As the Bank of Canada hunts down a candidate to become the first Canadian woman on a banknote, numismatists are pointing out that there’s already been one.
Princess Patricia, who died in 1974, was the wildly popular daughter of a Canadian Governor General whose portrait was chosen to grace a patriotic $1 note issued in the midst of the First World War.
Last week, on International Women’s Day, finance minister Bill Morneau announced that the 2018 issue of Canadian banknotes would feature an “iconic Canadian woman” selected by public nominations.
“It’s now been almost 150 years that we’ve not had a Canadian woman on our banknotes,” said Morneau.
But while Patricia was a born-in-England member of British royalty, she was technically a Canadian citizen by the laws of the era.
HandoutPrincess Patricia of Connaught
Under the 1910 Immigration Act, Canadian citizenship was automatically extended to any British subject who had spent more than three years in the country, provided they hadn’t spent part of it in prison or an “asylum for the insane.”
Patricia sailed to Canada in 1911 soon after her father, the Duke of Connaught, was appointed the country’s governor general. She had thus racked up six years in the Dominion by the time her banknote was first issued.
A granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Patricia was already a well-known European socialite by the time circumstances brought her to the frontier lands of early 20th century Canada.
Michael HicksThe Princess Patricia $1 bill
In a 1908 Los Angeles Times story, for instance, Patricia had been called the most “incorrigible flirt in Europe,” with suitors all across European royalty. Historians have since called her the “very pinnacle of smart society” when she set sail for Ottawa.
T. W. Loveridge, an Assistant Professor History at Royal Military College, described her in a note to the National Post as a mixture of Princess Diana and the Duchess of Cambridge.
“Perhaps Canadians saw something of their future in her … young, progressive, related to the crown but holding more modern, progressive views and with good hair,” he wrote.
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For starters, Patricia publicly incurred the shock of the King and Queen for backing the cause of women’s suffrage. In 1913, the princess even hired a well-known suffragist as her lady-in-waiting.
In Canada, she was athletic, became a respected watercolourist, inspired eponymous cosmetics lines in the United States and toured extensively throughout the country — even becoming a guest of honour at the inaugural Calgary Stampede in 1912.
HandoutPrincess Patricia in an undated portrait
Most importantly for a country full of lumberjacks and coal miners, Patricia ultimately abandoned her royal titles in order to marry a commoner.
“To all intents and purposes, she had become Canada’s own royalty,” said Loveridge.
Nowadays, Patricia is best known as the sponsor for Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, which in 1917 was already known as one of the Commonwealth’s deadliest regiments. The princess even hand-embroidered the regiment’s colours.
Patricia predates any Prime Minister on Canadian currency, and was arguably one of the first figures put on a bill for the sole reason that Canadians seemed to like her. Up to then, bills had usually only featured kings, queens, Governors General and their wives.
The choice was “a little off the beaten path,” said Brent Mackie, an executive director with the Canadian Paper Money Society.
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First issued on March 17, 1917, it was the only new bill issued during the First World War, and roughly 100 million of the notes would be printed before it was phased out in 1923.
Today, depending on its condition, a Princess Patricia $1 can sell for between $30 and $3,000.
Merna Forster, a Victoria historian who has been championing efforts to get a Canadian woman on currency, said she had not heard of the Princess Patricia bill, but said it sounded like a good start.
As she noted, if the country had kept putting popular Canadian women on banknotes after 1923, “I wouldn’t have needed a petition.”