Irene Baird

Irene Baird (April 4, 1901, Carlisle – April 19, 1981, Coquitlam) was an English-Canadian novelist, journalist and civil servant.

Baird was born Irene Violet Elise Todd, on April 9, 1901, in Carlisle, England.

She was the only daughter of Robert and Eva Todd, owners of a woollen mill.

Her education was through a governess and ensuing boarding schools.

After her father took a fly fishing trip to British Columbia, in 1919 the family relocated to Qualicum Beach, on Vancouver Island.

In 1923, she married Robert Baird, an engineer, and they settled in Vancouver.

They had two children, Robert (b. 1924) and June (b. 1928).

In the early 1930s, Baird was the first female teacher at St. George's Boys' Anglican Private School in Vancouver.

It has been called the best naturalistic Canadian novel to appear from the 1930s, as well as one of the most vital social documents of the period.

Baird moved to Victoria in 1937.

In the same year, she published her first novel, John, an elegiac character study.

The central figure is John Dorey, a 62 year-old English war veteran who rejects the family wool trade.

He settles on a coastal farm in Lisk, a fictional setting evidently somewhere on Vancouver Island.

The book was a best-seller and frequently compared to James Hilton's novella, Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

It follows the aftermath of a real event in June 1938, a day known as Bloody Sunday, when police forcibly expelled unemployed men who had occupied the Vancouver Post Office for nineteen days.

After the men were driven off by tear gas and clubs, some two thousand unemployed men travelled to Victoria to challenge the government.

The protagonist of the novel is Matt Striker, twenty-two years old and a man of no fixed residence, who arrives just after the conclusion of the sit-down occupation.

He befriends Eddy who has diminished mental faculties from being beaten by police.

Matt, who suffers at times from "rage blindness," wants to take a greater role in the labour movement but is rejected due to his unpredictability.

Toward the novel's end, Eddy's search for a pair of shoes leads to an altercation with a police officer.

Matt intervenes and loses control, beating the policeman to death.

In a remorseful panic, Eddy sacrifices himself in front of an oncoming train.

The novel had a positive reception upon release.

She is best known for her 1939 novel Waste Heritage, a depiction of labour strife.

Baird wrote four novels and also contributed journalism, stories, and poetry.

In 1939, Baird published Waste Heritage, her second novel.

In 1939, Bruce Hutchison called it "one of the best books to come out of Canada in our time."

A frequent comparison was made between Waste Heritage's characters Matt and his simple friend Eddy, with George and Lennie of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

However, when looked at critically the similarity is superficial.

Contemporary reviews also likened the novel to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, but Waste Heritage had already been sent to its Canadian publisher, Macmillan, when Steinbeck's book appeared.

The Canadian and American editions of the book differ in that some of the lines of the Canadian edition were subjected to censorship under the aegis of the War Measures Act.

In the early 1940s she began work for National Film Board and then the government of Canada, eventually becoming the first woman to head a federal information division.

In 1940 and 1941, Baird gave radio addresses on the war that were published as a pamphlet, The North American Tradition.

In it she extolled Canadians to have the courage of the pioneers and for Canada to act as a link between England and the United States.

Baird published her third novel, He Rides The Sky, in 1941.

The novel had disappointing sales and the book went out of print in 1942.

It was not to be reissued until 1973, when again it soon became unavailable for thirty years.

In 2007, the University of Ottawa Press published a new edition.

While Baird was politically a moderate, her novel is an effective rendering of labour unrest.

No longer neglected, Waste Heritage is now considered an important work of literature.