Editorially speaking...
Last week I wrote of various Remembrance services and historic anniversaries that all came within a week of the Chronicles going to press.
Among them, May 3rd was the 135th anniversary of Canada’s second worst colliery disaster, the explosion in Nanaimo’s No. 1 Esplanade Mine that killed 150 men including one of the rescue team.
Nanaimo’s No. 1 Esplanade Mine. You’d never know, today, that this heavily industrialized site was the scene of the second worst colliery disaster in Canadian history. Only a signboard, paid for an installed by volunteers, marks what was once the city’s longest operating and largest producing coal mine and its day of disaster, May 3rd, 1887.
I tried to equate its devastating effect upon a community of just 2000 souls: 46 women widowed, 126 children orphaned. A catastrophe so great and so horrific that there wouldn’t have been a single person in the greater Nanaimo area who didn’t mourn the loss of a family member, an in-law, a friend, a workmate, an acquaintance.
A catastrophe that had all the effect of a mini-nuclear bomb so pervasive was its impact.
Yet, 135 years later, few in Nanaimo seem to know or care. City Hall lowers its flag to half-mast but little else is done to mark the occasion.
How sorry I am to have to say that I was right. The Victoria Times Colonist noted the anniversary on page 2. As for the Nanaimo News-Bulletin, just a short article on the Annual Day of Mourning to remember workers who died on the job.
But of the May 3rd, 1887 disaster—the second worst industrial accident in Canadian history and the single greatest example of workplace fatalities ever to occur in British Columbia—that occurred in downtown Nanaimo—not so much as a passing reference!
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This May 9th marked the 30th anniversary of Nova Scotia’s Westray Mine disaster that killed 26 men in 1992 and which has been attributed to managerial incompetence and/or negligence. But no one has stood trial and never will, it’s just another in the litany of Canadian colliery disasters that killed and maimed.
There’s no other Canadian saga like that of our coal mining which is why it fascinates me and why it often leaves me shaking my head, both in wonder and in sorrow.
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For those of you who, like me, enjoy seeking out our provincial history, some new and wonderful resources are to hand.
You can now, in the comfort of your home thanks to the wonders of the internet, go online and access the archived contents of the two leading Vancouver dailies, The Province and the Vancouver Sun. Most of the Victoria Colonist has been digitized for years and the Daily Times also came on-stream a year or so ago.
Now the merged Times-Colonist archives are available up to 2010.
What a treasure trove of information, and all of it now available to you while you sit in the comfort of your chair in front of your computer with a cup of tea or coffee in hand!
So much to read and to learn, so little time...
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The Valley’s landmark cross on Mount Tzouhalem has been vandalized again, this time for good as the Nature Conservancy of Canada which owns the property says it has to go.
I have never—and never will—understand the mentality of vandals. Several of Cowichan’s cemeteries have been desecrated—beautifully crafted headstones and monuments damaged and destroyed.
Although I have mixed thoughts about the Mount Tzouhalem cross I’ve no doubts at all when it comes to the Old Stone aka Butter Church which, too, is being continually vandalized by graffiti and physical damage.
In 1958 the local chapter of the Native Sons of B.C. with the cooperation of Cowichan Tribes restored Father Rondeault’s long abandoned church with a new roof and steeple. In the 1980s Tribes used it as a visitor centre. Since then it has been the victim of neglect and outrageous vandalism that even has resulted in holes in its walls of sandstone.
Sandstone that had to be laboriously broken to size with a cannon ball then hauled into place by human brawn and devotion, and all financed by Fr. Rondeault through the sale of butter from his own cows.
This church, not Duncan’s City Hall as was suggested last week, is the Cowichan Valley’s most significant historic/heritage building and it should be saved. Period.
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