TW Paterson

Looking down into Richard III. Mine

Topographically, Big Sicker Mountain, so as to distinguish it from its immediate neighbour Little Sicker Mountain, is a 1700-foot peak between Duncan and Chemainus. It was the site of Vancouver Island’s greatest copper mining boom town at the turn of the last century. Although the excitement lasted only 10 years, a phenomenally rich mineral pocket yielded millions of dollars in copper, silver and gold, and spawned the development of three towns, two smelters, a railway, a tramway and the deep-sea port of Crofton.
You’d scarce know it today, however. But for its massive ore dump and the brick foundations of its powerhouse, Tyee Mine, the richest producer, has all but vanished. As has the Lenora Mine just down the hill to the west although you can still walk a short distance into a surviving shaft. Of the Richard III. up the mountain, a deep hole in the rock is all that shows, so fleeting is history.
It’s believed that at its height, about 1901-07, Mount Sicker’s two townships boasted a population of 2000 souls. There’s not a living soul there today. The mountain has been repeatedly logged over the past century and it’s highly popular with ATV-ers and target shooters, few of whom, it seems, have much interest in its colourful past.
They don’t know what they’re missing. I’ve been exploring Mount Sicker since 1978 because, despite those Cowichan Valley residents who insist “there’s nothing there,” I’m always finding something of interest and learning more about the mines’ and towns’ layouts. With the help of archival photos Jennifer and I have pinpointed the sites of numerous buildings at the Tyee and Lenora townsites, the most prominent of which is that of the Mount Sicker Hotel. Photos show it to have been a handsome two-storey structure with a hip roof. All that remains now, alas, are some rotting beams, broken bricks and galvanized flashings although some of its furnishings, such as its bar and bannister, were salvaged for use elsewhere and I have a chair from the dining room courtesy of George Compton, who lives immediately below the mountain. He and his brother “rescued” truckloads of rusty bits and other artifacts, back in the ‘50s.
The hotel’s where love-crazed miner Fred Beech tried to kill Mrs. Campbell, the widow who’d spurned his attentions, after he gunned down hotel Mount Brenton hotel proprietor Joe Bibeau. Why? Because Bibeau, his friend, tried to talk him out of it. After evading a posse for two days, Beech circled back to the hotel where Mrs. Campbell had been taken for safekeeping.  Beech drew her to an upstairs window by firing two shots with his Winchester from a distance of about 300 feet, then fired again, this time at her. She fainted and he, thinking he’d killed her, and seeing police charging from the hotel, turned his rifle on himself.
From the reports of the day and knowing the exact position of the hotel, I know where Fred Beech made his last stand. This, for me, is what gives history flesh and blood!
Back at the Tyee, you can stand directly atop the shaft that went down 1200 feet but which has been filled-in. This is where mine foreman Charlie Melrose plunged 300 feet to his death; when they recovered his body they found almost every bone to be broken but his face unmarked.
This is why we keep going back, why we keep looking, keep scratching, keep metal detecting. Treasure, to me, is finding an artifact with a story to tell. Last year, by the hotel, I found a prospector’s tool stash in a stump hole. Now, when I crack rock samples looking for signs of promising minerals, I use his small pick (repaired with a hammer handle) for the purpose it was intended.
Just 20 minutes from downtown Duncan by generally good gravel roads, Mount Sicker is on home turf. It’s like having one of Vancouver Island’s greatest ‘ghost towns’ for a backyard.

