THE ONLY B.C. PREMIER WITH FOUR NAMES DIES
Three men pass away in succession while serving as provincial leaders
British Columbia has had three premiers who died in office. Oddly, they all died in a five-year period, one after the other.
William Smithe died March 29, 1887. He was succeeded by Alexander Davie, who died Aug. 1, 1889. Davie was succeeded by John Robson, who died June 29, 1892.
Smithe was B.C.’s 7th premier, Davie the 8th and Robson the 9th. Smithe and Davie were relatively young — Smithe was 44 when he died, Davie 41 — while Robson lived until he was 68.
Smithe died of nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys. Davie died of consumption, a common malady in the 19th century. Its proper name is phthisis, but most people call it tuberculosis. Robson died of blood poisoning after jamming a finger in the door of a hansom cab (a horse-drawn carriage).
Perhaps they were cursed after having streets named after them in Vancouver’s West End. None of their predecessors did, and they all outlived their time in office, by as much as four decades.
Smithe was the premier between 1883 and 1887, when the Canadian Pacific Railway finally arrived in B.C., 1½ decades after the federal government had promised to connect the West Coast to the rest of Canada.
Born in Northumberland, England, Smithe came to B.C. in 1862, when he was 20. He started off as a farmer in the Cowichan district on Vancouver Island, tried his hand at gold mining in the Cariboo and worked as a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle before embarking on a political career.
Elected to the first provincial legislature in 1871, he succeeded Robert Beaven as premier on Jan. 20, 1883. It was the era of large land grants, and Smithe handed out two doozies: 6,000 acres in presentday Vancouver to the C.P.R., and two million acres on Vancouver Island to coal baron Robert Dunsmuir to build the Esquimalt to Nanaimo Railway.
Alexander Edmund Batson Davie is the only B.C. premier to have four names — newspaper stories of the day usually referred to him as A.E.B. Davie.
He was born in Somerset, England, and came to Canada with his father in 1862, when he was only 15. The family settled near Smithe in the Cowichan River Valley, but young Alexander chose to become a lawyer rather than farmer.
He was elected to the legislature for the Cariboo in 1875, and when he became premier was the MLA for Lillooet. But he doesn’t seem to have lived in either constituency when he was representing them — he was a Victoria lawyer.
Well-respected in legal circles, he was the attorney-general in Smithe’s government, a title he retained when he became premier.
Unfortunately for Davie, his health declined soon after he took office. In October 1887, he left B.C. to winter and recuperate in California and Colorado. He didn’t return until May 1888, and was still in poor health.
“His system was fast succumbing to the ravages of consumption,” noted the British Colonist in Victoria the day of his death. “Though he spoke at length (in the legislature) on several occasions, it required great effort on his part.”
Robson had been acting premier when Davie recuperated in the United States, and succeeded him as premier in 1889.
He was born in Perth, Ont., in 1824, when it was part of Upper Canada. In 1859 he moved west to B.C. to try his luck at gold panning. He didn’t have any success, but in 1861 became the editor of a New Westminster newspaper, the British Columbian.
Robson was one of the champions of New Westminster becoming the capital of B.C. when the mainland and Vancouver Island merged in 1866. He failed, moved to Victoria and became editor of the British Colonist. He went on to promote the idea of B.C. joining Confederation.
Like Smithe, Robson was elected to the first provincial legislature in 1871, representing Nanaimo. In the 1882, 1886 and 1890 elections he was elected in New Westminster. In the 1890 election, he was also elected in the Cariboo — politicians sometimes ran in multiple ridings, lest they lose in one of them.
Robson died in London, England, while on government business. He was succeeded as premier by Alexander Davie’s brother, Theodore. Theodore didn’t die in office, but didn’t live that long, either — he was just shy of 46 when he died in 1898, three years after he resigned as premier to become B.C.’s chief justice.