Events Archive

It’s Christmas time, 1943, in Ortona, Italy. Capt. William H. Melhuish of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada is writing a letter to his mother.

On May 23, 1914 a ship called the Komagata Maru—normally used for transporting coal—arrived at Vancouver and anchored in Burrard Inlet. She carried 376 Indians: 12 Hindus, 24 Muslims and 340 Sikhs, British subjects all, and people who had come to make a new life in Canada

The certainty of war in Europe in 1939 had an early effect, even in Vancouver, some 5,000 miles away from Berlin. The Page 1 headline in The Vancouver Sun for January 13 read: TWO GUNS TO BE PLACED AT FIRST NARROWS.

Thousands of people who see the dragon figurehead of the Empress of Japan in Stanley Park think it’s the real thing, but what you see in the park today is a fibreglass copy of the original, which—battered by the elements for 80 years—was tenderly restored by conservationists at Vancouver’s Maritime Museum….

The Vancouver Board of Trade marked with real enthusiasm the completion October 31, 1902 of the Pacific Cable, which in the words of the Province, was an “epoch-marking event in the history of the British Empire.” Vancouver would now be able to communicate instantly with places as far-flung as Great Britain and Australia over the 7,200 miles (11,500+ km) of the cable….