Well, Santa Claus (aka Peter Roosen and Guy Henry) may have been a week late but he (they) more than made up for it with the delivery, last week, of my ‘1911′ coal car. I put 1911 in quotes because it’s a hybrid of original parts salvaged from various Vancouver Island coal mines that, give or take, are of this vintage. They range from the Wellington Colliery to the Vancouver Slope to Extension and the rails are from the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway construction grade in the Alberni area.
I can’t thank Peter and Guy enough. They built it from scratch as a gift in recognition, they say, of my years of writing about and trying to preserve our mining and railway history in word and in photos. I’m truly humbled at their generosity–and absolutely delighted with what has to be one of the more unique yard ornaments on display in the Cowichan Valley.
Built to factory specs, the car’s eight feet long, four feet wide, weighs 1400 pounds and has a capacity of five tons. I do intend to ‘load’ it with coal but I’ll cheat with a false bottom, about a foot deep. I mean, really, five tons… So, should you see someone in a cowboy hat gathering chunks of coal at the South Wellington No. 10 or one of the other coal dumps in the Nanaimo area, you’ll know it’s me–and why!
And, this week, Jennifer and I squeezed in our first bushwhacking of the year with a four-hour visit to Mount Sicker’s Tyee and Richard III. mines. We’ve been to both so many, many times but we’re always drawn back. Because time was limited and our efforts with the metal detector unrewarding, we contented ourselves with–again–scouring the Tyee’s tailings pile in search of ore samples containing visible evidence of copper (chalco pyrite) and silver (galena). I don’t know how many rocks I’ve lugged home from Mount Sicker over the years. They’re in my museum room, the mud room and in the garden. They actually show best outdoors as, when wet, the various shades of green and turquoise literally leap out at you. Cool.

October 28th–January 8th.  I’ve been offline two months! I’ve committed the cardinal sin of blogging–total silence! No musings, no mutterings, no anything. I should be flogged…
Okay, I’m being facetious when I should be penitent. This blog is important to me. And it only works if I keep you, my readers, by posting new material, regularly, to justify your visiting twpaterson.com. So, to those of you who are still with me, my sincere apology and an equally sincere promise to do better from here in.
It was that damned 2012 Cowichan Historical Calendar, with its emphasis on Duncan, B.C.’s approaching centennial (Mar. 4, 2012), that I mentioned earlier. When I finally did get it through the press (I can’t remember a job so problematic since I began learning to print 40 years ago), I was so far behind in other work and so beat that it took weeks to shake myself off and get down to catching up again. Then it was Christmas/New Year. I guess it’s too late to tell a good ghost story for Halloween? Or pay my respects to Remembrance Day?
Okay, I’ll save the ghost story for another time. I do regret having to pass on Remembrance Day, however. It, in my mind, is the most significant day of the year. I say that because my family paid dearly in the world wars. Both my grandfathers came home, disabled, and Great Uncle Jim didn’t come home at all, from the First World War. And my father and two uncles served in the Second. I was the first of three generations who didn’t face the draft, who didn’t have to answer to God, King/Queen and Country. When my younger cousin Denny, whose family had moved from Nanaimo to Everett, WA, came of age, Uncle Sam called. And Denny went to Viet Nam.
But not me, prime cannon fodder though I was. And that’s why, for me, Remembrance Day is so important. Because of their sacrifices I didn’t have to serve. To not remember them would be to betray the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who gave their lives and who served their–our–country in the world wars, in Korea and in the many peacekeeping missions and Afghanistan since then. We owe them. Period. That said, I’ll be sure to pay them homage on this site in the future. (Busy and burned out or no, I did manage to write my 15th annual Remembrance Day supplement for the Cowichan Valley Citizen.)
Anyway, I’m back in the saddle again with a new year and a new slate for what I hope will be regular, entertaining and informative, postings. Please keep tuning in. –TW

