Roderick Haig-Brown
Encyclopedia
Roderick Haig-Brown was a Canadian writer
and conservationist
.
, Sussex
, England
his father, Alan Haig-Brown, was a teacher and a prolific writer who published hundreds of articles and poems on sports, the military and educational issues in various periodicals. His paternal grandfather, William, was headmaster of the Charterhouse School
for thirty-three years. Alan was also an officer in the British Army during World War I. In 1918 he was killed in action in France. Roderick had a high regard for his father and describes him in an essay entitled “Alan Roderick Haig Brown” as “an Edwardian: one of the young, the strong, the brave and the fair who had faith in their nation, their world and themselves” (27).
His mother, Violet Mary Pope, was one of fifteen children of Alfred Pope, a wealthy Dorset brewer. After the war ended Roderick, his mother and his two sisters went to live with her family. His grandfather Pope was an industrious man with very strong Victorian
values of “service, fair play, decency and acceptance of the obligations that follow with the privilege of class and education” (Robertson 6). He was a friend of Thomas Hardy
and took young Roderick to tea there on at least one occasion. Roderick later noted in his essay “Hardy’s Dorset” that he regretted not having elicited more information from Hardy about being a writer, but he was sixteen then and was passionate about fishing and shooting. Life on his grandfather's country estate on the Frome River was more fascinating to him than “the past or its old men” (“Hardy’s Dorset” 43). His many uncles loved sport and taught him to fish and shoot, but it was a family friend, Major Greenhill, who served as Roderick’s sporting mentor and taught him both the skills and the ethics of sportsmanship. The estate's gamekeepers, particularly "Old Fox", introduced him to the importance of conservation and the complexity of the environment. In 1921 Roderick entered Charterhouse where his grandfather Haig-Brown had been headmaster.
His physical and social childhood environment contributed, according to biographer Anthony Robertson, to Roderick’s code of conduct. Throughout his life he adhered to an ideal balanced between reason and passion, an ideal infused with knowledge and tempered by responsibility, decency and fair play. This code “invoke[d] a mental and physical discipline that [went] beyond making a successful catch or kill; its central virtue [was] knowledge, intimate and thorough, transcending pursuit” (8).
, Canada through a series of unexpected events. After he was expelled from Charterhouse School for drinking and sneaking out, he joined his father’s regiment for a short while, but found that army life was too restrictive. The family decided that the British Colonial Civil Service might be a more agreeable alternative but he was too young to write the exams. He went, in the meantime to Seattle, Washington at the invitation of an uncle who had married a Seattle woman, promising his mother he would come back when he was eligible for the civil service. He worked at a logging camp in Washington, then crossed the border to Canada because his U.S. visa had expired. He remained in British Columbia for three years to work at Nimpkish Lake on Vancouver Island
as a logger
, a commercial fisherman
and an occasional guide to visiting anglers. He returned to England in 1931 and enjoyed the fast-paced life of London
. But images of British Columbia haunted him while he wrote his first book, Silver: The Life of an Atlantic Salmon (1931) as well as part of Pool and Rapid (1932). He returned to BC at the end of the year and planned his third book, Panther (1934). He married Ann Elmore of Seattle after publishing Panther, and the couple settled on the banks of the Campbell River
where they lived for the rest of their lives, raising three daughters and a son.
From the year of his return to British Columbia to 1976, the year of his death, Roderick Haig-Brown published twenty-three books (five more were published posthumously), wrote numerous articles and essays, and created several series of talks and historical dramas for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
. He is most famous internationally for his writing on fly fishing and the natural world. He joined the Canadian Army as a personnel officer in 1943 and was later seconded for several months to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
which allowed him to travel across Canada and to the Arctic. He was magistrate for the town of Campbell River
from 1941 until 1974. He became a trustee of the Nature Conservancy of Canada
, an advisor to the BC Wildlife Federation, a senior advisor to Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Flyfishers, and a member of the Federal Fisheries Development Council and the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission. He was also Chancellor of University of Victoria
from 1970 to 1973. He served three times on the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for British Columbia. These many responsibilities prevented him from devoting much time to writing in the last decade of his life. He retired from the bench a year before his death and was planning to get back to writing as the pressure of his other commitments gradually eased off. His life in his mature years features in many of his books, especially "A River Never Sleeps" and "Measure of the Year".
Roderick Haig-Brown Provincial Park near Kamloops is named in recognition of the major work Haig-Brown did to preserve the Fraser River and its tributaries as Pacific salmon habitat, especially spawning grounds. This included lobbying to stop major hydropower projects such as the Moran Dam
. The Adams River
which runs through the Park is home to a major sockeye salmon run.
Mt. Haig-Brown in Strathcona Park on Vancouver Island is named for Roderick and his wife, Ann, in recognition of their efforts to preserve the Park, especially the battle in the 1950s to keep Buttle Lake from being flooded. The battle was lost but the process made many British Columbians aware of the need to be vigilant about their parks and the natural environment.
