High Noon in Downtown Vancouver
For those of you who don’t recognize the name B.A. McKelvie, aka Bruce McKelvie, aka ‘Pinky’ McKelvie, he was in his day one of the best known journalists and historians in the province.
But that was long ago and he had retired to Cobble Hill before I first encountered some of his works in the Provincial Archives. McKelvie was right up my alley, with his newspaper articles on crimes and shipwrecks and other exciting events in B.C. history. (I was in my early teens so it was these kinds of stories that initially appealed to me.) McKelvie and retired B.C. Provincial Policeman Cecil Clark, who wrote true crime stories for the magazine section of The Daily Colonist, inspired me to devote myself to historical non-fiction.
But back to McKelvie: He’d passed away by the time I moved to Cobble Hill, and it was years after that that I came to know more about him as a man, thanks in part to the late Lois Bomford. A family member, she allowed me access to many of his manuscripts, published and otherwise, and to other documents relating to his journalistic career. (That’s the first and only time I’ve ever seen an engraved invitation to a hanging. McKelvie was allowed to take a guest!)
That’s when I learned that, as a very young newspaper reporter in Vancouver, Bruce McKelvie packed a gun when he went to work! That he was there the day Police Chief Malcolm B. MacLennan died in a wild shoot-out with a crazed drug addict.
Ah, the good old days... Not until the gang wars of the past 20-odd years has Vancouver known so much gunfire.
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Vancouver Police Chief Malcolm MacLennan was breaking down the door with a fire axe when hit by a shotgun blast.--Vancouver City Police website
“Reporter packed a heater on the police beat,” is the sensational headline of one newspaper article about the legendary British Columbia journalist B.A. ‘Pinky’ McKelvie.
Other than the gang shootings in recent years, which seem to have died down now, it’s almost beyond our comprehension in this day and age that a newspaper reporter who covered the crime beat in Vancouver a century ago would pack iron.
Today Bruce McKelvie, once the foremost provincial historian of his day, seems to have been pretty much forgotten although he does have the consolation of having McKelvie Creek and Mount McKelvie, in the remote west coast of Vancouver Island’s Tahsis Inlet region, named for him.
McKelvie began his journalistic career as a printer’s devil for The Coast Miner at Vananda, Texada Island. Before long, at the ripe old age of 15, he was off to the big city of Ladysmith to work for the ill-starred Ledger before starting his own, even shorter-lived, paper.
His next job, as a police reporter, was for the Vancouver Daily Sun. If this seems to have been a big leap from printer’s devil to boy journalist, it certainly was.
A very young journalist/historian Bruce McKelvie was there, notebook in hand, the day Vancouver Police Chief Malcolm MacLennan was killed by a crazed gunman.
--Family photo courtesy of Lois Bomford
All of which set the stage for young McKelvie being on the scene the day Police Chief MacLennan went down. Compared to some of his latter-day successors, Malcolm B. MacLennan, 44, was something of a novelty for a Vancouver police chief in that he was highly regarded in law enforcement circles throughout the country and highly popular with his men. Hailing from Prince Edward Island, a 20-year veteran with the Vancouver force and chief for less than three years, MacLennan had been a breath of fresh air. He was way ahead of his time in urging, unsuccessfully, medical treatment rather than prosecution for drug addicts; he hired the first non-Caucasian constable, Japanese-Canadian Raiichi Shirokawa; he won two days off per month for officers who worked seven days a week; he established the VPD Pipe Band; he was working on a proposal for the unification of all Canadian police forces that he intended to submit to the forthcoming convention of the chief constables’ association.
Helping him to polish his report was young McKelvie. They were still at it at 6 o’clock, Mar. 20, 1917, when MacLennan went home for supper to celebrate a birthday with his family. McKelvie headed back to Kitsilano.
“I had started my meal when the telephone rang. There had been a gun battle on Georgia Street East, over payment of rent. A small boy had been killed. Detective John Cameron had lost an eye. Frank King, the landlord, had similarly had an eye blinded, and Detective Ernie Russell had his face peppered with bird shot.”
