Speechly, Stansfield Family fonds, 1866-1953

MSS 53, PC 75

1.6 m of textual records

Dr. H.M. Speechly was born in Cochin, South India in 1866, son of an Episcopalian bishop. He was educated at Perse Grammar School, Cambridge, and at Monkton Combe School, Bath, England. In 1884 he began his medical course at London Hospital in 1884, graduating in 1889. He practised medicine at Parkgate near Birkenhead from 1893 until he came to Canada in 1901. He located in Pilot Mound, Manitoba, where he was a practising physician and coroner for more than a decade. In 1916 he went overseas for war service as a medical officer for which he received the Red Cross Medal and returned to Winnipeg in 1919 where he was coroner from 1929 to 1942. Dr. Speechly was a past president of the Manitoba Horticultural Society, the Boy Scouts Association, the Winnipeg Health League, and the Dominion Brotherhood of St. Andrew. For many years he directed the anti-mosquito campaigns in Winnipeg.

Donated by Dr. H.M. Speechley's eldest daughter, Margaret Stansfield, in 1980

The collection includes correspondence, photographs, published articles, notes, pamphlets, memorabilia, and an unpublished autobiography of a prominent Winnipeg doctor over a period of almost four decades from 1925 to 1961. The letters to his daughter, Margaret Stansfield, written between 1925 and 1943, provide an interesting and relatively detailed chronicle of events and prominent people in Winnipeg. The collection will be of particular value to anyone studying social, political, and economic conditions in Winnipeg. The records trace the activities of prominent community leaders and the various associations of which Speechly was an active member

Open to all researchers

No further accruals are expected

Finding aid available