Author: Vancouver History

It’s a cold misty morning in November 1936. On the tarmac at Vancouver airport sits a motley collection of small aircraft—a couple of Fairchild biplanes, a Golden Eagle, two Fleets, two Gypsy Moths. Standing by them, shivering in the coolness and looking up into the sky, seven women wait.

Lauchlan Hamilton was the CPR land commissioner who, starting in 1885 as a young man of 33, surveyed much of Vancouver and named many of its streets. (A plaque commemorating his work is on the building at the southwest corner of Hamilton and Hastings, once a bank.)….

What an astonishing life he led. We can be absolutely sure of just a handful of facts. He was born in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia on June 20, 1909 and died in Vancouver October 14, 1959. He claimed to have been, in his life before film, a police constable, sanitation engineer, treasure hunter, sheep castrator, shipmaster for hire, fisherman and soldier.

If you live in British Columbia you’ve been looking at the work of Francis Mawson Rattenbury all your life. He was an architect, a supremely confident man in his youth, a hugely successful man in his middle life but, finally, a pathetic victim of a famous crime….

Bill Miner, the man who committed Canada’s first train robbery, was unfailingly polite as he stuck up his victims. That earned him a description as “the gentleman bandit,” and it may have been his success in escaping prison that led to his being remembered as the Grey Fox…