[1] His father, Alan Haig-Brown, was a teacher and a prolific writer, the author of hundreds of articles and poems on sports, the military, and educational issues in various periodicals.
His grandfather Pope was an industrious man with very strong Victorian values of “service, fair play, decency and acceptance of the obligations that follow with the privilege of class and education” (Robertson 6).
His physical and social childhood environment contributed, according to biographer Anthony Robertson, to Roderick's code of conduct.
This code “invoke[d] a mental and physical discipline that [went] beyond making a successful catch or kill; its central virtue [was] knowledge, intimate and thorough, transcending pursuit” (8).
After he was expelled from Charterhouse School for drinking and sneaking out, he joined his father's regiment for a short while, but found that army life was too restrictive.
The family decided that the British Colonial Civil Service might be a more agreeable alternative but he was too young to write the exams.
He remained in British Columbia for three years to work at Nimpkish Lake on Vancouver Island as a logger, a commercial fisherman and an occasional guide to visiting anglers.
But images of British Columbia haunted him while he wrote his first book, Silver: The Life of an Atlantic Salmon (1931) as well as part of Pool and Rapid (1932).
In 1947 Haig-Brown won the inaugural Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award, recognizing his 1943 novel Starbuck Valley Winter, which features trapping.
The Haig-Browns sold their family home and property on the banks of the Campbell River to the BC government to be preserved as greenbelt land in 1974, retaining a lifetime tenancy.
The battle was lost but the process made many British Columbians aware of the need to be vigilant about their parks and the natural environment.