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cate article remembers him, somewhat uncharitably,
along with his fellow County Court judge Rey Sargent as
“one of a group of eccentric and difficult County Court
Judges in Vancouver during the 1950s who included …
the late Judge McGeer (Gerry McGeer’s brother) and
Arthur Lord who later served on the Court of Appeal”.62
While obituaries must be taken with a grain of salt, the
tributes from his fellow jurists painted a very different
picture: of an individual who was personable, patient
and kind to members of both bench and bar. In any case,
his reputation should be considered in the context of his
persistent health issues, which stemmed in part from injuries sustained in
the First World War. It may also reflect the more unpredictable front-line
duties of a County Court judge: a newspaper article published a photograph
of a litigant who had argued his case for damages due to a leaking roof, all
while wearing the clerical robes of his idiosyncratic “Church of God”, and
clutching an ersatz crozier; Boyd C.C.J. reserved judgment.63
A reporter always seemed to be in the gallery of his courtroom, and the
newspapers frequently covered his hearings. One article, on a slow news
day, recounts Judge Boyd’s newly called son Bruce obtaining an order from
his judicial father: it noted that the order was by consent and thus ethically
permissible.64 Another recounts a landlord, a sergeant-major in the First
World War, testifying that he was shocked by his “obnoxious” ex-tenant’s foul
language. The article recounted: “Judge Boyd was surprised. ‘You are a sergeant
major in the army and you were shocked by the language. Well, it
must be a different army.’”65
From 1943, Boyd C.C.J. was burdened with the additional role of hearing
all rent appeals in southern British Columbia. He died in office, on December
18, 1957, of a heart attack, at age 65.
This survey of the earliest jurists on the Vancouver County Court bench
will end there, leaving the right half of the portrait gallery to be surveyed at
a future date.
It is likely that no portraits of Cane, Lennox and Boyd C.C.J.J. were found
when the wall was arranged in 1983, as these three jurists left no descendants.
Cane’s child and stepchildren moved east, and the Cane line appears
to have ended. Lennox C.C.J. had no children. Boyd C.C.J.’s only child, the
aforementioned Bruce, died soon after his father. It is hoped that these
restored photographs, and these brief sketches, provide some posterity to
these unsung jurists who in their time were central to the efficient daily dispensation
of justice in Vancouver, and central to the legal life and culture of
the city.
James Bruce Boyd