The Chronicles Blog

Many are the pitfalls awaiting the unwary history student.

Even the experienced researcher can be lured off course by these sirens of our colourful past. To a writer of ‘popular’ history, these detours can be profitable as well as pleasant; oftimes, research of one story can uncover another. And another and another.

Which is why I liken studying history to digging a hole—the more you dig, the bigger it gets.

Sometimes these yellowing newspaper pages can lead to a dead-end, being too brief or sketchy to provide more than the skeleton of an article.

So, today, some of these intriguing—sometimes infuriating—diversions of Victoria’s early day from the pages of the old British and Daily Colonist.

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PHOTO: This logo of the website Fallen Heroes – VicPD.ca recalls some of the fascinating criminal cases in Victoria’s history, as recorded in the pages of the Colonist. The British Bobby-style helmet was VPD issue until about 1950.

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I’ve written before how, as the son of a career Royal Canadian Navy man, my first collection as a nine-year-old was my father’s kit; he gave me everything but his tools and his medals.

By the time I was in my 20’s I was deep into writing about British Columbia and Canadian history, including, of course, stories about the RCN.

But until my first visit to the Royston booming grounds breakwater, which was made up of derelict ships, I had no idea that one of the RCN’s most illustrious veterans was among what I came to term the Royston death-watch which was composed of the hulks of sailing ships, warships, tugboats and a whaler.

Sadly, there was little to see of what had been HMCS Gatineau whose career began in 1934 as the Royal Navy’s HMS Express.

As such she’d participated in the Dunkirk evacuation, escaped being sunk by a German mine, then rescued almost 1000 survivors from the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales when it was sunk off Malaya by the Japanese.

Transferred to the RCN in February 1943, she assisted in sinking a U-boat and participated in the D-Day landing. She was paid off into reserve in 1946 and, two years later, stripped down to her decks and scuttled at Royston.

It was a truly sad end for such a courageous ship with so many battle ribbons and I’ve wanted to tell her story for years.

Next week I finally pay homage to HMCS Gatineau.

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PHOTO: HMCS Gatineau, the former HMS Express. —Canada.ca

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Like many an aspiring author I set out to write the Great Canadian Novel.

Very quickly, however, the harsh truth sank in: I didn’t have what it takes.

But there was a soft landing for me. Even before this sad fact hit home, I’d discovered non-fiction—writing about real people and real events. There was nothing, it seemed, that I could invent in my imagination that hadn’t already been done—and better—in real life!

There’s no getting around it: people and their actions—the good, the bad and the ugly—are fascinating. And the treasure trove of documented history available even to casual researchers is beyond calculation.

I was reminded of this recently while reorganizing my library: a story I’d researched way back when I was writing weekly for the Victoria Colonist. It’s a sad tale, one so unlikely that I defy any fiction writer to make it up.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Beautiful Veterans’ Cemetery, Esquimalt, B.C. —Commonwealth War Graves Commission  

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In last week’s Chronicle we saw how Frank Hulbert aka Frank Pepler appears to have gotten away with murdering 15-year-old Molly Justice in 1943.

He ended his life as a recluse, living in a converted bus. According to his obituary he died “peacefully,”  53 years later.

Which begets the question, did he suffer remorse? In other words, did Hulbert’s conscience trouble him in later years—or not?

We’ll never know.

But there are case histories of men who—so it’s surmised—were driven to the brink of despair and madness, even self destruction, by the inner demon of a guilty conscience. A century and a-half or so ago, Victoria City Police detective John George Taylor was convinced he was on the trail of just such a man.

It’s a fascinating story as you’ll see next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Pioneer Victoria was the last stop for many a man on the run... —Sun Life Insurance

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I’ve always felt that I grew up with Molly Justice, that she was family even though we weren’t related and she was gone before I was born.

Nevertheless, she is part of my DNA.

My Aunt Ada’s best friend, she’d lived one house down and across the road from our home on Brett Avenue, just east of Swan Lake, in Saanich. Ada and Uncle Cec lived next door to us; she was expecting when Molly Justice died and named her daughter, my cousin Molly, for her.

This January 18th will be the 80th anniversary of Molly Justice’s murder beside the railway tracks, just two blocks from her home.

Ten years ago, for the 70th anniversary, Jennifer and I made the trip to my childhood stomping grounds of Saanich to pay homage to Molly by attaching a poster to a tree beside the former CN Railway tracks, what’s now the Galloping Goose Trail, where her mutilated body was found in January 1943.

