Columnists
Great Grampa Built Christ Church Cathedral
David Burke, Victoria
Volume 29 Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: September 26, 2015
Christ Church Cathedral on Quadra – architectural marvel. Obdurate sentinel of Faith – facing the Justice building, second largest Gothic Cathedral in North America. In 1916, my great-grandfather Charles de Veber Schofield became archbishop of British Columbia, after rebuilding the cathedral at Fredericton, and lived for a time in what was virtually a manse with a tin roof. My aunt and grandmother, Peggy Schofield and Betty Robertson, his daughters, leaped and bounded over the tombstones in Pioneer Square.
Christ Church Cathedral on Quadra – architectural marvel. Obdurate sentinel of Faith – facing the Justice building, second largest Gothic Cathedral in North America. In 1916, my great-grandfather Charles de Veber Schofield became archbishop of British Columbia, after rebuilding the cathedral at Fredericton, and lived for a time in what was virtually a manse with a tin roof. My aunt and grandmother, Peggy Schofield and Betty Robertson, his daughters, leaped and bounded over the tombstones in Pioneer Square.
The Bishop’s health was not always good and in his wilder moments, he conceived the building of a vast cathedral, that slowly and inexorably, like so many of God’s plans, became fact. I first visited the Cathedral as a very young boy, clad in a white surplice, having made the long trek from St. Johns on foot with bullies throwing eggs at us from passing cars.
The Cathedral Choir were then the superior choir in the city and I rankled at Bill Dyson’s ability to hold a note, while I was eternal backup. The last time I paid any attention to a service in the Cathedral, I was overcome with the splendour of the costumes and found myself beating a hasty retreat.
Bishop Schofield didn’t always want to be bishop. My great-grandmother Emily Schofield wrote a slim book about him and in it she describes how, at his ordination in England, he got cold feet and almost backed out of the affair. And yet, there it sits. The second largest gothic cathedral in North America. Buttresses, vaulted roof, stained glass windows, the infamous robin’s perch… the flags and the nave finished long after the Bishop’s death.
Bishop Charles Schofield died of what was probably total exhaustion in 1936 on a stylish Napoleon settee. I really would have liked to meet him in my lifetime, but his spirit travels everywhere I go and when I want to talk to him, there’s a stain glass window of him in the foyer of the Cathedral and I’ve had many a heart to heart in that sacred place.
Emily Schofield, his wife, was an extraordinary pioneer as well as a supportive wife and mother. She met Helen Keller when she was young and she was one of the first women in North America to go to university. I still have her trunk and had a special relationship with her in childhood, where she fully recognized the potential of her grandchildren and every Saturday at her place on St. David Street, we were allowed to take home and keep, a rare children’s book, often a first edition.
When I was six she came to visit us in England, in the little town of Weybridge outside London, and a great fuss was made about her visit and high tea laid on, and there were talks in the drawing room and I recall so clearly, as if it were yesterday, leading great-grandmother Emily, aged eighty, up the long winding staircase of the Oatlands Park Hotel, and showing her triumphantly the incredible view of the surrounding countryside. If there is a God, I will be there next spring.
David Burke, Victoria