Edith Lucas and Public Education in British Columbia, 1903–1989

Helen Rartis

THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION in British Columbia is marked by the boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and geography. Although historians have devoted much time to documenting British Columbia’s turbulent ethnic, racial, and gendered relations, they have spent comparatively little time examining the impact of the province’s forbidding geographic landscape on its education system.¹ Yet since the inception of the first public schools in 1872, government and school officials have wrestled with the challenge of providing educational services to a thinly scattered population across a province that measures almost one million square kilometres [386,000 square miles] in size.²

Due to the isolation of British Columbia’s scattered communities, government officials have had difficulty attracting and retaining competent teachers, a situation first dubbed “the rural-school problem” in 1920 by Kelowna school inspector Alexander Lord. Edith Ethel Lucas was one such educator, and her story is one of sustained resistance to the geographic, racial, and ethnic constraints that bounded her students’ lives. In 1941 Lucas became one of only three women then directing a branch of government within British Columbia’s education department.³ She presided over the department for twenty-four years and managed some of the province’s greatest social challenges. An immigrant to Canada herself, Lucas used her power within the bureaucracy to ameliorate the lives of learners who, without the branch, might have been denied an education due to barriers of race, geography, and ethnicity. During her tenure as director of the high school correspondence branch from 1941 to 1963, she ensured provision of educational opportunities for British Columbians in remote regions of the province, including Japanese-Canadian high-schoolers who were interned during World War II, and to the steady flow of postwar immigrants who fled their war-ravaged homelands to settle in British Columbia. Lucas’s desire to assist the province’s marginalized populations was surely shaped by her personal experiences of leaving Ireland to settle in a city whose inhabitants, at the time, were considered “more English than the English.”⁴ This paper will argue that Lucas’s ability to exercise so much autonomy in government was facilitated by the era in which she worked—a time described by British Columbia historian Tom Fleming as the “Imperial Age of School Administration.” By the time Lucas left government in 1963, this age of autonomy was already beginning to dissolve.

Edith was the fourth of seven children born to John and Mary Ann Lucas in Ireland in 1903 (Figure 9.1). Her father, a gamekeeper on a moderately-sized estate, was left crippled after a serious bout of rheumatic fever in 1910. Realizing that his gamekeeper now presented him with a liability, the earl of the estate provided the Lucas family with passage to Canada. On 18 April 1913, the outcast Lucas family set sail for Canada on the Empress of Ireland and arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, on 2 May.⁵ Reflecting on the experience later in life, Edith’s older sister Evylin described the scene like this: “With ‘homesick feet upon a foreign shore’ five of us children stood in a row on the sidewalk outside the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) station building on Belleville Street in Victoria. Mother, with Rachel and Edwin in tow and Father hobbling along behind on his two walking sticks, had gone to look for a place to spend the night.” Curious passers-by questioned the children’s unsupervised presence and, upon learning that they had just arrived from Ireland, responded with a “sniff,” for, according to Evylin, Victoria at the time “was largely populated by zealots who referred to England as home.”⁶

John Lucas was never able to secure work after arriving in Canada, and Mary Ann supported the family by undertaking housecleaning and sewing repairs for the well-to-do families in Victoria. All the while, she encouraged her children to study hard in order to escape the poverty to which the family was now destined. Edith attended North ward Elementary School, noted at the time for its diverse immigrant population, and graduated from Victoria High School at age 16. (Figure 9.2) Her teachers immediately recognized her academic capabilities and encouraged her in several academic areas.⁷ As testimony to her hard work, Lucas’s name still adorns the honour roll in the school’s main entrance way. The commentary in her high school yearbook describes Edith as an outstanding scholar, “inclined to studious habits” with a mind “set to learn and know.”⁸

After graduating high school, Lucas earned first-class honours degrees in French and Latin from the University of British Columbia and received the Governor General’s Gold Medal—the province’s highest recognition of academic excellence.⁹ From 1925 to 1927, Lucas taught French at Powell River High School. She then applied for and won the Nichol Scholarship for postgraduate studies. In three short years, Lucas completed her doctoral studies in French Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris (Figure 9.3a and 9.3b). With her PhD in hand, Lucas returned to Canada and “stepped right in to the depression of the thirties.”¹⁰ Reflecting on her experiences several decades later, Lucas reported that she was “lucky” to have been granted the “only French position in the province at Chilliwack.”¹¹

