Thomas Dufferin Pattullo

First cousin of Ruth (Short) Ellingwood, nephew of Mary (Pattullo) Short, and the family’s best-known son: the 22nd Premier of British Columbia, from 1933 to 1941. He was named for his uncle Thomas Robson Pattullo, the Barkerville gold miner. Most of what follows is from the Wikipedia article on him (source) and the books it draws on: Robin Fisher’s Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (1991; its chapters on the Yukon and on 1937-40 now read, source), Hal Guest’s study of his Yukon years in BC Studies (1983), and Margaret Ormsby on the “Little New Deal” (1962). Fisher argues that he was the most significant British Columbia premier of the twentieth century.

Woodstock. He was born at Woodstock on 19 January 1873, the son of George Robson Pattullo, editor of the Woodstock Sentinel, and Mary Ann “Minnie” Rounds, who died when he was eleven. He grew up at “Burnside,” the family’s house, in the middle of the family’s Liberal politics. His father was chief Liberal organizer for Ontario from 1880 and Registrar of Deeds for Oxford County from 1886; his uncle Andrew ran the Sentinel-Review and sat for Oxford North. When he was three, his uncle Thomas came home from the Cariboo with gold for the Philadelphia Centennial and threw a handful of $20 gold pieces on the ground for the children to scramble for. Duff remembered sixty-five years later being “among the leaders who grabbed one of these coins,” the first real money he ever saw (source). His brothers included James Burleigh Pattullo, a Crown prosecutor and King’s Counsel in the Yukon and later a Vancouver barrister, and George Pattullo, the Saturday Evening Post writer. He went to the University of Toronto, was briefly a bank clerk, and then worked on the Sentinel and edited the Galt Reformer.

The Klondike. In September 1897, through the family’s Liberal connections, he went north as secretary to Major James Morrow Walsh, the new Commissioner of the Yukon. Fisher’s account of the journey, from Duff’s letters to his father, is the fullest (source). He went as a civil servant, but, like the gold-seekers, “he had his eye out for the main chance,” and admitted that “a little of the yellow has a temptation for me.” His letters were syndicated by his father and printed in the Sentinel, where his uncle Andrew used them for “some good political hits.” At Skagway he priced a drink (“it would cost a fellow about $25 before he could get even a moderate jag on”), and on the White Pass he watched the pack horses falling into what became Dead Horse Gulch, and insisted he had seen an ox try “to fling itself over the cliff rather than tread the terrible trail.” The party crossed by the Chilkoot instead, with “a large cohort of Indian packers,” so that he climbed it once, while the stampeders climbed it again and again: “To see the despair written on men’s faces as they carry their packs up and up the awful hill is almost enough to make one’s heart ache.” Sheltering on Lake Labarge, bearded, he was hailed by a friend: “Jesus Christ, how are you? I did not expect to see you here.” “Old friend,” he answered, “you can expect to meet Jesus anywhere.”

On 18 November 1897, a few miles below the Big Salmon River, the boats ran onto an ice jam. J. J. Freeman of the party jumped out on the wrong side and drowned in the slush. The Indigenous guides in Duff’s boat laid tent poles across the ice and went over on snowshoes; Duff, his snowshoe strings frozen, crawled after them on all fours for fifteen minutes, twice going through, and wrote that he “would not go through the 15 minutes crossing that slush again for all the gold in the Yukon.” The party wintered at the Big Salmon. In the spring Walsh and Duff went back up toward the border; after the Chilkoot avalanche of 3 April 1898, which killed more than sixty, they went down to help, and Duff spent the rest of April at Bennett (“ducedly monotonous”). Leaving Woodstock, Fisher writes, Duff “no doubt recalled his Uncle Thomas,” and at Bennett he met his uncle’s old friend. On 1 May 1898, writing to “My dear father,” he sent home the verses Captain Jack Crawford, the “Poet Scout,” had written on Uncle Tom’s death twenty years before: “He was so surprised to meet the ‘Nephew of Tom’ and particularly his namesake after twenty years. He says I look just like Uncle Tom except of course that I am not so large … Good-bye again, it is getting very late and Captain Jack has just left my tent.” Duff typed out the poem, “Under the Snow,” and the copy is in his father’s papers. Two days later the party left Bennett, and on 21 May 1898 they reached Dawson.