Has it really been 3 weeks since my last posting? How time flies when you’re having fun. So they tell us. Actually, I’ve had to forgo blogging to meet other commitments, primarily my annual Cowichan Collector Calendar. This calendar required much more work than usual as I’ve tailored it to highlight Duncan’s Centennial. (Duncan’s been around longer than a century but 2012 marks its 100th year since incorporation.)
Meaning 40 hours’ researching in the Cowichan Valley Museum & Archives above and beyond the usual amount of setup necessary as, for every day of the year, I cite a news event from the past on that corresponding day. Believe me, there’s more work to that than you might think, although going through the back issues of The Cowichan Leader, particularly those of 1911 and 1912, was almost as much fun as it was labour. Just reading the old ads and letters to the editor can be a blast.
In fact, I defy any historical researcher to read old newspapers and resist being sidetracked by events and stories that have absolutely nothing to do with their research project but are so fascinating as to be irresistible. These nuggets, as I call them, are real treasure for me in particular, as I’ve amassed a fat file of new leads for my twice-weekly Cowichan Chronicles columns in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. Mind you, with at least a two-year inventory of story projects already on file, I hardly needed them.
Which reminds me of a conversation I had 15 years ago when I began writing what turned out to be a 10-year column with Nanaimo’s Harbour City Star. Within four months, a business associate warned me, I’d be “starved for ideas.” He meant that, in that short time, I’d have used up whatever material I had on hand and be flailing for column material. Not a chance, I replied, fully confident that, in four months, I’d have more material to work with than when I started.
And I was right. The simple secret: Research, research, research. This is, after all, what I do, do, do! The result, after much of a lifetime of researching, reading, interviewing, investigating, etc., and a sizable investment in my library and files, is a private archive that’s larger than those of many of the public institutions that I’ve used. I don’t say this to brag but to make a point. These are my tools as a writer/historian, such as any other kind of artisan needs and uses in their various lines of work. I use information to craft my books and columns. Luckily for me, much of it’s in the public domain and was long before the internet blew most copyright restrictions to smithereens.
Anyway, just a few more days on my calendar and I can lighten up in time for the Christmas craft sales when I do the bulk of my yearly selling pitch. Writers, you see, have to eat, too, eh. I mean, the classic artists’ fate of starving in a garret and not being ‘discovered’ until after death doesn’t work for me. I’m sure you’ll understand when I say that I much prefer to have my recognition (such as it is) and royalties (such as they are) in this lifetime. Cheers for now, TW.

