We’re heading into BC Heritage Week, February 16-22. This year’s theme is "Stir the Pot," a celebration of the history, culture, and stories behind food.

Aligned with BC's Family Day on February 16, Heritage Week will, focus on food as a shared, inter-generational, and cultural tradition featuring events, workshops, and community activities province-wide.

All well and good, but when I think ‘heritage,’ I don’t think of food.

While shuffling files recently, I found a column I wrote for the Cowichan Valley Citizen for Heritage Week of 2007. At that time I and others were battling on two fronts: to save the Valley’s Kinsol Trestle and South Wellington’s Morden Colliery tipple/head frame from destruction.

I’m happy to report that my newest book, Unknown Nanaimo: History You Never Learned in School, is being well received in, where else, Nanaimo. One bookstore now orders by the case and she tells me that “people love local history”.

Who knew?

There aren’t many rules to writing for an audience any more. I mean, since the arrival of social media, particularly cell phones, people say just about whatever comes to mind and to h- with spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax and all that other boring stuff they tried to teach you in English Lit.

Here at the BC Chronicles we do attempt to write real good, ha ha. This is brought to mind by my own local newspaper, which shall remain nameless, having twice lately referred to the seven-month-long work stoppage of our bus system as being the longest in B.C. history. 

I know, I’ve said it before: They’re not making the good old days any more.

But it’s true.

Earlier this month, a front-page story of the Victoria Times-Colonist heralded the almost certainty that the Capital Iron lands project on Victoria’s waterfront will be approved by city council. It’s to be one of the greatest developments in the capital’s history—as many as 14 buildings constructed on a seven-acre parcel bounded by two whole blocks.

Several years ago when they stripped Sir John A. Macdonald of his place of honour on our $10 bills, the public was solicited for suggestions as to his replacement. Numerous names were given, all of them noteworthy and deserving, and it resulted as we know with Viola Desmond.

It set me to thinking of the many heroes and heroines of BC’s past who, if, alas, only briefly, achieved public recognition for acts of heroism. 

Welcome to another year and another ramble of the BC Chronicles. 

For years, I’ve devoted much of the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day to  ‘housekeeping’ in my library/office by sorting through files that didn’t find their way home after use during the year, while reflecting on this and that that chances to mind from the year gone by, or beyond. An annual introspection, if you will. 

Although today is the 1st of January 2026—the first day of the rest of our lives, as some sage once said—I’m going to use this issue’s Editorial to clear up some odds ‘n’ sods from what, overnight, became “last year.”

Sort of clearing my decks for hosting the BC Chronicles in 2026.

Well, readers, we’re a day early because tomorrow is Christmas. This week’s edition is the last BC Chronicle for 2025—another year done, and another 52 true stories about British Columbia’s rich and exciting past in the can. 

It took them long enough but they finally did it—rename Victoria’s Bay street Armoury in honour of General Sir Arthur Currie.

For those readers who don’t recognize him, this onetime Victoria school teacher, realtor and militiaman was slated to be promoted to, if Great Britain’s Prime Minister Lloyd George had his way, the supreme commander of British and Allied forces during the First World War.  

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. 

It was recently reported that a lawsuit has been launched against a gift and souvenir shop for copyright infringement of Francis Horne Sr.’s design of a Sasquatch.

I’ll leave it to the courts to settle that; I just want to express my admiration for BC Indigenous artistry. Look at these totem poles at Alert Bay in the 1890s. Magnificent!

Last week’s Chronicle by the late Peter Cheeke, “Turning ‘Tails’ on the Game Warden,” inspired this response and reminiscence from reader Bill Irvine.

I see in the news that the Garth Homer Centre in Victoria has moved into the old S.J. Willis School building while their new facility is being built.

That brings back memories of when I attended ‘S.J.’ for Grades 7-9. That was back in the Jurassic Age, you understand. Not happy memories, by any means, but Jr. High was unique to me for other reasons.

Let’s call this unfinished business.

I recently told the story of Rev. Henry “Father Pat” Irwin who, in my mind, is one of B.C.’s most remarkable pioneers ever. A man who, as you have read, never gave less than his all; a minister of God who thought nothing of riding all day  and all night in all kinds of weather in the middle of nowhere on an empty stomach.

War is Hell – But to Die After You Come Home is Worse 

I still recall the shock, followed by rage, all these years later. 

The shock that a former soldier had just died in a veteran's hospital where he'd been laid up since the First World War, some 40-odd years before. And rage at the thought that he’d spent two-thirds of his lifetime disabled and suffering in a hospital word, far, far from the trenches of Europe and long, long after Armistice Day. 

It wasn't right! It was so unfair! 

Not even a drizzling rain could keep the ghoulies away from Victoria’s Ross Bay Cemetery last Sunday.

It was October’s Ghost Tour by the Old Cemeteries Society, an annual event that draws so many visitors the tour has had to be broken up into 10 teams of 20-odd people each instead of the usual single group of, say, 20-40. Each stop is given five minutes with an enthusiastic volunteer storyteller, then a klaxon horn sounds and onto the next grave of interest. 

What would Halloween be without good a ghost story? And if they really do exist, there surely must be some resident in Ross Bay. 

Last week, inspired by the remarkable Rev. Henry “Father Pat” Irwin, the subject of last and this week’s Chronicle, I told you about A.G. Marsh, a pioneer I originally wrote about for the Victoria Colonist 35 years ago. He, too, seems to have thrived on physical and spiritual challenge. 

He, too, was doomed to disappointment. For Irwin, the loss of wife and baby then illness and premature death; for Marsh the labour of half a lifetime unfulfilled.

Have you ever really, really given thought as to how the British Columbia that exists today came to be? Of the legions of men and women, mostly unknown and unsung, who built this province, often with their hands, from what was wilderness?

You might reply, that’s my job, I’m the historian. Okay, but, funnily enough, it took me years of writing about historical events to realize that I was really writing about the people who made them happen.

I knew it was too good to last. In fact, I’m amazed that it lasted this long.

I’m referring to a singular piece of real estate, the site of a 1920s sawmill beside the Island Highway at the entrance to Lantzville.

Jennifer and I visited it several times, and a minor gold mine it was for Chinese and Japanese bottles, crockery and various other artifacts.