Farewell to a museum builder
Leonard Guy McCann: Friends have many and varied memories of the curator, for 45 years, of the Vancouver Maritime Museum
On Saturday, a diverse collection of friends, former colleagues, archivists, museum curators, historians and others will gather to tell stories about Leonard Guy McCann, who died near the end of March aged 88.
The wake should be a memorable one given the depth of sentiment expressed in the many emails I got about the man who over 45 years as curator and curator emeritus ushered the Vancouver Maritime Museum to its ranking among the top 10 such institutions in the world.
But once the tales are told, the fading personal recollections fixed in the jumbled archives of collective memory, a few of his closest friends will take up his ashes. They will carry them to a place on a compass bearing off Point Atkinson in West Vancouver and, at his request, cast them upon the swirling waters over Manson’s Deep.
That’s the little-known spot where the mortal remains of Vancouver’s mariners have historically been returned to the cold embrace of the sea.
The first mariner to be buried in Manson’s Deep is likely lost to history but among its distinguished residents are John Antle, the Newfoundland-born Anglican who established hospitals up the remote coast and ministered to First Nations villages, logging and mining camps from the mission ship Columbia, launched in 1905.
Old friend Bill McKee, who will be there to help send off McCann, thinks the tradition began in the 19th century. Nevertheless, he’s borne personal witness to one of the burials at Manson’s Deep, so he’s sure of the tradition’s authenticity.
“I witnessed, through my binoculars, a burial off a Royal Canadian Navy vessel, the body in a shroud sliding off the deck while sailors fired an honorary salute. I could not hear it but could see the smoke drifting. It was dramatic, even from a distance.
“Since Len played such an important role in preserving our maritime heritage, and he requested it, his ashes will be taken there later this summer
“He was one of the most wonderful people I have ever known. He had a talent for friendship and he shared his friends. His friends became my friends.
JEANNETTE BAXTER
by a few friends in a much more modest farewell.”
McCann, a modest man himself would doubtless approve, although his life reads more like a story from Boy’s Own Annual than what you’d expect from a museum curator.
He was born in Shanghai, wound up fleeing the Japanese invasion, only to be interned with his mother during the fall of Manila.
Three years later, after liberation by American forces, his mother settled in Victoria. He attended Oak Bay High School where he discovered a talent for amateur theatre. He worked as a shipfitter, sold draperies for Eaton’s, then clerked at a Land Registry Office.
During the 1960s, he designed sets for early CBC television productions in Toronto and Vancouver, but returned to university and was among the first graduates from UBC’s new museum studies program.
That led to the Royal Canadian Engineers Museum in Chilliwack. He joined the Vancouver Maritime Museum in 1968.
These days, Vancouver’s maritime roots are often forgotten.
McCann insisted we remember where we come from. He became an expert on local ships and shipping and understood the sweep and drama of that history from clipper ships in the tea trade to fishing skiffs rowed to the Skeena. He began a drive to expand the Vancouver museum’s collection of historical artifacts, archival documents and rare photographs.
He knew history is not historians; history is longshoremen, sailors, pilots and gillnetters.
He sought them and persuaded them to donate artifacts, art, models, bric-a-brac from old ships and snapshots. He obtained the chronometer Capt. George Vancouver used while charting English Bay.
And yet, ask his friends about him and it’s not these accolades that they recite.
For Paula Swart, who came to know McCann while she was curator of Asian studies at the Vancouver Museum, it’s the sweet memory of a trip with him to Shanghai and the intensity of emotion when he entered Holy Trinity Cathedral where his mother, a refugee from the Russian Revolution, had sung in the choir.
For Bill McKee, it was the whimsical journal he kept during a solo drive across Canada more than half a century ago, reaching Vancouver with only one gear still working.
For Jeannette Baxter, it was the dapper ascot he always wore to work — from the moment he retired he never wore it again — the beautiful dahlias he grew and how he so loved the sweater her mother knitted for him that he wore it to shreds.
“He was one of the most wonderful people I have ever known,” she said. “He had a talent for friendship and he shared his friends. His friends became my friends.”
A museum that’s one of the best in the world; a life well lived; well-loved by your friends — that’s a pretty fine leave-taking if you ask me.