Working 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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Cumberland’s Chinatown gone but not forgotten
The locals laughed when American collectors began hauling away bottles by the truckload… Here’s irony for you. Fifty years after collectors razed Chinatown to the ground in search of bottles, pottery and curios, the Village of Cumberland is out to recreate some of its Asian heritage with Coal Creek Historic Park. According to Drew Penner in the Comox Valley Echo, “The 40-hectare property containing Chinatown and No. 1 Japanese Town was given to the Village of Cumberland by Weldwood Canada in 2002, with the stipulation that a covenant be put in place to protect its heritage and ecology.” Talk about locking the barn door after the horse has bolted! Let me put it this way, with a column I wrote in the Cowichan Valley Citizen in 2002: Although it’s now a matter of history, Cumberland’s Chinatown lives on in...
Read MoreCapital Iron & Metals was a marine Mecca
Ah, the good old days when I had my first–my only–real job in the editorial room of what was then The Daily Colonist. God, how I hated it. But that’s another story for another time… Several years ago, I attended the film, The Shipsinkers, a just-released documentary that followed a team of Canadians who contract to sanitize and sink ships as artificial reefs. (We have evidence of their work in Nanaimo waters.) Much of the film dealt with their stripping-down of the decommissioned New Zealand frigate Wellington alongside a shipbreakers’ dock prior to giving it a Viking’s funeral. What memories that brought back to me of Capital Iron & Metals on Store Street beside Victoria’s Inner Harbour As coincidence would have it, the very next day I found myself sitting beside Ron Greene, Capital Iron’s former owner, in the...
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