A Salute to the Men o’ the Deep
Last week marked another Workers’ Memorial Day when we honour the too many 1000s of men and women killed or injured on the job.
Coincidentally, while researching my newest book about the coal mines of the South Wellington area, I found myself checking the Department of Mines’ Annual Reports for 1959 and 1960.
I was looking for something else altogether, but my attention was drawn by the workplace accident reports for both those years. Pages of them—more than 16,000 words in total—the equivalent of six weekly BC Chronicles!
What struck me most, besides the seemingly never-ending list of accidents and their multitude of causes, many of them fatal, was that 1959 and 1960 are within the lifetimes of many BCChronicles readers.
We’re not talking ancient history but within our own or our parents’ lifetimes. Somehow, that makes it more immediate and personal, at least for me.
Mining was, always has been, and still is a dangerous job. This week, the Chronicles will salute some of these mostly unsung men o’ the deep.
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Hi Tom:
I have been missing your columns in the Citizen of late and have not passed you walking along Koksilah Road when driving in to Duncan from Fairbridge.
We were stuck on our plantation in Thailand for an extra 5 months thanks to the pandemic and didn’t get back here until July 12th.
At any rate I was wondering if you may be writing anything up around Remembrance Day this year and if you wanted any information we have in the Fairbridge Chapel including plaques etc. We are going to be working over at the chapel most of this week after Tuesday as we have to clean the exterior of the clock tower. Give me an email or call (250 746-7519) or just pop by. I live in the old office building at 4718 Fairbridge Drive.
Ron
Hi, Ron:
Thought of you recently when filing some of my columns including the ones I did for last Remembrance Day. (I get waaaay behind sometimes).
Thanks to COVID the Chronicles were dropped from the Citizen after 23 years because of tanking advertising revenues.
So I’ve reinvented my column as http://www.CowichanChronicles.com; it’s much more of en e-zine than a blog with posts as long as 5000 words instead of the 1000 as in the paper. I publish weekly, on Thursday, just as the paper did when it dropped to a single issue a week.
Bottom Line: There will be my usual Remembrance Day special edition, but online, in November.
Because my website offers me almost unlimited scope I offer much more in the way of photos, graphics etc. than I could before, so I would be interested in doing something with the Fairbridge Chapel plaques, etc.
As you can see, email works best for me.
Please remind me in a few weeks of this conversation. I’m working 16-hour days and weekends so I’m going to put the onus on you to follow up.
In the meantime enjoy our beautiful weather. Cheers, TW
Love your articles.
Thanks, Rick. My subscription website, http://www.CowichanChronicles.com, sucks up most of my time and energy these days so I have difficulty in writing posts for twp.com, my free site. Hope you keep on reading, though. I will continue to add posts as I can. –TW
So do I (he said modestly). Thanks, Rick, please keep reading. You can also try my subscription site, http://www.CowichanChronicles.com for bigger and better posts. –TW