Images of early Black immigrants. | Photo courtesy of Vancouver Maritime Museum
Growing up in England, Lolly Bennett loved to dress up. She and her friends wore “sticky-outies,” brightly coloured clothes, to church every Sunday.
“All the neighbours would say, ‘look at those girls, how well they are dressed,’” Bennett laughs.
Now Bennett is showing how clothing influences how we view other groups of people. Her new exhibit, Dressed in Black: The Journey, examines the clothing of a specific group of Black people who came to British Columbia in the late 1850s.
There are different views of Black people in early Canadian history, points out Bennett, who is chair of the Vancouver chapter of the National Congress of Black Women Foundation.
“You often see pictures of Blacks with terrified faces and tattered clothing, running,” she says. “It wasn’t always the case. These were middle-of-the-road people, well dressed. They were well-educated, doctors, lawyers, painters. They came by ship, several hundred of them.”
Photographs of these people, and of their ships, can be seen in Dressed in Black, held at the Vancouver Maritime Museum during the month of February as part of Vancouver’s 2020 Black History Month.
Invitation to a better life
Black people came to British Columbia due to a fortuitous set of circumstances, explains Bennett. With the advent of the Gold Rush, powerful Hudson’s Bay company chief factor Sir James Douglas became concerned about the fate of his small Vancouver Island colony.
A mannequin shows typical clothing of the period, like that possibly worn by Black people in British Columbia.| Photo courtesy of Vancouver Maritime Museum
“The land was in jeopardy of being overrun by our neighbours to the south,” Bennett says. “Douglas, who was of mixed race, knew that Blacks were in turmoil. They were free, but they weren’t respected; they had no voting rights. Douglas sent a steamship captain to San Francisco with an invitation to Blacks to come to British Columbia.”
Steamships were the transportation mode of the day, notes Bennett, but the steamship Douglas sent was a fine one. Douglas’s Black passengers clothed themselves to match.
“Those early steamship riders got dressed in their finery to travel,” Bennett says. “They were wearing a lot of layers, adornments like lace, hand-sewn, hats, gloves. They wore double-hemlines, very thick, to keep the dust down as they walked.”
Many in the Black community continued to dress formally, even as they settled into life in British Columbia, Bennett continues.
“Joe Fortes is a name that is quite well-known in Vancouver,” she says. “He was a merchant mariner from Trinidad; he was a British colonial. He got the job of lifeguard in Vancouver. He was quite well-rounded and polished and very well-dressed. People forgot about his colour.”
Fashion was not the only thing Blacks brought to this part of the world, Bennett says.
“Important things were done by Black people, inventions, creations,” she says. “John Sullivan Deas was a tinsman in the 1800s. He owned the largest cannery on the Fraser river. He had salmon tins with labels, [and] he commissioned an artist to do the labels.”
Separate doors
Life in British Columbia did have its challenges, something that Bennett, a woman of mixed race born and raised in Manchester, England, knows a great deal about.
Lolly Bennett, an Englishwoman of mixed race now living in Vancouver, curated the exhibit Dressed in Black. | Photo courtesy of Vancouver Maritime Museum
“[Douglas] has clear intentions that Blacks would be treated fairly. [But] it was a rough country,” she says of Canada at this time. “The British colonialists had a superior mentality. In the early 1900s, Vanier Park was a segregated beach. It was known in the Black community as “brown skin beach.”
Bennett’s childhood was also marked by racism. Although her parents were married, her father was coloured, and this fact led to difficulties in 1940s England.
“There was the colour bar, still prevalent and in effect,” she says. My dad couldn’t go in the same door as my mother to enter the establishments they went to.”
Bennett, who now resides in metro Vancouver, wants to showcase British Columbia’s Black history and culture. She believes that, unlike the history of England, Black history here may soon be forgotten.
“Blacks have been in B.C. for 150 years,” she says. “[We’re] layered into the history of Vancouver. There’s a large community, and there’s a lot of history here. To have no footprint is a tragedy.”
For more information, please visit vancouvermaritimemuseum.com.
