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- WILLIAM BALFOUR MACDONALD
The man who engineered the transport of the Chinese bell to Victoria was William Balfour Macdonald. We will only briefly discuss his background, since there is already a published autobiography about him entitled At Land and By Sea, The Reminiscences of William Balfour Macdonald, r.n., edited by S. W. Jackman, Sono Nis Press, Victoria, 1983. The following is information summarized from that book.
William Balfour Macdonald was the son of Senator William John Macdonald and his wife, Catherine Balfour Macdonald (ne Reid.) Senator Macdonald, who had come to Vancouver Island in 1851, became one of the first senators of British Columbia when it joined the Dominion of Canada. William Balfour Macdonald was born in 1870 in Victoria and, following his brothers, he chose a service career; they went into the Army and he joined the Navy. He attended Britannia, a naval college at Dartmouth. After two years of training, he was appointed to the flagship H.M.S. Triumph. He had slow, steady promotion and was eventu�ally appointed First Lieutenant on H.M.S. Pique. It was while serving on this ship after its participation in the Boxer Rebellion (1900) in China that he would assist in the removal of two large Chinese bells�one went to Devonport, England; the other to his hometown of Victoria, Canada.
Macdonald was eventually selected as Captain of the Niobe, one of two naval vessels acquired by the Canadian Navy. In 1913 he returned to Britain and with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, joined a cruiser squadron. When the war ended in 1918, Macdonald remained in the Navy for a few more years and then retired to live in Hampshire. Although born in Canada, like all of his generation, Macdonald considered himself first and foremost as a British subject. He died in 1937 during a holiday in Germany.
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