Here’s yet another example of deja vu for you. It was reported this month that, 80 years after her loss from striking a rock in The Broken Group of islands in Barkley Sound, on Vancouver Island’s West Coast, the Dept. of National Defence is taking renewed interest in the wreck of the WWI Battle Class trawler, HMCS Thiepval.
Long the target of recreational skindivers, it’s now thought to be a hazard because of unrecovered live artillery shells and rifle bullets. What few people realize is that the lethal legacy of the wars of the 20th century is still with us the world over–and any ammo still littering the wreck of the Thiepval is but, as they say, a spit in the ocean…
For example, from time to time the media report yet another discovery of an unexploded bomb from the Second World War. Last summer, a 500-kilogram Allied bomb killed three German sappers at the construction site of a stadium in Goettingen. Apparently these deadly wartime leftovers are found regularly in Germany as they are from time to time in other European countries on both sides of the conflict.
The Germans, in fact, have 500 bomb disposal experts whose job it is to deal with such unexploded ordnance and it’s been predicted that they’ll have their hands full for another 40 years. “After the war, there was a building boom,” explained Volker Scherff, head of the Association of German Explosive Ordnance Specialists, “and buildings often went up in areas where there were bombs. These bombs are still there and when construction work is done today, the ground must always be actively searched for ordnance.”
Even Chancellor Angela Merkel was affected, in April 2009, when her apartment building had to be evacuated after the discovery of an unexploded Soviet bomb.
Canada wasn’t bombed from the air, happily, but that’s not to say that we haven’t had our own latent threats to life and limb, sometimes with fatal consequences. Because the sub-Arctic and North Pacific currents meet off  its west coast, Vancouver Island is said to be “a perfect drop-off for all Second World War mines and torpedoes still afloat”.
June 11, 1952, Royal Canadian Navy ordnance expert Lt.-Cdr. Ted Borradaille of Saltspring Island, died in the line of duty while disarming an anti-ship mine that had drifted ashore onto Bonilla Island, 90 miles from Prince Rupert.
From Ganges Harbour, he’d entered the RCNVR (Volunteer Reserve) in September 1940 as an acting lieutenant and was sent to Britain for training in mine disposal duties. Returned to Naden as a bomb disposal officer in 1942, he worked with a bomb disposal crew in Chilliwack before being assigned to Naval Headquarters from 1943 until war’s end when he demobilized. Continuing his connections with the navy, he trained annually at Naden and transferred to the RCN in June 1953 when he was assigned to the Ordnance School at Naden.
It was in this capacity that he found himself on Bonilla Island trying to destroy a beached mine when it prematurely exploded. His funeral drew 400 officers and ratings and a glowing tribute in the RCN magazine, The Crowsnest: “In the way of his dying, Lieut.-Cdr. Borradaille set us an excellent example. Calmly, precisely and carefully he faced great danger, as he had faced it so many times. None knew better than he the risk he ran, but he did his full duty in spite of it. May his example of calmness and fortitude inspire and strengthen us all.”
So many unaccounted-for ship mines were floating about on the high seas in the years immediately following the Second World War that many veteran divers were recalled by the navy. As an example of the challenges facing them, in the 1960s RCN frogmen had to remove 150-pound bombs from the shattered and shifting wreck of the USS Clare Lilley near Portugese Cove, Nova Scotia after cordite began washing ashore on nearby beaches.
Some wartime explosives are closer–much closer–to home and 40 years ago naval divers found themselves having to mount “a vigorous program of education on the dangers of souvenir war weapons such as grenades or shells and have defused hundreds of these lethal curios”.
The program obviously worked as, in June 1964, the following list of unauthorized ordnance surrendered to the RCN Diving Establishment at Colwood, B.C., was published: 44 four-inch recoilless rifle shells; eight 81-mm mortars; 30 heat shells; seven 12-pound armour-piercing shells; three semi-armour piercing shells; two smoke floats; one Asdic repeater target; one 11-pound bomb; 100 ‘small explosive devices’; one 100-pound incendiary bomb and two torpedoes!
The live, 11-pound bomb had been used for years as a lamp. The navy also intervened before a man cut the top off a live 400-pound ‘squid’ bomb for a birdbath!
Naval experts consider souvenirs to be the most dangerous of all explosives because their owners think them safe. Artillery shells, for example, may have had the percussion cap removed and the cartridge emptied but the explosive projectile may still be intact. Ironically, such ordnance couldn’t be legally confiscated (as of 1964, anyway), Lt.-Cdr. Arthur Rowse saying with a sigh, “I know of live hand grenades in a man’s home. He thinks they’re safe. I know they’re not. I can’t do anything about it because it’s perfectly legal to take the chance of blowing up yourself, your family and your house.”
“Explosives never deteriorate into something more safe. They’re unstable compounds to begin with and they break down into more unstable compounds.” In short, he had no sympathy for collectors of live or even questionable militaria: “They’re put on earth for only one purpose and that’s to kill. If you have or find anything, for God’s sake, call the Navy.”
(In my own experience, I remember poking inside two hand grenades my father had liberated during his navy days and mounted as doorstops for my grandparents. Disarmed, obviously.–TW)
The discovery of a working rocket launcher beside the Malahat Highway is the latest of a litany of such finds on Vancouver Island over the past 65 years.

Little did I realize it, lo those many years ago when first I set eyes on the semi-derelict Kinsol Trestle, that I’d one day find myself publicly championing its rescue from a government demolition order. Or that, six years later, I’d find myself acting as historical liaison to His Honour the Governor General of Canada during a rainy September visit to the Kinsol, ‘rehabilitated’ and open to the public as the crown jewel of the Cowichan Valley’s section of the Trans Canada Trail.

Governor General David Johnston greets school children on Cowichan Valley's historic Kinsol Trestle

