Register entry 252 - Richard Stuart Lake Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan
Visited the Bell Farm on Sept. 16, 1887, long with his younger brother Arthur (b.1865) and father Percy - all three of them signed the Visitors Register that day (# 251, 252 and 253). Richard's younger sister - Mabel - visited the Bell Farm on July 7, 18787, and so signed the Register (#235)
Richard Stuart Lake (1860-1950, was born in Preston, Lancashire, England. He migrated to Canada in 1883, along with his brother Percy, and settled to farm in the Grenfell district, about half way between Regina and the Manitoba border.
Lake was a committed Conservative, and was elected at both the Territorial and federal levels. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the North-West Territories in 1898, and re-elected in 1901. However, when Lake ran for a seat in the federal constituency of Assiniboia East in 1900, he was defeated. In 1904 he ran again, this time in the Qu'Appelle Constituency. He was elected to the Canadian House of Commons, and re-elected in 1908, but defeated in the election of 1911. His many years of active service to the Conservative Party was rewarded in 1915 when he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Saskatchewan, serving until 1921, during the challenging years of the Great War (1914-1918) and of the pandemic commonly known as the Spanish Flu (1918-1919).
In 1910 Richard Lake married Dorothy Marion Schreiber Fletcher (1885–1975), and they had two children. On Sept. 3, 1939, while Richard and Dorothy were travelling aboard the "S.S. Athenia", the ship was torpedoed; but both of them survived this disastrous start to World War II.
After he retired from politics, Richard and Dorothy Lake moved their family to Oak Bay, Nanaimo, British Columbia; he died in Victoria, B.C. 1950.
SOURCES:
Biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stuart_Lake
photo source: “The Canadian Parliament: Personnel of the Senate and House of Commons”, 1906, p. 197 - http://www.archive.org/stream/canadianparliame00montuoft#page/196/mode/2up
Biography: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lake-3488
1891 Census: Assiniboia East, District 198, Sub-District 24 - Parents, Richard and siblings. - https://www.ancestry.ca/imageviewer/collections/1274/images/30953_148228-00192?usePUB=true&_phsrc=iyx210&_phstart=successSource&usePUBJs=true&pId=3443046
Ancestry wbsite: https://www.ancestry.ca/family-tree/person/tree/72614900/person/220099919731/facts?_phsrc=iyx181&_phstart=successSource
“Saskatchewan Encyclopedia” - https://esask.uregina.ca/entry/lake_sir_richard_stuart_1860-1950.jsp
“The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan: Living Legacy”, 2005, p. 527-528.
“A Tower of Attraction: An Illustrated History of Government House, Regina, Saskatchewan”, by Margaret Hryniuk, 1991, p. 75-83
Parliament of Canada biography: https://lop.parl.ca/sites/ParlInfo/default/en_CA/People/Profile?personId=12016
RESEARCH BY:
Michelle Cabana, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; and Frank Korvemaker, Regina, Sask.