This Day in History, 1889: A floating cannery producing fish oil becomes a swimming bath

Anglo-B.C. Packing Co., Part of Evening Catch, Phoenix Cannery, Fraser River, circa 1890. Bailey Bros. Vancouver Archives AM1376-: CVA 102-27. Photo by Bailey Bros. /PNG

Article content

One of the first businesses in what became Vancouver was Spratt’s Oilery, a “floating cannery” on the Coal Harbour waterfront.

Article content

It was built around 1875 by Joseph Spratt of Victoria, who also owned a converted scow known as Spratt’s Ark. It lasted until 1884, when the large stocks of herring it had found in Burrard Inlet disappeared.

Article content

Article content

“The herring were very thick in Coal Harbour waters,” pioneer Calvert Simson told Vancouver’s first archivist, Major Matthews, in Vol. 3 of his Early Vancouver series.

Article content

Article content

“Spratt’s Oilery caught them, squeezed the oil out, and dumped the refuse back in the inlet; whether that drove all the herring away or not no one can tell positively, but they say it did; anyway they went.”

Article content

Article content

Some accounts say one method of fishing Spratt’s Oilery employed was throwing dynamite into the water. The fish oil Spratt’s Oilery wrung out of the herring was used in industrial machinery.

Article content

It was located at the bottom of a bluff near the foot of today’s Burrard and Thurlow streets. An 1884 photo shows a complex of several buildings surrounded by forest.

Article content

Spratt’s Ark was said to be 44 metres long by 14 metres wide and was used to take goods across the Strait of Georgia. In 2004, former Vancouver Maritime Museum head James Delgado wrote it was “most likely” the “mystery wreck” that had been found in the waters off Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver.

Article content

View of Spratt’s Oilery on Coal Harbour, 1884. Vancouver Archives AM54-S4-: Bu P20

Article content

In 1889, one or more of the Spratt’s Oilery buildings was rebuilt into the The West End Swimming Baths on the Coal Harbour waterfront.

Article content

“Sea Bathing,” hyped ads in the Vancouver World and Daily News-Advertiser “West of C.P.R. Wharf.”

Article content

Article content

It was opened by W.D. Jones and W.D. Burdis, and included a boat building business, presumably in another building.

Article content

Article content

Pioneer resident Harold Ridley said it was a “floating bath house.”

Article content

“Jones and Burdis ran it; you paid ‘two bits’ for a swim; it was all ‘two bits’ for everything in those days,” he told Major Matthews in Early Vancouver.

Article content

An ad from Aug. 29, 1889 said you could purchase adult season passes for $5, or $2.50 for boys and girls. You could also rent a boat for a spin around the Inlet or to Stanley Park.

Article content

A May 8, 1889, story said the location on the Inlet was on “hard sand and sloped gently and gradually from extremely shallow to any depth. This will accordingly permit the most timorous (to enjoy) in security the pleasures of sea bathing.”

Article content

There is blurry photo in the Vancouver Archives of several men at the Jones and Burdis swimming baths, a bare-bones wooden building that looks it was built on piles above the water.

Article content

The men are wearing skimpy bathing suits, not the full body garb you’d expect for the time. The baths and swimming areas must have been divided into male and female sections.