It was my way of keeping alive a family tradition. For over 40 years until her death, my grandmother, Ellen Green, placed an In Memoriam ad in the Victoria Colonist:  “In loving memory of Molly Justice, taken from us...”

I’ve told the story of Molly Justice several times over the years but not here in the Chronicles and it has recently been retold in a book on unsolved B.C. crimes. In answer to a Times Colonist reporter years ago, when he asked me whether I thought there was merit in their printing yet another story on Molly, I replied that I’d prefer that Molly Justice be remembered as a murder victim than that she be a murder victim and forgotten.

So I’ll tell her story again, next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Fifteen-year-old Molly Justice photographed in front of my Aunt Ada’s house, 870 Brett Ave., Saanich, Victoria. —Family photo

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On the cusp, as we are, of another New Year, it occurs to me to lighten up a little. In the course of the past year the Chronicles has covered numerous tragedies, from criminal to shipwreck. All great stories if I may be so modest as to say, but...

To begin a brand-new 2023, let's take a walk on the light side, with a chuckle or two from my archives. We have all year to get back to the grimmer side of our history...

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A professional peril, if you will, of researching history, particularly in old newspapers, is the lure of distractions. These sirens of print can take you temporarily, even completely off course.

Even if only momentarily, the danger is always there and time counts if you're researching in, say, a library.

Back in the old days of the typewriter and, worse, scribbling notes, I'd have to make the hard decision whether to actually record these nuggets, make a note for future reference or pass them by. Happily, this isn't a problem with today's technology which takes just a couple of commands to archive them for another day.

So, for the first Chronicle of a new year, a random sampling of some cheerier news stories from the pages of the Victoria Colonist.

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PHOTO: Victoria in the 1860's. It wasn't all bad news that made the pages of the Colonist and other newspapers. After all, we do refer to them as the good old days?

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As I noted in a recent editorial, 147 years later treasure hunters think they’ve found the wreckage of the SS. Pacific which foundered off Cape Flattery in 1875.

The result of a collision with a sailing ship, it’s one of the worst marine disasters in Pacific Northwest history—two survived of an estimated 250 persons aboard.

It’s a fascinating story of tragedy, complete with a message from the grave—and, if one chooses to believe, of a ghost that tormented the Orpheus’s captain to his grave.

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PHOTO: The sidewheel passenger steamer Pacific was old and tired—one of the so-called ‘floating coffins’ of the west coast in the so-called good old days—and she went down in minutes after receiving a glancing blow from the sailing ship Orpheus.

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We’ve seen how, just after midnight of Christmas Day, 1890, David Fee Jr. was gunned down on a city street as he and friend Frank Partridge were returning to a Christmas celebration after attending midnight mass.

It was a shocking and apparently senseless crime: a case, it seems, of mistaken identity.

Or was it a mistake?

Was there more—much more—behind this fine young man’s cold blooded slaying than was obvious?

We’ll find out in next week’s conclusion to the fascinating story of one of Victoria’s most sensational murders—this one, sad to say, committed on Christmas morning.

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PHOTO: St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Victoria. Now a National Historic Site of Canada, in December 1890 it was under construction when its watchman, who  supposedly was guarding the site, shot and killed young storekeeper David Fee. —Wikipedia

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“A crime as dark, cowardly and mysterious as ever disfigured the history of the province.”—Victoria Colonist

Dec. 24, 1890 – Christmas Eve in Victoria. Despite predictions of clear skies, evening brought rain.

For East Wellington storekeeper David Findlay Fee Jr., in town to visit his family and friends, midnight brought sudden, violent death.

It all began innocently earlier that evening with a masquerade party in the Philharmonic Hall on Fort Street. Among the celebrants were David Fee and Frank Partridge. Resplendent in their white costumes with red braid, they slipped away from the party to attend midnight mass in St. Andrew’s Cathedral.

Minutes later, as they headed back to the party, they were accosted by a man standing in the rain beneath an umbrella and apparently leaning on a walking stick. As they came abreast of him, he said something to the effect of, “I challenge you.”

To their horror they saw him raise what they’d thought to be his cane—a double-barrelled shotgun—aim it point blank at Fee and fire.

Next week in the Chronicles, the story of one of Victoria’s most sensational—and senseless—crimes.

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PHOTO: Bad news travels fast; this appeared in the San Francisco Call the day after.

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The recent passing of HRH Queen Elizabeth II and numerous comments made online and in letters to the editor about the British influence on our history, coming at a time of truth and reconciliation, set me to thinking.

There are 350,000 place names on Canadian maps, 50,000 of them in British Columbia. Of the 1000s that identify our Pacific Coastline, most—indeed, almost all—were coined by officers of the Royal Navy.

