BELOVED SUN WRITER DROWNS IN ENGLISH BAY
Bob Bouchette went for a swim in English Bay in the wee small hours of June 13, 1938. But he never made it back to shore.
Three days later, his dead body was found in Starboat Cove, near the Point Atkinson lighthouse in West Vancouver. He was 38 years old.
Bouchette’s death was frontpage news in Vancouver, because he was the city’s most beloved newspaper writer in the 1930s. In an era when most stories didn’t include bylines, he may have been the first journalist in town to become a household name.
His folksy, humorous column, Lend Me Your Ears, was a mainstay of The Vancouver Sun from 1930 until he left the paper to work for The Province in April 1938.
But he was also The Sun’s main feature writer and news reporter. Bouchette covered the big crime stories along with the new trends and the social issues that were gripping Vancouverites.
In January 1935, he went undercover to investigate the government’s controversial work camps during the Great Depression, where unemployed men were paid a mere 20 cents per day.
He began the series by relating how he was treated when he posed as one of these men.
“I was walking down a country road into a little town,” he wrote on Jan. 2, 1935. “I was tired and cold. I had four days growth of hair on my face. I was unwashed and greasy and I don’t think I smelled very nice.
“What I wanted more than anything else was a cup of coffee and a cigarette. So I entered a little restaurant and sat down. A woman came up from a backroom. She eyed me silently and then turned her back. Presently a man came from the back. “’Whadda you want?’ he said. “‘I want a cup of coffee and a small package of cigarettes,’” I replied meekly. “Suspicion was written all over his face as he served me.
I felt so uncomfortable that I paid him immediately to relieve the tension. It was quite clear that the man wondered whether I was a bum or a thief.
“What must be the feelings of a man who faces that distrust and thinly veiled hostility every day of his life? What must be the feelings of a man who sees nothing else ahead?
“If he has any sensitivity at all — and most of the men in relief camps are as sensitive as you and I — he must be filled with despair and a numb hopelessness. It isn’t a question of creature comfort: it’s spiritual. The men in Canadian relief camps today feel that they have no place in the ordinary world.”
His social conscience was one facet of his writing; his crime reporting was something else. His June 3, 1929, story about an unnamed crook who was terrorizing Vancouver is a classic of hardboiled reporting.
“The ‘phantom bandit,’ hunted and desperate, today lurks somewhere between Vancouver and the international boundary, ready to fire a murderous volley from his automatic pistol at the first potential captor who encounters him,” Bouchette wrote.
He also had a wicked sense of humour, often using it to lampoon political leaders. Bouchette particularly enjoyed ridiculing Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In one column, he posed as Mussolini’s valet.
“If he thinks he’s such a fire-eater why doesn’t he just set a match to his whiskers?” Bouchette wrote on April 1, 1938. “Maybe he would go up in flames. There’s so much sawdust inside his shirt.”
Robert Dillon Bouchette was born in Montreal to French and Irish parents. After a stint in the army during the First World War, he landed a job at the Montreal Gazette. He came west in 1923, working at The Sun for two years before signing on as a seaman on a freighter and sailing to Europe. He returned to Vancouver and The Sun in 1927.
It’s unclear why he left The Sun in 1938 — a prodigious drinker, perhaps he had a run-in with an editor and quit, or perhaps The Province lured him away for more money. He had also separated from his wife, which led some people to believe he had committed suicide. His death shocked Vancouver. “The whole city, in every walk of life, mourned the tragedy,” said his former colleague Gus Silvertz in The Sun on Aug. 4, 1967. “And countless numbers of nameless, faceless men trekking sadly from relief camp to relief camp across Canada mourned, too.”