But so it turned out and, Tuesday, in heavy showers, I joined the vice-regal entourage and Cowichan Valley Regional District board chairperson Gerry Giles as they hiked in from the south end (Shawnigan) parking lot. Not even the rain (which soon changed to brilliant sunshine) could dampen such an event.
Governor General David Johnson and his wife Sharon instantly proved themselves to be down-to-earth, charming and friendly. So much for the stereotypical stuffed shirts one normally associates with such high office, as they demonstrated so well when greeted by a handsome golden Labrador and scores of children from Discovery and Evergreen elementary schools.
The Johnstons were there as patrons of the Trans Canada Trail which really isn’t a trail as such–yet. In reality, it’s a system of trails, yet incomplete as it wends its way from B.C. to Newfoundland. Which was the whole point of Tuesday’s exercise, to promote the cause of connecting the dots in time to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017.
Cowichan’s miles of former Canadian Northern Pacific/Canadian National Railways grade, particularly the 614-foot-long Kinsol Trestle that towers the height of a 12-storey building over the Koksilah River, are among the national trails network’s most outstanding sections, of which we Cowichan Valley residents who fought to save the trestle are duly proud. We’ll be even more pleased when this section of the Trans Canada Trail is joined up with Greater Victoria’s Galloping Goose Trail (also built upon former railway grade). Then the existing Trans Canada Trail, again following the historic CnoP grade, is to carry on to the head of Cowichan Lake (Nitinat) and all the way to Alberni, Barkley Sound. From there it will break new ground, as required, to Cape Scott Provincial Park on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, for a length of 410 miles in total.
This will be a world-class destination trail for recreationists and railway history buffs from the world over when it’s completed.

Please bear with me. It’s that time of year again. You know, when, one day it’s searing hot (only a week ago–remember?), the next, someone turns a switch and–wham–it’s Fall. Autumn. The time of year that, besides putting me to work cleaning gutters, stacking firewood and all those good things associated with preparing for winter, I become reflective.
Is it just me, or is this a natural, yearly twinning of season and mood change prompted by the first falling leaves and the withering away of summer and all its happy associations of the beach, vacations, etc? As I, we, get older, I think this phenomenon becomes more pronounced.
For me, summer’s end always began with the week of the PNE. When I was of school age, radio and TV coverage of the Vancouver extravaganza, the biggest of the fall fairs, was the death knell for summer vacation, the cold-water-in-my-face-notice that my time was running OUT. Up until then I’d been so busy enjoying my summer freedom (I’m referring to my pre-teens) that I’d been able to block from mind that the clock was ticking, that every day was bringing me one step closer to the misery of school.
But I don’t have to worry about that today. Instead, I find myself looking backwards in time almost with a sense of wonder at the many and seemingly ever-increasing changes that have occurred since I arrived on this mortal plane. Actually, a request to speak on the subject of heritage at a dinner celebrating the 125th anniversary of St. Francis Xavier in Mill Bay, a subject to which I shall return in greater length in a future posting, set me in retrospective mode even before the turn in the weather this year.
