oral histories

Tell us about your family.

My grandfather’s family, the Ransford family, came to Richmond in 1908. My great grandfather, James Arthur Ransford had emigrated from England in 1898. He originally settled in Reston, Manitoba where I think he met my great grandmother. Her family had come from Tipperary, Ireland…. My great grandfather worked at a place where they actually milled the stone in Vancouver for many of the buildings that were being built in Vancouver out of stone at that time. I think what happened was he lost his job and they heard that there were opportunities in Steveston with the fishing industry. He came out there and they settled there in 1908 in Steveston. My grandfather was born in a secondary house that was at the back of a farm on Railway Avenue, just between Steveston Highway and Garry Street. They were renting from the owner of that farm at that time. That’s where my grandfather was born and, subsequently, they bought property at the northeast corner of Steveston Highway and Railway Avenue…. They originally moved into a house that was right on the corner. That house was one of two buildings that were brought to Steveston in 1905 as kit buildings. They were pre-manufactured buildings that were assembled. There were two identical buildings. One of them today is the Steveston Museum building, which is on Moncton Street, and it was a bank at that time. The identical building of that was at the northeast corner of Railway and Steveston where, today, O’Hare’s Pub is located. That’s the property that my great grandfather bought and moved into that house. It would have been around, I believe, 1914 or 1915. I think the house was built there in 1905 and I think they bought it about ten years later with some farm property in the back of that. That’s where my dad grew up. When my grandparents married . . .

My grandfather met my grandmother in Steveston. She was from a family that had emigrated from Manitoba, where my great grandparents had settled when they came over to Canada from Italy at the turn of the century…. They moved west to find jobs and they came to Vancouver, originally, and then moved out to a farm on Lassam Road. It was actually owned by the Lassam family. They rented them a small house, I guess, a small building where they came with their, at the time, with eight of their ten kids. They had a strawberry farm on Lassam Road, and my grandmother met my grandfather when they were in their late teens. They married. It was an interesting relationship because my grandmother was afraid to tell her mother that she’d got married. So, they lived apart, although they were married, for the first year before they admitted to their parents that they had married. I think [she was afraid because] a lot of it had to do with the way, culturally, people were treated at that time. The people that were the merchant class and the ruling class in Steveston at that time were mainly white Anglo-Saxon people. My great grandparents were from Italy, and they were considered – they called them peasants. They were considered second class. They were originally Catholics. They were not looked upon as people that were part of the mainstream of the community. This was the first marriage of its kind [in Steveston], I guess. There was only, as far as I know, one other Italian family in Richmond at the time. That was the Gamba family. … There was a lot of discrimination at that time. I was told a story by Wally Tufnail who I worked for when I was in my teens. I worked in a sheet metal shop in Steveston in the summers that he owned, and he was born in Steveston as well around the same time as my grandfather. They were very close friends. He said to me, one time, there was a bit of a scandal when your grandpa married your grandmother. I said, “Why is that?” He said, “She was from the peasant “wop” family that lived on Lassam Road and that was looked down upon.”

My grandfather, like most people that grew up in Steveston, started fishing at a very young age, at fourteen years old. He was a fisherman and he did other fishing related things throughout his life. In the 1940s he would have been working for Nelson Brothers fishing company, which was one of the larger fishing companies in BC and largely based in Steveston. He was a production manager for them.

At the outbreak of the war, there was a real movement to try to… at the time they professed they were protecting themselves, trying to be secure by moving the Japanese people out of Steveston. There was a large population of Japanese immigrants, and some of them second generation at that time – they had started coming to Steveston at the very turn of the [20th] century or just before. My grandfather was one of the people that advocated their removal from the community. That was something that I had many discussions with him about. I’ve researched a lot of the history at that time. He was quite outspoken about it. In fact, he was hired by the government as what was called Custodian of Enemy Property where he was responsible with other people for seizing the fishing boats of many of the Japanese fishermen that were sent away. We had a lot of discussions, as I was growing up, about whether that was the right thing to do and whether it was just or not. He often defended it and said that it was he felt threatened and felt that if Japan was about to invade, that his security would be threatened by these people of Japanese origin. I often questioned that. We had some heated discussions about it, but he felt very strongly that way. He later became a community leader. During the final years of the war, during that period of time he got elected to city council in 1946. The people that were evacuated started coming back, I think, just after that in 1949 and 1950. He was a writer in the Marpole-Richmond Review. I read a column that he wrote around that time, where he wrote about the conditions upon which the community would accept these people coming back to Steveston. It was pretty harsh. It spoke a lot of some of the economic issues. There was a feeling, I think, and I had this confirmed by actually listening to one of the oral histories that he did in the 1970s, where he talked about the issue of the Japanese workers taking jobs in the fisheries away from the people that had grown up in Steveston. The Japanese labour suppliers, the labour bosses, as they called them, could bring large numbers of people to a fishing crew or to a number of boats, and staff those boats. That would shut out anybody else because the others were not organized in that way. I think that was really the underlying motivation for making the move to move the Japanese out of Steveston at that time. It might have been masked by this suggestion that there was a security threat. I think it was more of an economic opportunity at the time, to try and seize some of the economic opportunity back from those people. Those were the underlying conditions that, I guess, were there that motivated a lot of the things that happened around that time.