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You won’t find this in Bob Dougan’s book, A Story To Be Told. It’s something he told me personally; of growing up on the family farm on Telegraph Road, Cobble Hill, and of knowing ever so vaguely, even as a child, that there was a skeleton in the family closet.
Read More“I’ve written a book.” This statement, from almost anyone else, would have been no outrageous thing in itself. I heard if often when wearing my publisher-printer hat.
Read MoreOne of my true regrets of having earned my journalistic spurs back in the ‘60s is that newspapers and magazines at the time were mostly black and white. Meaning no, or rarely, colour photos because they were too expensive to process and to print. Meaning that I took 1000s of photos in black and white—and we now live in an age of full colour reproduction!
Read MoreUp until recent years, Penelakut Island, east of Chemainus and midway between Saltair and Ladysmith, was known as Kuper Island. It was originally named, as were 100s of other B.C. geographical place names, after a British naval officer.
Read MoreIn my promo for this week’s Chronicle I noted that, as recently as the 1960s, Victoria was so quiet, t’was said they rolled up the sidewalks at night. It was even called a cemetery with a business section. Times have certainly changed, if not for the better, crime-wise.
Read MoreDramatic headlines for Jan. 15, 1903 proving that it was a great news story is the fact that these headlines are from the Winnipeg Free Press which had picked up the story by wire.
Read MoreA stroll along Ladysmith’s Sixth Avenue is a stroll into the past—Boer War era.
Read MorePerformed at Chemainus Theatre amid rave reviews, the Other Guys Theatre Company’s Good Timber was “a terrific local history lesson” built around (to quote the Cowichan NewsLeader Pictorial) “the logging camp poems of former Chemainus sawmill worker Robert E. Swanson [featuring] many historic clips of Cowichan’s logging days.” Bob who?
Read MoreIn his prime actor John Wood was hailed as an actor who “stood alone on the Pacific Coast”. But when he died he became an embarrassment to almost all who knew him when the circumstances surrounding his death touched off a furor that only ended in a crowded courtroom...
Read MoreGrowing up in Saanich (okay, Victoria) as I did, the CPR’s fabled B.C. Steamships’ Princess ships are part of my DNA. From the beginning I was drawn to the Inner Harbour and the comings and goings of these beautiful black and white pocket liners with their buff funnels and checker board logos.
Read MoreWe like to think that history repeats itself. Maybe yes, maybe no. But there’s no doubting that history does an about-face from time to time. You couldn’t find a greater contrast between these two news stories, which occurred 143 years apart, if you tried.
Read MoreEven though he’s been dead for almost a century, one of British Columbia’s most infamous con men is back in the news. dward Arthur Wilson, aka Brother XII, may be long gone but the legends of the religious cult he founded at Cedar-by-the-Sea (Cedar) and on DeCourcy and Cortez Islands in the 1920s live on.
I’m becoming a believer in coincidence. I’d no sooner decided to write about beachcombing and secrets that have been given up—or withheld—by the sea than an article in the Times Colonist caught my eye. Researchers from Universite du Quebec a Rimouski are trying to determine if a letter that washed up in a bottle onto a New Brunswick beach in 2017 is genuine.
Read MoreYou could say that today’s story began at the foot of my driveway. That’s where, upon returning from my daily walk along the old CNR Tidewater Line by my house, I saw a man standing by my mailbox. As I approached it became apparent that he was waiting for me.
Read MoreWe must go way back to Sept. 23, 1916. On that Saturday, Cowichan Lake’s Doreen Ashburnham and Anthony Farrer were walking along a forest trail on the South Shore, bridles in hand, to their pastured ponies. They almost ran into the cougar, “lying quite still in the pathway”.
Read MoreOne of my favourite pioneer storytellers, D.W. Higgins, whom we’ve met before in the Chronicles, wrote two books during his retirement. Both were based upon a series of articles he’d written for the Daily Colonist about his 40-year career as a journalist and newspaper editor during the province’s eventful founding. In the latter book, published in1905, he tells a fascinating tale of a brutal robbery and murder in B.C.’s Cariboo gold fields.
Read MoreAs I explained last week, every blue moon the Mountain comes to Mohammed. By which I mean that a story, fully researched, comes to me. Such is this week’s tale by Robin Garratt of England. In 2010, by which time he and his wife were in their 70s, they visited the Cowichan Valley for two weeks. Robin wanted to learn more about his maternal grandparents’ brief employment at Hill Farm in Cobble Hill just prior to the First World War.
Read MoreThere's some confusion as to whether J.H.S. 'Sam' Matson actually built this large Cobble Hill farm house in 1908 or whether a French Canadian named Gravelle already had a house on the site. It's more credible that Matson, a wealthy Victoria newspaper publisher and businessman, engaged a Chinese crew to build a residence here in 1914. Did he have it designed by the renowned Victoria architect Sam Maclure? That's another mystery for heritage buffs.
Read MoreBefore getting down to things that go bump in the night I must introduce you to Hudson’s Bay. Co. fur trader John Tod. Not only was he one of a kind but so is this unique description of him by the gilt-penned historian Hubert Bancroft.
Read MoreAs I admitted in last week’s promo, I ‘borrowed’ this great title from authors and historians Ian Baird and Peter Smith. Several years ago they coined it for their ‘hiking and biking’ guide book to abandoned railways on southern Vancouver Island. These included the two major former railway grades in the Cowichan Valley which are now the Cowichan Valley and the Trans Canada Trails, formerly the E&N Railway extension from Duncan to Lake Cowichan, and the Canadian National Railways mainline from Sooke to Lake Cowichan.
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