“Police were being poured into the area, and more fighting was anticipated.”
Vancouver City Police crest --VPD website
Bob Tait, the suspected gunman, and his girlfriend, Frankie Russell, were cornered in an apartment above a Chinese grocery store at 522 East Georgia Street. Bruce McKelvie reached the side of Deputy Chief William McRae, Detective Inspector John Jackson and other officers just moments before Chief MacLennan, who took up a position at the base of a narrow, steep flight of stairs attached to the side of the building while he conferred with his men.
“I knew that MacLennan never carried a gun,” McKelvie recounted. “So I said, ‘Chief, don’t you go up there until I get back.’ He nodded, and I made my way along the front of the building, and then dashed across an open space to a window from that side of the store, until I was shielded by a house. I went into this and had just started to dictate a bulletin to my office, when I heard a blast from a shotgun, and the rattle of revolver shots.”
He charged back to the others. MacLennan hadn’t been seen since they’d shot their way out of an upstairs hallway after Tate opened fire during their attempt to negotiate. A detective groaned, “It must have been him [MacLennan] who was shot down inside the doorway.”
According to McKelvie, “Bob Tate [sic]...was a narcotic fiend, was filled with morphine. He was at best a worthless character [who] frequently acted as a stool pigeon for the police. He had built himself a protected bulwarks of mattresses, behind which he and Frankie Russell crouched. He had the shotgun, two powerful rifles, two revolvers and 300 rounds of ammunition—and a quantity of morphine and a hyperdermic [sic] needle.
Detective George McLoughlin asked to borrow McKelvie’s pistol, a .25 calibre Browning automatic similar to McLoughlin’s own weapon which he’d emptied during the upstairs fusillade.
He was armed with McKelvie’s weapon when, after a lengthy impasse, he crept up the stairs and down the darkened hallway to confirm that MacLennan was dead. Recovery of the body would have to wait.
When marksmen positioned in buildings across the street raked the gunman’s apartment with high-powered rifles but failed to penetrate the mattresses with which Tate had protected himself, police entered the grocery store downstairs.
Under the direction of a deputy fire chief, they blazed away at the ceiling—not really expecting to hit the gunman but to create air-holes for gas.
The four-hour-long siege ended dramatically and suddenly when Tait, in McKelvie’s words, realizing that “even another shot of morphine would not help him...put the muzzle of the shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger—exclaiming, just before he ended his life, ‘I’m a good marksman, all right; I got the big chief!’”
The resulting, glaring headlines in The Vancouver Daily Sun would never pass a taste-test today:
Chief MacLennan Is Shot Dead in Battle With Negro Desperado
Colored Gunman Dies by Own Hand After Withstanding Siege of Several Hours
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SENSATIONAL GUNFIGHT WITH GIANT DRUG-CRAZED NEGRO ON GEORGIA ST., EAST, ENDS IN DEATH OF THREE
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(Immediately below was Chief MacLennan’s photo with a caption that again identified his slayer as a negro.)
Robert Tate [sic] Holds About Entire Police Force at Bay Over Fallen Body of Chief as Efforts to Capture the Murderer Are Made—Plans to Blow up Building Are Nearly Complete When Muffled Shot of Self-Destruction Is Heard.
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White Paramour, An Occupant With Tate Arrested by Police
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Woman Surrenders to Officers When Negro Blows Out His Brains With Gun Which Killed Chief MacLennan and Boy—Detective Cameron to Hospital in Critical Condition From Wounding in Battle.
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THE DEAD
Police Chief M.B. MacLennan, shot in attempt to arrest Robert Tate, an armed negro.
George Robb, boy aged 8, hit by stray bullet in fusilade [sic] fired by Tate at police officers, died in hospital.
Robert Tate, giant negro desperado, drug fired and notorious character, committed suicide.