In 1931 Lucas accepted a teaching post at Prince Rupert High School and became principal in 1933. During her time in Prince Rupert the provincial Department of Education contracted Lucas to write the first senior French language correspondence courses.¹² The high school correspondence branch had been established in 1929 to reduce the educational inequities that had plagued the geographically remote areas of the province since public education’s inception in 1872. Because many settlers would not have ventured into British Columbia’s hinterland without assurance of education for their children through correspondence, the branch became instrumental in the government’s plan to address the “rural-school problem.”¹³ Lucas’s success in course writing led to an invitation to join the British Columbia education department full time in 1937, and in 1941 she replaced John Gibson as director of the high school correspondence branch.¹⁴

Within a year of assuming the directorship, Lucas found herself at the centre of a political tempest over the internment and education of children of Japanese ancestry. Anti-Japanese sentiment in British Columbia began long before World War II, and it tended to rise during economic downturns, periods of increasing immigration, and contentious provincial elections.¹⁵ By January 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Canada’s declaration of war against Japan, anti-Japanese hysteria was sweeping the province.¹⁶ In the face of severe public pressure, the Canadian government moved the first 100 men of Japanese ancestry from coastal areas to work camps in the province’s interior on 24 February 1942.¹⁷

At that time, the Dominion government assigned the men “to work on completing the Jasper-Prince George Highway, a road considered vital to British Columbia’s defence,”¹⁸ but it did not intend to relocate women or children. However, events unfolded rapidly over the next eleven months and culminated in the evacuation of some 22,000 people of Japanese descent from British Columbia’s coast, including women and children. As its first step, the federal government established the British Columbia Security Commission (BCSC) and granted it the power to remove any residents of Japanese origin from their homes. Next, the BCSC transported Japanese evacuees from coastal points outside British Columbia’s lower mainland to Hastings Exhibition Park in Vancouver before sending them to abandoned mining towns and other interior areas.¹⁹ The government confiscated their property and belongings and sold them below market value without consent or recompense. Some 6,000 Japanese Canadians were “repatriated” to Japan, and most of the rest were scattered throughout Canada. Few remained in British Columbia.²⁰

The internment seriously compromised the education of children of Japanese ancestry. There were just over 5,000 Japanese-Canadian school children in British Columbia when the government announced the evacuation.²¹ They had earned reputations as intelligent, hardworking, and well-behaved, and as having above-average ability.²² Reports indicated that the Japanese-Canadian students were active in every aspect of school life and that they mixed well with other children.²³ Teachers spoke fondly of them, and as anti-japanese sentiments increased in 1938, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation defended them, condemning anti-Japanese policies as “dangerous and un-Christian.”²⁴

Teachers and administrators who worked closely with Japanese pupils also sought to protect their students’ academic status. In April 1942, A. R. MacNeill, the popular principal of Richmond High School, informed S.J. Willis, provincial superintendent of education, about his concern over the rumoured removal of the Japanese students. He inquired about the proper procedures regarding students qualifying for university entrance and argued that if the students were evacuated they should be given correspondence courses free-of-charge for the remainder of the term to maintain their academic studies.²⁵Unfortunately, the province’s elected politicians were not as supportive of the rights of these pupils as their educators. The provincial government maintained that because the Canadian government had orchestrated the relocation, the province was no longer accountable for educating children of Japanese ancestry.²⁶ This was partly because many schools in British Columbia’s interior did not have the physical capacity to accommodate the Japanese children, although small numbers of children were “squeezed in” where possible.²⁷ One of the provincial government’s main concerns, however, appears to have been a lack of human and financial resources. Provincial education minister H. G. Perry estimated that the total cost of educating the roughly 5,000 interned school children would be $343,026—of which approximately $230,000 was needed to construct new buildings in the interior settlements and the rest going to “teachers’ salaries, textbooks and incidental expenses.” Perry and his government argued that such spending was unwarranted because the evacuees no longer paid property taxes, and revenues could not be generated to cover the costs of their education.²⁸

The educational problems generated by the war did not affect the interned students alone. Throughout World War II, education in British Columbia suffered from a lack of human, financial, and material resources. In August 1942, the Vancouver Sun newspaper announced that the “harassed Department of Education” was making “desperate attempts to secure instruction” for children whose teachers had left teaching to support the war effort. Approximately fifty provincial schools were closed as the Department of Education “appealed for former teachers in British Columbia and elsewhere to help out.”²⁹ By refusing to permit British Columbia teachers to instruct Japanese children removed to rural areas, the department was following its strategy to “conserve teachers” for geographic areas with higher student populations.³⁰ In an attempt to ensure equity throughout the province, the government encouraged students in teacher-less schools to enrol in correspondence courses through the education department’s high school correspondence branch, which had increased its production capacity significantly to meet increased demand. In light of these widespread hardships, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and United Church groups offered to provide facilities for educating some of the evacuee children.³¹

