Editorially speaking…
In this week’s Chronicle about unexploded ordnance, I focus on the lethal legacy of the Second World War. But the problem—the threat to life and limb—goes back long before WW2.
As proof, I offer this chapter from my about-to-be-released new book, Unknown Nanaimo: History That You Didn’t Learn in School:
Pioneer Souvenir Hunters Found Deadly Treasure
For barber Jacob Korter, a momentary lapse of judgment and...disaster. The miracle is, he didn’t take others–and much of downtown Nanaimo–with him.
The May 15, 1880 Free Press account of this extraordinary tragedy is fully as spectacular as its bold headline, 70 POUND SHELL EXPLODES ON COMMERCIAL STREET:
His foolishness cost Jacob Korter his life. The miracle is that no one else was killed. —BC Archives
“At one o’clock on Thursday afternoon, the citizens of Nanaimo were startled by a terrific report, followed by the crashing sound of broken glass. On rushing to the scene of the explosion on Commercial Street opposite the Masonic Hall, we found that a 70 pound bombshell had exploded, and that Mr. J. Korter had the lower part of his right leg blown off, besides other minor injuries, and all the glass in the immediate neighbourhood, shattered...”
Fifteen-odd years before, a British warship had fired several 70-pound ‘round bomb shells’ onto the beaches of Protection Island for gunnery practice. “Parties visiting the island had often seen these shells, but they were generally left alone,” noted the Press.
Until the spring of 1880, when three men returned to town with a large, un-exploded shell. Declared to be “empty,” it was displayed in front of Korter’s barbershop whose proprietor had often exhibited curios of various descriptions in his front window. Because of the shell’s weight, it was placed on the sidewalk where it, as Korter had hoped, piqued the curiosity of customers and passersby.
It also prompted him and several others to return to Protection Island to procure another shell.
Not content with exhibiting it, too, on the sidewalk, Korter and George Pritchard, as a small crowd watched, carried it into the street and unscrewed the fuse. Upon seeing that it still contained its charge of gunpowder, they poured an estimated two-thirds of the damp charge onto the ground and ignited it “without doing any damage”.
Someone then suggested dropping a match into the fuse hole to make it “fizz”.
After warning Korter and Pritchard that “it surely would blow them up,” all but one of the spectators departed. But, as the loyal Pritchard and a third man “were cowering on the sidewalk in front of the barber shop, just a few feet distant,” Korter dropped a match into the fuse hole. The result was “a most terrific explosion”.
Radiating outwards, the shrapnel almost severed the barber’s leg and smashed through the windows, walls and roofs of the barber shop, Gilmore & Clark’s clothing store, the Nanaimo and Royal Hotels, and the Masonic Hall. One fragment landed in St. Ann’s Convent garden on Wallace Street, 750 yards distant, where it buried itself a foot into the ground, and another fell into Mrs. John Bryden’s front yard, half a mile away.
All nearby windows “were smashed to atoms and it will take between two or three hundred dollars to repair...damages.”
Amazingly, injuries among those in the immediate area were slight. Pritchard received mild facial burns, fellow onlooker Alfred Sommerhayes was launched eight-odd feet into the air, resulting in bruises to his legs, and a young girl suffered a flesh wound in her arm. Two children in their garden at the upper end of Albert Street came “within an ace” of being struck, and pedestrians on the other side of Commercial Street were blown off their feet.
All were spared more serious injuries because poor Jacob Korter had taken the brunt of the blast. Using his barber chair for their operating table, Drs. Cluness and Gamble amputated the leg below the knee, then declared that he’d make a full recovery.
Their optimism was unfounded and, nine days later, Korter died of tetanus.
As you’ll see in this week’s feature story, explosive devices don’t necessarily lose their sting even after years of rusting away in damp soil.
* * * * *
This recurring Pinterest photo finally registered with me. I’d seen it several times before but, this week, it sparked memories of two conversations I’d had several years ago. The first, a chance encounter in a Canadian Tire parking lot, was with a regular reader of my Cowichan Valley Citizen column in which I’d written about my and friends poking about abandoned coal mines in the Greater Nanaimo area.
Had I seen the abandoned mail coach, he asked?
No, I had no idea what he was referring to. He then told me how, as a boy of perhaps 9-10 years old, he and a friend had gone hunting with a new .22 rifle in the Harewood area, site of several defunct coal mines.
Dropping down into a bush-shrouded gully, they were startled to see, of all things, a stagecoach, still showing its red paint and the legend, Royal Mail. What made it so unusual was that it appeared to be intact despite, obviously, its having been there for decades, judging by the size of the surrounding growth. Who’d abandoned it? Why there? When?
But there was something definitely creepy about it, my informant, who appeared to be in his late 70s, told me and, although his friend was for climbing up and inside the coach, he wanted nothing to do with it. He finally convinced his companion to come away and he never ever tried to find it again.
Reading my columns had brought back memories of that eerie childhood encounter for him.
Years after that, a second chance encounter described a similar discovery—so similar, in fact, that both parties had to be talking about the same stagecoach. However, if the mystery mail coach really had existed, it’s not surprising that we never found it, the area having been logged repeatedly since the 1930s, the decade that, I surmised, my first informant would have been about 10 years old.
Did he imagine it? Make it up? Or—did he really find an abandoned stagecoach, just like the one in the photo? Stranger things have fallen between the cracks of time.
* * * * *