’s father but from the distaff side of the family. Wilson’s great-uncle, Wilson Dick, had not immigrated and still lived on Islandmagee, but the young Wilson would visit him in his late teens. Presumably to avoid confusion in the Duff household in Vancouver, Wilson growing up was called Junior.

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The Vancouver of the mid-1920s that Wilson was born into was a city in the midst of booming growth. The Vancouver economy had taken a few years to bounce back after the First World War and the boom would not last very long. In the mid-twenties the economy was roaring, jobs were available and the city was building and spreading out. Home ownership was possible even for those without a lot of money, and so Vancouver was a city of single-family houses at all levels of the social scale. In the growing suburbs of South Vancouver, British immigrant working-class families lived in smaller houses called cottages. The Cedar Cottage area lay between the cities of Vancouver and New Westminster. The growth of the area was connected to two major transportation lines: the British Columbia Electric Railway’s interurban tramway ran through Cedar Cottage and, later, when the automobile became the preferred method of transportation, the Westminster Highway, now Kingsway, was the major thoroughfare. The British Columbia Electric Railway also ran the streetcar system on the north–south streets that connected South Vancouver to the City of Vancouver. The logic of these transportation links was realized when South Vancouver was amalgamated into the City of Vancouver in 1929. In the 1920s Cedar Cottage was accessible: building lots were available and relatively cheap, and so the area attracted young working-class families who looked hopefully to the future. The year 1929 was, alas, significant for another reason.

Early in the development of Cedar Cottage, someone had built a roller coaster near the business centre around the 3500 block of Commercial Drive. It did not survive long, but it can still stand as a metaphor for the ups and downs in the area. The dizzying heights of the 1920s were only accentuated by the deep plunge into the Depression of the 1930s, as bright optimism faded into shades of anxious grey. The Great Depression was devastating for Vancouver and the Duff family along with it. As prices for goods plummeted, thousands were thrown out of work or saw their income drastically reduced. Through much of the 1930s more than a quarter of the Vancouver workforce was out of work. The single unemployed were the largest group but, by the fall of 1930, 4,503 married men had applied for unemployment assistance and there were undoubtedly others who were too proud to ask for help.³ Married men who were unemployed or underemployed usually had families to worry about, which only added to their stress. For them, providing for one’s family was the measure of a man. Many could no longer afford their houses and, though the population of the city increased over the decade, the value of building permits dropped to a fraction of what it had been in the twenties. No area of the city was hit harder than working-class suburbs like Cedar Cottage.

Like most of Vancouver’s workers, Wilson’s father was employed through the 1920s. He worked as a plumber for Kydd Brothers Hardware and later for Murray Brothers, a heating contracting company. The British Columbia Directories suggest that he was not working for a firm after 1929,⁴ presumably because the house construction sector had collapsed, and so he was underemployed for most of a decade, working on houses when he could. The Duffs were not destitute, but making ends meet certainly was a struggle. Like building permits, housing lot prices had dropped to a mere fraction of what they had been before the crash, so Wilson Sr. bought two at the corner of Lanark Street and East Twenty-First Avenue. Working with a contractor friend, he built two very similar houses that were also not unlike the house where they were living on Windsor Street: fairly straightforward construction with the roof ridge running front to back and a dormer window on one side. They may well have been built following one of the pattern books for workers’ cottages that were readily available. The houses were built as spec houses, to be sold, but under the depressed conditions they were only able to sell one, so the Duff family moved the few blocks from Windsor Street into the corner house. On Lanark, they lived among working-class families, many of whom were British immigrants, living on streets with names like Inverness, Dumfries and Culloden. They were a block away from what is now Knight Street and the growing commercial centre on Kingsway. Their house was not pretentious: two storeys with a basement for the furnace, and each floor made up of small, enclosed spaces. There was a living room with an open fireplace and a small kitchen from which everything had to be carried to the dining room for meals. A narrow, steep set of stairs led up to small bedrooms on the second floor. It was here, amidst his own family and a community of families coping with challenging times, that Wilson spent his school years. By today’s standards the house was cramped, with little space for five people to have much privacy. His need for solitude would become an issue for Wilson.

