Mystery Women of Vancouver

Most old photographs are enigmatic, usually providing far more questions than answers. As an example, who are these two ladies, where were they out walking, and when? If you are lucky, you might find a caption scrawled on the back of the photo, but even these can be less than illuminating. On this particular photograph all it says is "This was taken in December on the street". Why, oh why, can't people put more information on the back of photographs. I've got so many unknowns like this.

Colourising the image enhances it somewhat but still raises questions.

The photograph comes from a file which I’ve labelled "unknown family photographs and odds & sods". I do not recognise this rather stern pair of ladies, but the photograph must have been passed to me through my family as I’ve got very few random images from other sources. I think it comes from ‘my’ side of the family rather than Mrs P’s. This being the case, the place could be Brighton,  Bristol or South Wales. The lady on the right is not my maternal grandmother but there are some similarities. However, there is a "foreign" feel about the location - the names of the shops, the size of the billboards, the pricing of the goods. I tried searching for some of the shop names, but it wasn't until I got a match for "Millar and Coe" that things became interesting. I found online a 1930s photograph of a street of shops in which there is a Millar & Coe almost next door to a shop called Cordell. Not in Brighton, Bristol or South Wales but in Vancouver in Canada.

Some of my questions are now answered - the place is the city of Vancouver - a place, to the best of my knowledge, nobody in the family has ever visited - and, from the style of dress, I’d say the time is the 1930s. And, given that it's labelled as being in December, I'll assume that the ladies are doing a bit of Xmas shopping. I am, however, still left with the mystery as to who these two ladies of Vancouver are. Ah, the joys of family history. Maybe I’ll uncover a link one day - not out of the question as it took me 10+ years to accurately attribute a couple of other photographs in the same file. My working hypothesis is that the answer may lie with my grandmother’s extended and largely unknown tree of step-siblings from Bristol.