One of the most intriguing of our discoveries is
that Robert Henry MacLauchlan and his second wife had a second home in Vancouver
in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He and the former Calgary stage actress
Evelyn Hambly very likely lived at the Darlington (1403 Beach Avenue), a quite classy
address in Vancouver’s West End during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
We would like to know if there are any people still
alive who may remember the doctor and Evelyn living there or have heard about them
living there.
Our source for this information about their
residence at that location is Mrs Jean Hunter, a former administrator of the
Victoria Symphony. Mrs Hunter, when she was a stage-struck teenager, lived next
door to the MacLauchlans when they leased Riley Lodge in Calgary in the 1940s.
So did her siblings, retired Alberta author and defence attorney Jack Pecover
and retired Nanaimo schoolteacher Helen O’Conner.
“It was a sign that you had made it,” remembered Mrs
Hunter, “that you had enough money to get out of frigid Calgary and to winter
in Vancouver.” Hunter, mother of deceased BC journalist Dennis Bell, remembers
the Beach Avenue apartment well, because it was the first one she had ever seen
with pink porcelain fixtures in a corner-set bathroom. “Smashing!” was how this
lively 90 year old described it.
Readers of this blog, the following tenants lived in
the Darlington in that year: two sisters -- Miss Doris E James (schoolteacher) and
Miss Phyllis M James (saleswoman); Arnold H and Mildred Tatton (he was a BC
Electric employee), Hubert D and Isabel Richardson (he was also a BC Electric
employee); Mrs. O Bayfield; Miss
Margaret H Roulston; Mrs. Sarah Morrison; H Baker; J Brookes; W E Campbell
(these latter six people had no occupation listed); Mrs. V M Graham (Dental
assistant); James and Barbara E MacDonald (James MacDonald was one of the
partners in the law firm of Robson and MacDonald, and later became a justice of
the BC Appeals Court; he was the son of Malcolm Archibald MacDonald, a former Chief
Justice of BC during the 1920s and was also the brother of Alex MacDonald, former
Attorney General of BC who served in Dave Barrett’s NDP government of the early
1970s); Mrs. H I “Alice” Heeney and Byng Heeney; and Frederick C and Cleora
Charles (he was the manager of a gas station, Majestic Service).
To repeat: We know this is a long shot but if there is anyone
out there who knows the above people, or who is related or descended from them,
we would like to know if they ever mentioned the MacLauchlans being residents
of the Darlington at 1403 Beach Avenue.
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