Author’s Note: The Countess Bubna – Litic was without any doubt one of the most compelling characters Kelowna BC has ever known. Her legacy began with the opening of a destination hotel in 1926. This is an excerpt from her story.

Her arrival had been expected for weeks. She was born Irene May Blair but by the time she landed in Kelowna BC she was a countess, having married an Austrian blue blood.  

The Kelowna of 1926 was home to just s few thousand people, almost all of them immigrants from the Old World; German, Ukrainian, Italian, Portugese and British ex-pats among them. Indigenous natives had been in the Okanagan for thousands of years but they were neither ‘seen’ nor acknowledged in any meaningful way.

The town, incorporated in 1905, was home to a melting pot of eccentric characters, some of them hiding from the outside world, some seeking a new start, others believing the Okanagan Valley was their Valhalla, a place of vast beauty, natural resource and promise for the future. Into their midst arrived this eccentric, independent, modern woman. They would become part of her story.

This is an historical fiction. The Countess Bubna, as I will refer to her going forward was a real person, as are many others in my story. Others however are not, created in my imagination to advance the narrative about this remarkable woman and the small Interior town she landed in.

For those who would hold me to account as to my historic accuracy, I plead guilty. Others who have come before me and perhaps those who may follow, have ably recorded the known facts of Countess Bubna’s life and times. This novel harbours no such ambition. I am a story teller and the story of ‘Bubna’ is long overdue. This extraordinary woman, her times and the people who found themselves in this remote interior town, in the hinterland of Canada’s most western province, are fascinating. She was ‘The Spirit of The El’

The Countess Bubna walked slowly along the path winding up from the lake, through a stunning rose garden and up toward the Hotel Eldorado. A floral parasol protected her from the hot Okanagan summer sun.

The Countess had arrived to mark the grand opening of her magnificent destination resort hotel built on the shores of Okanagan Lake, just south of the small interior town of Kelowna British Columbia, Canada’s most western province.

BC’s most influential social and political leaders had trekked to Kelowna for a week of festive celebration, to mark the opening of this extraordinary grand hotel, built in the English Tudor style by one of Canada’s most eccentric women. On the final afternoon guests gathered outside to celebrate the Eldorado Garden Party and Evening Soiree, which was to end with a climactic fireworks display lighting up the Okanagan summer night sky.

It was 1926.

She had landed in Kelowna three years earlier at the age of forty-three, already the principal character in an extraordinary life story, growing up the daughter of one of Victorian England’s most notorious women.

Her mother, the Duchess Mary Caroline Mitchell had scandalously married the 3rd Duke of Sutherland after a decade long affair, outraging polite English society with her ‘brazen disregard for the acceptable rules of Court’. The Duchess had married the Duke of Sutherland just four months after the death of his first wife, disregarding the accepted rule requiring the Duke to wait at least one year. The marriage took place against the express wishes of Queen Victoria and the breach of etiquette was not to be forgotten. The Queen was furious and banned the new Duchess of Sutherland from appearing at Court. Some years later and after bearing two children, one of whom was to become Countess Bubna-Litic, the duke died. The fight for his wealth between the Duchess and the Duke’s surviving children became an epic cause celebre for the paparazzi of the day.

Far from leaving her penniless though, the Duchess ended up a very, very wealthy woman, one of the wealthiest women in England.  At the time of his death the Duke of Sutherland had been the wealthiest land owner in England, with over 1.4 million acres. The newspapers of the day anointed the Duchess ‘The Jailhouse Duchess’ after she was convicted of burning some legal papers during the very contentious court case. She was clearly not to be trifled with. Her daughter Irene May Blair did not fall far from the tree.

As 1895 dawned young Irene was happily single and one of the most celebrated actresses in London’s West End, the theatre district.  Two years earlier the celebrated Irish playwright Oscar Wilde had premiered his newest play, ‘A Woman of No Importance’. The opening on April 29, 1993 was marked by an article in The Illustrated London News, alongside of which was a photograph of the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland. There could not have been a more obvious condemnation of the Dowager Duchess, who was in the judgement of English society of the day, no less than a tramp with whom the Duke had carried on a decades long affair. She was ‘the woman of no importance’. The issue was printed on the day the Dowager Duchess went to jail.  That was Irene May Blair’s mother.

At the time, Victorian England was roiling with social and political upheaval and Irene May Blair, the future Countess Bubna-Litic, was smack dab in the middle of it all. Suffragettes were protesting, chaining themselves to the gates at Westminster outside Parliament, violently confronting the police, bombing and burning public buildings and engaging in headline grabbing hunger strikes. All of it was shocking for conventional England; this was a new breed of female social and political activists who would seemingly stop at nothing to press their cause. Emily Davison, a suffragette famously threw herself in front of rampaging horses at the Epsom Derby, a highpoint of the social season for the English upper crust. She died in that protest, photographs of her body crushed by oncoming horses, front page news in every English newspaper.

After Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, change accelerated. Edwardian England and everything the male dominated ruling class held firm was tossed on its head and as with all protests, the early response was to meet it with violence. Suffragettes were jailed by the hundreds. This was a new modern woman, the vanguard of what was to become a century of protest and struggle in search of gender equality. Out of this social and political caldron stepped Irene May Blair.

The young actress married an Austrian blue blood, Count Jan Frantisek Bubna-Litic and had two children with him. But that marriage did not last and she divorced the Count in 1908. She was given a substantial settlement and retained her vast wealth which had been accumulated by her mother. She was by now what would be called in the vernacular of the times, ‘a woman of independent means’. After her mother died in 1912, there was not much left for Irene in England. She decided to emigrate.

The Irene May Blair who landed in Canada in 1914, her children in tow was a fiercely independent suffragette and feminist, a single wealthy mother of two young children, wealthy beyond imagination. The Countess journeyed to Alberta where she bought a large cattle ranch and went about the business of learning how to breed cattle, building a herd of thousands over the next few years. By 1923, she had bored of that life and decided to move further west to the Okanagan Valley, first buying and building another cattle ranch near what is now called Duck Lake, about fifteen kilometres north of the small town of Kelowna. She remained steadfastly single, fully immersed in whatever passion gripped her in the moment. It was during her visits to Kelowna that the seed of her idea to build an extraordinary destination hotel on the shores of Lake Okanagan germinated.

In those early years of the 20th century the Klondike Gold Rush of 1998 had become the stuff of legends, injecting popular language with new words and names. One of the great gold discoveries in the Yukon was on Eldorado Creek and ‘Eldorado’ became synonymous with great fortune and wealth. The Countess chose the ‘Hotel Eldorado’ as the name for her vision.

How the Countess thought she could persuade the wealthy elite in the province, almost all of whom lived in Vancouver and New Westminster, to make the week long trek to Kelowna is lost to history. But history records that great achievements are most often created by those who can imagine beyond the boundaries of what binds most of us. The Countess was one of those who could. This eccentric, insatiable, risk taking immigrant would live a remarkable life creating a legacy of destination tourism for Kelowna and the Okanagan which thrives to this day.

This is her untold story.

“Welcome Countess. ‘Tis good to see you again, mo leannan!”

Jack Cunningham was standing on the hotel’s veranda, dressed in his kilt for the celebrations. He was a rugged, Scottish prospector who had become the Countess’ constant companion but she hadn’t seen him for several weeks and her heart raced as soon as she caught sight of him.

“Oh Jack, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

‘Bubna’ will be published in 2023.