The anti-Japanese sentiment characteristic of some politicians and the public has been well documented in British Columbia’s historical literature. Less well documented, to this point, is the history of various civil servants who were sympathetic to the Japanese evacuees. According to historian Patricia Roy’s account of the internment, it was “the civil servants in the BCSC [who] persuaded their political masters that educating children in the interior housing settlements was ‘a matter of fairness to the future of the children’ and ‘in the national interest.’”³²

As a result of this persuasion, on 18 September 1942, the BCSC announced that it would cover the cost of elementary correspondence programs for interned pupils up to grade eight. Letters between Anna Miller, director of elementary correspondence, and the BCSC indicate that as early as July 1942 the branch provided marking support for lessons in elementary literature, language, health, social studies, grammar, and general science.³³ Although Miller informed the BCSC education supervisors on several occasions that course materials and supplies could not be sent, this was usually due primarily to shortages brought about by the war.³⁴For example, in August 1942, Miller wrote to W. S. McRae, supervisor at Hastings Park, Vancouver, stating that she could not provide a marking key for mathematics because the branch had only one set. Two months later the branch notified the BCSC that compasses had become scarce and it was likely that drawing sets would no longer be supplied.³⁵

According to historical accounts of the internment, “high school students—[unlike their primary counterparts] were [officially] left to fend for themselves through correspondence courses—at their own expense.”³⁶ These accounts appear at odds with education department correspondence involving Edith Lucas. In April 1942, provincial School Superintendent S. J. Willis informed Lucas that the BCSC was considering correspondence education for high school students in the internment camps.³⁷ By 15 June 1942, plans were approved for correspondence courses to “be made available to high school students under supervisors, with regular hours of study.”³⁸Under this arrangement—referred to as the “group plan”—individual correspondence lessons were purchased and shared by several high school students working under the supervision of Japanese-Canadian adults.³⁹ This “user pay” system was not unlike the system in which many non-interned, geographically remote students enrolled in and paid for their own high school correspondence courses.⁴⁰ At the start of the war in 1939, the branch enrolled 3,101 such pupils. The total jumped to 3,982 in 1941 as branch staff scrambled to accommodate additional pupils whose schools were forced to close due to wartime teacher shortages.

By February 1943, Edith Lucas and Cleo Booth of the BCSC’S department of education were corresponding at length regarding arrangements for end-of-year high school examinations.⁴¹ What is significant is that Lucas and her colleagues set and marked the exams, not only for official registrants of the correspondence courses, but also for evacuee students who were not officially registered.⁴² Furthermore, in response to a request from internee supervisors, Lucas and her staff postponed end-of-year examinations from June to August to accommodate evacuees whose educational progress had been hampered by administrative “delays and other handicaps” brought about by the evacuation.⁴³

Lucas and her colleagues in the high school correspondence branch were not alone in their attempts to help evacuee children. Other educational administrators within and outside of government also assisted in the interned children’s education. In a letter to Anna Miller in October 1942, the BCSC indicated that 2,418 elementary school students had benefited from correspondence lessons at a total cost to the commission of $3,344.45.⁴⁴ Later that month, J. A. Tyrwhitt of the BCSC wrote to Miller to indicate his need for approximately 1,020 copies of New Canadian Arithmetic, books I and II, because the books were no longer prescribed by the provincial education department and were no longer available from the textbook branch.⁴⁵ Since correspondence lessons were based on the old texts, Miller appealed to H.N. MacCorkindale, superintendent of the Vancouver schools, to supply the branch with any surplus copies.⁴⁶ Nine days later superintendent MacCorkindale had provided Miller with 1,020 texts that she then dispatched to the BCSC.⁴⁷ Further assis tance was extended to the evacuees by the faculty of the Vancouver Normal School, which held annual summer school courses at New Denver to accommodate BCSC school instructors.⁴⁸

