Dr. C.E. Hart, Victoria’s First Coroner, Had City’s First Auto

A history-making medical practice which had spanned more than 60 years came to a close in October 1960 when Dr. and Col. Edward Charles Hart, CMG, MD, CM, FACS and Victoria coroner, died at the age of 90.

Did I say history-making? This amazing Nova Scotian served as Victoria’s coroner for more than half a century.

For no fewer than 56 years, Dr. E.C. Hart had served as Victoria’s coroner–one of the longest holders of this office in provincial history.

This was by no means the first time that Dr. E.C. Hart made history, many remembering him for being, perhaps, the first in Victoria to own a ‘horseless carriage.’

Setting records, in fact, seems to have been almost commonplace for the remarkable Dr. Hart.

Three Victorians who had good reason to know this was true were his son, Edward G. Hart, who provided many of the details for this post, and daughters Ellen, and Josephine, widow of the renowned B.C. Museum director, Dr. Clifford Carl.

Nova Scotia-born in 1870, the son of a merchant, Edward Charles Hart had his first taste of adventure at age 17 when he went to sea aboard his father’s trading schooner. Annually, the Hart schooner sailed to Newfoundland to trade goods for codfish. On this particular voyage, the vessel’s supercargo became ill just before sailing and young Hart took his place.

As son Edward noted in 1973, “It was quite a responsibility for a lad of that age,” and we can but regret that more details of his father’s seafaring career aren’t forthcoming.

His next stop, after graduation from the Pictou Academy in 1887, was McGill Medical School in 1890. During four years of study he worked summers to help pay his tuition, serving one such ‘vacation’ as a ‘copyist’ in Ottawa. This tedious profession was in the age before the typewriter, when his fine handwriting, so uncharacteristic of a budding doctor, and attention to detail made him invaluable at transcribing documents in triplicate.

At least two other summers were spent as a ‘levelman’ on a railway before he graduated as Dr. E.C. Hart, MD, CM, in 1894. However, he didn’t begin his practice until three years after, in Baddeck, N.S., the small community made famous for having been the summer home of Alexander Graham Bell, and as the site of the first heavier-then-air flight in the British Commonwealth.

It was there that he met the future Mrs. Hart, Margaret McPhee, M.A. of Antigonish, N.S., then working as a schoolteacher. But the young physician was becoming restless; Baddeck couldn’t offer him as large a practice as he desired and, upon reading in a newspaper that things were booming in B.C.’s Kootenays, he decided to head west to the mining town of Rossland.

As it turned out, Baddeck’s loss wasn’t to be Rossland’s gain.

After passing through Winnipeg, which he didn’t like–“It was no place to make a start,” he said later, and ditto for Calgary. By the time he got to Rossland, the mining boom had peaked. So he went on to Victoria to obtain his B.C. medical licence. Once there, he decided to stay and he was appointed temporarily as the superintendent of the Royal Jubilee Hospital.

Three months later, having established a practice, he was appointed City Coroner on May 24, 1899. By this time he’d sent for Margaret and married her upon her arrival in Vancouver.

With Dr. F.W. Hall, he opened an office on Yates Street while residing at the corner of Courtney and Douglas streets but the partnership dissolved in 1908 and he opened his own office in his own home. By then, because of the Boer War, he’d joined the 5^th B.C. Garrison Artillery as its part-time medical officer, all of which kept him busy attending to his own patients and army patients while working for the City.

By the outbreak of the First World War, by this time a major in the regular Canadian Army, he volunteered and was sent overseas in 1915. Made a lieutenant-colonel, he was placed in command of the No. 5 Hospital in England after recruiting and organising the staff himself in 1915. Then it was on to Greece to oversee hospital operations for the heavy Allied casualties at Salonika. Transferred to England, he was promoted to assistant director of Canadian medical services, supervising the hospital ships returning wounded men to Canada.

Decorated with the Companion of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), Hart returned to Victoria in 1919 after almost six years of serving his country overseas.

He’d been awarded the CMG, he’d say with typical modesty, because he “got along all right with the top brass”.

Finally back in Victoria, he resumed his private practice and his civic post as Coroner, the position that he held until his death. Among his most notable cases in this capacity were the inquests into the Valencia, Clallam and Iroquois steamship disasters.

When he was presented with a British Columbia Centennial Scroll by the Canadian Medical Association at their Annual Scientific Session in 1958, the Victoria Daily Times described him as a “tall, spare man with slightly stooping shoulders and a generous moustache”.

Upon his passing in October 1960, Edward Charles Hart was recalled for his “quick wit, ready smile and abundant sympathy for persons involved in the innumerable tragedies which touched him in his position of both Coroner and doctor”.

Also for his having bought the “first gasoline-driven car in Victoria” in 1902, for $650. No doubt it was essential to his being able to attend to all of his duties, particularly emergencies.

His son, whom I interviewed in 1973, was convinced Dr. Hart “had the first g asoline car in B.C., a 3.5-hp Oldsmobile. (See Valerie Green’s article in the Times-Colonist, https://www.timescolonist.com/…/our-history-when-the-first-cars-came-to-victoria-1.8…,) There were a few steam cars and a few other claimants,” although he admitted that he wasn’t born until two months later.

He recalled his father promising children who balked at being vaccinated a ride around the block. He drove the 1902 model until 1950 when, aged 80, he switched to a Packard.

At 88, he was the oldest practising physician and surgeon in the province.