Empress of Ireland

You can watch my 2 minutes and 13 seconds of fame here: The Empress of Ireland’s BC Connection Global News – This is BC: It was great to chat to Jay Durrant about the Empress of Ireland on Global News this week. One of the biggest surprises for me while doing the research for Beneath… Continue reading Beneath Dark Waters on the 6 pm News

I was thrilled to receive an email from Paul Fletcher last week. He wrote to tell me that he had read Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck and that his maternal grandfather was Tracey Harley Archer. Lost wife and son: In May 1914, 33-year-old Tracey Harley Archer was travelling on… Continue reading Remembrance Day: Honouring Tracey Archer

Between 1869 and 1948, Britain shipped more than 100,000 boys and girls, some as young as four to Canada to work on farms and as household servants. These kids were either orphans or from poverty-stricken families, and the thought was that they’d be better off in countries like Canada, Australia and South Africa. They weren’t.

September 25 is World Maritime Day, and this year’s theme is “Our Ocean, Our Obligation, Our Opportunity.” It’s a theme that could easily apply in 1914 when the Empress of Ireland sank, killing four more passengers than the Titanic. Oliver Mardall: One of those passengers was 31-year-old Ensign Oliver Mardall of Vancouver. Mardall was a… Continue reading The Empress of Ireland and Oliver Mardall

By Sébastien Hudon In the summer of 2020, my colleague Louis Pelletier, an historian of early cinema, and I learned that some very old film reels were to be auctioned off in England and bids would be accepted online. The one that caught our attention related to the Empress of Ireland. Louis and I grew… Continue reading The Story of a Missing Film and a Broken Ring

Of the many places that victims of the Empress of Ireland disaster hailed from, one of the most obscure was Comaplix, a sawmill town on the northeast arm of Upper Arrow Lake in the West Kootenay.

Freda Evans, 27 ran the Lardeau Hotel there with her husband Russell.

I gave the first talk about my new book Beneath Dark Waters at Black Bond Books in Ladner Thursday night. I’ve been researching and writing this book for several years and usually when I tell people what I’ve been working on, few have ever heard of the Empress of Ireland, the CPR liner that sank… Continue reading Empress of Ireland: The Vancouver Connection

In August 2019, I was sitting on a Zodiac in the middle of the St. Lawrence River piloted by a French Canadian marine biologist. The trip was arranged by Hugh Verrier, and we were right above the wreck of the Empress of Ireland, a CPR-liner that sunk in 14 minutes after being rammed by a… Continue reading Why I wrote a book about the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck