Week in History: Pansy Mae Stuttard was a B.C. granny with a gun who ran a brothel
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2020 18:16:33 +0000
A photo of Pansy Mae Stuttard eyeing a pistol helped make her an overnight celebrity in 1958.
Stuttard told police that she’d been robbed of almost $15,000 by two men. Maybe because of her background, Stuttard knew how to protect herself. She had a mini arsenal of guns and fired a 12-gauge shotgun after the robbers when they fled with her cash.
The photo of Stuttard was taken by Ralph Bower, staff photographer for The Vancouver Sun. Her story appeared in publications across the country including The Star Weekly, a British-style Sunday paper published in Toronto.
In addition to a shotgun, Stuttard had a .30-.30 rifle and a .38 U.S. army revolver.
“Pistol-packin’ Pansy, 84 years old and in no mood to die, has her private arsenal all loaded up in case the robbers come back to “get me,” was the first sentence of the story in The Vancouver Sun on Friday, Jan 3.
Friends had warned her several times to put her money in the bank but she thought of herself as “an old pioneer type … who could look after herself,” police said.
She had all that cash on her because she said was going to New York to visit her twin sister and two brothers. Stuttard was a grandmother and married to husband Rupert.
On the night of the robbery Stuttard said she had been awakened at 3 a.m. by a crash of glass breaking at the front door of her house in White Rock.
“Before I could move toward the bedroom wall for the loaded shotgun, the two men burst into the bedroom,” she told The Sun.
When she said told them she had no money, the bigger man of the two grabbed her by the feet and shook over the bed, banging her head a couple of times.
“I had the money in a towel under my nightgown,” she said. “The bundle fell out. I had fastened the towel with seven safety pins and they broke every pin.”
Although the robbers tied her to the bed, she wriggled free.
“I picked up the shotgun and went to the door,” Stuttard said.
“I couldn’t see anything because it was pitch dark, but I fired one blast in each direction along the street.”
Her cocker spaniel Muffett was in the house with her but she said “he is so friendly with everyone he was no help.”
Although it wasn’t mentioned in the newspaper accounts, Stuttard was a woman of many accomplishments. She was Canada’s first female sea captain in the early 1900s and later operated the Pansy Mae Cabaret, a brothel and bar in Tsawwassen. She called her cabaret a “place to bring a girl for a drink, and if you don’t have a girl, we’ll supply one,” according to a history of Stuttard by Gary Cullen.
Her operation was located on a 11-hectare (27-acre) site at the south end of English Bluff Road in what is now Tsawwassen Heights. She smuggled booze into the U.S. where a ban on the sale and import of alcohol was in effect during the Prohibition. She also built a “cable-and-pulley system to carry liquor down to Tsawwassen beach” where boats waited in the dark to take their illicit cargo into the U.S.
“The location was very isolated and a perfect place to quietly move liquor across the border,” Cullen writes.
In the late 1920s, her cabaret had a dance hall and 16 small rooms to rent. It was across from her house which had already been enlarged for a bar.
The Pansy Mae Cabaret lasted until 1933 when Prohibition ended in the U.S.
Stuttard died in 1963 in Cloverdale. She was 87.