Captain George W. Robarts (I don’t know what the^“ W.” was for), but he was born, as I said before, in Avondale, Nova Scotia, which is on the Avon River very near Windsor. He was a man, he was 48 in 1918 (so you’ll be able to figure his age out, when he was born, I won’t take up that room on the tape) and he told me he went to sea when he was a very young man. He didn’t tell me what the first ship was he went on, but he was a man of about five foot nine, about five foot nine in height, and he weighed about two hundred and forty pounds and he was two hundred and forty pounds of absolute wildcat. He was a big man but he wasn’t fat: he could flip up on his hands and walk around the yard on his hands and do all kinds of acrobatics. And old sailors that had been with him, they said that on one of these ships where he was a bucko mate, that he wasn’t a quarrelsome man, but, boy, he was sure a finisher when any fight started! Captain Young, who was with him when he was a young man, he said that he saw three waterfront toughies ambush Captain Robarts one time, a deliberate ambush, one pounced on his back and the other two rushed in from the sides and he said if three toughies had pounced on a full-size grizzly bear, they couldn’t have come apart any quicker. He just wrecked them and he was completely unaware that they were going to attack him. But anyway, he was a wonderful man, he was just a wonderful fellow, and a very dear friend of mine. He came out on a ship called the Mark Currie , Captain George Liswell. The Mark Currie was named after, I believe, the first mayor of Saint John, New Brunswick and they came into Vancouver and the first night, as my father said, always had to happen – you always had to go to jail the first night you were in port or you were no square-rigged sailorman. You had to be in jail before morning. So the whole bunch of them, old Liswell’s son and Captain Robarts who was just a kid at the time, and Robarts and the whole crew, they got into some real tough dive uptown, up around Tommy Roberts’ saloon there on Water Street or somewhere there and during the course of the evening this young Liswell, who was quite a devilish kid, he got a good rousing fight going, and Captain Robarts, who was a peaceful fellow unless he was attacked, well, he got right in the middle of it. And then Liswell and Young, they sneaked out and left this thing in a terrible uproar and the police came along and put the whole works of them in jail. So old Young said next morning, here’s these two kids, very, very saintly look on their faces, that’s all there was aboard the, what was her name, the Mark Currie and old Captain Liswell, I think he was a State-of-Mainer, but he said he was kind of a sour old character, anyway, and chewing tobacco, and he came along the deck and he looked at these two kids and he says, “I just wonder where you two sanctimonious devils was last night when I lost all my crew?” ……….

This is a very interesting little story. Captain Robarts, when he was quite young, he came into a port in Nova Scotia, I’m not sure where, somewhere in the Minas Basin, and he went up to kind of a hoe-down that they had there and he met a girl and they danced and had a good time that evening and he went back aboard the ship and went away. He came out to British Columbia (I don’t know whether – I think he went back and came out again – I’m pretty sure he went out the first time on the Mark Currie ) but he came out here and he quit the deep water and he became Captain of a little ship called the – oh gosh, I’ve lost the name now. I’ll think of her in a minute — a little fishpacker, Unican , United Canneries, and he was Captain on her and he was making pretty good money, so he wrote back to Nova Scotia. He had been corresponding with this girl for several years and he wrote back to Nova Scotia and asked this girl if she would come out and marry him and she said she would, and she came out to British Columbia on the train and he met her at the depot and they got married. And that was Captain George Robarts. So Captain Robarts then, he was on the Unican for a while and then he became one of Vancouver’s pilots – he was a pilot from about 1905 or 6, I would say, he returned somewhere just before the war and he was a very dear friend of mine and I met him on the corner of Granville and Georgia just at the beginning of the war, he was getting to be quite an old man, he was about eighty years of age, and he said to me, “Charlie,” he said, “you know I feel very proud today” and he pulled out a telegram from the British Admiralty asking him if he would come out of retirement and go down to Esquimalt and put the Queen Mary on the dry-dock, and they brought him out of retirement and he said, “You know, it’s pretty nice when even the British Admiralty recognizes that you’re a good sailor”, and so he went down, and some of the tugboat men, they said that “Nothing to it – Captain Robarts just handled her like a toy.” He put her on and took her off again and he didn’t live very long after that, another couple of years and Captain Robarts died. But I don’t think he ever had much sickness, he just – he was about eighty-two or three and he just got old. That’s part of the history of George W. Robarts, one of the most wonderful sailors I ever had anything to do with, and a real shantyman, a real deep salt-water shantyman.