Early Life
Stevens was born in Bristol, England and immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of nine. His family settled in Peterborough, Ontario where his widowed father and he and his three brothers and sisters were raised. The family moved to Vernon, British Columbia in 1894 and Stevens found his first job as a grocery clerk at the age of 16. He then went to northern British Columbia to work in the mining camps before working as a firefighter on the Canadian Pacific Railway and later as a stagecoach driver. In 1899, he joined the United States Army and travelled to the Philippines and then to China where he was present during the Boxer Rebellion before returning to British Columbia in 1901 where he found work again in the grocery business and then as an accountant. He became active in politics after a high profile anti-crime crusade. Vancouver was rife with opium dens, saloons and illegal gambling halls and Stevens would visit these places each night and then publish the names of the establishments and what he witnessed there in the press the next day. His campaign forced the resignation of the chief of police and won Stevens a seat on the Vancouver city council in 1910.
Read more about this topic: Henry Herbert Stevens
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“I sought the simple life that Nature yields;”
—George Crabbe (1754–1832)