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and conservationist
Conservationist
Conservationists are proponents or advocates of conservation. They advocate for the protection of all the species in an ecosystem with a strong focus on the natural environment...
.
Early life
Born in LancingLancing, West Sussex
Lancing is a town and civil parish in the Adur district of West Sussex, England, on the western edge of the Adur Valley. It lies on the coastal plain between Sompting to the west, Shoreham-by-Sea to the east and the parish of Coombes to the north...
, Sussex
Sussex
Sussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is an historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
his father, Alan Haig-Brown, was a teacher and a prolific writer who published hundreds of articles and poems on sports, the military and educational issues in various periodicals. His paternal grandfather, William, was headmaster of the Charterhouse School
Charterhouse School
Charterhouse School, originally The Hospital of King James and Thomas Sutton in Charterhouse, or more simply Charterhouse or House, is an English collegiate independent boarding school situated at Godalming in Surrey.Founded by Thomas Sutton in London in 1611 on the site of the old Carthusian...
for thirty-three years. Alan was also an officer in the British Army during World War I. In 1918 he was killed in action in France. Roderick had a high regard for his father and describes him in an essay entitled “Alan Roderick Haig Brown” as “an Edwardian: one of the young, the strong, the brave and the fair who had faith in their nation, their world and themselves” (27).
His mother, Violet Mary Pope, was one of fifteen children of Alfred Pope, a wealthy Dorset brewer. After the war ended Roderick, his mother and his two sisters went to live with her family. His grandfather Pope was an industrious man with very strong Victorian
Victorian morality
Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of people living at the time of Queen Victoria's reign and of the moral climate of the United Kingdom throughout the 19th century in general, which contrasted greatly with the morality of the previous Georgian period...
values of “service, fair play, decency and acceptance of the obligations that follow with the privilege of class and education” (Robertson 6). He was a friend of Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
and took young Roderick to tea there on at least one occasion. Roderick later noted in his essay “Hardy’s Dorset” that he regretted not having elicited more information from Hardy about being a writer, but he was sixteen then and was passionate about fishing and shooting. Life on his grandfather's country estate on the Frome River was more fascinating to him than “the past or its old men” (“Hardy’s Dorset” 43). His many uncles loved sport and taught him to fish and shoot, but it was a family friend, Major Greenhill, who served as Roderick’s sporting mentor and taught him both the skills and the ethics of sportsmanship. The estate's gamekeepers, particularly "Old Fox", introduced him to the importance of conservation and the complexity of the environment. In 1921 Roderick entered Charterhouse where his grandfather Haig-Brown had been headmaster.
His physical and social childhood environment contributed, according to biographer Anthony Robertson, to Roderick’s code of conduct. Throughout his life he adhered to an ideal balanced between reason and passion, an ideal infused with knowledge and tempered by responsibility, decency and fair play. This code “invoke[d] a mental and physical discipline that [went] beyond making a successful catch or kill; its central virtue [was] knowledge, intimate and thorough, transcending pursuit” (8).
Writing career
Haig-Brown found his way to British ColumbiaBritish Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
, Canada through a series of unexpected events. After he was expelled from Charterhouse School for drinking and sneaking out, he joined his father’s regiment for a short while, but found that army life was too restrictive. The family decided that the British Colonial Civil Service might be a more agreeable alternative but he was too young to write the exams. He went, in the meantime to Seattle, Washington at the invitation of an uncle who had married a Seattle woman, promising his mother he would come back when he was eligible for the civil service. He worked at a logging camp in Washington, then crossed the border to Canada because his U.S. visa had expired. He remained in British Columbia for three years to work at Nimpkish Lake on Vancouver Island
Vancouver Island
Vancouver Island is a large island in British Columbia, Canada. It is one of several North American locations named after George Vancouver, the British Royal Navy officer who explored the Pacific Northwest coast of North America between 1791 and 1794...
as a logger
Lumberjack
A lumberjack is a worker in the logging industry who performs the initial harvesting and transport of trees for ultimate processing into forest products. The term usually refers to a bygone era when hand tools were used in harvesting trees principally from virgin forest...
, a commercial fisherman
Fisherman
A fisherman or fisher is someone who captures fish and other animals from a body of water, or gathers shellfish. Worldwide, there are about 38 million commercial and subsistence fishermen and fish farmers. The term can also be applied to recreational fishermen and may be used to describe both men...
and an occasional guide to visiting anglers. He returned to England in 1931 and enjoyed the fast-paced life of London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. But images of British Columbia haunted him while he wrote his first book, Silver: The Life of an Atlantic Salmon (1931) as well as part of Pool and Rapid (1932). He returned to BC at the end of the year and planned his third book, Panther (1934). He married Ann Elmore of Seattle after publishing Panther, and the couple settled on the banks of the Campbell River
Campbell River (Vancouver Island)
The Campbell River is a river on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, draining into Discovery Passage at the northwest end of the Strait of Georgia, at the City of Campbell River, which is named for the river. The Kwak'wala name for the river, or for the village near its mouth The Campbell...
where they lived for the rest of their lives, raising three daughters and a son.
