W. Kaye Lamb

"I met her first in 1934, shortly after I was appointed Provincial Librarian and Archivist. I had Mrs. Higgins intended to leave instructions in her will that her father's house should be torn down and his manuscripts destroyed. She could not bear the thought that the house might be allowed to deteriorate into a slum and that the reminiscences might fall into unsympathetic hands.

(Family #45)

After our first meeting I saw her fairly frequently, and we became friends. On my walk to the office I passed the house. . .and from time to time she invited me to lunch. I usually arrived armed with a question that could probably be answered by consulting the reminiscences. She would bring out the five volumes, hunt for the relevant passage, and read it to me.

Then one memorable day, she handed me a volume and suggest I should read it myself. Even a brief glance was sufficient to show that the reminiscences comprised an historical narrative of quite exceptional interest; the problem I faced was how to ensure that Mrs. Higgins did not carry out her expressed intention of leaving directions that they should be destroyed."

"At last I determined to pay her a special visit. I told her that I wished to talk about the preservation of the reminiscences, that I would expect no comment from her I pointed out that by and large the people who were remembered . . . were those about whom adequate documentation was available. Thus she held in her hands much of what the future could know about her father; to destroy the reminiscences would be in a considerable measure to destroy his memory. Having said my say I went away, leaving her sitting quietly, looking out the window, her hand in her lap, resting on one of the five manuscript volumes.

 To the best of my knowledge the idea of destroying the volumes was never raised thereafter, and Mrs. Higgins's will gave no instructions about the reminiscences. Neither did it make any reference to the house. . .I had told her that I considered it unthinkable that a building of such historic interest the oldest structure in British Columbia now existing in substantially its original state would be allowed to go to rack and ruin.

After her death in 1939, at the age of seventy-seven, I asked the Hon. John Hart, minister of finance, to visit the house with me. Though additions had been made to it on two occasions, the house as first built in 1852 had not been disturbed. This was the first time I had seen Dr. Helmcken's bedroom which we found exactly as he had left it nearly twenty years before; his clothes were hanging neatly in the cupboard; the shirt he would have put on the next morning was ready to hand. Mr Hart was charmed and impressed and negotiations soon began between the government and the estate that resulted in the acquisition of the house in July. The outbreak of war in September delayed plans for a time, but Helmcken House opened to the public as an historical museum in August 1941.

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