It wasn’t as if George Cruickshank was the first citizen or colonial administrator to be charged with dipping into the till in those early years of Vancouver Island as a crown colony.
Read MoreI always acknowledge, if not immediately answer in full, requests for information from readers and others who track me down. But there are far more of you than there are of me and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep up, so please bear with me. But make no mistake: I’m not complaining. I’m simply pointing out that while my archives doesn’t always contain the specific answers I’m looking for, it usually points me in the right direction. It’s the ferreting out that takes time...
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The sinking of the American steamship Clallam while en route to Victoria is one of the worst in provincial record. But, more than a century later, there’s so much more to this tragedy than just the date, place and circumstances of her foundering in a storm in Juan de Fuca Strait.
Read MoreAnother challenge to answering the numerous requests for information made of me is that my filing system over the years has occasionally proved to be something less than perfect. I never subscribed to the Dewey Decimal System and, overall, my ad hoc approach to filing has worked. There have been exceptions, of course, and they can be maddening.
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Never a week goes by but I receive fascinating emails from both regular readers and from those who track me down online or are referred to me with their queries and, not as common but best of all, offers to share their family histories and scrapbooks. These come from close to home and from afar, two of the most recent and most promising being from the Maritimes and the United Kingdom.
Read MoreIt wasn’t a Nanaimo building but it certainly was a landmark beside the Trans Canada Highway just south of the Silver Bridge. I can remember, when still living in Saanich in the 1960s, driving my mother who was an avid collector of carnival glass and women’s things, to the cabin which was operated as a silversmith and antique store.
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I’ve never understood the human fascination with crime but there’s no denying its universal appeal. Crime stories, particularly those about true murders, unsolved and otherwise, are the subject of movies, plays, books, magazines and websites; they’re on television and radio, and among the headliners of daily newscasts.
Read MoreI probably shouldn’t admit to this but I’m not the only British Columbia historical website available to you online. In fact, they’re growing in number all the time, to the point that I begin my work day by opening my email and checking, on average, 20-30 emails (plus more throughout the day). Some of them I subscribe to, some are of little interest to me, but rarely are they spam.
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Victoria’s famous Dallas Road waterfront has always been a ‘high rent district’. It wasn’t necessarily the houses that made these properties so expensive as most of them, 50 years ago, were older, some of them pretty modest if you went by appearances. It was that mantra of real estate, location, location, location (if you focused on the sweeping views of Juan de Fuca Strait and the Olympic Mountains and ignored the Ogden Point lumber wharves). Since then cruise ships (pre-pandemic) have taken the place of lumber piles, freighters and a grain elevator, and succeeding years and upgrading have made Dallas Road more popular and ever more expensive.
Read MoreIt’s no coincidence that for two weeks in a row the latest Chronicles have had their roots in the present. One of the first and most valuable things I learned as an historical storyteller was to forge, when possible, a vicarious link between then and now.
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One of the joys of publishing what really amounts to an online magazine is that it often draws a response from readers, usually as brief comments but, sometimes, something much more ambitious.
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Many of you will know that the copper mining activity on Mount Sicker at the turn of the last century has intrigued me from even before I moved to the Cowichan Valley. I’ve since written about it in newspaper articles, columns and even a book, Riches to Ruin: The Boom to Bust Saga of Vancouver Island’s Greatest Copper Mine, from which much of today’s story is taken. To tell the incredible story of Mount Sicker in as few words as possible (my 2007 book is 300 pages)!
Read MoreYears ago, when I was invited to launch a weekly historical column in the Nanaimo newspaper (I think it was the Daily News which became the Harbour City Star then something else, I've lost track) a friend predicted that I'd be starved for research material "in four months". Not a chance, I said; in four months I'll have more to work with than I do now.
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As I’ve said so many times before, history just keeps on coming.
Everywhere I go, every time I open my mail, every time I read the paper, there’s something ‘old’ in the news. So often lately that they’re ganging up on me. So, next week I open my mail bag and my clippings and email files and share with you some of these news stories whose roots are firmly in the past.
Some of them may surprise you. I promise they will entertain you.
That’s this week in the Chronicles.
As mentioned in last week’s promo, this week’s post is a mixed bag of historical “nuggets in the news” drawn from my newspaper clippings file, and from comments, suggestions and queries from readers of the Chronicles.
It’s so easy to think of history as being, well, in the past and far removed from our present-day lives. But here we are, in effect replaying the great ‘Flu epidemic of 1919-20. So much for the distant past and far away!
Back in 2007 the Nanaimo Star ran a look-back piece on the city’s ‘Costco Caper’ robbery of Mar. 7, 1996.
This was a rather ingeniously planned heist of Loomis Armoured guards as they made a delivery of cash to Costco’s ATM machine. The lone robber escaped with seven cassettes of currency; the amount stolen has never been released to the public.
We’re already mid-month January and the ‘new’ year is beginning to look more and more like a replay of 2020—more pandemic, more tragedy, more hardship, more inconvenience. Even with vaccines on the way it’s obviously going to be a long haul.
What did the British use to say in hard times, “Keep a stiff upper lip”?
As we, ever so unwillingly, go on struggling through these historic trials we can at least take advantage of our ‘down time’ (thanks to what amounts to self-imposed house arrest) by reading about and enjoying—maybe even learning from—history.
What interesting times we live in!
It took well over a century but the hardy Chinese miners who helped to carve a province from wilderness enjoyed the last laugh.
Today, decades later, thousands of recreationists throughout British Columbia are participating in a modern-day boom in their eager search for that once derided ‘green gold,’ jade.
Today’s prospector are called rockhounds but the name of the game is the same—the thrill of the hunt and the pride of achievement that comes from transforming a piece of stone into a beautiful gem.
Read MoreWell, another year gone by. And what a year it was!
2020, which began with just whispers in the news of a new contagion in China became, by March, full-blown global pandemic. For the first time in a century since the infamous ‘Flu of 1918-19, we—all of us—are in the front lines of defence.
Not since the Second World War has Canada had to mobilize to face a common and deadly enemy; not for 75 years have we all had to make personal sacrifices and endure personal inconvenience for the common cause.
For years I’ve been a devoted fan of garage sales, flea markets and thrift stores, always on the lookout for the useful, the exotic and the unique—as I define the terms.
One of my more outstanding treasures turned up in a community 'free store' on Gabriola Island years ago. It’s a framed colour photo of a church memorial window. Not in itself a real turn-on for me.
But that changed when I read the penned caption. It identified the window as a memorial for Michael F.A.Ney, RCN. RCN, of course, stands for Royal Canadian Navy.