Coincidentally, an article in the Victoria Times-Colonist about the introduction of oleo margarine and a shuffling of my files turned up a list I’d begun of some of life’s passing fancies. Now, admittedly, I’m out of touch with some aspects of our modern society and living habits so some of the items I’m about to mention may still be with us, perhaps in some other guise. Those readers with grandchildren will probably be better able to judge in this department.
I’ll begin with a small highlight of my earliest years, gifts that came in cereals and bubble gum cards. It’s interesting to note that the early, original baseball cards have become highly collectible and extremely pricey. Who knew?
I believe the yo-yo is still with us but cap guns, at least those using real exploding caps of gunpowder, surely are no longer considered safe for children, let alone firecrackers. I guess BB guns are a thing of the past, too, although air-powered rifles with considerably greater and deadlier ‘firepower’ can be had in most sporting goods departments. I don’t suppose they make model airplanes of balsam any more either. I’m referring to ones that you launched by hand or powered with miniature gas engines, not the more elaborate and expensive radio-controlled models of today.
As for soap box racers made of scraps of lumber, wire and wheels recycled from a wagon or such, forget it! No foot-peddle-power for today’s kids who start, almost from toddler stage, on mini-motorbikes and ATVs. In my day, we progressed from wagons and tricycles to single- (at best, three-) speed bicycles by high school age.
And last week’s Cowichan Exhibition reminded me that the circuses aren’t anything like they used to be. We still have carnies with their rides and games as we did back when, but every year or so while I was growing up in Victoria, a real circus with live, ‘wild’ animals came to town. The one that sticks out most in my mind, probably because I knew his name from the movies, was the Clyde Beatty Show. It was bigger and better than most, at least of those that I was privileged to attend, and I well remember peddling from Saanich to the fairgrounds on Esquimalt Road to watch the roustabouts erect the enormous tents, then returning in the evening with my parents to see the great man himself, dressed in khaki fatigues and armed with only a whip, step into the cage with the lions and tigers. Then, from my seat high in the bleachers, holding my breath in awe as the trapeze artists did their magic on ropes and swings high overhead. By far the best, of course, for a child, were the clowns.
But traveling circuses, those with animal acts, have come under the fire of animal rights activists in recent years, as have rodeos. As an adult, of course, I can see that life for animals in cages and always on the move is  cruel. But when you’re a kid…
The memories roll by: Of milk in bottles that jingled as they were delivered to your door; of scooping corn syrup for your pancakes from a can with a spoon; of the last of the ice boxes as refrigerators became the norm; of Mom graduating from her wood stove to an electric model, from a wringer washer to an automatic, from a clothesline to a drier. Of Dad no longer having to stoke a wood furnace; of me not having to haul and stack mill slabs that, even with gloves, somehow always managed to sliver your hands. Surely few men or women of that era mourn these changes in their daily lives!
And no more Watkins or Raleigh Man, no more Chinese Vegetable Man, no more Ice Man, no more Milk Man, no more Ice Cream Man.
Mind you, no more strap in school, either. Now there’s progress for you. Too bad it didn’t come in time for me.
But I’ve rambled enough. It must be that time of year.