SERIOUSLY WOUNDED
Detective Jack Cameron, at Vancouver General Hospital with shotgun wounds in head, expected to recover.*
UNDER ARREST
Frankie Russell, white woman, alleged paramour of Tate, was in apartment when triple tragedy occurred. Surrendered to police after Tate committed suicide. Charged with complicity in shooting.
*(The Sun didn't mention that landlord Frank King also lost an eye.)
In case you missed it, Robert Tait was a Negro, as The Sun pointed out six times in its headlines about the man at the centre of “one of the most sensational and horrible tragedies Vancouver has ever experienced”.
Tait is again described as a giant negro who was said to be known to the police of “every city on the coast”. Having survived the multiple shootings uninjured, Frankie E. Russell, “white, a woman of the underworld” who was also known as Edith Rice and Annie Harris, and who shared the East Georgia Street apartment with Tait, was arrested and charged with being an accomplice.
In describing how Detective Cameron was shot, The Sun declared, “Never in Vancouver’s history has such exciting times and tense situations prevailed as in the 500 block on Georgia east last night from shortly after 7 o’clock till nearly 11.” It all began with Cameron attempting to arrest “the drug-crazed negro” for threatening his landlord, Frank King, owner of the two-storey building with an apartment above a grocery store.
It’s as well for King that Tait committed suicide as police had resolved to dislodge him with explosives; they only held back while Chief MacLennan lay where he’d fallen in the upstairs hallway, with a gaping wound in the forehead from a shotgun blast, and it wasn’t known if he was dead or seriously wounded.
As it happened, his death was finally confirmed by Officers Perry, Berry and McLeod who braved further gunfire from Tait who, unaccountably, even though he could see them clearly, held his fire as they dragged the body away. They later claimed to be “the luckiest people in the whole evening’s events”. Detective Inspector James Anderson had also had a narrow escape during the initial shoot-out when he, McLennan and the others had burst into Tait’s living room.
Despite being back-lighted by a lamp which made him a perfect target for Tait who was firing from the darkened bedroom, one of Tait’s shotgun blasts missed Anderson completely. That was the blast that struck the chief squarely in the forehead.
In an attempt to drive Tait out so they could reach their fallen chief, Deputy Chief McRae, Detective Roy Perry and Officers Berry, McLoughlin and McLeod prepared to ignite cans of sulphur powder, used as an insecticide and pesticide by farmers; this explains the holes McKelvie said they drilled in the ceiling of the store beneath Tait’s apartment. They abandoned the attempt when they heard a muffled shot from upstairs, which proved to be Tait shooting himself.
Even then they hesitated in rushing the apartment because they knew “the giant negro” murderer’s girl friend was possibly armed and willing to continue the siege.
Frankie Russell, Bob Tate mugshots that appeared in the Mar. 21, 1917 Daily Province
Unsure that Tait was dead, they again called upon both occupants to surrender and waited another 20 minutes.
It was the final phase of the tragedy that was the most tragical” of all, according to The Sun (with yet another reminder that the murderer was a negro). When called upon to surrender, Russell, sounding hysterical, said she couldn’t come out because Tait was lying on top of her, dead.
The Sun account, possibly written by young McKelvie, is sensational even by today’s gorier journalistic and entertainment standards: “Cautiously the police entered the death chamber where the chief had given up his life in a fearless attempt to arrest the worst desperado that had been brought to bay in the city. Stepping over a pool of blood where the chief’s body had lain, they still more cautiously approached the adjoining bedroom, where a most horrible sight met their gaze. Lying across the Russell woman’s body and pinning her to the floor with his great weight—Joe Tate weighed considerably over 200 [pounds]—was the negro, dead, with the whole top of his head blown off from the eyes up. Even hardened police officers accustomed to ghastly sights involuntarily shuddered at the terrible spectacle.
“The desperate negro dope fiend, realizing that his house was surrounded, and that it was only a question of time until he would be captured or shot, had held the shotgun with which he had previously wounded Detective Cameron and killed Chief MacLennan, close to his head and pulled the trigger. Blood and brains were scattered all over the room, some of the negro’s scalp actually adhering to the ceiling.”