Dawson. He found Dawson “a jolly place,” and in the June flood “had a libation from a canoe in one of the numerous bars on Main Street.” He was briefly secretary to the Yukon Council, went out with Walsh in August, and came back in October with his brother James (“Burt”), who gave up his Toronto practice for the Yukon courts. Sifton had made Duff abstracts clerk in the Gold Commissioner’s Office, but the new Commissioner, William Ogilvie, who disliked him as Walsh’s man, overrode the appointment and “banished” him to Fort Selkirk for the winter of 1898-99 as timber agent. Ogilvie wrote to Sifton that Duff was “very often termed Major Walsh’s pimp by some of the best people here,” and charged that he had passed himself off as Ogilvie’s son Morley to get favours from saloons and music halls (source). Duff wrote over his head to the minister; on the very day he wrote, Sifton was visiting Woodstock as George Pattullo’s guest. He was put in the office in 1899 and set its records in order, and in November 1901 became acting assistant Gold Commissioner, though without the title or the pay. On the Treadgold concessions he took the side of capital: “the day of the pick and shovel is gone by; modern methods must be introduced.” Passed over a second time in 1902, and refused a salary by the deputy minister, James Smart, he resigned. His colleagues gave him a testimonial, the Gold Commissioner a gold watch, and even the hostile Klondike Nugget praised him. His uncle Andrew then wrung his back pay out of Sifton, conceding that in the early days Duff “would have been a ‘rare bird’ indeed had he not cut loose once in a while, but when warned by both the minister and his family he had stopped his drinking binges,” and that his work, alone in the department, had been criticized by no one, “from the Minister down.” In 1903 he ran the Yukon Sun, Dawson’s Liberal paper, borrowing $3,000 himself to keep it going; in January 1904 he was elected to the Dawson city council, chairing its fire, water and light committee; and he was vice-consul for Sweden and Norway, for the many Scandinavian miners (a Nugget reporter credited his “fluency in Swedish,” to his friends’ amusement). He fought a long factional war with Commissioner Frederick Congdon, whom he called “unreliable, unpolitical, weak and wholly lacking in ordinary judgment.” Guest argues that the Yukon taught him his lasting distrust of distant federal authority. Fisher adds the other half of the lesson: the Klondike “was a frontier where people expected the government to deliver services but protested vociferously when it appeared to interfere with their economic objectives.”

Lillian. In the summer of 1899 he met Lillian Miles, a young widow. Born Lillian Riedemiester (as Fisher spells it) at Toledo, Ohio, in 1871, a lawyer’s daughter, she had come to Dawson in 1898 with her husband, Jerry Miles, a pharmacist with claims on the creeks, who went out to the diggings in the cold and froze to death. They were married on the evening of Thursday 30 November 1899, by a minister, in her house, a cabin at Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue, and Duff moved in. He took power of attorney over her finances and began to pay off his debts, and told Sifton that as a married man he must now “live the life of a gentleman and not as a ‘squaw man’” (the slur of the day for a white man living with an Indigenous woman); Sifton raised him to $2,000 a year. In 1902 they built a house on Grant Street at Ninth Avenue. Their one daughter, Lillian Doris (later Mrs. Collison), was born in 1905. In 1907 he went into business with William G. Radford, but Dawson was emptying, and in 1908 he left. In later life he wrote verses in the manner of Robert Service, “Over The Chilkoot” (“We was waitin’ for the Major, / We was waitin’ for the word”), and liked to say “you will never reach the heights by refusing to climb.”

