BURST
One of the first businesses in what became Vancouver was Spratt’s Oilery, a “floating cannery” on the Coal Harbour waterfront.
It was built around 1875 by Joseph Spratt of Victoria, who also owned a converted scow known as Spratt’s Ark. It lasted until 1884, when the large stocks of herring it had found in Burrard Inlet disappeared.
“The herring were very thick in Coal Harbour waters,” pioneer Calvert Simson told Vancouver’s first archivist, Major Matthews, in Vol. 3 of his Early Vancouver series.
“Spratt’s Oilery caught them, squeezed the oil out, and dumped the refuse back in the inlet; whether that drove all the herring away or not no one can tell positively, but they say it did; anyway they went.”
Some accounts say one method of fishing Spratt’s Oilery employed was throwing dynamite into the water. The fish oil Spratt’s Oilery wrung out of the herring was used in industrial machinery.
It was located at the bottom of a bluff near the foot of today’s Burrard and Thurlow streets. An 1884 photo shows a complex of several buildings surrounded by forest.
Spratt’s Ark was said to be 44 metres long by 14 metres wide and was used to take goods across the Strait of Georgia. In 2004, former Vancouver Maritime Museum head James Delgado wrote it was “most likely” the “mystery wreck” that had been found in the waters off Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver.
In 1889, one or more of the Spratt’s Oilery buildings was rebuilt into the The West End Swimming Baths on the Coal Harbour waterfront.
“ Sea Bathing ,” hyped ads in the Vancouver World and Daily News-Advertiser “West of C.P.R. Wharf.”
It was opened by W.D. Jones and W.D. Burdis, and included a boat building business, presumably in another building.
Pioneer resident Harold Ridley said it was a “floating bath house.”
“Jones and Burdis ran it; you paid ‘two bits’ for a swim; it was all ‘two bits’ for everything in those days,” he told Major Matthews in Early Vancouver.
An ad from Aug. 29, 1889 said you could purchase adult season passes for $5, or $2.50 for boys and girls. You could also rent a boat for a spin around the Inlet or to Stanley Park.
A May 8, 1889, story said the location on the Inlet was on “hard sand and sloped gently and gradually from extremely shallow to any depth. This will accordingly permit the most timorous (to enjoy) in security the pleasures of sea bathing.”
There is blurry photo in the Vancouver Archives of several men at the Jones and Burdis swimming baths, a bare-bones wooden building that looks it was built on piles above the water.
The men are wearing skimpy bathing suits , not the full body garb you’d expect for the time. The baths and swimming areas must have been divided into male and female sections.
The baths only seem to have been around in 1889 and 1890. As the city expanded into the West End, the beach at English Bay became Vancouver’s favourite place to swim.
Jones became the lightkeeper at Brockton Point for 35 years, and Burdis became the secretary for David Oppenheimer, the early mayor.
The 1889 newspapers can be quite hilarious. The Vancouver World tried to appeal to women with a column one-line stories titled “Daughters of Eve.”
“Mrs. Oscar Wilde wears the same ‘best’ dress through the season,” read one nugget. “Shaking hands has made Mrs. Cleveland’s right hand longer than the left.”
On Aug. 27, 1889, the World carried almost a full page of Vancouver council news. But it also ran a small story that said “it was remarked by many who attended the council meeting last evening that the business could be disposed of much more expeditiously than is the case, if the aldermen, especially those of them who seem to like to hear themselves talk, were to speak more directly to the points at issue.”
One of the issues council was dealing with was leasing “portion of the East End park” to the B.C. Jockey Club “for the proposed racetrack.” This would become Hastings Park racecourse, which opened in 1892 and closed this year.
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