Events

April 26, 2021, marks Vancouver’s 135th birthday. On that day 135 years earlier, the little sawmill community of Granville was reborn as the brand new city of Vancouver.
The story has often been told how the Canadian Pacific Railway chose to locate its Pacific terminus at Granville instead of Port Moody in return for a large land grant from the provincial government.

Ernie Fladell died in Lions Gate Hospital on Friday, Dec. 8, aged 81. Many Vancouverites have never heard of him, even when he was brightening their lives year after year. Not many others have done so much for this town’s performing arts—and for its residents—as Ernie achieved….

There weren’t many automobiles in Vancouver in 1907 (a five-minute film taken along several downtown streets this year shows precisely one), but there were enough for someone in the Vancouver office of the Imperial Oil Co. to decide that the usual method of fueling them at the time—carrying a sloshing bucket full of gasoline up to the vehicle and pouring it through a funnel into the tank—was somewhat dangerous.

Vancouver was incorporated in 1886.

What else was happening that year outside the city? Well, the first CPR passenger train from the east pulled into Port Moody on July 4. (The first passenger train into Vancouver will arrive in May of 1887.)

It’s October 1, 1940 and Province photographer Claude Dettloff is standing on Columbia Street at 8th Street in New Westminster, his press camera up to his eye, preparing to take a shot. He’s focusing on a line of hundreds of men of the B.C. Regiment marching down 8th to a waiting train. Soldiers of the Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles are marching past. Suddenly, in the view-finder, Dettloff sees a little white-haired boy…

If you were here on March 6, 1945, you will remember the waterfront explosion of the 10,000-ton freighter Greenhill Park, easily the most spectacular and disastrous event in the port’s history…..

A new era in rail travel in Canada began April 24, 1955. The Canadian Pacific Railway introduced The Canadian, an “ultra-modern, lightweight, highly attractive stainless-steel streamlined train.” The train would offer the world’s longest dome ride: 2,881.2 miles. (4,637 k/m).

In 2004 Eric Daichi Ishikawa, one of the students taking part in that year’s Historica event (in which students from elementary schools all across Canada prepare historical exhibits on topics of their choice), assembled an illustrated report on the June 17, 1958 collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge.

Was Canada’s national anthem written in Vancouver? No. To get the facts, come back with us to a gloriously sunny day in July, 1908 in Quebec City. Brigadier-General Lawrence Buchan was in command of the garrison at Quebec, at the head of 12,000 troops taking part in ceremonies…

In 1997 Lorne Findlay, the man standing by that beautifully restored 1912 REO Special, made an astonishing journey: he drove the car right across Canada! With him was writer John Nicol.

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….

On May 28, 1886, Vancouver’s first fire department was formed. Sixteen days later, the little city burned to the ground. In the 45 minutes it took for the town to burn that day, Volunteer Hose Company No. 1 was helpless—it had no fire engine. City council had ordered equipment from the John D. Ronald Co. of Brussels, Ont., but it hadn’t arrived yet. The two dozen volunteers were equipped with nothing but axes, shovels, buckets and enthusiasm. Sadly, it wasn’t enough….

“Imagine,” says the Vancouver Historical Society, “seeing King George VI and Queen Elizabeth being driven down Georgia Street in 1939 as thousands line the sidewalks and cheer . . . and all in colour!” That’s just one of the rare chunks of film shown February 22 at the Vancouver Museum. Colin Preston (left), the CBC’s Vancouver archivist, has a fine collection of film clips from the past, so this was one of the VHS’s more enjoyable events of the year….

The 1951 census showed that Metropolitan Vancouver had a population of 584,830, just barely squeaking past 50 per cent of the province’s total of 1,165,200. These figures are a reminder of how rapidly the city’s suburbs have grown since 1951, when the population of the city totaled nearly 60 per cent of the metropolitan area. In 2007 the percentage was more like 27 per cent….

1944 marks the dramatic entry into local history of New Westminster’s Ernest Alvia “Smokey” Smith. On October 21 Smokey, a Seaforth Highlander, aged 30, won the Victoria Cross for bravery in action in northern Italy.

I’ve been working on some research for the Association for Mining Exploration British Columbia (AME BC), and came across a book by Ernest Ingersoll (1852-1946) titled Gold Fields of the Klondike. It’s a fine little book, originally published in 1897 as Gold Fields of the Klondike and the Wonders of Alaska.

On April 23, 1944 Jack Benny did his famous NBC radio show live from Vancouver to be broadcast all over North America. He brought his regular cast up from New York: Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, Rochester, Dennis Day and announcer Don Wilson. What made the show particularly notable was that Mary Livingstone (real name Sadie Marks), although born in Seattle, had grown up in Vancouver.

The big new Golden Ears Bridge, connecting Surrey and the south shore of the Fraser to Maple Ridge, opened to vehicular traffic on June 16 and my wife Edna and I drove over it that day just to say we had. It’s a big, handsome structure, a kilometre long, and cost $800 million. We stopped for an ice cream treat on the north shore, then turned back.

1937 was an active year in Vancouver: the Vancouver Sun was burned out of its 125 West Pender headquarters and moved across the street…, we elected our first woman alderman (Helena Gutteridge), the Pattullo Bridge opened, construction started on the Lions Gate Bridge, we celebrated the coronation of King George VI, the Cave Supper Club began and the Lougheed Highway was opened to traffic. But all of these events pale into insignificance compared to the introduction of . . . wait for it! Sliced bread.

The novel Tobacco Road had been out for 21 years, a play based on it ran on Broadway for 3,182 performances, and a movie had appeared in 1941, but when the stage production of the book by Erskine Caldwell on life in the southern USA hit Vancouver in 1953 there was one hell-thumpin’ ruckus in these here parts.

In 1930 Paul Whiteman’s band was a very big deal. A Vancouver Sun story April 2 on his impending arrival from the States to play in the Vancouver Theatre referred to the April 4 visit as an “epoch . . . one of the outstanding events of Vancouver’s musical history.” The visit “is being looked forward to by thousands of lovers of music. Booking is going ahead merrily at the box office . . .” . . . Alas, it was not to be. . .

In 1937 movie stars Richard Arlen (American), Lilli Palmer (German) and Antoinette Cellier (British) starred in a filmed-in-and-around-Revelstoke production called Silent Barriers. (The original title was The Great Barrier.) It’s about the building of the CPR through the Rockies. There are a lot of familiar names portrayed: William Van Horne, Sir John A. Macdonald, Major Rogers, James Hill . . . the movie plays fast and loose with the facts, but it’s fun to watch.. . .