Heritage Register
Fernwood

1555 Pembroke Street

Built 1911
Heritage-Designated 2001, includes garden wall

For: Ernest & Mary Fairey

Designer: Ernest Fairey

ARCHITECTURE:

This Arts & Crafts house is 1½ storeys with a steeply pitched, front-gabled roof. It has shed-roofed saddlebag dormers; a through-the-roof chimney is against the back wall of the right dormer with a shallow cantilevered box bay below. There is a similar box bay on the left side. The gabled porch extension on the right front is similar in design to the apex of the main gable. They both have triangular brackets, and are stuccoed and half-timbered above a shallow triangular-shaped stringcourse. The horizontal bars of the brackets end in pyramidal tips which extend beyond the bargeboards. The brackets are a Craftsman Arts & Crafts feature. The front porch, which has been glassed in, has retained its chamfered square posts. The front stairs have a solid stepped balustrade. The cladding is bullnosed double-bevelled siding. There is a fieldstone retaining wall with entry piers at street level.

ORIGINAL OCCUPANTS:

1911-18: Ernest Fairey and Mary Eleanor (née Dixon), both born in Liverpool, England, were married in Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria in 1906. Ernest, a joiner by trade, became an inspector of public school buildings and grounds. By 1920 they were living at 1611 Bank St when they lost their eight-month-old baby boy to kidney infection. Ernest was living in San Francisco when his mother died in Victoria in 1941.

OTHER OCCUPANTS:

1920-29: Farmer and millwright John Archibald and Elizabeth Duncan Cameron, who later left BC.
1931: Postal clerk Alfred and Elizabeth Mary Belcher came to Victoria in 1923. Their son, police officer Claude Alfred Belcher married registered nurse Grace Jean MacDonald in this house in September 1931. Grace was in the 1929 graduating class of the Royal Jubilee Training School for Nurses. In the 1950s, Claude was a real estate salesman and they lived at 908 St Charles St in Rockland.
1932-34: Charles Clifton Perry and Catherine Jane (née Manson, b. Nanaimo, 1882-1943) married in Nanaimo in 1910. Charles was the Canadian Government’s Assistant Commissioner for Indian Affairs for BC until retiring in 1936.

1937-44: William James Bennett (b. Delaware, ON, 1885-1965) and Estella “Stella” May (née Smith, b. St. John, NB, 1895-1942), widower and widow, married in Victoria in 1921. William’s daughter Doris, a BC Police stenographer, lived with them. Stella had married architectural draftsman Harry Chateauneuf Johnston in 1914; he signed up for WWI in September, 1918, but died in Vancouver of Spanish Influenza, before leaving for Europe. William was an RCAF mess manager during WWII. He was residing at 1015 Moss St, Rockland, when he died.

1950-55: Elmer Tingstad and Sanna Alvida (née Grundberg, b. Lundemo, AB, 1901-1985), with their offspring Clarence John and Gladys. Some of the family were in Victoria by 1943, when Clarence worked at Sidney Roofing Co and his brother Ingemar at Yarrows Shipyard. By 1946 Sanna and Elmer were living in Fernwood and Elmer was a carpenter; with them were Clarence, an upholsterer with Modern Metal Furniture, Ingemar, a carpenter, Irene, an employee of Weston Bakery at 1284-98 Gladstone Av, and Gladys, a federal government typist. In 1949 Elmer, Clarence and Ingemar established Tingstad Logging Co. Sanna, whose parents were Swedish, was living in Kelowna near their daughter Gladys Wishart when she died.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION & IMAGES:

• Fernwood History

• Fernwood Heritage Register


• This Old House, Victoria's Heritage Neighbourhoods,
Volume One: Fernwood & Victoria West