BURST
The Denman Arena burned down in a spectacular blaze on Aug. 20, 1936.
But part of Vancouver’s first big hockey rink remained — the lower concrete walls. So in 1940, the enterprising evangelist Clem Davies decided to turn the site into a 10,000-seat “out-of-door” stadium for his Sunday night sermons.
“The cement walls of the Arena have been painted light green on the inside, and the pillars which supported the gallery have been removed,” said a story in the June 29, 1940 Vancouver Sun.
“A stage 30 feet by 12 feet has been erected 14 feet above floor level. Workers have built 1,700 benches, each with a seating capacity of six, which have been painted a darker green than the walls.
“They spread out across the great floor area, over which crushed stone walks have been laid. A vast backdrop, portraying an ecclesiastical motif, dominates the speaker’s rostrum.
“The stage is flanked by purple and gold drapes, and accommodates an electric organ.”
The Sun story said the stadium cost $3,500, and had been put together by 50 to 100 volunteers working “every day since the project began.”
It sounds totally over the top, but seemed to work: a photo in July 20, 1940, shows Davies lecturing to a full house.
Davies is all but forgotten today, but was a big deal from the 1920s till the 1950s, because he pioneered delivering sermons on radio. When he died at 61 on Dec. 21, 1951, his obituaries said Davies had made 15,000 radio broadcasts over three decades.
Davies was born in Birmingham, England, and moved to the U.S. when he was 19. After graduating from Methodist ministerial college in Minnesota, he became a doctor of divinity at Oskaloosa College in Iowa.
He came to Victoria in 1922 to preach at Centennial Methodist church, and started doing a radio broadcast in April, 1923, two years before future Alberta premier “Bible Bill” Aberhart started broadcasting in Calgary. Davies started lecturing at the Empire Theatre, mixing religion with topics of the day.
He was identified with British Israelism, which Wikipedia calls “a pseudo-historical“ belief that the British people are “genetically, racially, and linguistically the direct descendants” of the 10 Lost Tribes of ancient Israel.
On Nov. 11, 1925, he did a sermon/lecture at the Victoria City Temple called “Shall We Join the Ku Klux Klan?” For Davies, the answer was yes — the Victoria Times reported he was chairman of the “Victoria’s first Ku Klux Klan function” at the Crystal Ballroom on Jan. 18, 1926.
“The feature of the evening was a demonstration of the Ku Klux Klan wedding ceremony,” said the Times.
“Fifty Klansmen in full regalia with hoods and flowing robes solemnly paraded up the centre of the hall and up in cross formation to face the platform. As the lights were dimmed, there blazed up the flaring fiery cross, which glowed through the whole hall.”
Davies seemed to put his association with the KKK in the closet when he moved to Vancouver about 1937. But he continued to retain some controversial views.
He raised eyebrows on Feb. 5, 1938, when he told an audience in the old Hotel Vancouver that when King Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson in 1936, he was hypnotized and drugged by an “international gang of Jesuits.”
According to Davies, the Jesuits in Rome made a wax effigy of the former King, “encircled it with hypnosis and day after day concentrated upon the figure until they had sublimated it into life.”
Still, Davies was popular, with a daily radio show on CKWX and sermons Sunday and Wednesday at the Georgia Auditorium.
With the advent of the Second World War, his sermons had titles like “Samson and Delilah Modernized … Showing How Britain Seduced to Weakness is Now Gaining Strength.”
He left Vancouver for Los Angeles in 1941, where he proved as popular as in Canada. He died from malaria, which he contracted on a trip to Africa.
The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News reported Davies left an estate of $55,000 to his executive secretary, Eileen Bennett, but nothing to his wife or two kids. He’d been separated from his wife for two decades.