Beehive Illustration

An Immigrant's Tale by Robin Lawrie

15 February 2021

D.P., an Emigrant's Tale', is an autobiographical story relating Beehive illustrator Robin Lawrie's family's experiences, in his own words and colour illustrations, of emigrating from a Scottish mining village in 1953 to Vancouver via a Cunard White Star liner, whose captain tells him he was a surviving deck hand aboard the Titanic sleeping on the lowest deck by the great steam engines. Then onward travels via Canadian National Railways, a Cadillac car, two buckboard wagons, plus various pickup trucks and Greyhound buses.

He talks briefly about the effects of World War 2 and how it produced great waves of emigration, and explains about evacuees and the hazards of transatlantic migration both in peacetime (Titanic) and wartime.

In his story, his family, settled in the mountains of central British Columbia, suffered great hardship and found themselves quite out of their depth when it came to survival in the wilderness. They befriend an elderly couple who succeeded in settling many years before and made it clear that the family will never achieve this state of equanimity with the harsh environment.

Here are some of Robin's fantastic illustrations and a rough layout of the book.