Prince Rupert. In 1908 he moved to Prince Rupert, hoping to profit from the coming of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. “By now,” Fisher writes, “he had also imbibed the boomer mentality of the northern frontier. So when he heard that a new town was to be opened up he was eager to place huge bets both on its future and on his own.” But “unlike Dawson City, where at least there was a boom before the bust, in Prince Rupert the boom never really came.” His real estate and building ventures did not prosper, but he was elected to the city’s first council in 1910 and served as mayor. In 1916 he won the new riding of Prince Rupert for the Liberals and held it for twenty-nine years, going straight into the cabinet as Minister of Lands, over the province’s forests. As minister he signed, on 25 July 1923, the order that made the Indian reserve settlement of the McKenna-McBride Commission final for British Columbia, with its “cut-offs” of reserve land taken without the bands’ consent (source); pressed by Ottawa that month for more land for the bands, he promised only to have the list “carefully examined,” without “any assurance that any of the additional applications would be granted” (source). He courted settlers for the north: Estonians for the Stuart Lake lands and, in 1924, Hebridean crofter-fishermen, whom he wanted on the Queen Charlotte Islands and lost to Vancouver Island. When their promoter asked for more, he answered that settlers who could not “make good on a grant of $600 and a tent apiece” had better “stay in the Hebrides” (source). After the Liberals lost in 1928 he became party leader, and he rebuilt the party in opposition through the worst of the Depression.

Premier. He won the election of 1933 in a landslide and became premier on 15 November 1933. His program, which he called “socialized capitalism,” was to use the power of the state to steady the economy, not to replace it. Under the Special Powers Act of 1934 his government raised the minimum wage, put men to work on roads and bridges (the Pattullo Bridge over the Fraser opened on 15 November 1937), spent more on schools and relief, proposed health insurance (shelved when the doctors opposed it), and in 1937 set up a Department of Trade and Industry. It was the most vigorous provincial answer to the Depression anywhere in Canada. He fought both prime ministers, Bennett and Mackenzie King, for federal help (both privately called him a dictator); in 1941 he joined Ontario’s Hepburn and Alberta’s Aberhart in refusing the Rowell-Sirois Commission’s plan to centralize taxing power; and he pressed for the Alaska Highway and for joining the Yukon to British Columbia. “We do not apologise,” he told the legislature, “we simply give reasons for our actions”: the philosophy, his biographer thought, that took him to the top, and the attitude that would “play a large part in his downfall” (source). In 1937 Cudge Ellingwood, Ruth’s husband, travelling west to find work, “went over to get acquainted with Ruth’s cousin, Duff Pattullo, who was premier of British Columbia in Victoria. He gave me some good advice as well as a fine time” (source, p. G37).

Asian Canadians. Like nearly every white British Columbia politician of his day he opposed the vote for Chinese, Japanese and South Asian Canadians, but his own letters show how far he went. He told the Rowell-Sirois Commission in 1938 that “as many Orientals as possible should be returned to the land from which they came” (source). To Mackenzie King, privately, in 1939: “We would like to take action which would drive the Japs out of business here,” and “we in British Columbia would like to see the day when all the Japanese are repatriated to their own country.” In September 1940 he persuaded King to keep Japanese and Chinese Canadians out of the call-up, because “there will be a demand that they be given the franchise, which we in this Province can never tolerate” (source). In public he was guarded: “No one can blame the Oriental for trying to make a living. The mistake has been their admission into the country”; and in 1940 he rebuked those who would “recklessly slur as a body those of foreign birth.” The research thread on Bloody Sunday weighs the whole record.

