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That old adage, “Better late then never” certainly proved to be the case in Nanaimo, two and a-half weeks ago.
That’s when a special memorial service was held in the Nanaimo Cemetery to honour the victims of a 1951 air crash, at that time the worst in Canadian history.
Read MoreIt’s interesting to speculate as to how many ways there are to turn a dishonest dollar. There must be as many variations to the old shell game as there are operators, and B.C. has known its share of these shady types.
Almost a century ago, Jacob Jacobsen (if that was his real name) earned his niche in provincial criminal lore when, under the alias John Hellsing, he worked a novel dodge on a Victoria realtor. His was, as a newspaper reported put it, a “smooth scheme,” and one not without its charm if something less than original.
Read MoreEven as a kid I knew what the Broad Arrow stood for.
As the son of a career navy man, I’d seen it from time to time on various things such as trunks and tools, etc.: a three-pronged arrow head pointing straight up, sometimes beneath a crossed bar.
I noticed it among Dad’s things and, later, in the treasure trove of maritime memorabilia on display or for sale at Capital Iron & Metals.
Read MoreIt was a colourful career that Thomas Herbert Murphy reflected upon in the summer of 1930. A lifetime that had been seen him in the mixed roles of sailor, blackbirder, prospector and Justice of the Peace.
Read MoreNever let the facts get in the way of a good story. Was it Farley Mowat who said that?
I was reminded of his alleged quote when a lady suggested that, perhaps, I should change my initials to B.S. Paterson. She was joking, of course. Wasn't she?
Read MoreIt’s so easy to just go with the obvious, to accept old newspaper accounts at face value. After all, the story is exciting enough that others have done it before you, so why look a gift horse in the mouth?
Heck, I’ve done it many times!
Read MoreIf you don’t think history is alive and well, you’re not following the news.
By alive, I mean, current stories whose roots go back—often way back—in time. Sometimes, alas, they’re in the news because they’re still festering like an unhealed wound.
Read MoreEveryone has seen the story in the news: B.C. Ferries has contracted to spend billions—billions—of dollars, building new ferries in China.
The only surprise is China; we’ve been buying ferries from European countries for years.
Read MoreMany B.C. communities will mark this week’s 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. From my archives, this historical column I originally wrote for a Nanaimo newspaper on the 60th anniversary.
Read MoreSo soon we forget; it’s almost part of the Canadian character, it seems.
How many times have I encountered cases of true heroism, often to the point of supreme sacrifice, during my extensive historical research. But even war heroes come and go in memory; civilian heroes rising to the call at home and in peacetime rarely rate more than a momentary ripple.
Monuments? Hardly. Immortalized in school textbooks? Not a chance.
Read MoreSasquatch aka Bigfoot hasn’t been in the news lately but some Williams Lake residents were reminded of the elusive giant recently when they found a B.C. Forest Service bulletin attached to their windshields.
Headlined SASQUATCH ALERT, the notice advised of recent Sasquatch sightings in the area and urged that anyone encountering one of the hairy creatures not to be alarmed, that Sasquatch come down from the mountains to feed on fish, freshwater clams, vegetation and to mate.
Read More“With her holds full of water and possibly abandoned by the underwriters, the 10,000-ton American freighter Golden Harvest is lying at the mercy of North Pacific waves, a hoped-for harvest of the natives living along the rim of the inner Aleutian Islands and the bleak Alaska coast when the seas break her up and distribute the cargo remaining in her holds along the beaches of the northern coast...”
It wasn’t often that the mighty steam tug Salvage King had to admit defeat. For 15 years her name achieved almost legendary status in B.C. maritime circles—as fine a working lady as ever secured a bowline.
Read MoreThis week’s story is about the great avalanche of March 1910 that killed 62 railway crewmen and navvies in Rogers Pass, the worst such disaster in B.C. history.
Last month, I told the story of the province’s second worst snow slide, that which entombed 26 miners at the Granduc copper mine in February 1965. (Snow Slide, June 12, 2025.)
Read MoreThe date: Mar. 4, 1910.
The site: Rogers Pass.
The toll: 62 railway workers swept away or buried alive.
The legacy: the worst avalanche disaster in Canadian history.
Read MoreThis week, the Chronicles concludes the sad tale of Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 21, British Columbia’s worst unsolved mass murder.
How is it, one might ask, that hardly anyone, besides journalists and family descendants, seems to know about it? Is 60 years that long ago? It’s almost as if many us have placed a statute of limitations upon memory.
While researching and writing this story several thoughts have come to mind.
Read More(Conclusion)
Last week, we ended the first instalment with the investigation into what was suspected to have been a bomb aboard CP Air 21 underway...
By this time the on-site examination of the wreckage was declared to be completed upon removal of items of interest for laboratory examination. These included as many pieces of the tail section as could be found having been transported for re-assembly to a vacant hangar at the Vancouver airport.
Read MoreIt’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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreAs 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.
Read MoreA 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.
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