William Bancroft Family by son Timothy
William Bancroft was born at Kildwick, near Keightly, Yorkshire, England, on December 12, 1878. The son of a farmer and hackney breeder, he served his apprenticeship as a stonemason before emigrating to Calgary in 1905. Upon his arrival, he bought a second-hand bicycle and rode around the district looking at homesteads, filing first on the SE Sec 25 Twp 25 Rge 3 W5M at Bearspaw. Later, he decided that the SW Sec 35 Twp 25 Rge 3 W5M was better; he cancelled the first choice and proved up on the second. We still have the original homestead shack, which he built in 1905. Father didn’t keep cattle but bought, broke and sold horses. He also cut prairie hay and hauled it to the livery barns in Calgary. Sometimes, arriving at Calgary after dark, he would pull off the road where the Brentwood Shopping Centre is now, and sleep on the top of the load of hay to save the cost of a hotel room.
One day he met a man who wanted to go farming in the Peace River area, so he traded a few head of horses for a house the fellow owned. At that time, it was out on the prairie, but with Calgary’s growth, it was located in the centre of the Sunnyside district. We had the house rented until the middle 1950’s when my mother sold it to make room for an apartment block.
Around 1910, father dug a well by hand, going down 120 feet until he came to where a spring was flowing over a large rock. While he was digging, he had to do some dynamiting, so he put W. P. Biggar, who was driving by with a team and wagon, to time him climbing out of the hole so he would know what length of fuse to cut. Percy always declared that father made much better time coming up after the fuse was lit. A number of years later, a well driller drilled down 8 or 9 feet into the rock to form a basin. This well is still in operation and is capable of supplying all the water needed on the farm.
When the Glenbow stone quarry, located a half mile south of the homestead, opened in 1909 my father worked there as a stonemason. The quarry’s main contract was to supply the stone for the Legislature building in Edmonton. There was plenty of work for a stonemason in Calgary and one of the jobs my father worked on was the Brook Building on 8th Avenue and 2nd Street West.
Prior to 1914, father traded some building lots on Bellevue Avenue in Calgary to Arthur Norris for the NW Sec 34 Twp 25 Rge 3 W5M. He also bought the NE Sec 33 Twp 25 Rge 3 W5M from the Canadian Pacific Railway about the same time.
Like the modern housewife, bachelors in the early days had ways and means of saving work. For example, father would tie his bedding around his waist and swim across a slough a few times to wash them and then spread them over the brush to dry. Another fellow would spread newspapers on his table and when this became soiled or when company came, he would put a clean sheet over top. This would go on until there were two or three inches of paper on top of the table.
Joining the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles in 1914, father went overseas and was severely wounded when caught in machine gun fire at the Battle of the Somme. He returned to Calgary and the homestead in 1919. In May of that year, a big blizzard blew in which lasted three days. He had a number of cows due to calve; as soon as the storm broke, he went looking for them. They had bunched up together in some brush and the snow had piled up higher than their backs making a wind break. Three or four calves born during the storm were fine. A friend, who farmed where McMahon Stadium is now, remembers seeing hundreds of cattle drifting by during the storm. It had been a hard winter and cattle were in poor condition with many dying as they piled up against fences.
While stationed at Longmore in England, he met my mother, Bertha May Holloway, who was born at the “Wakes” Selbourne in Hampshire on May 4, 1893. She came to Calgary July 9, 1920 and they were married the next afternoon at the Cathedral Church of the Redeemer by Dean Paget. They took the train to Glenbow that evening and walked the two miles over the hill to the homestead.
Transportation was usually by horse and buggy, although sometimes they would drive down to Glenbow, tie the horse up behind the Glenbow store and post office, take a red flag out of the tiny Glenbow station and flag down the train. Coming back in the evening, they would notify the conductor who would stop the train at Glenbow to let them off. Only certain trains could be stopped and the service continued until the late 1930’s.
My parents had two sons. Jack Holloway was born December 2, 1921 at the Holy Cross Hospital in Calgary. He married Betty Hawkwood from Bearspaw and farmed in the Glendale district. They have a son and a daughter William and Judith. I, Timothy, was born July 15, 1924 on the homestead at Glenbow. I married Frances Savage from Sedgewick and continue to live on the homestead. We have two daughters, Carol and Anne, and a son, John. Carol lives in DeWinton,Alberta,Anne lives in Calgary and John has a farm west of Innisfail.
