Reeves and Mayors of Oak Bay

Oak Bay Council ca.1940

[Photo: Oak Bay Archives Accn 2017-049-090, Reeve R.R. Taylor, centre, ca. 1940 with municipal council and staff.]

George Murdoch (Reeve 1959-1963) notes in his unpublished History of Oak Bay for 1968 that "the Minister of Municipalities advised in April that, through a change in the Municipal Act, reeves and councillors of district municipalities were henceforth to have the respective titles of mayor and aldermen ". The change in terminology from Reeve to Mayor occurs between one Council meeting and the next in April 1968, during the tenure of FW Hawes.

1. 1906 - 1908 William Edgar Oliver (1867-1920)

2. 1909 - 1911 William E Henderson (1837-1931)

1. 1912 W E Oliver

3. 1913 Francis Mawson Rattenbury (1867-1935)

1. 1914 - 1915 W E Oliver

4. 1916 - 1917 Marshall P Gordon (1862-1929)

5. 1918 Newton Townley Burdick (to April 9) (1882-1953)

6. 1918 - 1919 Charles E Wilson (April 17 1918 – December 1919)

7. 1920 - 1922 Samuel James Drake (1874-1940)

8. 1923 -1924 Harold Frederick Hewlett (1887-1961) [source: death cert, BC Archives]

9. 1925 - 1927 Herbert Anscomb (1892-1972)

10. 1928 - 1932 Ernest C Hayward (d.1933)

11. 1933 - 1935 Robert W Mayhew, later MP (1880-1971)

12. 1936 - 1940 Richard Ratcliffe Taylor (1884-1942)

13. 1941 - 1945 Walter Leonard (Len) Woodhouse (1895-1967)

14. 1946 - 1947 Walter Mitchell Walker (1887-1983)

15. 1948 - 1949 Robert Alexander Burnie Wootton (1901-1982)

16. 1950 - 1953 Philip Archibald Gibbs, later MLA (1893-1960)

17. 1954 - 1956 Frederick Elford Norris (1910-2003)

18. 1959 - 1963 George Murdoch (1893-1979)

19. 1964 - 1967 Allan Leslie Cox (b.1927)

20. 1968 - 1969 Frederick William Hawes

21. 1970 - 1973 Frances Henrietta Elford (1914-2002)

22. 1974 - 1979 Brian Smith (b.1934)

23. 1980 – 1983 J Douglas Watts

24. 1986 - 1990 Susan Brice

25. 1991 – 1996 Diana Butler

26. 1997 – 2011 Christopher M Causton

27. 2011 - 2018 Nils Jensen (d.2019)

28. 2018 - Kevin Murdoch

Sources: Minutes of Oak Bay Council, passim; 'Fifty Years of Growth: 1906-1956 Golden Jubilee Souvenir Booklet"; portraits series in Oak Bay Municipal Hall; British Columbia City Directories.

Questions? Comments? Please contact the Archivist