Black Ball Ferry Chinook was last word in comfort
A tribute to “the Queen Elizabeth of the inland seas” It’s hard to believe, today, that in 1946-47, Victorians were as interested in Washington’s newest car ferry as the citizens of Seattle. That’s when the M.V. Chinook was said to be the last word in Pacific Northwest commuter comfort and elegance. So proud of their new-born flagship were the directors of Puget Sound Navigation Co., the parent firm of Black Ball Transport, that they touted her as “the Queen Elizabeth of the inland seas”. The launching of the $2.5 million lady at Seattle’s Todd Shipyards, April 22, 1947, was a gala event. Victoria was represented by Mayor Percy George and members of the chamber of commerce along with officials of Ports Angeles and Townsend. Capt. Alex Peabody addressed the assemblage on behalf of the PSNC: “Permit me to say...
Read MoreHMCS Annapolis made waves for Reefs Society
HMCS Annapolis, an honoured name in Canadian naval history, was in the news in 2015. After successive challenges by The Save Halkett Bay Marine Park Society to prevent the sinking of the stripped-down destroyer escort as an artificial reef in Howe Sound, she was in fact sunk off Gambier Island. This is the second Canadian destroyer to bear the name of the river that runs through Nova Scotia’s fabled Annapolis Valley. The first Annapolis began her career as USS Mackenzie and was one of six of 50 WW1-era ‘four-stacker’ destroyers acquired by Great Britain from the U.S. under Lend-Lease then turned over to the Royal Canadian Navy. Commissioned in Halifax in September 1940, newly recommissioned HMCS Annapolis underwent refit (including removal of one of her four funnels) and strengthening after having spent 17 years in mothballs. Initially assigned to...
Read MoreB.C.’s first ‘lunatic asylum’ was a disaster
British Columbia’s first pioneer mental health facility opened in Victoria in the spring of 1876 in a former quarantine hospital on the west shore of the Inner Harbour. Just three and a-half years later, the ‘Lunatic Asylum’ was rocked by scandal. The superintendent admitted to wearing his patients’ socks but not their drawers! The Victoria Colonist expressed its “pain, surprise and indignation” that evidence “injuriously affecting the characters of the superintendent and matron of that institution…that ought to be the most perfect in its management of any in the province…” had come to light after apparently being ignored by the previous government. The matron, Mrs. Flora Ross, had complained of “a series of outrages [to quote the newspaper] that would have disgraced the veriest martinet that ever held authority”. Her charges included her having suffered “gross insults” from Supt....
Read MoreWhere did Canadian history go wrong?
You remember how it was in school: names, dates, events, all of them of long ago and far away and of no real interest. Which is precisely what’s wrong with the way we teach Canadian history in school, if you ask me. (They don’t, of course.) If children don’t engage with Canadian history, is it their fault? Or is it ours because we present it so poorly that Canadian history becomes, in fact, boring and dull? Several times I’ve been asked by teachers who think outside the prescribed curriculum to speak to their students. Now I’ve been speaking to adult audiences almost since I first became published. It comes with the job. But, speak to kids? For years, I resisted. I well remember how I hated my own schools days, how I rebelled against the regimentation, the learning by...
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