The annual Heritage Tea has become a popular tradition at West Vancouver Seniors Activity Centre during Heritage Week in February.
“It’s one of the ways we celebrate the people who built our community,” says Joni Vajda, outreach co-ordinator. “Every year, we do something different but always relating to West Vancouver’s history. The tea has become one of our most popular events.”
This year, West Vancouver Historical Society plays a return engagement with a slideshow and talk about West Vancouver as it was.
John Moir and Dave Barker, born and raised in West Vancouver and teachers who both attended and taught at West Vancouver secondary, will talk about life along West Vancouver’s waterfront.
Dave’s paternal great-grandparents, Minnie and Art Bossenberry, were summer visitors, camping in tents on the north shore of Burrard Inlet in 1911, before there was a West Vancouver. His maternal grandparents, George and Jenny Barker, operated a boat rental and café at the foot of 17th Street during the 1930s.
John, born in 1947, remembers walking to school accompanied by the hooting of foghorns on foggy autumn mornings.
Delia Hughes is looking forward to the tea. “I’m a newcomer to West Vancouver,” she says. “I’ve only been here eight years and I love learning about the history of this place. We have thriving and healthy seniors who remember West Vancouver in the early days. How lucky we are to have our history still within living memory.”
British by birth, Delia knows a little something about history’s long reach. Her story, like everyone’s, is unique.
An only child, she lost her father at the age of 11, a year before the Second World War broke out. Her mother returned to nursing to support herself and her daughter, managing to keep Delia enrolled in dance and elocution classes through the long years of the war and the equally long years of rationing.
“A bra required three coupons, a coat 12, and you only got 24 coupons a year, so you had to be very careful,” recalls Delia.
Her life changed in the early 1950s when she took the opportunity to become a governess for a sugar-magnate’s family in Cuba. One of the perks of the job was an annual trip to Paris to see new clothing collections.
One year they took nine trunks with them on the voyage but returned after three months with 28 trunks filled with clothes.
“It seemed we saw a new collection every day,” recalls Delia. That year they brought back a line of clothing called the New Look pioneered by Christian Dior, which used yards and yards of fabric that was “vastly different from the meagre selections back in England.”
In 1953, Delia met and married Islyn “Lyn” Hughes in Canada. When he retired, they opened a shop they called Crystal Cave where he repaired timepieces and jewelry and Delia was a dressmaker, eventually moving the shop home to England to be near their aging parents. After Lyn and Delia’s mother died, the time had come to make another change. Delia returned to West Vancouver to live near her daughters.
“When I arrived here, I knew no one. The seniors centre changed that. Through Keeping Connected, I joined a fitness class, a social club, a conversation club and go on outings. I met people who are now dear friends and we, in our turn, help newcomers to the centre make their own connections. It’s a vital service for seniors who might be feeling a little bit squashed. When we lose our spouses and friends, and even family members, it can be a challenge to make new connections and to keep active.”
Once settled, Delia returned to an early interest: the stage. She had trained at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and “trod the boards” in repertory. Delia joined Theatre West Van, performing in Murder on the Nile and Fawlty Towers before retiring from the stage for the second time.
Join Delia and her friends at the Heritage Tea on Monday, Feb. 20 from 2 to 4 p.m, in the Marine Room at West Vancouver Seniors’ Activity Centre, at 21st Street and Marine Drive. Tickets are $8. To reserve your place call 604-925-7280.
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. Contact her at 778-279-2275 or by e-mail at lander1@shaw.ca.
