Tivey, Tom Brown

Tom Brown Tivey was born in England April 2nd, 1892. He enlisted in the Great Britain Northumberland Fusiliers in December 1914 and was wounded with a gunshot to the left chest at the second battle of Istanbul in Mesopotamia on April 25th, 1917. Tivey received the Military Medal and the Victory Medal for his service.

Tivey travelled to Canada in 1921 and lived in central and northern Alberta. He began work for the Alberta Great Waterways Railway and then was a construction and farm laborer. Later Tivey enrolled in the Alberta College of Edmonton and the Edmonton Normal School; while a student he took summer employment with the Dominion Chautagua and the Soda Lake Creamery. Tivey graduated with a teaching certificate in 1923 and took his first teaching job in the school district of Nizir, a Ukrainian settlement near Two Hills. He later moved to schools in Vegreville, Hay Lakes and Chipman. He had plans of reading law but eventually gave this up to concentrate on teaching English at the High School levels. In 1928, he was the Principal at the Paulus School in Chipman. His letters of 1928 give medical details of his continuing recovery from a bullet wound he received in the chest while in World War I. In 1928, Tivey moved to the Peace River area in order to homestead, hoping to give up teaching as he notes it was “ruining my nerves and general health.” He continued to teach in Dunvegan, but wrote of his declining health and his desire to become otherwise employed, and to be married. In 1929 Tivey took a position with Liard Coals Ltd and moved to the North West Territories, eventually returning home to England to 1930. Tivey married Lillian Madge Birk in 1932.

Tivey began writing crime novels in the late 1930s. Drawing on his experience in northern Alberta, he published several novels: Trapline (1938); When Daylight Dies (1939); Riddle of the Snows [1944]; and Marenka of Monteney, [1946].