It was a daunting task even for the vaunted “iron men in wooden ships”.

The B.C. coast, as the crow flies, is approximately 954 km (593 miles). But when you allow for its indentations and over 40,000 islands, it’s over 25,725 km or 15,985 miles—a tenth of all of Canada’s coastlines.

Charting and naming these 10s of 1000s of features—bays, inlets, islands, rivers, reefs and on and on—took decades of dedicated, often dangerous, work and is, in fact, an ongoing task. But it was the officers and crews of the Royal Navy’s handful of survey ships that did the heavy lifting at incredible personal expense.

The result of their work still stands.

Most of their pioneering navigational charts continue in use today; work that’s vital to the safe navigation of some of the most treacherous waters to be found anywhere. Thanks in great part to their efforts, coasts that were notorious for shipwreck are no longer threats to life and limb when navigated with due diligence.

All thanks to these British tars who, for the most part, are unnamed and unsung. I’ll tell you about some of them and the stories behind some of their more interesting christenings next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The modest Sir George Henry Richards, KCB, FRS, who surveyed and named 1000s of features of the British Columbia coastline, never named a single geographical feature after himself. —Wikipedia

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It was said of the Eliza Anderson that “no steamboat ever went slower and made money faster”.

During her 40-year-long career she was a fixture of the maritime traffic between Puget Sound, Victoria and the Fraser River, carrying passengers and freight.

But it’s her last voyage, this one all the way to the Klondike gold rush when she was old and decrepit, for which she’s most remembered. A hellish voyage that ended on the very brink of shipwreck and destruction—at which moment a ghost-like figure in white beard and oilskins miraculously appeared on her bridge and directed her to a safe anchorage.

It’s an amazing story—as you’ll see next week in the Chronicles,

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PHOTO: The sidewheel steamer Eliza Anderson, shown here as she was in 1880, was every bit ungainly as she looked. —Wikipedia

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Chronicles readers who’ve visited Lake Cowichan’s Kaatza Station Museum, in particular the old Mesachie Lake schoolhouse building, will recognize the name, Wilmer Gold.

Victoria-born but raised in Alberta, Gold (1917-1992) moved to out-of-the-way and (almost) off-the-map Youbou in 1934. For the next half-century he chronicled the Cowichan Lake region’s logging scenes—which is why enlargements of his fabulous logging photos form the main display in the school building.

BC Bookworld has termed his portfolio, “one of first comprehensive studies of B.C. logging”.

But there’s nothing scholarly about Wilmer Gold’s work, just fine photography. His camera was his artist’s easel and the scenes he has captured for all time are nothing less than priceless.

Personal note: I’ve visited Kaatza dozens of times and always find myself studying his photo gallery in the school, sometimes giving it more time than the exhibits in the museum itself. Always, I see something new. Many of the photos are late 1930s; I study the faces and wonder what became of them? Did they go off to war or—?

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The cover of Wilmer Hazelwood Gold’s photo book, Logging As It Was.

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The story of Doris Gravlin has travelled world-wide over the years, mostly thanks to the internet and an almost insatiable interest in the supernatural.

As we’ve seen, the finding of husband Victor’s body with Doris’s shoes in his pockets closed the police investigation, it being accepted that, depressed, he’d strangled her when she refused to return to him then drowned himself.

But Doris doesn’t sleep.

Within months of her death there were reports of sightings of a lone woman walking the beach of the Victoria Golf Club, usually dressed in an old fashioned brown suit...

Next week, the conclusion to Doris Gravlin who has become British Columbia’s most famous ghost of them all...

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Working on the premise that late is better than never, and with Halloween fresh in memory, I’m going to access my files for another ghost story, this one Victoria’s most famous of all.

In September 1926 attractive, 30-year-old Doris Gravlin was reported missing by her parents with whom she was living with her young son since she’d separated from husband Victor. At his pleading, she’d gone to meet him to discuss their strained marriage but failed to return home.

Her body was later found at the water’s edge of the Victoria Golf Course; she’d been strangled. Days later, Victor drifted in on the tide, an apparent suicide.

What should have been the end of a sad story was just the beginning because Doris still walks the golf course, 80-plus years later!

Of the many who’ve claimed to have seen her on the links, an unnamed fisherman told how he’d watched a woman as she “suddenly hurried down as if she were going to meet someone, and on the way, she vanished. I saw her just kind of melt into thin air.’”

His is only one of many such sightings, as you’ll see in next week’s Chronicles.

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Human error. It has always been with us, always will be.

