Walhachin: A Gentlemanly Occupation

By Michael Kluckner

Few BC communities changed as much as Walhachin during World War I. All of the optimism that had created it a few years earlier was swept away. The kind of people who founded it and were, to put it bluntly, sucked in by it, emerged into a completely different world in 1918.

Situated in an arid, sagebrush-studded valley along the Thompson River east of Ashcroft, Walhachin appeared to be an ideal spot for the kind of British-flavoured orchard community that had been established in the Okanagan Valley in the first years of the twentieth century. Growing fruit was a “gentlemanly occupation,” requiring some considerable capital to begin but, it was said, allowing for a leisurely lifestyle once the trees became established.

Walhachin—an unlikely Eden. Courtesy of the Clarke family

As with the Okanagan Valley, Walhachin’s small “fruit ranches” were marketed in England and attracted people of “education and refinement.” In fact, most were the kind of second sons who stood no chance of inheriting property at home—a mix of men who usually had achieved little in school, the military or the civil service.

On the surface so genteel, the community became “a catch-all for rejects” in the words of Bertram Footner (1880–1972), the itinerant, “lower-born” English engineer who designed and built most of the Walhachin bungalows with highhipped roofs and wide, spreading verandahs in the style of Britain’s hot-climate colonies in Africa, where he had previously wandered in search of work. The population peaked at about 150, supplemented by about fifty Chinese workers and servants plus seasonal labourers.

All but one of the unmarried Englishmen decamped in August 1914, forming the Walhachin Squadron of the 31st British Columbia Horse. As the war progressed, more of the older and married men also enlisted, leaving a population of only about fifty by 1918. However, very few of Walhachin’s soldiers died in combat and most returned after the war, staying only briefly before moving on to more practical opportunities.

The war had wrecked fortunes and land had little value. As financier Rex Mottram remarked in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, “Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914.”

Walhachin itself turned out to be a badly planned, poorly located community, a combination of poor soils, sharp frosts and a substandard irrigation system making sustainable orcharding impossible. By 1922 all of the original British settlers had abandoned their holdings.

Bert Footner and his wife, Norah, stayed in Walhachin during the war years, maintaining buildings and attempting to manage the orchards while they started a family. Footner’s impatience with his well-born neighbours was matched by Norah’s dislike of rural BC life, for she had grown up in England in comfortable circumstances. They leased property a few miles farther west on the CPR mainline but failed as farmers. He picked up work as a builder elsewhere in BC before moving to California. But, son Vern recalled, as they didn’t want their children to receive an American education they returned to Canada, eventually settling in Victoria where the pre-war British dream survived mostly intact.

Gordon Flowerdew’s horse. Courtesy of the Clarke family

A few historic buildings survive today in Walhachin, home to a handful of people. The tiny community hangs on to its memories, while the former orchard lands on the bench below grow fine crops of alfalfa, easy to irrigate with modern pumps.

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