HMCS Sackville, Last of Canada’s Corvette Navy
HMCS Sackville
Anyone who knows anything about Canada’s naval contribution in the Second World War should be pleased to learn that one of our two surviving veterans is getting $3.5 in federal funding for “extensive repairs”.
HMCS Sackville is the last of the Royal Canadian Navy’s famous Flower-class corvettes and Canada’s oldest warship. She has been owned and maintained by the non-profit Canadian Naval Memories Trust since the 1980s and serves as a museum ship in Halifax, home port to most of the Canadian naval vessels which fought and won the Battle of the Atlantic.
Commissioned in December 1941, HMCS Sackville‘s active naval career was quite short; she was paid off in November 1944.
Canada’s fighting corvettes became legendary and have been termed unique—“born of particular necessity at a particular moment—nothing like [them] had ever been seen before, nothing quite like [them] will be seen again.”
No fewer than 43 Flower-class corvettes and revised Flower-class corvettes were built during the war and their contribution to Canada’s role in the North Atlantic earned them undying fame.
Now only HMCS Sackville survives and it’s paramount that she be well maintained for all time—ditto her only surviving wartime ‘sister,’ the Tribal-class destroyer HMCS Haida.
Fittingly, the latest repairs will be made in Halifax’s HMC Dockyard and, according to the news report, the memorial trust and the Dept. of National Defence are to “develop a long-term plan for the ship’s renovation”.
All of which suggests to me that HMCS Sackville has been allowed to moulder, no doubt because of the lack of adequate ongoing government funding over the years.
New James Bay Library
After a public campaign for suggested names, Victoria’s new James Bay Library branch has been christened in the tongue of the local Songhees and Esquimalt nations.
Of the 500 names submitted, more than a third were in favour of an Indigenous name.
That chosen was the name applied to the James Bay area by the original inhabitants, but it’s a tongue-twister.
It’s pronounced s-hweng-hwung-on-ha.
Mayor Lisa Helps admits the pronunciation is going to be problematic; she and council had to be coached from an audio file provided by Songhees elder Elmer George.
“Its [pronunciation is] actually not that hard,” she said after practising and she considers any adjustment by the general populace to be “part of reconciliation” between First Nations and non-Native cultures.
The city also named one of the library’s meeting rooms after Elmer Seniemten George for his efforts to preserve the Lekwungen language.
Mifflin Wister Gibbs
In another act of recognition, this one posthumous, the other meeting room was named for the city’s most notable black pioneer, Mifflin Wister Gibbs. He was the first black person to be elected for public office, to Victoria City Council in 1867, in B.C.
This past February, on Black History and Heritage Day, Parks Canada and the City of Victoria unveiled a plaque honouring Gibbs in Irving Park, also in James Bay, property once owned by Gibbs.
Mifflin Wister Gibbs deserves a full-length biography but, for today at least, I’ll simply note that he was born in Philadelphia in 1823, trained as a carpenter and became active in the abolish slavery movement.
In San Francisco he prospered as a merchant and founded California’s first black newspaper. In 1858, with the encouragement of Vancouver Island’s Governor James Douglas, he led 800 fellow blacks from the racially oppressive California to the British colony.
Again successful in business, he became active in community affairs and was elected to city council in 1867. This made him the first black person to hold public office in British Columbia.
None of this was enough for Gibbs, however; only two years later he returned to the U.S. Settling with his family in Arkansas he was elected a city judge—another ‘black’ first—and was later appointed consul to Madagascar.
Mifflin Wister Gibbs died in 1915; slightly more than a century after, this plaque has been placed. It’s a small and overdue tribute to one of our most remarkable pioneers.
Also on the Indigenous Front
There’s growing support in Victoria for an Indigenous Walk of Fame similar to Hollywood’s venerable Walk of Fame, the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame and Canada’s Aviation Walk of Fame.
The Indigenous Walk of Fame, according to Indigenous fillmaker Steve Sxwithul’tx’w, would celebrate First Nations artists in film and television. He noted that Hollywood’s star walk honours a single Indigenous actor, Jay Silverheels, wo long played the role of the Lone Ranger’s ‘faithful Indian companion,’ Tonto.
Among the names suggested to date: Chief Dan George (perhaps best remembered for his role in the Dustin Hoffman film Little Big Man); Adam Beech (Suicide Squad, Windtalkers); Graham Greene (Dances With Wolves, The Green Mile); Wes Studi (The Last of the Mohicans, Avatar); William Sampson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Outlaw Josie Wales) and Gordon Tootoosis (Legends of the Fall, Pocahontas).
Sxwithul’tx’w originally approached Duncan City Council with his proposal but he now thinks that Victoria would be a more appropriate home for the Indigenous Walk of Fame because it’s “a tourist city [and] in Lekwungen territory”. He also noted the capital’s proxity to Vancouver, ‘Hollywood North’.
He thinks the Walk would serve as an unique reconciliation initiative: “There’s nothing like this in North America. Nothing.”
He estimates the initial cost to be a rather modest $17,000 and suggests historic Bastion Square as the site of the Walk. Bastion Square is where the colony of Vancouver Island had its ‘police barracks’ (jail) and, later, the provincial court house. Many Indigenous people were tried and convicted here, several of them hanged.
At last report three city councillors had expressed themselves in support of the Indigenous Walk of Fame.
More about plaques
In July 2017, Edmonton police were investigating the theft of metal plaques honouring ‘miltary heroes and some of the grimmest battles from Canada’s history’. These included both world wars and a Victoria Cross, the British Commonwealth’s highest honour for bravery.
Why would anyone want to steal bronze, brass or copper plaques? For their scrap metal value, of course.
The 15 stolen plaques were leftovers from a former army base.
Only a day after the thefts were reported in the press police had recovered most of them. But they’d been so badly damaged by the thieves’ efforts to remove them that they can’t be re-installed. They were turned in by a scrap metal dealer; at last report, police were still looking for those responsible.
We Canadians have never been very good at honouring our heroes
Not in tangible ways, but we’re getting better at it. News reports of memorial services and other means of recognition are more frequent now than was long the case.
Last September, hundreds gathered in Victoria for the annual remembrance service for fallen police officers. No fewer than 120 officers have died in the line of duty around the province over the past 160 years.
As it happens, the first fallen officer and the most recent died while on duty in Victoria: Victoria Const. John Cochrane in 1859 and VPD Const. Ian Jordan on April 11, 2018, after being in a coma for 30 years. He was responding to a potential break and enter in the early hours of Sept. 22, 1987, when his vehicle collided with another VPD car and he was critically injured.
