An Awful Accident to a Railway Train on the Union Colliery Line
Six Men Reported to Have Met Instant Death– the Wires Down
Such were the headlines of the Victoria Daily Times, Aug. 17 1898…
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One of the benefits of being a regularly published writer is that one automatically becomes a ‘destination’. By this I mean, I rarely know who my readers are but they know me, and how to contact me.
And when they reach out it sometimes becomes a gift—more grist for my mill.
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For months now we’ve been watching the drawn-out demise of Canada’s oldest corporation, the Hudson’s Bay Co.
Major department stores have been failing in recent years; companies we grew up with, trusted and patronized while eagerly awaiting the latest catalogue in the mail from Eaton’s, Woodward’s, Sears and the Bay, to name the four biggest.
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(I originally wrote this touching wartime reminiscence for the Cowichan Valley Citizen in 2005, the Year of the Veteran, with the help of the late Jean Phillips of the Royal Canadian Legion, Cowichan Branch 53.)
The BC Chronicles rarely strays beyond our geographic borders but I believe Remembrance to be universal. Speaking is the late John Cannon of Duncan, B.C.
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(Conclusion)
He was barely middle-aged, this man of iron will, stamina and religious zeal. But he’d challenged his health so many times and now he was weighed down by sorrow. His closest friends noticed that he seemed to have aged perceptibly, and at least one of them expressed fear for his life.
None could foresee that, after all he’d done for others, Henry Irwin was already running out of time. His premature passing remains one of the sadder ironies of our history.
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(Part 3)
Was there ever a bigger heart than that of pioneer missionary Henry “Father Pat” Irwin?
A man who did nothing by halves—he only gave his all.
What bitter irony that, at the moment of his greatest joy, he should be struck by double tragedy.
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(Part 2)
As we saw last week, a young Henry Irwin had, as his biographer Anne Mercier wrote in 1909, “laughingly declared his intention of choosing a cold climate and being a missionary there; and he...fulfilled this intention by choosing British Columbia as the province, and New Westminster the diocese, where he would begin work.
“The life of a missionary priest in Canada amongst settlers is not often an eventful one. It generally presents a record of hard, monotonous work like that of a poor priest in a scattered agricultural parish in England. There are, however, some points of difference...”
So wrote, in 1909, The Right Reverend John Dart, D.D., Bishop of New Westminster and Kootenay, in his preface to Mrs. Jerome Mercier’s forthcoming book, Father Pat:
A Hero of the Far West.
(Conclusion)
“My conscience is clear. It was no fault of mine for I did all that I should have done. The lights were on and the gates were locked.”
So said bridge tender Thomas Dodson, four days after one of B.C.’s worst public transit disasters in history, third only to the collapse of Victoria’s Point Ellice Bridge on May 26, 1896, and a collision between a railway car and a streetcar in November 1909 that killed 15.
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(Part 1)
Such was one of the horrific headlines of Vancouver’s The World newspaper, Nov. 10, 1916.
Beneath the page-width banner, FOURTEEN KILLED IN B.C.E.R. WRECK, startled readers were informed that a “motor stage,” as multi-passenger forerunners to buses were defined a century and more ago, had plunged into the Fraser River with a load of passengers.
It’s one of B.C.’s worst public transit disasters in history, third only to the collapse of Victoria’s Point Ellice Bridge on May 26, 1896, and a collision between a railway car and a streetcar in November 1909 that killed 15.
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For years in a previous lifetime I spelunked on weekends. In other words, I and friends explored caves, small, large, often wet and dirty, but sometimes breathtaking.
Which probably accounts for my particular interest is this legend of a lost cave as told by Rev. William Henry Collison, one of B.C.’s legendary missionaries among coastal First Nations. He tells the story in his fascinating memoir, In the Wake of the War Canoe (edited and annotated by Charles Lillard).
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Today’s so-called ‘war on drugs’ has an interesting parallel in history. In 1917, after a contested and controversial referendum, Prohibition was declared and, overnight, Canada Dry became more than a popular soft drink.
Officially, at any rate. In practice it was more a case of business as usual, despite the efforts of police.
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It’s interesting to speculate as to how many ways there are to turn a dishonest dollar. There must be as many variations to the old shell game as there are operators, and B.C. has known its share of these shady types.
Almost a century ago, Jacob Jacobsen (if that was his real name) earned his niche in provincial criminal lore when, under the alias John Hellsing, he worked a novel dodge on a Victoria realtor. His was, as a newspaper reported put it, a “smooth scheme,” and one not without its charm if something less than original.
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It was a colourful career that Thomas Herbert Murphy reflected upon in the summer of 1930. A lifetime that had been seen him in the mixed roles of sailor, blackbirder, prospector and Justice of the Peace.
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It’s so easy to just go with the obvious, to accept old newspaper accounts at face value. After all, the story is exciting enough that others have done it before you, so why look a gift horse in the mouth?
Heck, I’ve done it many times!
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Everyone has seen the story in the news: B.C. Ferries has contracted to spend billions—billions—of dollars, building new ferries in China.
The only surprise is China; we’ve been buying ferries from European countries for years.
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So soon we forget; it’s almost part of the Canadian character, it seems.
How many times have I encountered cases of true heroism, often to the point of supreme sacrifice, during my extensive historical research. But even war heroes come and go in memory; civilian heroes rising to the call at home and in peacetime rarely rate more than a momentary ripple.
Monuments? Hardly. Immortalized in school textbooks? Not a chance.
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“With her holds full of water and possibly abandoned by the underwriters, the 10,000-ton American freighter Golden Harvest is lying at the mercy of North Pacific waves, a hoped-for harvest of the natives living along the rim of the inner Aleutian Islands and the bleak Alaska coast when the seas break her up and distribute the cargo remaining in her holds along the beaches of the northern coast...”
It wasn’t often that the mighty steam tug Salvage King had to admit defeat. For 15 years her name achieved almost legendary status in B.C. maritime circles—as fine a working lady as ever secured a bowline.
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The date: Mar. 4, 1910.
The site: Rogers Pass.
The toll: 62 railway workers swept away or buried alive.
The legacy: the worst avalanche disaster in Canadian history.
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(Conclusion)
Last week, we ended the first instalment with the investigation into what was suspected to have been a bomb aboard CP Air 21 underway...
By this time the on-site examination of the wreckage was declared to be completed upon removal of items of interest for laboratory examination. These included as many pieces of the tail section as could be found having been transported for re-assembly to a vacant hangar at the Vancouver airport.
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