JOHN HUGH ROBERTS: Mystical Writings from a Cymric Soul
By DALE BERTRAND
Early Vancouver was home to many interesting characters; one of these was a Welsh mystique and his family. John Hugh Roberts immigrated to Canada from Wales with his wife Anne in the early 1850s and after exploring various locations in the eastern part of America, settled in Toronto.
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THIS PICTURE looking north from the Main Street bridge at downtown Hastings is Vancouver era 1885, and is from what is now Quebec and 10th Avenue.
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He was successful at developing property in and around Queen and Sherbourne and then in 1881 he and his wife Anne Roberts picked up their family, Tomhu, Mississippi, Sarah, and traveled across Canada to Vancouver, via San Francisco.
They and their family homesteaded on property at what is now Quebec and Tenth Avenue, eventually building their dream castle “PenLangera Lodge” in Point Grey and living there until his death in 1917.
Their son Tomhu was an accomplished artist – one of the first who registered himself as an artist in the Henderson Directory and was a teacher and painted and sketched many of the early Vancouver scenes and characters of the day.
His grandson Charles Steele, willed the writings and dairies to my mother, Mary Bertrand. Anne Roberts calls Charles Steele, christened Charles Frederick Hector Steele – the first white boy born in Vancouver – as he was born in 1886 on August 6 on Alexander Street, the year Vancouver was incorporated as a city.
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JOHN HUGH ROBERTS circa late 1890s.
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John Hugh’s legacy: Over 55 years of diaries of early Canadian life in detail describing Vancouver in the First Year from 1884-1917 and mysterious papers titled “The Last Recorder of the Druids.”
John Hugh Roberts believed that he was born to Welsh parents in Cornwall in 1828 to a Captain Roberts and his wife. It was not until near his “mother’s” death in the 1870s that he learned that he was a foundling, saved as an infant off of a shipwreck near Cornwall in 1828.
He had been on board from the second or third day of birth and that the journey had been approximately four weeks. His birth parents drowned and Captain Roberts saved him from the raging sea to raise him as his own.
He was educated and partially raised by three women, one from Brittany – Mary St. John, one from Cornwall – Mary Temanmaur and the last, Mary Movrin Roberts, who he thought was his grandmother, from North Wales.
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JOHN HUGH ROBERTS and his artist son Tomhu H. Roberts circa 1890.
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The three women all had similar names with the sea or water in them and he referred to them as the “Three Mermaids.” As a foundling, they took him under their wing and he was taught ancient writings and languages, Runes, Ogamy, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Cuneiform writing, Phoenician, Cymric, Gaelic, modern and ancient Hebrew and other arcane languages.
He writes, that he is one of the “Hereditary Druids (Lords of Teman). We inherit a certain right or privilege under the covenant, provided we conform to certain ordinances. Among these rights, are the privileges of reading these wonderful records of nearly 73 hundred years!”
In the year 1838 he was led to a cave in Cornwall by the two remaining “Mermaids,” and here he was shown many stone slates, He wrote, “there were many written in these Greek letters, and others in Cuneiform hieroglyphics, and others with pictures, and emblems and scrolls. So that I became familiar with them by sight, but was ignorant of their content.”
Later in his life he received a charm of which he writes, “enclosed in the charm, a Key to these hieroglyphics! And for the last nine years, I devoted all my time to the study and translation, of these ancient Secret Inspiration, and Revelation.” These nine years of John Hugh Roberts’s life were spent in Vancouver.
Nest month: Excerpts from the writings of “The Last Recorder of the Druids.”
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Visit www.azatlan.com to learn more about the Roberts Project and see the booklet “First Days in Vancouver.”
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