Member Project: Al Witham and a rare Dey Bros. canoe

Chapter member Al Witham (Renfew, ON) has submitted a message to the chapter in regards to a rare Dey Bros. canoe being worked on this winter. Please contact Al by email listed at the end of the post if you can offer assistance.

Hi everyone,

As Alex has suggested, I'm sending along some pics of an interesting canoe that came into our shop this year. It was quite a derelict when it arrived, with many broken ribs (and was subsequently quite hogged), plus the usual rot in the ends of the decks and inwales, both stems were broken, a lot of broken planking, etc. 

The centre thwart is attached with hinges, which Dick Persson has suggested included it as one of the "girling" canoes. But to my eye, the lines of this boat are quite beautiful. 

The inside was very black with dirt and old varnish, but when we started to strip it, we found the centre rib to be embossed "Dey Bros Ottawa" etc as you can see picture below: 

Through the Historical Society of Ottawa we have started to unravel some of the story of the Dey family, who were a prominent family of the region in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The canoe business appears to have been started by the father and subsequently carried on by his sons, and they built not only canoes but other types of watercraft for both pleasure and business use, from roughly 1875 through to the 1920's. 

There is a picture in John Jennings' book The Canoe of Frank Amyot, who won a gold medal for Canada in the 1K sprint at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and he's paddling a Dey Bros canoe. We have had indirect contact through Facebook and the historical society with a granddaughter of one of the sons, so will see where that leads. In addition to their boat-building business, the Dey family built the first 3 indoor skating rinks in Ottawa and were involved in the ownership of the original Ottawa Senators hockey team back in the day. Jennings' book mentions that there is a Dey canoe in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, which we haven't yet seen.

Murat Vardar has found references to Dey Canoes in a number of places, including some old Rod and Gun magazines where Dey Canoes advertise themselves as specializing in racing canoes under another trade name, Capital Boat and Canoe Works.  Dick Persson has also researched and made some notes on Dey Canoes when one came into his shop some years ago, and we hope to compare notes at some point. 

But there may be other WCHA members who have come across Dey Canoes, or references to them, and if so I hope they'll email me at pawitham@sympatico.ca with any and all information. We're only about half way through the restoration, so it will be some time yet before we're done.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Al Witham

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