Bloody Sunday, 1938. In the spring of 1938 his government closed its winter forest relief camps, as it had in 1937, and refused relief to single men who had come to the province within the year, offering them train fares home. About 1,200 of the jobless, led by the Communist Steve Brodie, occupied the Vancouver post office, the art gallery and for a day the Hotel Georgia on 20 May, demanding “work, not train rides,” and held them peacefully for a month. At dawn on 19 June the police cleared them, with tear gas and clubs at the post office (“Bloody Sunday”). His biographer writes that, having promised to meet the men in Vancouver on the 20th, “in the meantime, believing that subversive influences were at work and that the situation could no longer be tolerated, he arranged with the federal government to have the men forcibly evicted” (source). The next day Duff told the press that “he had been the prime mover in securing the Sunday eviction” (source), “absolutely refused to provide any more immediate relief” (Fisher), told city pastors, by one account, that “there comes a time when too much sympathy can be shown the men,” and said: “We have got to have a showdown. British Columbia cannot take care of unemployed from all over Canada. It is absolutely impossible” (source). It cost him much of his support in the city. On the radio he warned that “sole dependence upon the Government would simply lead to moral decrepitude of the individual,” which his biographer calls “a far cry from his vibrant advocacy of state intervention in 1933.” That autumn, when strikers at the Blubber Bay lime works on Texada Island accused the provincial police of serving the company, he refused an inquiry, citing “some very subversive elements at work” (source). What he did, and why, is set out in the research thread on Bloody Sunday, which also weighs his record on the reserves and on Asian Canadians.

The birthday and the royal visit, 1938-39. On his sixty-fifth birthday in January 1938 three hundred people dined in his honour in the crystal ballroom of the Hotel Vancouver, round a cake made as a replica of the legislative buildings. During the royal tour of 1939 he and Lillian received King George VI and Queen Elizabeth on the steps of the legislature. Lillian was suffering from arthritis and found standing painful, so Mackenzie King took her on his arm for much of the day, leaving Duff free to talk to the King and Queen; afterwards Duff drove King out to his house on Beach Drive, where their daughter Doris and two of the grandchildren were waiting (source).

The Cariboo, 1941. In June 1941 he made a “Grand Swing of Cariboo,” and at Barkerville he visited his Uncle Tom’s grave above Williams Creek. At Stanley he saw the deep diggings on Lightning Creek, where Tom had mined in the 1870s, and at a dinner given for him by the Barkerville and Wells boards of trade he told the story of the $20 gold pieces (the Cariboo Observer and the Province, as Bourdon quotes them).

The end. The 1941 election left the Liberals short of a majority, and his caucus wanted a coalition with the Conservatives. He refused, warning that if the Liberals went into coalition the party “will start downhill, and never again within a generation will it be the power it has been in British Columbia.” They overruled him, and he resigned as leader and premier in December 1941. The coalition’s break-up in 1952 opened the way for Social Credit, as he had foretold. He ran in Prince Rupert as an independent Liberal in 1945 and lost, and retired to Victoria, where he died on 30 March 1956, aged 83. He is buried at Royal Oak Burial Park under a flat marker, “Hon. T. D. Pattullo 1873-1956” (source). The Pattullo Range, Mount Pattullo, the Pattullo Glaciers and Pattullo Park in Prince Rupert carry his name; the Pattullo Bridge, in use for eighty-eight years, was closed on 6 February 2026 and replaced by the stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge.

Open questions

• Lillian’s maiden name. Fisher prints it “Riedemiester” (twice, for her and her father Otto), the Wikipedia article “Reidemeister”; the German name is usually spelled Riedemeister. A Toledo record (her birth or baptism, her father’s death, or her first marriage to Jerry Miles) would settle it, and give her dates.
• The Wikipedia article on him has Freeman drowning when the party’s boat capsized on Lake Bennett in early November 1897, and Ogilvie complaining of Duff’s “drinking and rebellious spirit.” Fisher puts the drowning at an ice jam below the Big Salmon on 18 November; “rebellious spirit” has not been found in Guest or Fisher, and the words found are Ogilvie’s “Walsh’s pimp” and Andrew Pattullo’s “drinking binges.” The article could be corrected.
• His Ontario birth registration (1873).