Colonial Despatches

Reverend James Gammage was one of two Anglican missionaries sent to the colony of British Columbia in 1858 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.1 Born in London, England on 11 October 1822, he trained as a teacher at St. Mark's College before he joined the priesthood.2 He entered St. Bees College in 1855, was made a deacon in 1857, Curate of St. Mary's later that year, and priested in 1858.3 The Society assigned Gammage to be minister to the gold hunters at Frazer's River and elsewhere on the main land.4

Gammage and his wife Mariane left England in autumn 1858 and arrived at Esquimalt on 11 April 1859.5 They were provided free passage on board the Thames City through the kindness of her Majesty's Government.6 Gammage established a mission at Douglas on Harrison Lake in the interior, raising enough funds to build a church by 1862. The mission was not successful, however, as most inhabitants of the small community were single men who were not interested in religion. When the completion of the Cariboo Road through the Fraser Canyon provided an alternative transportation route, the mission was closed.7 Gammage and his wife returned to England in 1863.8 He held a number of positions in the Church between 1864 and 1890.9 He was seventy-one years old when he died in 1893.10

• 1. Consecration of the Bishop of Columbia, Watchman and Wesleyan Advertiser, 2 March 1859, 70.
• 2. Classified Digest of the Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1892 (London: The Society, 1893), 880; Derwent Coleridge, A Statistical Inquiry into the Results of the Education Afforded in the National Society's Training Institution for Schoolmasters, St. Mark's College, Chelsea (London: Levey, Robson & Franklyn, 1848), 8.
• 3. Crockford's Clerical Directory [1882] (London: Horace Cox, 1882), 399.
• 4. Mission to British Columbia, London News, 18 September 1858, 2.
• 5. United Kingdom, The National Archives, RG12 General Register Office: 1891 Census Returns, RG12/1018, 37; Richards to Merivale (Permanent Under-Secretary), 30 September 1858, 9929, CO 60/2. B585AD06.html; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Ecclesiastical Gazette,, 14 September 1858, 54; The Mission Field, A Monthly Record of the Proceedings of The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home and Abroad [vol. 4] (London: 1859),169-173.
• 6. The Mission Field, A Monthly Record of the Proceedings of The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home and Abroad [vol. 3] (London: 1858), 240.
• 7. Frank A. Peake, The Anglican Church in British Columbia (Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1959), 38-39.
• 8. Classified Digest, 880.
• 9. Gail Edwards, Creating Textual Communities: Anglican and Methodist Missionaries and Print Culture in British Columbia, 1858-1914, (PhD thesis, University of British Columbia, 2001), 446.
• 10. United Kingdom, General Register Office Index, Deaths Registered in October, November, and December 1893, Uxbridge, vol. 3a, 15. http://www.freebmd.org.uk