Father died January 22, 1934 and Mother, Jack and I went to England in May of that year, renting the farm to Mr. Damgard. While in England, Jack and I attended a small two-room country school in Hampshire. When Jack left school he got a job as a garden boy on a nearby estate owned by Lord Horder, the King’s physician. When I left school I worked as a stable boy at Bedales, co-educational school for children of the rich and famous, about 1 1/2 miles from where we lived. There were twenty-six horses, a riding master and a riding mistress. I remember the students were extremely well-mannered.
Returning to Canada in the spring of 1939, we bought a herd of cows and quota from Ernie Thompson. We shipped milk to the Union Milk Co. in Calgary. Fran and I continued dairy farming until 1989 when our son John, and his wife Dawna, took over the herd and moved them to their farm at Innisfail.
Starting in 1928, the Norris and Bancroft families took turns having Christmas and New Year’s Day dinner. This continued every year except for the five years we were in England until 1952 when the families got too large for the houses.
Walter Gooding, who farmed south of Bearspaw on the SW Sec 24 Twp 25 Rge 3 W5M who knew my father very well wrote the following: “One could not live in a district for twenty years or more without making contact with many different people, some lasting and some otherwise. One of the friendships I made was with ‘Billy the Yorkshireman’! Billy was a man worth making a friend of. Billy used to haul his hay to Calgary and sell it by the load. If you were on the trail going West anytime after midnight and saw a team coming, a load but no driver, you could be sure it was Billy, snuggled down in the hay, letting the horses making their own way.”
Although my mother had lived in the country all her life, she had never lived on a farm until she came to Canada. She soon learned to milk cows and help with all the chores associated with farming. Going to Calgary with horse and buggy, she would drive to a vacant lot at 8th Avenue and 3rd Street West, tie up the horse behind the large sign boards and go shopping down 8th Avenue, driving home in the late afternoon.
Apparently, this lot was a favourite parking spot for many farmers and Indians (sic). Eaton’s eventually built their department store on the lot.
Arthur Norris, who homesteaded the land across the lA highway from my father, was born with a deformed foot, but he drove a Model T Ford touring car. My mother would sometimes ride into Calgary with him. She rode in with him on a Saturday when he was taking two calves to MacLean’s Auction Mart. He had taken the back seat out of the car and as the latches on the back doors were broken, they were held shut by a piece of binder twine tied across the inside of the car from handle to handle. As they made a left tum onto 16th Avenue, where the Home Depot is today, one of the calves fell against the door, the twine broke and both calves fell out into the ditch. They were not hurt and took off across the prairie where the North Hill Shopping Centre is today. Because of his deformed foot, Arthur could not run, but my mother could and she spent nearly an hour, hampered by a long skirt, catching the two calves and getting them back into the car. They went on to MacLean’s without further incident.
In 1949, my mother and I decided it was time we took a holiday as we had been milking cows for ten years without a break. We had a 1947 Hudson car and bought an eighteen foot Ingle Shultz house trailer, made arrangements with Doug and May Masters to live on the farm and look after the cows. We left home on October 17, 1949 in a snow storm, traveled south to San Diego, California. Then went east to Keywest, Florida, north to Norfolk, Virginia, west to St Louis, Missouri, north and west through Minnesota and Montana back to Alberta, arriving back at the farm on March 15, 1950. We had no serious problems and added over 13,000 miles to the car’s odometer. I did all the driving as my mother had never learned to drive. Total expenses for the holiday were $911.00, the average price of gasoline was 37 .3 cents per gallon.
My mother retired from the farm in 1952 and lived in Calgary. She died on November 18, 1983. My brother, Jack died April 27, 2006.
Fran and I still live on the homestead. Fran keeps busy with her watercolour painting. Although we have no livestock, I cut and bale some hay every year. Fran has been a member of the Glendale Women’s Institute for over fifty years and I have been a member of the Bearspaw Lions Club for forty-nine years. We have both been actively involved in the Bearspaw Fair since it started, as well as other organizations in the district.
