Cape Palmerston Named For Irish ‘Firebrand’
Midway between Quatsino Sound and Cape Scott is Cape Palmerston. Mount Palmerston and Palmerston Creek are also to be found in Rupert District, the area encompassing Vancouver Island’s northern tip. They take their name from Henry John Temple (1784-1865), third Viscount Palmerston “in the peerage of Ireland, G.C.B. and K.G.,” statesman, orator and British prime minister. For much of his public career he served as foreign secretary and played a key role in British policy. Lacking in personal diplomacy A diplomat on the international stage, he was known privately as ‘firebrand’ Palmerston for his quick temper which made him numerous enemies abroad and at home. His “self-asserting character, brusqueness of speech, and interference in foreign affairs, were little calculated to soften party animosity in England, while his arbitrary manner won him foes abroad. “Yet withal he was a national...
Read MoreMemoirs The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Was it Hallmark Cards that used this line as their sales motto? The gift I have in mind is of far, far greater value and lasting meaning than any greeting card. It’s one I’ve known about for years. I became aware of it as both a writer/historian, and in my other life as a commercial printer/publisher. Over 25-odd years, I turned from printing business cards, office stationery and the like to specializing in an area where my journalistic skills were called into play, the printing of books, many of them—indeed most—telling the clients’ life stories. I’m referring to family histories, autobiographies, memoirs, life histories, reminiscences, whatever you want to call them. Genealogy has become a popular phenomenon for family researchers and historians, both on hobby and professional levels. But a family tree goes only so far. Where’s the flesh...
Read MoreGreat Fraser River Flood, 1948
Hopefully, the worst is over in this year’s flooding in the Fraser Valley. Happily, the damage done to date hasn’t come even close to that during the crisis of the spring of 1948 when many of British Columbia’s rivers ran wild. From Prince Rupert on the coast eastward through Prince George to the Alberta border, and all the way south to Vancouver, rampaging rivers, fed by snow-melt, threw off hastily-erected bonds of sand and gravel and drove hundreds of refugees before them. Despite these efforts homes, farms and businesses had to be abandoned as thousands of acres vanished beneath seas of mud amid early reports of two fatalities. Prince Rupert was besieged by a rising Skeena River, Terrace was cut off from the outside world when its highway and railway links were washed away, and residents of Remo, Usk...
Read MoreLaurel Point Environmental Clean-Up Long Overdue
An environmental clean-up program that could cost as much as $25 million is about to be launched to remove a century’s worth of industrial contamination at Victoria’s Laurel Point. The City of Victoria’s share is about 10 per cent of that budget for remediating the point’s park after the work is done. It’s known that the toxic stew left behind by previous owners includes metals, petroleum hydro-carbons, chlorophenols and polychlorinated biphenals (the notorious PCBs). The contaminated soil will be removed and replaced with clean fill, both to be carried to and fro by barge. The project, expected to take up to 18 months, is set to begin in September. Today’s Laurel Point, the site of a luxury hotel, is nothing like it was when Jacob Sehl bought it as “a barren rocky spot” in Victoria’s Inner Harbour. There, where...
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