Nevertheless, British Columbia’s original government policy was to not educate the evacuees and to not permit them to enrol in correspondence courses.⁴⁹ However, the Department of Education was caught in a dilemma, with educators such as Lucas, Miller, and MacCorkindale working to overcome the political circumstances to assist the interned students where they could. Although the full extent of these educators’ efforts may never be known, a letter from Harry Shibuya, supervisor at Alpine Lodge, Cascade, British Columbia, suggests that Lucas’s assistance was much appreciated. Shibuya stated that Mr J. A. Tyrwhitt of the Securities Commission had “acquainted” him with the effort Lucas had “exerted on behalf of the Canadians of Japanese parentage, in the matter of their education.” He closed the letter by extending thanks for her “sense of justice and fair-play,” which she showed on “behalf of the unfortunate children of evacuees.”⁵⁰

British Columbia’s historical literature has failed to record the positive contributions of Lucas and her colleagues to the education of the Japanese Canadians. Instead, accounts have focused more directly on the actions of the individuals who orchestrated the internment for reasons that might include racism, military defence, or political expediency. In contrast, the actions of Lucas and her colleagues seemed motivated by a strong sense of social justice, civic fair-mindedness, and a general sense of fair play. These same qualities served Lucas well after the war, when the deputy minister of education assigned her the daunting task of coordinating the province’s English and citizenship program during a high point of immigration. Lucas met the challenge and built the high school correspondence branch into an internationally prominent organization.

As part of the post-World War II resettlement of “displaced persons,” an influx of non-English-speaking European women came to British Columbia in 1948 seeking work as domestics. The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Victoria, where most of these women settled, “undertook, among other things, to give them classes in English.” YWCA volunteer teachers were soon overwhelmed by the magnitude of this work and the insufficient resources, prompting the deputy minister of education to request that Edith Lucas “take charge of the program in English and citizenship.” Lucas quickly recognized the sheer size of her task, given that there was “no book on the market suitable for teaching English to intelligent adults of a different tongue.”⁵¹

Although Lucas, a seasoned teacher and principal, had never before prepared lessons for adult immigrants, she knew that these learners’ needs differed from those of children and adolescents. Finding no suitable resources for adult language instruction, Lucas devised her own strategy. On her own time, Lucas organized a class of newcomers to meet in the evenings in her Victoria office, a stone’s throw from the YWCA. Once she had prepared and “field tested” a lesson with her own students, she had it “mimeographed and sent to the YWCA classes for their guidance.”⁵² Each lesson consisted of formal grammar, a vocabulary drill, and pages of reading material about a fictitious immigrant family experiencing various aspects of Canadian life, such as government, banking, property insurance, taxation, home decoration, and workmen’s compensation. Lucas eventually compiled her lessons into three books, titled English I, English II, and English III, each totalling over 300 pages.⁵³ Upon completing English II, students could sit an examination that entitled them to a “certificate in English and citizenship,” a document they could present as evidence of readiness when applying for Canadian citizenship. By 1954, more than 115 night schools in British Columbia used Lucas’s textbooks, which she described as “instruction in the rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship, teaching at the same time practical English and our customs.”⁵⁴

As a member of the Canadian Citizenship Council and an immigrant to Canada, Lucas considered the development of English I, II and III to be a “labour of love”—produced mostly during her own unpaid time. Lucas preferred to produce her own materials from scratch, because she disapproved of many of the available language texts whose pages were rife with stilted, formulaic phrases, such as “the pen of my aunt is under the lilac bush.” Lucas took pride in her works, which were well illustrated with phrases built around the daily needs of the adult immigrants “in the sort of sequence in which they are naturally spoken.”⁵⁵

Although first, and always, an educational civil servant, Lucas proved adept at marketing her books and the other resources produced by the correspondence branch. With information provided to her by the federal citizenship and immigration branch, Lucas would write to Canadians sponsoring or employing recent immigrants offering them her English language materials. By the early 1950s, Lucas was receiving requests for her materials from public school teachers.⁵⁶ Requests for advice and materials came from as far away as California.⁵⁷ In keeping with official custom of the time, Lucas replied personally to all requests, sending information and materials free of charge.