For the 19 miners of the Pacific Coast Coal Mine on the morning of Feb. 9, 1915, someone’s slip-up cost them their lives.

19 men died because someone screwed up; because someone misfiled the plan showing the conversion of scales between the abandoned and flooded workings of the Southfield Mine, and the working PCC Mine.

The plans that clearly showed that the miners weren’t 440 feet from danger as they believed, but within just a few feet of disaster.

Clearly, someone was responsible for an oversight that bordered upon criminal negligence. But if not PCC Mine manager Joseph Foy, one of the victims, who?

The B.C. Attorney-General’s office was sure enough where the fault lay that it pressed criminal charges against two of the principles involved in the tragedy. That one of them was the PCCM’s Managing Director J.H. Tonkin probably came as no big surprise to many.

But the Chief Inspector of Mines, Thomas Graham?

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PHOTO: Sam Wardle, one of the miners drowned when they broke into the abandoned Southfield Mine. —Courtesy Helen Tilley

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Of all the coal mining disasters in Vancouver Island’s history that of the Pacific Coast Coal Mine in South Wellington stands out on two counts.

First, that it was caused not by the usual suspects, gas, explosion or cave-in, but by flooding.

Second, that, for once in an industry that all but accepted dangerous workings conditions and their consequences as the cost of doing business, criminal charges were laid.

Someone had screwed up.

19 men had died.

Someone had to pay.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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Today, it’s a farmer’s field, the right-of-way for a gas line, and patches of third-growth forest and wild fruit trees bisected by the E&N mainline.

Other than a concrete tower-like structure in the middle of a pasture, some concrete foundations of the powerhouse in the trees, and evidences of scattered and mounded coal waste, the once famous—perhaps infamous--PCC Mine has all but vanished. Little, besides a sign warning hikers of “possible toxic gas and collapse,” to even suggest that this was a busy coal mine.

Nothing at all to suggest that here is where, 107 years ago and 100s of feet below the surface, 19 men were drowned.

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Of all the coal mining disasters in Vancouver Island’s history that of the PCCM in South Wellington stands out on two counts. First, that it was caused not by the usual suspects, gas, explosion or cave-in, but by flooding. Second, that, for once in an industry that all but accepted dangerous workings conditions and their consequences as the cost of doing business, criminal charges were laid.

Someone had screwed up.

19 men had died.

Someone had to pay.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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As many of you will have seen on Facebook, this year’s Extension Miners Memorial service, Ladysmith’s “annual tribute to the 32 miners whose lives were lost in a tragic explosion on Oct. 5, 1909,” was held this week in front of the Metal Collage on the corner of First Avenue and Gatacre Street.

But, to my knowledge, there never has been a latter-day memorial service for the lost men of the Pacific Coast Coal Mines colliery operation at South Wellington.

Today, it’s a farmer’s field, the right-of-way for a gas line, and third-growth trees intersected by the E&N mainline. Other than a concrete tower-like structure in the middle of a pasture, some concrete foundations of the powerhouse in the trees, and evidences of scattered and mounded coal waste, the once famous—perhaps infamous--PCC Mine has all but vanished.

Nothing to even suggest that this was a busy coal mine. Nothing to suggest that that here, 106 years ago, 100s of feet below the surface, 19 men were drowned.

Their deaths should never have happened, were totally preventable. Their families’ sole consolation was that, for one of the very few times in the history of the Island coal industry, some of the principles involved were charged with criminal negligence.

The story of the PCC Mine is a sad but a fascinating one, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you read next week’s Chronicles.

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I remember, years ago, a mayor of North Cowichan saying, “People come first.”

Meaning, human wants and needs trump environmental values every time.

As you may have seen in the news, and last week’s Chronicle, North Cowichan Municipality is looking to expand Mountain View Cemetery into an adjoining forest of mature fir and maple trees—proving that even dead people come first.

As should surprise no one, I’m a dedicated fan of cemeteries, even having written the history of the Valley’s public graveyards, Tales the Tombstones Tell. Which inspired me to check North Cowichan’s website and to go along to the open house, last Thursday afternoon.

There weren’t many there besides Municipal staff, most of them immediate neighbours on Drinkwater Road who are concerned for the loss of their forested backyards. There’s still room for burials in the Valley’s only non-denominational cemetery, and more and more people are choosing to be cremated, which allows for up to six headstones in place of a single traditional grave.

But, for all our New Age environmental enlightenment, people come first and you can bet your life that the cemetery’s expansion, to be done over a period of years, whatever the cost to trees and wildlife, is a go...

Next week, the stories of Mountain View Cemetery and of some of its more fascinating occupants.

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