Gough gets the Woodcock
April 01st, 2026
Barry Gough, one of BC’s premier historians and author of more than 20 history books including the first book ever published by UBC Press in 1971, The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1914, is this year’s winner of the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.
Gough has also been the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing, the Queen Elizabeth Golden Jubilee Medal and the Clio Award of the Canadian Historical Association, as well as honours, awards and prizes in the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain. In November 2014, he received the Maritime Museum of B.C.’s 2014 SS Beaver Medal for Maritime Excellence.
He has received awards from the North American Society for Oceanic History and the Keith Matthews Award, which recognizes publications in the field of nautical research. When Gough’s title, Possessing Meares Island (Harbour, 2021) won the Keith Matthews in 2022, it was the fourth time his books had been given the award.
Fortune’s A River (Harbour, 2007) was shortlisted for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize in 2008. It is a cumulative work that integrates Gough’s knowledge of the Spanish, Russian, French, American and British influences on the development of the Pacific coast of North America “with particular emphasis on Canadian traders’ influences on and responses to the Lewis and Clark expedition.”
In 2018, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Jan Morris declared Barry Gough’s dual biography about the early 20th century relationship between Winston Churchill and Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher as “enthralling” and “a work of profound scholarship and interpretation.” Gough investigated how the two friends clashed over World War One strategies in his 600-page Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty (Seaforth, £35/Lorimer $39.95). Gough delved deeply into the collisions of their temperaments, describing the work as “an inquiry into . . . the role of personality and character in the making of history” chiefly when Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, the Navy’s political chief, and Fisher was its First Sea Lord, its professional chief.
As a former high school teacher who was born in Victoria in 1938, Gough gradually climbed the academic history ladder, becoming founding director of Canadian Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, then a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, fellow of Kings College, London, and life member of the Association for Canadian Studies and of the Champlain Society. He has been archives fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and a member of the board of academic advisors of the Churchill Center, Washington, DC.
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BOOKS
Possessing Meares Island: A Historian’s Journey into the Past of Clayoquot Sound (Harbour Publishing, 2021) $36.95 9781550179576
Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty (Seaforth, 2017 or Lorimer, 2017) Cdn$39.95 9781459411364
Britannia’s Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812-1914 (Heritage House, 2016) $32.95 9781772031096
From Classroom to Battlefield: Victoria High School and the First World War (Heritage House, 2014) $19.95 9781772030051
The Elusive Mr. Pond: The Soldier, Fur Trader and Explorer Who Opened the Northwest (Douglas and McIntyre, 2014) $34.95 9781771620390
Juan de Fuca’s Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams (Harbour, 2012) $32.95 9781550175738
Fortune’s a River: The Collision of Empires in the Pacific Northwest (Harbour, 2007) $36.95
Through Water, Ice and Fire: Schooner Nancy of the War of 1812 (Dundurn, 2006)
Britain, Canada and the North Pacific: Maritime Enterprise and Dominion, 1778–1914 (Routledge, 2004)
Fighting Sail on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay: The War of 1812 and its Aftermath (Vanwell, 2002)
HMCS Haida: Battle Ensign Flying (Vanwell Publishing, 2001)
First Across the Continent: Sir Alexander Mackenzie (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997)
The Falkland Islands/Malvinas: the contest for empire in the south Atlantic. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1992)
Gough, Barry M., ed. The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1988, 1992)
Gough, Barry M., ed. The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade and Discoveries to 1812 (UBC Press, 1992)
Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846- 1890 (UBC Press, 1984)
Gough, Barry M., ed. The Hudson’s Bay Company in British Columbia: Forts Langley, Kamloops, Victoria and Simpson. Rodney Wiens…[et al.] (History Dept., Simon Fraser University, 1983)
Distant Dominion: Britain and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1579-1909 (UBC Press, 1980)
To the Arctic and Pacific with Beechey (London: Hakluyt Society, 1973)
The Royal Navy on the Northwest Coast (UBC Press, 1971). Reprinted, revised, as Britannia’s Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812-1914 (Victoria: Heritage House, 2016) $29.99 9781772031102
Barry Gough and the Great War plaque at Victoria High School, October 18, 2017.
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