A Vancouver Rink Burned in 1936. A Historian Traces Women's Hockey's Decline

The building that hosted an early international women's hockey game burned down in the middle of an August night, and almost nobody wrote about the women who had played there.

That is the thread running through Part 7 of "Finding Doris," Daniel Wagner's seven-part family history of women's hockey in Vancouver, built around his grandmother, the speed skater and hockey player Doris Parkes.

The fire broke out in Coal Harbour, near Denman Arena, in the early morning of August 20, 1936, a little past 1 a.m. The flames quickly spread to the wooden boatyards on the arena's north side. Brick cladding added in the mid-1930s did not save the place. Once the flames reached the wooden seating, the arena went fast. "The fire jumped up the rows of seats inside the Arena like a man walking up stairs," Fire Marshal J.A. Thomas told the Vancouver Sun that day, as quoted by Wagner. Firefighters had it under control in two hours. What was left was a brick skeleton, just short of the rink's 25th anniversary as the first artificial ice surface in Canada.

The eulogies that followed remembered the 1915 Stanley Cup Final won by the Vancouver Millionaires, the visiting Toronto Grads, the boxing and the lacrosse. They skipped the women entirely, despite Denman Arena having been the one building in the city that reliably gave women's teams prime practice ice and scheduled their games on nights that drew crowds. Owner Frank Patrick backed the women's game; his wife, Catherine, sponsored Amazons fundraising dances and chaperoned the team's trips to the Banff Winter Carnival.

Wagner writes that for decades after 1936, he could not find any record of women's hockey in Vancouver. It did not return in earnest until 1972 and the founding of Killarney Girls Hockey, now the Vancouver Angels. By January 1938, the Sun was already treating the Amazons as a "remember when" item. The BC Sports Hall of Fame inducted the 1921-22 team in 2024.

Parkes kept winning on the speed skating oval a while longer, taking the 220-yard provincial title at the Rotary Ice Carnival in 1936, 1937 and 1938 before stepping away at 33.