From the year of his return to British Columbia to 1976, the year of his death, Roderick Haig-Brown published twenty-three books (five more were published posthumously), wrote numerous articles and essays, and created several series of talks and historical dramas for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly known as CBC and officially as CBC/Radio-Canada, is a Canadian crown corporation that serves as the national public radio and television broadcaster...
. He is most famous internationally for his writing on fly fishing and the natural world. He joined the Canadian Army as a personnel officer in 1943 and was later seconded for several months to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police , literally ‘Royal Gendarmerie of Canada’; colloquially known as The Mounties, and internally as ‘The Force’) is the national police force of Canada, and one of the most recognized of its kind in the world. It is unique in the world as a national, federal,...
which allowed him to travel across Canada and to the Arctic. He was magistrate for the town of Campbell River
Campbell River, British Columbia
Campbell River is a coastal city in British Columbia on the east coast of Vancouver Island at the south end of Discovery Passage, which lies along the important coastal Inside Passage shipping route...
from 1941 until 1974. He became a trustee of the Nature Conservancy of Canada
Nature Conservancy of Canada
Nature Conservancy of Canada is a Canadian private not-for-profit charitable environmental organisation established in 1962. The NCC works to achieve the direct protection of what they deem as Canada's most important natural treasures through property securement and long-term stewardship of...
, an advisor to the BC Wildlife Federation, a senior advisor to Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Flyfishers, and a member of the Federal Fisheries Development Council and the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission. He was also Chancellor of University of Victoria
University of Victoria
The University of Victoria, often referred to as UVic, is the second oldest public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It is a research intensive university located in Saanich and Oak Bay, about northeast of downtown Victoria. The University's annual enrollment is about 20,000 students...
from 1970 to 1973. He served three times on the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for British Columbia. These many responsibilities prevented him from devoting much time to writing in the last decade of his life. He retired from the bench a year before his death and was planning to get back to writing as the pressure of his other commitments gradually eased off. His life in his mature years features in many of his books, especially "A River Never Sleeps" and "Measure of the Year".
Recognition
In 1953 Haig-Brown received an honourary LLD (Doctor of Laws) from the University of British Columbia. His books for younger readers won several awards, including the Governor General's Award for "Saltwater Summer" (based on his experience salmon fishing off northern Vancouver Island). The Haig-Brown's sold their family home and property on the banks of the Campbell River to the BC government to be preserved as greenbelt land in 1974, retaining a lifetime tenancy. The house is now home to a Canada Council sponsored Writer in Residence in the winter months and bed-and-breakfast in the summer. Haig-Brown's literary and judicial papers are in Special Collections in the library of the University of British Columbia and at the University of Victoria. Other family papers are in The Museum at Campbell River.Legacy
A large-sized Residence Hall at the University of Victoria is named after Roderick Haig-Brown.Roderick Haig-Brown Provincial Park near Kamloops is named in recognition of the major work Haig-Brown did to preserve the Fraser River and its tributaries as Pacific salmon habitat, especially spawning grounds. This included lobbying to stop major hydropower projects such as the Moran Dam
Moran Dam
Moran Dam, also called High Moran Dam or Moran Canyon Dam, was a 1950s proposal to dam the Fraser River in the Canadian province of British Columbia . The structure was planned in the wake of devastating floods in a time of rapidly growing power demand, and if built, would have powered the largest...
. The Adams River
Adams River (British Columbia)
The Adams River is a tributary of the Fraser River in British Columbia, Canada. Beginning in the Monashee Mountains to the north, the Upper Adams River flows mainly southward and eventually reaches Adams Lake. The Lower Adams River begins at the southern end of the lake and flows into the extreme...
which runs through the Park is home to a major sockeye salmon run.
Mt. Haig-Brown in Strathcona Park on Vancouver Island is named for Roderick and his wife, Ann, in recognition of their efforts to preserve the Park, especially the battle in the 1950s to keep Buttle Lake from being flooded. The battle was lost but the process made many British Columbians aware of the need to be vigilant about their parks and the natural environment.
See also
- Roderick Haig-Brown Provincial ParkRoderick Haig-Brown Provincial ParkRoderick Haig-Brown Provincial Park is a provincial park in British Columbia, Canada, located northeast of Kamloops and northwest of Salmon Arm. It stretches along the banks of the Adams River, between the south end of Adams Lake and the western portion of Shuswap Lake...
- Alan Haig-BrownAlan Haig-BrownAlan Roderick Haig-Brown is a Canadian novelist and non-fiction writer. He specializes in commercial marine and commercial fishing writing and photography.He lives in New Westminster, British Columbia and Bangkok, Thailand....
- A Fly Fishing Mentor