The house on Windsor was right across the street from Charles Dickens Elementary School, where Wilson may have done part of his first school year. After they moved to Lanark Street, all three of the Duff children continued to attend Charles Dickens, even though they were slightly outside its catchment area. Crossing Knight Street, they walked the few blocks to the school. Most children were taken to their first day of school by their mothers, and big sister Win would also have been there to show Junior the ropes. A child’s expectations of school were instilled by parents and older siblings: Wilson’s parents placed great value on education as a path to a better future in uncertain times, and sister Win did very well at school so was a role model. In Wilson’s day, Charles Dickens was an imposing brick building like many built in Vancouver, designed to impress the community with the gravity and importance of schooling. The population growth in Cedar Cottage required the school to be expanded in 1925 to twenty classrooms, with a gymnasium that could accommodate close to five hundred pupils.⁵ The teaching within, however, was formal and uninspired. Even an effort by the provincial minister of education to overhaul the elementary curriculum in the mid-thirties made little difference in the classroom. Teachers at Charles Dickens followed traditional, formal practices. Learning was largely by rote and involved constant drills on grammar, arithmetic and the facts of history and geography. Few teachers had the education or the opportunity to convey the joys of intellectual activity to pupils. Teachers faced salary cuts through the 1930s even though class sizes were large, and got larger, while Wilson was at Charles Dickens. Teachers often paid little attention to the needs of individual students. Discipline was rigid and enforced with corporal punishment if necessary. Nevertheless, it quickly became clear, even in this constrained school environment, that Wilson was a very bright student. He skipped all or part of grade two. His younger brother, Ron, who became a schoolteacher, later wondered whether Wilson, because he was now younger in his grade and a bit of an outsider, as well as being the eldest son, learned to be very competitive at school.⁶ Certainly A was a regular grade on his record, and he was often the first- or second-ranked student in his class. IQ tests were becoming popular in North American schools, and when Wilson took such a test in his last year at elementary school he produced a score of 144, which by the standards of the day would put him in the very gifted or genius range.⁷ On the other hand, Wilson’s father, who firmly believed in education for practical purposes, would not have been pleased with his son’s Cs in Manual Arts. In the future there would be no doubt that Wilson was blessed with a creative intellect and was capable of imagining original ideas, but these characteristics were not developed through his elementary education. The system discouraged independent thinking and provided little opportunity to be creative. Another student with an excellent academic record later recalled that they “just regurgitated.”⁸

At home on Lanark Street, Wilson grew up in a household where the parents lived according to well-defined, traditional gender roles. Family life was structured and disciplined, father ruled the roost and no one dared sit in his armchair by the radio in the front room. His accustomed chair no doubt provided a measure of security, but Wilson Sr. also had his challenges. Being without paid work was a source of social, economic and psychological insecurity. Providing for his family was a struggle in difficult times, and he was a man of strong and definite views that were only made stronger by that experience. “My father was a competent, thoughtful man with a straightforward way of looking at life,” recalled Ron, the younger and more easygoing son.⁹ Wilson Sr. had worked hard to become a skilled tradesman and, like many others in the Depression, he correctly felt that the capitalist system had let him down. It is not surprising that he had socialist and perhaps communist leanings. While politics were one thing, religion was another. Wilson’s father had seen its divisive effects in Ireland and had no time for organized religion. Some of Nan’s family regarded him as an irredeemable atheist. Nan’s mother, on the other hand, was a member of the Plymouth Brethren and was dogmatic and insistent about the importance of religion, constantly beleaguering the family about church attendance. Since she lived close by, both she and religion were sources of conflict in the family. Wilson’s mother attended the United Church, but his father was clear that the children were not to be coerced on religious matters, so they were not regular churchgoers. Wilson’s father also had health problems that seemed to have come from the workplace. He had a lung disease that would not have been helped by his persistent smoking of roll-your-own cigarettes all his life. At one point, while the children were still in elementary school, his lungs were so bad that the only treatment was complete bedrest. The family spent a summer in a cottage at Crescent Beach, on Boundary Bay in Surrey, a popular getaway for Vancouverites. The children had to be very quiet, so they played outside on the beach while their father recovered. By the end of the summer he was breathing normally again, but the lung disease would return. Life on Lanark during the Depression was no easy street for Wilson Sr., but in spite of that, or perhaps even because of it, he was a strong presence in the home. Wilson’s father was a hard man, obdurate and demanding of his children.

