For most Chronicles readers, I’m sure, Sunday past was just another grey autumn day. For Victoria’s Bill Irvine, it was much more than that—the 84th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, a date etched in his mind as a child.

Canada was already at war with Germany and its Axis partners in December 1941, but all that was far away. Not so the threat of attack by Japan, the BC coastline suddenly being all too exposed to possible enemy action. For many BC residents, the war suddenly seemed to be in their own backyard.

Overnight, BC was on the alert and in the dark once blackout took effect. Then came air raid drills, the internment of Japanese Canadian citizens, and the issue of gas masks. War was no longer just overseas and in the theatre newsreels but right here in BC, something that none of us today can really appreciate.

Which makes Bill’s reminiscence relevant in 2025.

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Three months before my fifth birthday the ‘Japs’ bombed Pearl Harbour, Sunday morning, December 7th 1941. I remember it well as our family was no stranger to Canada being at war in Europe since September 10, 1939.

A ship is hit during the raid on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese, Dec. 7, 1941--”a date which will live in infamy”. —*https://pearlharbor.org/pearl-harbor-history/*

My grandfather, Robert William Hurst, owned with his brother, Ephraim Alexander Hurst, a large industrial wood-finishing mill: Canadian Western Woodworkers Sash & Door Company (CWWW). Bumpy, as we called our mother’s father, had procured several military contracts requiring woodfinished products. The most-memorable to me and my two siblings was those products made from Balsa wood.

The Canadian military — before the invention of Zodiacs — needed small, light-weight watercraft (boats) made from this light-weight material. My elder brother, Gerald (6yrs), soon learned Balsa wood was great for making model airplanes. To his delight, our father brought home from the mill copious amounts of waste-material Balsa wood just for Gerald’s purposes.

Our father, Bruce Frederick Irvine, had married a Hurst daughter, Gwendolyn Florence Hurst (Gwen) and both were raising their three children at their home on Gorge Road in Victoria, BC in 1941. In fact it was not their home because it was owned by Gwen’s sister, Margaret (Glee, nee Hurst) Craigmyle and her husband, Sandy Craigmyle. They had one son, Grant.

Germane to this conversation, is the proximity of where the Irvines lived and that of the CWWW mill’s location. As kids we were told to tell anyone who asked: “We live at Gorge & Garbally”. What is now 507 Gorge Rd. East (it’s now a car lot). The CWWW mill was located at the western end of Garbally Rd. at what is now 2909 Garbally Rd.. These two location are only 242 metres apart.

This means dad, who was employed in his father-in-law’s mill (surprise, surprise), walked from home and back on work days. This means on December 7, 1941, I was four years, eight months and nine days old and had not yet started school.

One of my fondest memories from that time was meeting my father, returning from work, at the foot of the driveway and him bouncing me up to the house by pulling my hand and lifting me off the ground with each step. So, let me say I have vivid memories of when America entered the Second World War (WW2).

And by the way, we always called them Japs — never Japanese. At five years, six month old (5½), in 1942, I started school in grade-one at Burnside Elementary School located at 3137 Jutland Rd. (600 metres from home). These were War Years and every phase of our waking hours we were reminded of this fact. It dominated the entire world. No Canadian generation has lived through anything like it since. I hope we never do.

At school we didn’t have fire drill — we had air raid drill!

On each of our desks — beside the ink well — hung our gas masks. When the test alarm sounded we donned our mask and headed across Jutland Rd. to hide in bushes in a vacant lot. In 2019, while I stopped in at Burnside School to reminisce with a staff member, he asked me why we ran over and hid in the bushes if it was an air-raid drill?

“Because we were told to,” was my reply.

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