Author Description

Written primarily by Daisy Phillips, with a few by her husband Jack, to her family in England, these letters describe the creation of a shortlived English home in the Windermere Valley of southwestern British Columbia. Not given to introspection, Daisy registers her immediate and frank reactions to her new environment and startling new way of life. From her letters we learn of the experiences of the Phillips and their neighbours in settling the newly opened land and of their attempts to grow fruit in an area with limited agricultural potential. The contrast between middle-class British mores and those of Canadian pioneer society -- largely classless and multi-ethnic in character -- was to Daisy a challenge to be overcome. Requests to England brought in return a flood of British consumer goods which helped her to duplicate in her dress and household furnishings the more cultivated surroundings and manners of home. While such affectations seemed incongruous in a frontier setting, Daisy learned to work to maintain them and mastered tasks unknown in England to one of her station. Between her first request for a pamphlet on laundering handkerchiefs and her departure less than three years later, she learned to cook on a wood stove, sew, clean house, and wash clothes without running water or servants. There is also evidence that prior to their abrupt return to England at the outbreak of war, the cultural barriers were breaking down as the Phillips became more involved in sharing the experience of being pioneer Canadians. Jack's early death on the battlefield gives Daisy's letters an added poignancy. Not only do they constitute a valuable historical document but they also convey with simple directness the story of a happy marriage, of the intersection of an English dream with the Windermere Valley, and something of the story of all immigrants to any new settlement in Western Canada.