H.H. Stevens was B.C. top federal Conservative in the 1910s, 20s and 30s
Henry Herbert Stevens was one of B.C.’s most prominent politicians from 1910 to 1940.
As he aged, he became known as a “walking encyclopedia of Canadiana” who took an annual birthday walk around Stanley Park.
“Head down, legs pumping, breath streaming behind him in grey balloons, the Honourable H.H. Stevens, the grand old curmudgeon of Conservative politics, plunged through pelting rain to celebrate his 75th birthday,” wrote Mac Reynolds in the Dec. 8, 1953 Vancouver Sun.
Stevens had started his birthday tradition in 1932, and kept it up until 1970, when he did a 10.4 km walk in 2½ hours at the age of 92.
“He started off at 9:45 a.m. at the Robert Burns statue,” Aileen Campbell wrote in the Dec, 9, 1970 Province. “He finished at 12:10 p.m., with two tea breaks, eight lumps of sugar in the cup ‘for energy.’”
Daughter Patricia Coolridge followed Stevens at a “discreet distance” by car.
“He doesn’t like to talk while he’s walking,” she told Campbell. “It takes his breath away.”
Stevens had a long association with Stanley Park: In 1922, he had helped secure $10,000 in federal funding for the Stanley Park seawall, which was built in fits and starts over six decades. He lived to see it completed on Sept, 26, 1971.
Stevens hoped to do the seawall on his 93rd birthday in 1971, but passed because of a big snowfall. He didn’t make it because of a cold snap in 1972, and died on June 14, 1973 at 94.
He was born in Bristol, England, on Dec. 8, 1878, and immigrated to Canada in 1887. His family initially lived in Peterborough, Ont., and moved to Vernon in 1894.
“In the Okanagan he worked as a clerk in a general store, tried prospecting and ranching, fired the locomotive for a time, then drove a stagecoach from Penticton to the booming mining centres of the Boundary country,” wrote the Sun’s Ron Rose on June 15, 1973.
He joined the U.S. army in 1899 and was sent to the Philippines and then China during the Boxer Rebellion, when the Chinese fought to drive out foreigners.
He came back to Vancouver in 1901 and got involved in real estate and politics. By 1905 he was head of the Vancouver Moral Reform Association, which sought to close down “Chinese gambling dens, the red light district and rough saloons.”
In 1910, he was elected an alderman. In 1911 he became a federal Conservative MP. He would remain in parliament for three decades in Vancouver and the Kootenays, serving as a cabinet minister three times.
Stevens was a key figure in the infamous Komagata Maru incident, in which 376 would-be immigrants from the Punjab in India were denied entry to Canada in 1914. The ship sat in Coal Harbour for two months before it returned to India.
On June 24, 1914, The Province reported Stevens concluded a speech with “I have no ill feeling towards the Asiatics, but we cannot keep the standard of comfort or the standard of civilization we have if we have a people among us whom we cannot assimilate, and I stand firm for a white Canada.”
In August 2019, Stevens’ name was removed from a federal office building in Vancouver as a symbolic gesture of reconciliation to the victims of the Komagata Maru incident.
He entered the Conservative cabinet in 1921 as minister of trade and commerce under prime minister Arthur Meighen. He was minister of trade and commerce a second time in R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government in 1930. But he had a falling out with Bennett in 1934 after accusing big department stores of using their buying power to distort prices.
In 1935, he was kicked out of Bennett’s cabinet and formed his own Reconstructionist party. He had begun his political life as a free enterprise Conservative, but the ravages of the Great Depression convinced him the government should intervene in the economy.
“It is now as much the duty of the state to ensure for its people the elementary needs of food, clothing and shelter on a civilized scale as to protect them and their property from molestation,” Stevens stated in the party manifesto.
But he was the only member of the party elected in the Oct. 14, 1935 election, and was defeated in 1940 and 1949.
