PIONEER FARMER HORACE BODDINGTON GIBBS
The ancestors of Horace Boddington Gibbs, including his great grandfather, Sampson Boddington, had been farmers in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the bleak Canadian landscape that confronted this young immigrant at the dawn of the 20th century was a New World away from the well-cultivated acres of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire.
Many a man in his early twenties might have turned round and headed back across the Atlantic to the comforts of home, but Horace was made of pioneer stuff and determined to make a success of his new life in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta.
By 1909 he had a half share in the west half of Section 8, Township 55, Range 21, West of the 4th Meridian, which was a legal land description at the time – a system devised when the Prairie Provinces were surveyed and homesteads were offered to people to settle in Canada.
Horace and his partner, George Walter Cook, took on 320 acres and set about turning this unprepossessing land, covered in snow throughout much of the long Alberta winters, into a workable farm – certainly no task for the faint-hearted.
As Lucille Horne of the Alberta Genealogical Society wrote to me: “Living and trying to survive in the early days was brutally difficult.
“Horace would have worked all day ploughing with a team of horses, then had to make supper and fall into bed - repeated each day.
“Winter was worse as he had to keep a fire burning to keep warm. Loneliness and isolation caused further hardship, especially for bachelors.
“Clumps of trees covered much of the virgin land. It was cleared by chopping down each tree and then extracting the roots. On the other hand, trees provided logs to build a shelter and when dried were burned in a stove for warmth and cooking.
“Not an easy life - it's a miracle that the country was settled at all.”
To ease this grindingly punishing regime, Horace, a one-time chorister, bought an upright Kohler-Campbell piano on a payment plan from a local dealer, G.H.Suckling, and no doubt filled the long dark evenings in his rudimentary wooden frame home with tunes he had played with his sister, Dolly, back in Newport, Monmouthshire.
By the autumn of 1912, it seems like he had tired of a lonely life in the outback and he moved to the city comforts of Edmonton, where his brother’s architectural business was thriving.
But Horace retained his interest in the farm, which comprised 200 acres “of breaking”, one frame dwelling house, one frame stable 24 x 60, one frame granary 16 x 24, one log granary 16 x 24 and three miles of fencing.
In March, 1915, two months after Horace answered the recruiting posters and enlisted in the 51st Overseas Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, he and his partner, George Cook, sold their land to Edward H. Barclay – his share came to $4,957.57.
When Horace died on September 27, 1916, “somewhere in France”, his debts, including payments due on the piano, were settled and the Estate was left with $5,262.54, which was distributed to his beneficiaries.
His mother received $2,500, brother Lionel and sister Flo $1,000 each, George Cook $500, with the residue split between brother Raymond and sisters Dolly and Mim.
The land that Horace back-breakingly carved out of the wilderness is now owned and farmed by the Hutterite Brethern Church, whose members are known for cultivating every square inch, according to Lucille Horne.
They live in colonies scattered throughout Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, producing most of the region’s locally-grown food products.
It is heart-warming to think that Horace not only left a legacy of his battlefield poetry, but also a tangible if unremarked enrichment of the Canadian soil.