The name
A reef, and the man who found it the hard way.
brotchie-harbour
Brotchie Ledge is a shallow reef off the entrance to Victoria's Inner Harbour. Before 1849 the charts called it Buoy Rock, which tells you roughly how much thought anyone had given it.
Captain William Brotchie spent his career on this coast in Hudson's Bay Company ships: the Cadboro through the late 1830s, the Cowlitz, the Beaver, the Vancouver. In 1849 he was in command of the Albion when it struck the reef. The chart was redrawn with his name on it, which is a hard way to be remembered and a permanent one.
He did rather better afterwards. In 1858 Governor James Douglas made him Vancouver Island's Harbour Master, so the man who had put a ship on the rock ended up responsible for everyone else's.
What that has to do with a barbershop
Almost nothing, honestly. This is a new shop with an old local name, borrowed from a reef most people in this city have sailed past without knowing it had one. We are not claiming a lineage. We liked that the name belongs to the water rather than to a family, and that it was earned by a mistake rather than by money.