Her name is largely unknown today, but during her short sixteen years on earth, she experienced more trauma and sadness than is impossible to imagine. 

Eliza Blanche Baker (always known as Blanche) was born in 1860 in Surrey, England, but eventually came to Canada with her father, Thomas Joseph Baker, who was an accountant. There is no record of her mother so perhaps she might have died giving birth to Blanche as many women did at that time. Thomas himself died of a heart attack in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1873, leaving his thirteen-year-old daughter an orphan.

By that time, however, Blanche had already caught the attention of a young man— twenty-two-year-old Theodore Davie— the youngest son of Dr. John Chapman Davie, and the brother of Alexander Davie, a future Premier of the province. Theo was madly in love with Blanche despite their age difference and he asked her to move in with him so she would not be homeless.

Naturally this caused a scandal in prim and proper 1873 Victoria and today Theo would have been accused of being a pedophile.  By the time Blanche was fourteen she was pregnant but, being an honorable man, Theo married his young sweetheart. A few months later, their daughter Eliza Blanche was born, but the birth was a very difficult one and left Blanche extremely weak.  To make matters worse, little Eliza developed a fever when she was ten months old and never recovered. Her death left poor Blanche in deep depression from which she never recovered.

Nothing could bring her out of her ‘melancholy’ and on the 17^th of April, 1876 at age sixteen, she also passed away, a motherless young girl who had lost her father, fallen in love, given birth and then lost her child, all within three years. Her memorial reading “sacred to the memory of Eliza Blanche, wife of Theodore Davie” is today in Ross Bay Cemetery.

Theodore eventually recovered from his tragic loss and ten years later he married Alice Mary Josephine Yorke and together they had six children.  Theodore, like his older brother Alexander, became a lawyer and went into politics. He became attorney general in 1892 and succeeded John Robson as BC Premier in 1895. He died at the young age of 45 three years later. His wife Alice died in 1896.

Sadly, poor Blanche, his first love, never lived to see his success in both law and politics. The scandal had been completely forgotten by the time Theodore became premier!

The tragic love affair of Blanche and Theodore will appear briefly in my next book, which tells the story of her sister-in-law, Constance Skinner Davie, whose husband was also a British Columbia Premier. Both the Davie brothers loved their wives deeply and worked hard to improve and organize a province slowly emerging from colonialism. It’s a great story of a strong woman, family love, and the ability to overcome grief. The book will be available soon.