Colonial Despatches

The Rev. William Burton Crickmer received a BA degree from Oxford in 1855 and an MA in 1858. He became a deacon in 1855 and was priested in 1856. Crickmer was curate of St. Marylebone Church, London, in 1858, when he was sent to British Columbia by the Colonial Church and School Society.1 He arrived in Victoria with R. C. Moody on Christmas Day, 1858.2

Crickmer began work on 8 May 1859 in the parish of St. John the Divine at Fort Langley, whose church had been built by the Royal Engineers. But the decision to establish the capital at New Westminster instead of Fort Langley quickly depopulated the latter centre and Crickmer moved to Fort Yale in 1860.3 He returned to England in 1862.4 In 1864 he became perpetual curate of Beverley Minster in the Diocese of York, as well associate secretary for the Colonial and Continental Church Society.5

• 1. Dorothy Blakey Smith, ed., The Journal of Arthur Thomas Bushby, 1858-1859 (Victoria: Queen's Printer, 1963), 91. http://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0383423
• 2. Ibid., 86, 113-116.
• 3. Letter from the Rev. A. B. Crickmer, Daily British Colonist (Victoria), 12 April 1861, 1. http://n2t.net/ark:/13960/t0xp8z27z
• 4. Smith, The Journal of Arthur Thomas Bushby, 171.
• 5. Ibid.; Crockford's Clerical Directory [1865] (London: Horace Cox, 1865), 152. http://n2t.net/ark:/13960/t4wj2b23q