Vancouver Police Chief

For those of you who don’t recognize the name B.A. McKelvie, aka Bruce McKelvie, aka ‘Pinky’ McKelvie, he was in his day one of the best known journalists and historians in the province.

But that was long ago and he was retired before I first encountered some of his works in the Provincial Archives. McKelvie was right up my alley, with his newspaper articles on crimes and shipwrecks and other exciting events in B.C. history. (I was in my early teens so it was these kinds of stories that initially appealed to me.) McKelvie and retired B.C. Provincial Policeman Cecil Clark, who wrote true crime stories for the magazine section of The Daily Colonist, inspired me to devote myself to historical non-fiction.

But back to McKelvie: Years later I came to know more about him as a man, thanks in part to the late Lois Bomford, a family member, who allowed me access to many of his manuscripts, published and otherwise, and to other documents relating to his journalistic career.

That’s when I learned that, as a very young newspaper reporter in Vancouver, he’d packed a gun when he went to work! That he was there the day Police Chief M.B. MacLennan was gunned down in a wild shoot-out. All this in downtown Vancouver!

Ah, the good old days... I tell the story of Bruce McKelvie’s role in Chief MacLennan’s death in the line of duty in next week’s Chronicles.

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