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In the summer of 1985, a young student, possibly serving a Saturday “Defaulters,” discovered a set of 283 drawings of the proposed Chateau Prince Rupert by Francis Rattenbury. The drawings were found in the attic of the Rattenbury House at Glenlyon School while the student was helping headmaster Keith Walker clean up.
Entrance to the attic is up a steep, narrow stairway on the second floor, leading through to the “Widow’s Walk” at the top of the house. The occasional site of end-of-school year staff celebrations, and on one occasion Super Hero’s death defying leap down to a cheering throng of goggle-eyed young students at a Jump Rope For Heart event.
The drawings are now held at the British Columbia Archives in Victoria. A full set is also held by the Prince Rupert City and Regional Archives as part of the Francis M. Rattenbury collection.
They were the plans for one of the largest hotels in Canada to be built as the destination point of the Grand Trunk Railway’s new Pacific port in Prince Rupert, that was to rival Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco as a commercial outlet on the West Coast. The project was the brainchild of the president of the GTR, Charles Melville Hays to create a second transcontinental railway within Canada.
Rattenbury was contracted by Hays in 1909 to produce plans for a grand hotel to support the anticipated number of people that would pass through Prince Rupert, similar to his Empress Hotel in Victoria that was built in 1908. In order to battle rising costs to continue with his plan, Hays went to London in early 1912 to solicit financial support and was then keen to get back to Ottawa for the opening of the GTR’s Chateau Laurier. He was invited by Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line to travel back on the maiden voyage of the company’s new liner RMS Titanic.
Hays perished in that shipping disaster, which contributed to the collapse of the Grand Trunk Railway’s west coast scheme seven years later. For his part, Rattenbury’s first sketches were made in September 1911, and he completed the final plans in June 1913. Work on the foundations in Prince Rupert began in late 1913 on 2nd Avenue. However, the hotel was never constructed as a result of the combination of an economic downturn, the death of Charles Melville Hays, and the onset of World War I.
The school made arrangements for the drawings to be added to the British Columbia Archives in Victoria. For those of you interested in seeing the sketches and drawings of the Chateau Prince Rupert, go to: Prince Rupert Archives, Francis Rattenbury Fonds, click on View Details, and scroll down to Subject Access and then Architectural Drawings.
In the meantime, take a look around your attic – you never know what’s waiting to be discovered up there!
