Edna Jaques

Early Life and Family

Edna Jaques was born and raised in Collingwood, Ontario. She and her twin sister, Erie, were born prematurely. Erie died six weeks later. Jacques’s mother was Mary Ellen Donohue. Jaques’ father, Charles Adolphus Jaques, was a Great Lakes passenger ship captain who travelled the route between Collingwood and Fort William (now Thunder Bay). As captain of the Northern Belle, Jaques’ father was the last to leave the ship when it famously caught fire and burned in 1898. Jaques recalled that her father had to break through the burning deck to save himself.

Jacques’s ancestors were Huguenots (French Protestants) from the community of Hazebrouck, France, near the Belgian border. She recalled her grandmother telling a story of being rescued by Royal Navy ships that brought them to the “safety of England.” The family settled in Yorkshire before immigrating to Canada in 1835. They lived near the village of Colborne, Ontario, before settling in Collingwood in 1879.

When Jacques was 11, her father, gripped with a pioneering spirit, moved the family to Saskatchewan to homestead. Edna had two older brothers, Bruce and Clyde, as well as two younger sisters, Madge and Arlie. The family farm became the nucleus of a new community in which the Jaques family would be intimately entwined. Edna’s mother ran the local post office out of their house and named it for the brier roses that grew on a nearby ridge. The community ultimately adopted the name of the post office, Briercrest.

Early Career

Edna Jaques’ talent for poetry was evident at an early age. Her poetry was first published in the Moose Jaw Times when Jaques was 13 years old. At age 14, she sent a collection of poems to evangelist Billy Sunday, who sang them at revival services.

Jaques completed her education in a nearby public school. She had intentions to travel the world but only got as far as Calgary. By the age of 20, Jaques’ poems were regularly appearing in newspapers and copies of Saskatchewan Farmer magazine. She made her way as an itinerant seamstress and continued writing and submitting her poetry.

“In Flanders Now”

Edna Jaques’ most famous poem was a positive, patriotic response to “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Jaques wrote the poem while living in Calgary in her 20s, during the First World War. Jaques recalled that a flash of inspiration came over her while she was mending clothes at Calgary’s Holy Cross Hospital. She scribbled down her poem on a scrap of paper she found.

“In Flanders Now”

We have kept faith, ye Flanders' dead,

Sleep well beneath those poppies red,

That mark your place.

The torch your dying hands did throw,

We've held it high before the foe,

And answered bitter blow for blow,

In Flanders' fields.

 

And where your heroes' blood was spilled,

The guns are now forever stilled,

And silent grown.

There is no moaning of the slain,

There is no cry of tortured pain,

And blood will never flow again

In Flanders' fields.

 

Forever holy in our sight

Shall be those crosses gleaming white,

That guard your sleep.

Rest you in peace, the task is done,

The fight you left us we have won.

And "Peace on Earth" has just begun

In Flanders now.?

“In Flanders Now” was first published by the Calgary Herald. Reprints soon followed in newspapers across North America. The poem was used in a fundraising campaign led by the Everywoman’s Club in the United States. It raised $1 million for the restoration of the Louvain Library in Belgium. Jaques made only $40 from the poem, but it established her international reputation. The poem was also read as part of a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC, upon the return of the Unknown Soldier.

Later Career

“In Flanders Now” brought Edna Jaques instant celebrity. The editor of the Calgary Herald offered to pay for her university education. But Jaques instead went to Vancouver in her effort to continue seeing the world. Before her poetry earnings were sufficient to provide an income, she worked in a hospital, as a stenographer and as a waitress. Finally, she joined the Vancouver-based Province as a journalist.

Jaques married William Ernest Jamieson, a farmer from Moose Jaw, in 1921. They established a farm near Tisdale, Saskatchewan, where their daughter Joyce was born. When the farm fell on hard times, she and Joyce moved to Victoria, BC. Jaques continued working on her poetry, wrote articles for local newspapers and magazines, and worked as a stenographer.

Jaques became a popular public speaker. She was first invited to speak to the Canadian Club of Moose Jaw in 1929. She spoke regularly between 1933 and 1939 as an invited guest lecturer by the Homemakers’ Clubs of Saskatchewan.

Jaques had an exceptionally high output over the course of her career. She is said to have submitted two poems a month to Saskatchewan Farmer and had a poem published in every issue of the magazine for 30 years. This eventually caught the attention of editors at Maclean’s magazine, to whom she also regularly sent her poetry. Over the years, she would regularly publish her poetry in the Winnipeg Free Press as well as the Province. Over the course of her career, Jaques is estimated to have written 3,000 poems. They have been collected in a dozen published books of poetry.

During her life, Jaques was known either as the Scrapbook Poetess of the West or the Scrapbook Poet. The latter nickname is said to have been provided by friend Nellie McClung in a 1934 article she wrote about Jaques. The nickname alludes both to Jaques’ penchant for scribbling her poems on scraps of paper and to the fact that her poems published in newspapers were often cut out and placed in scrapbooks for safekeeping. It was McClung who played an instrumental role in helping Jaques publish My Kitchen Window (1935), said to be her first substantial collection.

In 1935, Jaques sent her daughter Joyce to Briercrest so that she could focus on developing her career. During the Second World War, Jaques worked in a factory in Toronto and then for the information branch of the wartime Prices and Trade Board in Ottawa, along with many other women journalists.

Honours and Legacy

Edna Jaques’ poem “Thankful for What,” published in the November 1932 issue of Good Housekeeping, was named best poem of the year by the New York Times.

By the 1950s, Jaques was arguably Canada’s best known and best-selling poet. She was called the best poet of her generation and was compared to Scottish poet Robert Burns, given her role as a “voice of the people.” A 1952 survey named Jaques one of Canada’s most popular women. By the time of Jacques’ 85th birthday in 1976, it was estimated that her collections of poetry had sold a quarter million copies. That same year, Ontario premier Bill Davis named Jaques “Woman of the Year.”

Peachey House, long associated with the Jaques family in Briercrest, was declared a heritage property in 2008. Shortly thereafter, it became home to the Brier Rose Cultural Centre, which was dedicated to Edna Jaques.

Published Collections

• Wide Horizons (1934)
• Drifting Soil (1934)
• My Kitchen Window (1935)
• Dreams in Your Heart (1937)
• Beside Still Waters (1939)
• Britons Awake (1940)
• Aunt Hattie's Place (1941)
• Verses for You (1941)
• Roses in December (1944)
• Back-Door Neighbors (1946)
• Hills of Home (1948)
• Fireside Poems (1950)
• The Golden Road (1953)
• Uphill All the Way: The Autobiography of Edna Jaques (1977)