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Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! (Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye!)
Town criers, or just criers, go back a long—all the way back to the Roman Empire. In the centuries before newspapers, when few people were literate, they were an established social institution throughout Europe
Often uniformed in a red and gold coat, white breeches, black boots and a tricorne hat (think pirate), they’d stroll village and city streets, crying Oyez!
Read MorePart 1
So who is Victoria's most outstanding character?
Such a distinction might seem to be a difficult one to assign, given the many weird and wonderful individuals who’ve walked our Capital’s streets during the past 160-plus years. But there is one man who stands head and shoulders above all the others.
Without doubt, the most fabulous character ever to call Victoria home port is John Butts. Or John Charles Butts, ‘town cryer to her Britannic Majesty,” as this rogue preferred to call himself. A newspaper of the day expressed the view of many citizens when it declared John to be “a greater scourge than cholera or smallpox.”
Read MoreNEWS ITEM: 15 acres added to John Dean Park
“Some of the last old-growth stands of Douglas fir and Garry oak on the [Saanich] Peninsula are now part of 15-acre parcel of land added to the border of John Dean Provincial Park...after being acquired by the B.C. Parks Foundation from a private landowner for $1.63 million...”
So reported the Times Colonist in November.
Read MoreToo late, as I admitted last week, did I realize I had the perfect play on the popular Spaghetti western movie title, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
With a difference—women.
By too late, I meant the correct sequence: I’d already led with Belle Castle, The Bad (in the sense that she was a ‘fallen’ woman who redeemed herself too late for love). making Nellie Cashman, The Good, the second instalment by default.
But now we’re back on track with Agnes, The Ugly.
Read MoreMost Chronicles readers, I’m sure, have seen the news about the loss to fire of the well-known and highly-regarded Whale Interpretation Centre at Telegraph Cove. The 20-year-old natural museum housed a wonderful collection of marine mammal specimens including the skeleton of a 20-metre fin whale.
The cove’s buildings and docks were much older, with a rich history of their own.
Read MoreThis week, it’s the turn of The Good - The Miner’s Angel whose name was synonymous with warmth and generosity in every mining camp from Mexico to Alaska.
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Nine years ago, Victoria's old Cemetery Society established a special Nelly Cashman Fund to raise money for a centennial stone to be placed on her grave in Ross Bay Cemetery. “Nellie Cashman deserves our recognition,” the Society’s Patrick Perry Lydon and Donna Chaytor told the Times Colonist.
Read MoreCan you believe it? 2025! A quarter of a century into the ‘new’ millennium!
Where did it go? More importantly, where is it going?
Well, here at the Chronicles, some things never change—just more stories to come about British Columbia’s rich and colourful history, of which there’s simply no end. As I’ve noted before, history is like digging a hole—it just gets bigger and bigger.
Read MoreHer real name and where she came from, no one knew. But that she’d been beautiful and a lady, all were agreed. Upon her death in a lonely B.C. mining camp, forsaken by all but the man who loved her—and the rose tree she’d nurtured and cherished with a mother’s devotion—her secret went with her to the little cemetery on the hillside.
Today, even her grave site is unknown and the mystery of Belle Castle, as she called herself, remains safe with the ages.
Read MoreWell, another year is about to bite the dust.
For most of us blessed to live in Canada, it likely has been another year of getting by in comparative comfort while complaining bitterly about inflation every time we go to a checkout. A minor plaint when you look around this embattled world of ours...
Read MoreI really wanted to begin the new year with more of an upbeat story. But...
I also didn’t want to do another shipwreck so soon after the S.S. M.G. Zalinski, either. But...
Read MoreIt should come as no surprise to Chronicles readers that I spend a lot of time delving into old newspapers. They’re a ‘popular’ historian’s lifeblood.
Read MoreIt should come as no surprise that the yuletide spirit has influenced our mapmakers. In British Columbia it can be found, in variations, at least 18 times.
Read MoreHere’s irony for you...
In researching today’s feature story on the sinking of the U.S. Army transport S.S. Brig.-Gen. M.G. Zalinsky, and the subsequent—and expensive—efforts to stem the bunker oil leaking from her hull, I found an article bearing this headline,
Oil Spills Are Bad For Shipwrecks
I mean, it’s ironic that sunken ships that leak oil and pollute the environment are subject to accelerated corrosion from their own oil! Sort of like being hoist with (her) own petard, as Shakespeare would say.
Read MoreMore than three-quarters of a century after she sank in B.C.’s remote Grenville Channel, an American army transport is back in the news.
Oil is leaking from the wreck of the S.S. Brigadier General M.G. Zalinski, posing an immediate environmental threat that must be dealt with, according to the Canadian Coast Guard. This, despite the fact that 44,000 litres of heavy oil and 319,000 litres of oily water were extracted from the wreck nine years ago.
Read MoreThere will be no great fanfare this week for the departing Phillipine Mars water bomber, as was the case for her sister Hawaii Mars back in August. Her final flight to a military museum in Arizona, after decades in the Alberni Valley, will be determined by weather conditions.
Read MoreFrom the man who brought us those memorable eccentrics, Messrs. David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Mr. Pickwick and Company—there came to Victoria in 1868 the slight figure, in flesh and in fact, of one Acting Lieut. Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, RN.
Read MoreAs I write this, the 1000-foot-long S.S. United States, the “longest and largest ocean liner ever built in America,” and the record holder for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by a passenger liner, is about to sail one last time.
Not under her own power but with the aid of five tugs.
Read MoreConclusion
It’s one of the Cariboo’s greatest mysteries—whatever became of the Halden family, Arthur, Adah and Stanley?
I don’t think I’ll ever become comfortable with Facebook.
Sure, I post something historical every two days and have built up a small following. It’s a modest way of self-promotion which, after all, is part of the publishing game. What’s the point of writing about our pioneers and historical events if there’s no one there to read them?
For the most part, it can be fun, requiring as it does little of the discipline necessary to researching and writing serious texts, and some of the comments are illuminating.
Read MorePart 2
As we’ve seen, in October 1920, Arthur, Adah and Stanley Halden appeared to have abandoned their Quesnel farm and left a number of outstanding debts around town. The biggest one, all of $1250, a large sum at that time, was a promissory note made out to their hired hand, David Arthur Clark. It was Clark who told those who asked that the Haldens had left for Spokane to attend Arthur’s brother’s funeral, but he’d had no word from them since.