As must be apparent to readers by now, I like to use time lead-ins by drawing parallels between past and present, as I did with this historical flashback…
In January, a China-bound freighter was forced to put in at Ladysmith so that its cargo of uranium concentrate, several drums of which had shifted in stormy seas, could be examined. This isn’t the only time in B.C.’s history that dangerous cargo and heavy weather have challenged ships’ crews.
For years, the Royal Canadian Navy dumped obsolete munitions in 6000 feet, 200-odd miles off Vancouver Island’s west coast, latterly using civilian crews to man its naval auxiliary vessel, CNAV Laymore. In June 1965 the navy refuted an anonymous informant’s charge that the 935-ton ship was unfit for such duty, saying that she was halfway through a refit to equip her for her new duties as a scientific vessel with the Pacific Naval Laboratory. As her engines weren’t yet functional, she and her cargo of aging high-explosives would be towed to the dumping grounds.
“The Laymore is the only ship we can use that has a proper hold to carry the ammunition, and she can use her electric winches to lift it over the side and lower it almost to surface level–then drop it a ton at a time. She has been doing our dumping (every three years or so) for many years.”
That was on June 1, 1965. Seventeen days later, HMCS Laymore was again in the news, bold black headlines proclaiming, “Seamen survive 25-foot-waves, 70 mph winds; four hours of terror on raft; explosives ship still adrift off West Coast.”
By then her 17-man crew had been safely removed from their rubber life raft but Laymore, with 149 tons of munitions in her hold, remained adrift with a jammed rudder. She’d almost foundered in a 70-mph gale that snapped the 1300-foot towline connecting her to the naval auxiliary tug Clifton when about 35 miles southwest of Tofino.
When 48 pallets of ammo shifted, Capt. John Francois, 59, a veteran naval officer of the Second World War, ordered his crew to abandon ship at 5:15 p.m. After four terrifying hours adrift in 25-foot waves, they were picked up (after three tries) and the naval tug Heatherton was standing by Laymore until she could take her in tow. The single casualty among her crew was First Officer Leonard Walsh who injured his back while conducting a final survey of her decks to see that all the men were accounted for.
“We rolled the raft over the side of the ship and pulled the pin which automatically inflates it,” Capt. Francois told reporters. “The raft was still secured to the ship when we jumped. There was no panic. When they were told to jump–they jumped.
“And nobody missed the raft. I wanted to be the last man to go but I was pushed in second last. Everybody was soaking wet and it was damn cold. We were all wearing life-jackets, and were in sight of a ship during the whole four hours. [But)] the rescue was damn near impossible. We were considering the possibility of riding out the storm all night on the raft.”
They’d never been alone, the Clifton and the destroyer escort HMCS Mackenzie standing by after making three unsuccessful attempts to pick them up. To calm the seas, Mackenzie dropped an oil slick.
In another interview, Capt. Francois described his crew’s conduct as magnificent. “There was no hint of panic although we were all pretty scared. She (the Laymore) was going over between 60 and 70 degrees when we jumped.”
He’d been too concerned with his ship foundering, then having to deal with abandoning ship, to worry about her cargo, he said upon his arrival, still shaking, in HMC Dockyard. “She was going over so far and we had no way of controlling her. I don’t know enough about explosives to say how dangerous it was or what the possibilities of an explosion were. I just knew we had to get off before she went under.”
During the Second World War he’d gone over the side amid exploding depth charges in mid-Atlantic when HMCS Saguenay lost her stern in a collision. “I thought that was bad but last night was worse. The worst night I’ve ever put in since going to sea more than 40 years ago.”
When a dock worker shook his hand and said he was glad that he’d returned safely, Francois replied, “Damn right, so am I.”
“You’re safer carrying that stuff than you are crossing Douglas Street on a Friday night,” pooh-poohed crew member and Rocky Point munitions handler B.J. Harford. “But those waves were pretty high and she was rolling terribly. I tell you, the greatest sight I ever saw in my life was the Clifton when she picked us up,” around 9 o’clock.
Crewman Curly Morgan, with 12 years’ sea experience, was looking forward to a hot bath and some sleep. He said he’d seen worse seas–“but never with a cargo like that on board”. To him, the 25-foot-high waves had “looked like a hundred feet” high.
The munitions, from the Rocky Point Magazine, consisted mainly of anti-submarine mortar bombs, fuses for three- and four-inch naval guns, obsolete fuses and some demolition charges. Speaking for the navy in response to accusations that sending an unpowered and undermanned Laymore to sea with a cargo of high explosives was “a damned disgrace–nobody in their right minds would ship 200 tons of TNT on a ship like the Laymore unless it had its own power,” Capt. R.H. Chicken declared, “The Laymore’s still afloat, isn’t she? She hasn’t blown up yet. People have the strangest ideas about ammunition. If they would stop and think with what force a shell leaves a gun they would realize that it takes quite a force to make one explode. The explosives on the Laymore were absolutely safe and, had the storm not come up, would have been dumped by now without harm.”
“The navy has a lot of questions to be asked on this one,” retorted a critical retired officer, “and I don’t think they have the answers.”
None of those questions and answers he had in mind dealt with the practice of using our Pacific doorstep to dispose of expired ordnance that possibly included mustard gas and phosgene, a practice long conducted by military forces around the world.
HMCS Laymore, towed back to port and her cargo restored to the ammo lockers at Rocky Point, returned to full service under her own power until decommissioned. Then 32-years-old, she was sold for scrapping in 1976. The issue of which lethal armaments lurk, and precisely where, off Vancouver Island’s west coast was revived as recently as 2005.

