She was right on the money
AS THE SEARCH BEGINS FOR A CANADIAN WOMAN TO PUT ON A BANKNOTE, THIS ONE MADE IT IN 1917
As the Bank of Canada hunts down a candidate to become the first Canadian woman on a banknote, numismatists are pointing out that there’s already been one.
Princess Patricia, who died in 1974, was the wildly popular daughter of a Canadian governor general whose face was chosen to grace a patriotic $1 note issued in the midst of the First World War.
Last week, on International Women’s Day, Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced that the 2018 issue of Canadian banknotes would feature an “iconic Canadian woman” selected by public nominations.
“It’s now been almost 150 years that we’ve not had a Canadian woman on our banknotes,” said Morneau.
But while Patricia was a bornin- England member of British royalty, she was technically a Canadian citizen by the laws of the era.
Under the 1910 Immigration Act, Canadian citizenship was automatically extended to any British subject who had spent more than three years in the country, provided they hadn’t spent part of it in prison or an “asylum for the insane.”
Patricia sailed to Canada in 1911 soon after her father, the Duke of Connaught, was appointed the country’s governor general. The princess had thus racked up six years in the Dominion by the time her banknote was issued.
A granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Patricia was already a wellknown European socialite by the time circumstances brought her to early 20th-century Canada. In a 1908 Los Angeles Times story, for instance, Patricia had been called the most “incorrigible flirt in Europe.”
Historians since have called her the “very pinnacle of smart society” when she set sail for Ottawa.
T. W. Loveridge, an assistant professor of history at Royal Military College, described her as a mixture of Lady Diana and the Duchess of Cambridge.
“Perhaps Canadians saw something of their future in her … young, progressive, related to the Crown but holding more modern, progressive views and with good hair,” he said.
Patricia publicly incurred the wrath of the King and Queen for backing the cause of women’s suffrage. In 1913, the princess even hired a well- known suffragist as her lady-in-waiting.
She was athletic, became a respected water colourist, inspired cosmetics lines in the United States, was a guest of honour at the inaugural Calgary Stampede in 1912 and, most importantly for a country full of lumberjacks and miners, she ultimately abandoned her royal titles in order to marry a commoner.
“To all intents and purposes, she had become Canada’s own royalty,” said Loveridge.
Nowadays, Patricia is best known as the sponsor for Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, which in 1917 was already known as one of the Commonwealth’s deadliest regiments. The princess even hand- embroidered the regiment’s colours.
Patricia predates any prime minister on Canadian currency, and was arguably one of the first figures put on a bill for the sole reason that Canadians seemed to like her. Up to then, bills had usually only featured kings, queens, governors general and t heir wives.
The choice was “a little off the beaten path,” said Brent Mackie, an executive director with the Canadian Paper Money Society.
First issued on March 17, 1917, it was the only new bill issued during the First World War, and roughly 100 million of the notes would be printed before it was phased out in 1923.
Today, depending on its condition, a Princess Patricia $1 bill can sell for between $30 and $3,000.
Merna Forster, a Victoria historian who has been championing efforts to get a Canadian woman on currency, said she had not heard of the Princess Patricia bill, but said it sounded like a good start.
As she noted, if Canada had kept putting women on banknotes like the Canadians of 1917, “I wouldn’t have needed a petition.”
HOLDING MORE MODERN, PROGRESSIVE VIEWS AND WITH GOOD HAIR.