ABSTRACT
James Inglis Reid’s butcher shop on Granville Street in the heart of downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, had a version of the “Selkirk Grace” lit up in neon over the entry way until the business was closed and the building torn down to make way for the expansion of a downtown shopping mall in 1986. The illuminated marquee, with the line “We Hae Meat That Ye Can Eat” on each side, was a well-known local landmark. The allusion proved to be a powerful marketing tool with Burns Night being the biggest sales day of the year for the firm. 2 Reid, a native of Kirkintilloch, very likely provided the haggis for the Immortal Memory that followed the unveiling of the Burns statue in Stanley Park in 1928. As one of the founding members of the Vancouver Scottish Society, Reid offered the response to one of the toasts made that evening, and he would certainly have been in the crowd that witnessed the unveiling. Reid’s butcher shop is gone, but photographs of the Vancouver unveiling survive as they do for other Burns monuments in North America. As Chris Whatley has recently demonstrated with photographs of unveilings in nineteenth-century Scotland, such images can provide an indication of the intentions of those who erected the monuments as well as the response of contemporaries to their creation. 3