Well, so much for my comments to date–the good, the bad and the trash deposited by people wanting to hitch a free ride for their political mumblings, sports trivia, unintelligible gobbledygook and spam. I’ve cleaned house. Ruthlessly.

To those of you have been so kind as to acknowledge what I am trying to achieve with this blog, to offer me suggestions and/or constructive criticisms,  I am most appreciative. As for those who are out to piggyback or to hijack or to sabotage other people’s work, a pox on the lot of them!

Now, I’ll try again with a clean slate.  Please feel free to comment as you will. All I ask is that you have something to say that’s worth your trouble and mine. And if it’s criticism, please be, well, gentle!  Thank you, TW.

Rain or shine, there’s something satisfyingly peaceful about Protection Island. With its panoramic sea views, generous green reserves, public waterfront access, and traffic all but limited to motorized golf carts, residents literally leave the madding world–in full view–on the Nanaimo shore behind them. The island gives a visitor every impression of being a commuter’s dream come true.
All of which makes it so much more difficult for one to wrap one’s mind around the fact that, at least three times in its recorded history, Protection Island has been the scene of tragedy and violent death. Its Gallows (originally Execution) Point takes its name from the fact that two Indian murderers were hanged there in 1853. Sixty years later, just offshore in the same immediate area, the ill-fated dynamite carrier S.S. Oscar ruptured her innards in an explosion that damaged much of downtown Nanaimo. Miraculously, there was neither loss of life nor serious injury.
And it was at Gallows Point, near today’s lighthouse, that the New Vancouver Coal Co. (later the Western Fuel Co.) had its Protection Island shaft, 1890-1938. Linked underground (and underwater) to the No. 1 Esplanade Mine and an air shaft on Newcastle Island, its miners could hear steamships as they passed overhead. Years ago, one of them told me that it was just like in the movies, when a destroyer passed over a hiding U-boat, its churning propellers chilling the hearts of those who waited for the depth charges that were sure to follow. Such may have been the case for submariners; for Nanaimo miners, it was almost a reassuring sound, one by which they could tell the time without a watch, by identifying the regular sailings of the CPR’s Princess boats.
The two mines and their air shaft straddled an amazing underground network that extended for miles under the harbour and tapped both the shallower Douglas and the Newcastle coal seams. This was good business for the coal company but meant tough, tight working conditions for miners following the snaking, thinner Newcastle seam.
Like all Nanaimo coal mines, there were more than harsh working conditions to be endured underground. Danger of explosion, fire, cave-in and poison gas were constants that miners and their families had  to take as their lot in life. None of them could have foreseen the circumstances that, at 7:10 on the morning of Sept. 10, 1918, saw16 men killed instantly when the elevator cage in which they were riding plunged 550 feet to the bottom, “cutting through 12-inch timbers as though they had been matchwood,” and splintering almost at the feet of 96 of their workmates who had safely descended minutes before, and who, alarmed by the roar of the descending cage, thought that the whole mine was caving in. Of all the terrors to be faced underground, this was so out of the blue that it stunned the community.
Reported the Nanaimo Free Press on its front page the next day: “It was late last evening before the final tally of the killed…was completed, considerable difficulty having been experienced in identifying some of the bodies of the victims, owing to the fact that they were so terribly mangled that the barest clues had to be accepted as evidence of identification. For quite a long while it was believed that there had been 17 victims of the accident, but fortunately this proved not to be the case and the list of dead remains at 16 who have been identified…”
Killed were: Joseph Turner, James Bond, William Blinkhorne, Rathom Maisuradse, Robert Kelly, John Rollo, Augusto Eussa, M. Eussa, Robert McArthur, David Eddy, Joseph Bonak, Joseph Sturma, Caleb Price, Angelo Sedola, John Kernahan and Lionel Barlow. All but four were married and, in total, they left 42 children.
The cage carried 16 men at a time. Six times, the elevator had safely delivered its human cargo of the morning shift after having carried the night shift to the top. For the remaining men of the morning shift of Sept. 10th, the seventh time was anything but lucky. In the terrifying moments that immediately followed, those miners who’d already been lowered had retreated from the area at the bottom of the shaft in the fear that “the entire roof of the mine was caving in , such a roar did the cage make in its descent, and such a deluge of broken timber and other material did it bring down with it…”
Obviously, the hoisting cable, said to be only three years old, had snapped, the result, laboratory tests confirmed, of its exposure to the salt air.
Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011, under a blazing hot sun made bearable by a cool breeze from off the water, the Protection Island Historical Society hosted the 1st Annual Memorial and Dedication Service to the 16 lost miners. At their museum, formerly a lighthouse, at Gallows Point, they gave several ‘songs of the working men’ and a beautiful solo rendition of Amazing Grace. Between, the names of the 16 miners, their nationalities, their ages and family status were read out in succession. A lady in the audience later told me that it was all she could do to keep from crying.
Then they unveiled a handsome sign commemorating the 1918 tragedy. All said, it was a moving event, extremely well presented and intended to be an annual affair such as the Joseph Mair Memorial held each year in Ladysmith.

The photo shows Robert McArthur’s pocket watch, stopped at 7:10 a.m., about the time the elevator carrying him and 15 workmates plunged hundreds of feet to the bottom of the mine, killing them all.