Vancouver’s Robert Watt, a stained-glass enthusiast, says that if you stand in Holy Trinity Cathedral in New Westminster on a clear, early morning you will see the three great stained glass windows there on the east wall behind and above the altar begin to glow. “The window on the left as you face the altar is a memorial to the late Dr. A. W. Sillitoe…
Read More![Chinatown [Image: Vancouver Courier]](https://vancouverhistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/chinatown-800x445.jpg)
Largely forgotten since his death in 1971, Wong Foon Sien was perhaps the most influential person in Vancouver’s Chinatown, if not in Canada, in the easing of restrictions of the immigration laws. In the late 1940s, the Chinese in Canada were allowed to bring in from China their spouses, unmarried children under 21…
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The late actor Victor McLaglen (an Oscar winner for The Informer, and an unforgettable foe of John Wayne in The Quiet Man) was once a professional boxer. In fact, he once fought world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in a bout in Vancouver!
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It turns out there are lots of performers, past and present, born in Metropolitan Vancouver, who have made their mark on TV and in the movies. (One of B.C.’s most famous names is Pamela Anderson, but she was born in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, so she doesn’t qualify for this list.
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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.
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