The Chronicles

It’s so easy to think of history as being, well, long ago and far away. In the past. Come and gone. Done with. Move on.

The reality, of course, is that history walks among us as a living, vibrant being. Rather than being static, it’s happening every minute of every day, even in our own backyards. Okay, sometimes it takes a while to be officially recognized and recorded as such; that’s what historians and archivists are for.

Conversely, and it’s happening more frequently these days, we turn the telescope around and, like the revisionists of Communist infamy, we try to undo history—making even more history. 

A month short of 20 years before Air India Flight 182 was blown out of the sky by British Columbia-based terrorists, B.C had its own aerial mass murder. 

Late in the afternoon of July 8, 1965, CPA Flight 21, bound for Whitehorse, Y.T. via Prince George, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson and Watson Lake from Vancouver, exploded in the sky near 100 Mile House, 170 miles northeast of Vancouver, crashing and killing all 52 persons aboard. 

It’s B.C.’s worst mass murder and—unlike Air India—has been all but forgotten. 

As noted last week, I’m finally working on my tribute to the coal miners of mid-Vancouver Island after 25 years of field and archival research. 

This week’s Chronicle about the 1909 Extension mine disaster, and a revisit to Granby two weekends ago, brought back old memories and prompted these reflections on how transitory history can be. 

A wander through the Ladysmith Cemetery and you see it, not once, not twice but again and again: the date, October 5, 1909.

That was “Ladysmith’s Day of Horror” of 116 years ago when, as B.A. McKelvie wrote in the Vancouver Province in 1957, The Mine Blew Up.

Now the company that wants to salvage whatever valuable minerals are left in the ore dumps of the Tyee and Lenora mines on the Cowichan Valley’s Mount Sicker is looking to process the tailings piles of the Blue Grouse Mine.

Jennifer and I made several visits to the adjoining Blue Grouse and Sunnyside claims on the west shore of Cowichan Lake years ago, I’m happy to say, so it isn’t on my bucket list, or I’d be champing at the bit to check it out before they can go to work.

More than one seagoing lady of the night has called Victoria, B.C., home port over the years. Ladies of ill repute who’d ghost into harbour unannounced, rest and restore then, as the city slept, quietly weigh anchor for destinations unknown. 

To the curious, their masters and crew had little to say beyond a terse, “Bering Sea,” or equally vague “North Pacific.” Asked as to cargo, they’d grunt a muffled reference to “ballast,” and push on by.

Long gone are my feckless days of youth when I wrote with all the confidence of a new-born, all of it based upon my mimicking newspaper reports and the works of others, and none of it from the well of my own experiences. 

But time has marched on, times have changed—and, thankfully, so have I. 

‘He lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.’

We haven’t heard from our old friend D.W. Higgins for a while. Not for want of material, I assure you, as my file for this pioneer journalist and one of B.C.’s all time great storytellers continues to grow. 

There’s an interesting item in this week’s Terrace Standard about Japanese triplexes at “the last intact cannery on B.C.’s north coast” having been restored as a vital piece of the region’s multicultural fishing heritage. 

The North Pacific Cannery in Port Edward, virtually unaltered to this day, goes all the way back to 1889 when salmon canneries were a major contributor to the provincial economy. Now it’s a national historic site and museum that offers visitors “an immersive glimpse” into the lives of cannery workers.

“May Day, May Day, May Day—!”

The distress call pierced the grey stillness of Feb. 18, 1965. Then the voice was cut off, and static reigned the airwaves.

One of the joys of researching in old newspapers is discovering smaller news items, nuggets I call them, that just don’t make it to the big time. By which I mean, they’re what some would cruelly call trivia, so get passed by.

But this one recently caught my eye and, if only momentarily, sucked me down the rabbit hole. I share it with you today. It’s from the Victoria Daily Times of Jan. 25, 1929.

“Mr. President: It is with much diffidence that after repeated urging on your part I undertook to contribute a paper to this society...”

So began, modestly, George Hope Johnston’s address to the Calgary Historical Society in February 1920.

There’s an interesting footnote to today’s Chronicle about Louisa Townsend who came to B.C. on the bride ship Tynemouth and married Edward Mallandaine.

Their son, Edward Jr., born propitiously on July 1st, 1867, the same day as the Confederation of the Dominion of Canada, became an itinerant carpenter for several years after leaving school at the age of 14. He found himself (again propitiously) in the CPR construction town of Donald, B.C., in time to witness the driving of the Last Spike.

Long before the famous war brides of the Second World War there were the brides of colonial days; young British women, aged 14-20, who sailed halfway round the world to “the colonies” in hopes of finding husbands.

“On this bright sunny day, May 13, 2025, the work commenced on our special project for 2025...”

So begins the latest issue of the Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria’s newsletter. The special project referred to is the restoration of the grave of Edna Farnsworth, the subject of this week’s Chronicles.

A century and a quarter has passed since 19-year-old Edna Farnsworth died. Her suicide made headlines from Victoria to San Francisco. She had no money but was given an expensive, fancy plot in Ross Bay Cemetery.

Memory is a funny thing. It can be vivid, branded into the brain; it can be ephemeral, just a wisp-like fog that swirls about you from time to time but is always there, slumbering in the subconscious while it awaits a word, a sight, a smell or a sound—something, anything—to bring it if only momentarily to the fore. 

One that has always stuck in my mind from childhood concerns money. A stack of bills pulled from the wall of an old house, once a store my mother told me, as it was being torn down.

Eric Duncan is remembered for having written what has been described as “the most important document for the history of the Comox Valley,” From Shetland to Vancouver Island: Recollections of Seventy-Five Years. 

Published in Edinburgh in 1937, it’s a fine read but long out of print. Happily, I’ve had a copy—a first edition, to boot—for years and have read it twice. It was, in fact, one of my earliest antiquarian book finds.

Recently, I scanned it again and found a chapter which I’m sure will please Chronicles readers.