Nan Duff, Wilson’s mother, was the softer side of the family. She was the homemaker who cared for her children day to day—which was also not an easy task. Father provided and mother made do with what was provided, and what was provided was not always plentiful, so making do was hard work during the Depression. The children never went hungry or went to school in rags, as some in the neighbourhood did, but the care and nurture of three children was certainly a full-time job. Nan had that reputedly Scottish talent for making a penny go a long way. She cooked meals without any waste, made bread and canned fruit and vegetables. The Vancouver area offered opportunities for food-gathering outings that the children later recalled with pleasure. They picked blackberries at the University of British Columbia, gathered clams and crabs on the beaches and sometimes took Sunday outings to the log booms on the North Shore to go fishing. They never ate at a restaurant. Nan’s skill as a seamstress went a long way toward clothing her children. Nan was strong in her way, and part of that strength was in providing for her children both physically and emotionally. In later life Wilson would speak of his mother with great affection, and she became his model of what a mother should be. She was a warm, caring person who was also the one who maintained contact with her wider family, on both the Duff and Hislop sides.

One member of Annie Duff’s extended family was Wilson’s cousin Mervyn, who was five years older than Wilson and who sometimes was around at Lanark Street. Against firm family advice, Annie’s sister, Joyce, had married a doctor from Ceylon who had treated their father when they were still in Scotland. After the First World War the couple moved to India, where Mervyn Samarasinha was born in 1920. His father, now an army doctor, went to treat a typhus outbreak in a village, but he caught the disease himself and died. Mervyn and his widowed mother came to Vancouver, but Joyce seemed unable to cope with bringing up her child. Mervyn lived in foster homes, even after his mother remarried and he became Mervyn Davis. His loneliness and alienation at being passed around among foster parents, and growing up with the consequences of his mixed cultural background, may have been mitigated somewhat by visiting his cousins in the Duff family. He is present in photos of the extended family. Mervyn experienced the dirty thirties first-hand when the man who lived in a crowded tenement across the street lost his white-collar job and, after months of unemployment, took his own life. He watched the man’s surviving family living in grinding poverty until the Depression was relieved by the Second World War. Mervyn witnessed the violence at Ballantyne Pier in 1935, when striking dockworkers seeking union recognition and improved conditions clashed with police. He also watched on Bloody Sunday, as unemployed protesters were forcibly evicted from the Vancouver Post Office after the police filled the building with tear gas in 1938. Mervyn developed the sense that much was amiss with the status quo in Depression-era Vancouver, and he became more involved with the left-wing movement.¹⁰ As he grew into a young man, Mervyn related to Wilson Sr.’s progressive social and political ideas. Wilson Jr. and Mervyn’s lives would intersect again in the future.

Wilson’s own memories of childhood were mixed. As an adult he would describe a traumatic experience at...

Table of contents

• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Vancouver Boyhood
• 2. I, the Navigator
• 3. Learning Anthropology
• 34. Provincial Anthropologist
• 5. Restoring Totem Poles
• 6. Museums and Beyond
• 7. Teaching Anthropology
• 8. Meaning in Haida Art
• 9. Negative Spaces
• 10. Coming Back
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Photos