The Jane Rule Commemorative Bench
by Allan Forget
In the 2000s the Galiano Club Board began to rent the refurbished lower level of the Community Hall to a group of island parents looking for a space to locate activities for their pre-school children. Later in the decade the Board, under President Don Anderson, decided to create a kids playground on a nearby level piece of land within the Hall grounds.
(Part of this area had been cleared in the late 1980s when the number of Hall washrooms was increased and a new septic field was installed. An outdoor wood performance stage had been built adjacent but it wasn’t much used and was eventually dismantled and removed.)
A major part of the funding for the purchase of equipment for this playground came from a bequest of the Estate of recently deceased islander Jane Rule (1931-2007).
Jane’s home property had included an outdoor swimming pool which she opened to island children to use during the school holiday summer months. It was here, during almost three decades of operation, that many Galiano kids learned to swim.
Once the playground was completed, in the summer of 2009, the Board decided to commemorate Jane’s contribution by erecting a wood bench nearby. Remembering Jane’s attachment to the island’s younger residents a commemorative brass plaque was included which reads:
Remembering
Jane Vance Rule
1931-2000
Always a good friend
to the children of Galiano Island.
Author and equal-rights activist Jane Vance Rule came to Galiano in 1976 accompanied by partner, Helen Wolfe Sonthoff, both women having recently retired from teaching positions at UBC in Vancouver. Jane had decided to dedicate her time to creative writing; eventually she would have published over a dozen novels, numerous essays, magazine & newspaper articles.
Soon after moving into their Highland Road house, Jane developed serious rheumatoid arthritis. A life-long swimmer (Jane’s father, Art Rule, had been a member of the 1936 USA Olympic swim team) Jane decided to add a small outdoor pool to the property where she might swim and gain some relief from the arthritic pain.
Wishing to share this luxury with others Jane offered the use of the pool to island kids (and their parents). From then on during most every school summer holiday week day afternoon there could be found upwards of 20 kids enjoying Jane and Helen’s pool with many parents sitting and chatting nearby. Jane was always in attendance, initially as pool life guard and then later as swimming instructor. This summer afternoon treat continued for almost 30 years until the year of Jane’s death in 2007.
Both Helen & Jane much involved themselves in the island community becoming loved & respected members. Among the many local organizational responsibilities they took on, for many years, was Helen being the Secretary of the South Galiano Volunteer Fire Department, Jane being the Treasurer for the Galiano Club. Jane was eventually awarded both the Order of Canada and the Order of BC, the investiture ceremony for each being held, at Jane’s insistence, on the island. Helen Sonthoff died in 2000, Jane Rule in 2007. Their ashes are buried together in the Galiano Cemetery just a short walk away from their island home.
For as long as any of us can remember there has been an old wooden building located next to the Galiano Community Hall. It is a simple enough four-sided structure, thick wood boards nailed to unfinished posts rooted into the ground, sloping corrugated metal roof. A single door, no windows. The floor is made up of packed soil and one very old tree stump. One side of the structure seems to have been left open (to receive firewood?) and was eventually covered over with a number of reused wood doors. Originally built in 1931 as a “wood shed”, the structure has been used as a general storage shed since at least the late 1950s. Stage props, food stuffs, archival papers, garden tools, excess lumber, retired furniture, kitchen pots and pans, sandwich boards and much much more, all found temporary and even long-term storage there. In the last few decades the outer walls became a place to post old event signs (in the days when these were still made of wood with hand painted letters), signs that advertised a wide variety of Hall functions: dances, art shows, craft markets, etc. While the building probably served very well as a wood shed, it was never a satisfactory storage shed: drafty and uninsulated, rotting boards, rodent infested. Historic though the building was becoming, it has long been in need of replacement and relocating. Just this past month the Club Board decided to do both. Under the supervision of Club Director, Diana Burgoyne, the old building is being dismantled, the boards and poles saved for use elsewhere. (One of those helping with the dismantling is Barry New. Barry’s grandfather, Donald New, was one of the founders —- in 1924 —- of the Galiano Club and was most active with the Club in the early 1930s. Mr. New quite probably helped with the construction of the original shed, the very one that his grandson is now helping take apart.) A stronger, more efficient storage building is soon to be constructed closer to the Hall itself.
In 1949 a group of local entrepreneurs established the Galiano Light and Power Company. Initially the Company provided electrical power to some 30 customers in the Sturdies Bay area. In the early 1950s the Galiano Club agreed to invest in the Company with the arrangement including the bringing of electricity to the Hall. A single power line was eventually strung on wood poles (cut from the Bluffs) stretching from Sturdies Bay to the Hall. By the early 1960s, with the creation of both BC Hydro and BC Ferries, a more reliable supply to the island of both electrical power and of natural gas (originally named ‘rock gas’) eliminated the need, from the Hall, of all the oil lamps and of the wood burning stove, replacing them with electric lights, gas and electric heat. The need for a wood shed was no longer there.
