People

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…

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…

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!

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.

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…

One of the most remarkable people in Vancouver history, Charles Allen Crane, who died in 1965, was both blind and deaf. He couldn’t see anything, he couldn’t hear anything. Yet he attended UBC for two years, worked as a reporter for the Ubyssey, wrote for the Province, became a star varsity wrestler and worked as a “translator”…

In 1977 Leonard Schein decided to buy a movie theatre. Schein has made himself part of Vancouver’s entertainment history with his years-long dedication to bringing us good movies. He arrived here in 1973 from Los Angeles after a two-year detour through Saskatchewan, where he studied at the University of Saskatchewan

Walter Mulligan, who got to be Vancouver’s chief of police on January 27, 1947, looked like a cop. He was six foot two, beefy at 230 pounds, tough, seasoned and confident. He sounded like a cop. Even his name was a perfect cop name: Mulligan…..

English music hall queen Marie Lloyd’s reputation for doing “blue” material was well established by the time she got to Vancouver. It got her into trouble here. From Ivan Ackery’s book of reminiscences, Fifty Years on Theatre Row, he quotes an oldtimer, Teddy Jamieson, who recalled a visit to the (old) Orpheum Theatre…

A letter many years ago from Canon Stanley Higgs, the well-known (and since deceased) Anglican priest, set me off on the trail of the late J. Williams Ogden (1858-1936). “There are some old paintings at Fairview Baptist Church in Vancouver,” Canon Higgs had written. “I think you might be interested in them.”

He is revered by Communists in China—and by Nationalists on Taiwan. His name is Dr. Sun Yat-sen and he’s considered the Father of Modern China. Sun played a leading role in the overthrow of the oppressive Ch’ing dynasty (the famous Manchus) in 1911 and was the first president of the Republic of China.

From The Vancouver Sun of January 30, 1960: “Arthur Frederick Jones, photographer, was having lunch in the PNE’s Terrace Room when he was called to the telephone in the kitchen.

Why is an elementary school in Vancouver named for the Australian aviator Charles Kingsford-Smith, the first man to fly across the Pacific Ocean, and the first to fly across both the Pacific and the Atlantic? The answer: he and his family once lived in Vancouver.

Even when Vancouver was very young and very small, famous people began to drop by. Sometimes they weren’t famous yet: on May 8, 1911, when Fred Karno’s entertainment troupe from England began a week-long engagement at the Orpheum Theatre (not the present one) at Pender and Howe Streets, one of the performers was a hugely gifted 22-year-old Charlie Chaplin.

It’s not widely known, but three or four chunks of land in Metropolitan Vancouver were once owned by the famous English writer, Rudyard Kipling.

When Kipling first visited Vancouver in June 1889, (during a tour of North America), he was, at 23, just beginning to be famous.

On September 27, 1979 street photographer Foncie Pulice took his last picture. Foncie and his Electric-Photo camera had been a familiar sight on city streets for a jaw-dropping 45 years. He’d begun as a 20-year-old away back in 1934…

This page, and a dozen as long, wouldn’t be enough to tell you the full story of the fascinating Gustav Konstantin “Alvo” von Alvensleben, a German nobleman described in his Oct. 22, 1965, obituary in the Province as a man who “built one of the largest financial empires in the history of British Columbia.

Charles Marega was an Italian-born sculptor who arrived in Vancouver with his wife Bertha in 1909. He was about 38. The Maregas had planned to settle in California, but Bertha was so smitten by the North Shore mountains—they reminded her of her native Switzerland—that they changed their minds and stayed here.

On September 1, 1922 Mrs. Marie De Carlo Middleton, minutes away from giving birth, was at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver being attended to by two nurses because the doctor hadn’t arrived yet. The nurses said later that, as Mrs. Middleton was being shifted onto the delivery table, she was shouting, “I want a girl. It must be a girl. I want a dancer!”

Major J. S. Matthews, adventurer, innovator, and first archivist of the city of Vancouver was born September 7, 1878 in Wales. He was a natural archivist, keeping meticulous track of his activities and of those around him who he thought were making an impact on society.

Anna Pavlova, the most famous woman dancer who ever lived, came to Vancouver November 17, 1910. She would visit us twice more, but that first visit made the greatest impression locally. The audience went gaga….

Vancouver’s oldest company is older than the city itself. The story began in Germany in the last century when four young brothers, Godfrey, Charles, David and Isaac Oppenheimer left their native Frankfurt “to help in building a new continent.”

In the Fifties the adult world looked upon us as a rebellious generation. As a part of that rebellion we had discovered the merits and talents of black singers. To buy a record by Lloyd Price, Ruth Brown, Wynonie Harris or Laverne Baker you had to go to a record store and ask for it by title and artist. The record clerk would bring it from the back of the store or from under the counter in a plain brown sleeve. They were called “race records” and were not featured on the racks along with all the nice lily-white recording artists of the day

The futuristic saucer-shaped revolving restaurant and observation deck that soars halfway to the moon in the night sky over Vancouver was opened by a man who went all the way.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the lunar surface—on Sunday, July 20, 1969—was the perfect choice to christen the Harbour House Restaurant atop the Sears Tower…

His name was Malcolm Alexander MacLean, so it’s no surprise to learn that Vancouver’s first mayor spoke Gaelic like a Highlander. He was born in Tyree, Argyllshire on Scotland’s west coast, in 1844. He arrived in Granville in January of 1886, three months before it became Vancouver….

Researching the earliest years of the Vancouver Board of Trade turns out to be more interesting than we’d anticipated. Most of us know at least a little of the history of The Board’s first president, David Oppenheimer (who was also the city’s second mayor), but another figure pops up in those early years whose name has almost vanished into an undeserved obscurity.

The story of Rogers Sugar—whose refinery has been on Vancouver’s waterfront for more than a hundred years—begins away back in 1881 with a 15-year-old kid, Ben Rogers. Rogers would begin Vancouver’s first industry not based on the forests or fishery, a company worth many millions of dollars today. He was 24 years old when he started it.

The great American bass Paul Robeson was to have performed in Vancouver in January, 1952. He had performed at the

One of the more unusual pieces of outdoor sculpture in Vancouver is the huge, old-fashioned and impressive memorial to U.S.

Americans have had a major influence on the history of Metropolitan Vancouver. Simon Fraser Simon Fraser, after whom the Fraser

Scottish influence in metropolitan Vancouver was important from the very beginning of our post-native history…

The first black immigrants arrived in British Columbia from California in 1858. They settled in Victoria and on Salt Spring Island, but as the center of economic power shifted, some came to Vancouver in the early 1900s.

Hogan’s Alley was the unofficial name for a T-shaped intersection at the southwestern edge of Strathcona that formed the nucleus of Vancouver’s first concentrated Black community. Vancouver’s first archivist, J.S. Matthews (see Major Matthews’ House), noted that the name “Hogan’s Alley” was in use by 1914.

A lot of people know Mandrake the Magician as a comic book protagonist, but the real Mandrake grew up in