During her time as a civil servant, Lucas’s department handled over 100 different correspondence courses that addressed a range of topics, from “mathematics and French to steam engineering and frame house construction.”⁵⁸ A 1941 survey of student enrolment revealed a highly varied student population, of which 27 per cent of the 3,900 enrolled were adults. Many of Lucas’s enrollees were physically marginalized from mainstream society, including 273 who were confined to hospital beds, 104 British Columbia Penitentiary inmates, and twenty inmates from Oakalla prison. A further eighteen students were enrolled from the Girls’ Industrial Home, and twenty were from New Haven, the boys’ home. Many enrollees not only passed their senior matriculation, they won scholarships and other honours.⁵⁹ One such award went to Horst Kramer, a Rumanian immigrant, who won a major university entrance bursary for academic excellence in 1956. He had taken all of his high school education through correspondence—beginning with Lucas’s English for New Canadians I and II.⁶⁰

Lucas’s correspondence branch also helped many new settlers endure the hardships experienced in some of Canada’s most geographically remote areas. In 1941 there were but three non-native women in the Fort Selkirk district of the Yukon. They would meet on Thursdays to sew and knit for soldiers abroad. One of the three, Mrs Kathleen Cowaret, took up the study of French through Lucas’s correspondence education school. Through Cowaret’s “delightful, chatty letters,” Edith Lucas learned of the lonely life in the Far North for those women whose husbands were absent on trapping expeditions for lengthy periods of time.⁶¹ Over the years, appreciative parents informed Lucas that “without assurance of education for their children through correspondence, they never would have ventured into remote parts of B.C.”⁶²

By the time Edith Lucas left the civil service in 1963 (Figure 9.4), she had spent over 25 years building the reputation of British Columbia’s high school correspondence branch into “international prominence.”⁶³ The branch grew from serving 2,000 pupils in 1940 to 20,000 in 1963.⁶⁴ Through her publications in scholarly journals and talks she provided when invited, on topics such as correspondence schooling and adult education, Lucas extolled the virtues of correspondence education.⁶⁵ At the 1959 annual convention of the British Columbia School Trustees Association, Lucas lectured school board members that, in regular schools, “there is a tendency among students to expect the teacher to do all the work.”⁶⁶ In contrast, Lucas asserted, correspondence students “learn quickly to stand on their own feet,” and in so doing develop perseverance and willpower that helps them excel at their studies.⁶⁷ Not surprisingly, Lucas sought to foster in her students the discipline and resourcefulness that she had learned as an immigrant child—the qualities that had taken her from a working-class neighbourhood in Victoria to the classrooms of the Sorbonne, and the independent mindedness that she had demonstrated throughout her career in government as she sought to surmount the rural, racial, and ethnic inequalities that divided British Columbia society as surely as its great mountain ranges. In 1960, as testament to her international stature, the Ford Foundation selected her to set up a correspondence program for the West Indies.⁶⁸

In 1963, Lucas decided to retire early for two reasons. Troubled throughout her life with a serious goitre, her physical energies had begun to wane. In addition, the provincial education department was on the verge of reorganization. She felt that after such a reorganization, the branch should be in the hands of younger people. With her usual blend ofhumour and humility, she noted that she did not want to “crawl to the goal post.”⁶⁹

On 3 February 1989—two months before her eighty-sixth birthday—Edith Ethel Lucas passed away.⁷⁰ Newspapers noted her passing with headlines lauding her as a “famous educator” with an “honoured career.”⁷¹ These records testify that Lucas was an outstanding scholar and a pioneering educator who made significant contributions to provincial, national, and international communities. No doubt Lucas’s first-hand experiences as an Irish immigrant in the very “English” city of Victoria, and later on as a graduate student alone in France, fostered her empathy for “outsiders.” And, like other educational and social reformers of her time, Lucas was evidently motivated by a strong desire to serve others.⁷²

Edith Lucas’s story provides contemporary researchers with a window into a forgotten world of educational government—a world controlled almost entirely by “professionals” inside the system.⁷³ Lucas’s ability to “push” the physical, racial, and ethnic boundaries that would otherwise restrict the lives of her learners was greatly facilitated by the “unbounded” autonomy that government granted civil servants of the time. From her position inside the education department, Lucas could, and did, by pass government’s official policy not to educate the Japanese-Canadian internees. As a senior civil servant, she could, and did, make decisions that mattered to youngsters, as she did in postponing the 1943 year-end examinations. Unable to find a suitable textbook with which to teach English to adult immigrants, she simply created her own. In short, Lucas’s achievements on behalf of the province’s marginalized learners were the consequences of a combination of two factors: a socio-political context that bestowed unbridled latitude on senior civil servants, and Lucas’s personal drive to improve the lives of British Columbia’s marginalized learners, among whom she had once been counted.