For my last post of the year, I’ve chosen the top 10 Facebook group pages. This list is highly subjective and based on a loose criteria—they have to deal with some aspect of the history of Greater Vancouver or Victoria, and you have to be able to see the posts without having to join (I’m intrigued by East Vancouver Selfies and Lululemon Barter Wars, but fear either rejection or disappointment).
I was so sad to hear of Jim Munro’s death last Monday. Jim was a huge promoter and lover of books, heritage buildings, art and authors, including of course, his first wife the Nobel prize winner Alice Munro.
He was also a lovely man. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim a few years back when I was researching Sensational Victoria.
The following story is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria: “Murders in the Capital.”
A few years after the Bests’ bought their James Bay home, a young woman knocked on the door and asked if she could come and take a look inside. She told them that her grandparents had lived in the cottage in the 1950s and she’d grown up believing that they were killed in a car crash.
Here are five of my favourite eccentric BC houses that still stand (or did at the time of research).
1. The Hobbit House(s)
There are two in Vancouver and one in West Van designed by Ross Lort in the early 40s, and against all odds, all survive. Hobbit house at King Edward and Cambie is now part of a town house development.
It’s been incredibly exciting seeing Sensational Vancouver claim the top spot on the Best of BC list for the past four weeks, and it’s made me pay close attention to the book section in the Vancouver Sun.
What I’ve noticed is that M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, has ranked in the top 10 on the National Bestsellers list for the past seven weeks.
The Tilikum lives at the Maritime Museum in Victoria and it’s well worth the visit. At 38-feet long it looks like a flimsy thing to take out in Victoria Harbour on a windy day, let alone around the world, but in 1901 Captain John Voss and Norman Luxton, a reporter from Winnipeg, intended to do just that.
In 1912, when it was tough for a woman to make a decent living, Christina Haas arrived in Victoria and bought herself a brothel.
Thomas Hooper once had the largest architectural practice in Western Canada. He designed hundreds of buildings including the Victoria Public Library, the Rogers Chocolates and the Munro’s Books Building in Victoria.
To mark the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this week’s blog is a story about Mabel Fortune Driscoll who survived the disaster, moved to Victoria and lived there until her death in 1968. The full story appears in Sensational Victoria.
Mabel Helen Fortune was 23 when she set off for a tour of Europe with her father Mark, mother Mary, younger brother, and two older sisters.