Victoria’s Mayfair Mall: Brickyard to Boutiques
Good grief, has it really been that long since I was a kid, messing about in the old Baker Company brickyard? I was prompted to ask this of myself by the 50th anniversary of Victoria’s Mayfair Mall. You’d never know it today, that these acres of glittering glass and cinder block and parking on the eastern shoulder of Douglas Street, between Tolmie and Finlayson, were, for years, derelict–a wasteland of tumbled-down structures, clay piles and ponds inhabited by frogs and tadpoles, snakes and water weeds. Which is precisely what drew us kids to its barren landscape, those frogs Now, I’m not talking basketball-sized bull frogs but our own native species, vivid green and smaller than a Mandarin orange. Why? you ask. To catch and release them in our parents’ back gardens to eat the bugs. It was our childish...
Read MoreInfamous Chinese head tax got off to a slow start in British Columbia
Premier Christy Clark recently formally apologized to Chinese-Canadians on behalf of the B.C. government for the infamous $500 head tax and 100 laws, regulations and policies that discriminated against citizens and immigrants of Chinese descent since the province entered Confederation in 1871. Clark called the racism of past B.C. governments “a stain on our history. We cannot undo the past, but by acknowledging it, by apologizing for it, together we can ensure that we and our children learn from these mistakes and never ever make them again.” Chinese miner Ah Lock A century and a half ago, the Saltspring Island member of the House of Assembly for the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island, moved a motion to impose a $10 tax upon Chinese immigrants. To this, The British Colonist took exception and, in its...
Read MoreWorking on Pendray’s dairy farm in Saanich
Dairy farms and milk delivered in bottles (with their distinctive musical jingling against the wire baskets) is part of my DNA. As a Saanich lad, growing up beside Swan Lake, I was surrounded by family dairy farms. In fact, our back fence was of barbed wire because it was the southern boundary of Charlie Pendray’s farm. I think he called himself Swan Lake Dairy although his brother Tom Pendray, with the property next to his that wrapped around the northern end of the lake, may have done so. Or was Tom ‘s the Lakeside Dairy? (Obviously, I wasn’t always historically conscious.) At the foot of our street, and to the left, were the Black and McLean properties. The Blacks had long retired from active farming but their barn still stood, a favoured playground for us kids. John McLean, their...
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Victoria’s ‘Pampered’ Louis the parrot ‘postponed push for people’
Contrary to legend, his daily tot of brandy was for ‘medicinal purposes only’. One could write a book–someone probably has–about strange bequests. More than one last will and testament has bedeviled and bemused, and one in particular that intrigued Victorians for many years, was that of Miss Victoria Wilson. At the time of her death in 1949, she owned an old mansion on some of the primest real estate in downtown Victoria. Described as a “kindly if eccentric spinster,” she remembered the Royal Jubilee Hospital and the Red Cross Society in her will. And her parrot, Louis. A great photo of Louis the Parrott by, and courtesy of, the late Victoria Colonist photographer, Jim Ryan. Unfortunately, in the minds of some, the molly-coddled macaw came first He was to live out his life in the big house on Courtney...
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