Incredibly, there’s more: Despite being high on drugs, Tait had “done the job perfectly...the whole top of [his] head was shot off almost as perfectly as if it had been sawed. Thick clots of blood smeared the floor, and the walls and even the ceiling, and the gray matter of his brains and his hair were scattered about in every direction”.
Short of surrender or death by his own hand, there was no way that Tait would ever have left the bedroom alive, police having accepted the services of a returned soldier who volunteered to attack the apartment with hand grenades or a bomb.
A police chief, an eight-year-old boy and a crazed gunman dead, two men maimed: this was the sum total of the four-hour-long drama that had begun with a dispute over four months’ non-payment of rent. When landlord Frank King demanded to be paid, Tate, who, with his girl friend Frankie Russell was known to be a morphine and cocaine addict, had brandished a shotgun and threatened to “blow his brains out”. Hence the call to Chief MacLennan who left his 10-year-old son’s birthday party to negotiate a landlord-tenant dispute that had turned ugly. No one, it seems, suspected that Tait had amassed an arsenal and that, for reasons of his own, he’d determined to “go under” rather than surrender.
First on the scene were Detective Ernest Russell and Constables John Cameron and Duncan Johnstone. When they and the landlord knocked at the apartment, Tait fired through a small window in the door, “showering them all,” in the words of the Vancouver Police Department website “with glass, splinters and buckshot”. Both Cameron and King were permanently blinded in one eye, requiring immediate hospitalization, and Johnstone was peppered with lead pellets in the face. They all staggered down the stairs to the street where they hailed down a passing vehicle to take Cameron and King to hospital as Johnstone headed for a nearby call box to call for reinforcements.
Worse was yet to come.
Now unhinged, Tait began firing at passersby in the street with his rifle. Eight-year-old George Robb was walking from his house at 548 E. Georgia to buy candy when struck by a bullet. He died on the operating table an hour later.
That’s when Chief MacLennan took charge of what had become a stand-off between Tait, Russell and police. MacLennan tried to negotiate but when Tait refused to surrender he led the charge, armed with a fire axe to break down the door to the apartment. Tait had holed up behind his barricade of mattresses in a back bedroom, his firepower of two shotguns, two rifles and two pistols greater than that of the police officers.
The police returned his fire in the darkened hallway, emptying their revolvers, retreating to reload, then advancing again. (The news accounts don’t mention, as McKelvie did years later, that MacLennan usually worked unarmed.) Only when they retired to the street, out of ammunition, did they realize that MacLennan wasn’t among them, that he lay in the hallway, wounded or dead and unresponsive.
With Tait continuing to resist and unwilling to blast him out because the chief might be alive, they contented themselves with having sharpshooters from windows across the street keep Tait pinned down. His senseless return fire only began to taper off as he ran out of ammunition.
Tried for murder, his companion Frankie Russell was acquitted, there being no evidence that she’d participated in his rampage. Also an addict, she’d been thrown out on the street by her husband and taken in by Tait.
After leaving the Sun, B.A. McKelvie worked for several Vancouver newspapers, as a publicity agent and for a time ran the provincial tourist bureau before becoming managing editor of the Victoria Daily Times. Upon his death in 1960, he left a treasury of archival research and stories and, for Nanaimo area residents, something of even greater significance.
It was B.A. ‘Pinky’ McKelvie who laboured for years to have Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Ltd. set aside a small tract of land on the city’s southern doorstep.
That’s why, today, we have Petroglyph Provincial Park.
Chief MacLennan was succeeded as Vancouver’s chief constable by his deputy, W. McRae. It’s interesting to note that there were 250 people working for the Vancouver Police Department in 1917 when Vancouver had a population of 100,000 residents. That compares to 2020’s 1327 VPD officers serving 2,581,000 residents.
Chief MacLennan's name is one of the many on the British Columbia Law Enforcement Memorial at the Victoria Parliament Buildings. --B.C. Law Enforcement Memorial website
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