Browsing “Vancouver Was Awesome Series”

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

After James Woodsworth was fired from his government research job in 1917 for opposing conscription, he left Winnipeg and headed west to Vancouver. He rented a room at 1218 Howe Street and found work on the docks.

Back home he was well known as JS Woodsworth, a preacher and social reformer devoted to improving conditions for the poor urban immigrants he called the “Strangers Within Our Gates.” But in Vancouver he kept his past — and his fancy Oxford education — to himself, hoping to blend in with the other stevedores. “Being a town-bred boy and having gone through school and college into professional life, I had never done manual work,” he confesses in On the Waterfront, a booklet describing his Vancouver experience.

On the Waterfront is a rare inside look into early Vancouver’s most important industry. Woodsworth introduces us to some of the characters he worked with, the “men without a country” who found themselves, like him, “in war time marooned on the shores of the Pacific.”

Wordsworth found longshoring to be physically demanding, monotonous, and unreliable work. Job security was non-existent and work conditions were generally grim, even though this was one of the more coveted manual labour jobs at the time. Ultimately the book is an exposé of the plight of the working class and an outlet for Woodsworth’s developing socialist ideas.

JS Woodsworth returned to Winnipeg in 1919 and was arrested for his involvement in the General Strike of that year. Then he was elected to the House of Commons, where he found himself in a position to force Prime Minister King to introduce old age security legislation as the first substantial component of Canada’s social safety net. In 1933 Woodsworth and other democratic socialists formed the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (the precursor to the NDP), which he led until WWII. His great-niece is former Vancouver city councilor Ellen Woodsworth.

Source: Terminal Dock, 1924 (cropped) by WJ Moore, City of Vancouver Archives #PAN N203; JS Woodsworth, On the Waterfront (Ottawa, ON: The Mutual Press Ltd., 1918), via the Internet Archive.

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Harry Gardiner was a stunt man who earned his living climbing tall buildings in North America and Europe, with no special gear aside from his highly developed fingers. On 31 October 1918, the “Human Fly” climbed the Hotel Vancouver and then the World Tower on the corner of Beatty and West Pender. He wore white so as to be visible to the “seething solid mass of humanity” that came out to watch. The climb took about an hour and a half.

After reaching the top, Gardiner disappeared into the building and re-emerged onto the street soon after. He addressed the crowd from atop a fire truck ladder, urging them to “buy Victory Bonds and more Victory Bonds for the completion of the allied victory that now looms up through the world nightmare of the past four years.”

Source: City of Vancouver Archives #1376-113 (cropped)

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

After graduating from the University of Cambridge in 1896, Martin Grainger trekked out to the Klondike gold fields, served in the Boer War, then travelled around BC working as a miner, journalist, and logger.  He went on to become BC’s Chief Forester, was the architect of the province’s first forest practices code, and ran his own logging company. But what Grainger is most remembered for is his 1908 novel set in BC entitled Woodsmen of the West. It’s freely available online, but I thought I’d share a passage because the book contains a great description of 1908 Gastown and the clusters of men we often see in old Vancouver photos.

The book begins with the protagonist descending east along Cordova Street, where the storefronts progress from retail shops to employment agencies, hotels, and saloons; where the number of women dwindles to nil, save for the occasional Dupont Street reference; and where the monotony of life between logging jobs is broken with alcoholic misadventure.

The first thing a fellow needs when he hits Vancouver is a clean-up: haircut, shave, and perhaps a bath. Then he’ll want a new hat for sure. The suit of town clothes that, stuffed into the bottom of a canvas bag, has travelled around with him for weeks or months – sometimes wetted in rowboats, sometimes crumpled into a seat or pillow – the suit may be too shabby. So a fellow will feel the wad of bills in his pocket and decide whether it’s worth getting a new suit or not.

The next thing is to fix on a stopping-place. Some men take a fifty-cent room in a rooming-house and feed in the restaurants. The great objection to that is the uncertainty of getting home at night. In boom times I have known men of a romantic disposition who took lodgings in those houses where champagne is kept on the premises and where there is a certain society. But that means frenzied finance, and this time you and I are not going to play the fool and blow in our little stake same as we did last visit to Vancouver.

So a fellow can’t do better than go to a good, respectable hotel where he knows the proprietor and the bartenders, and where there are some decent men stopping. Then he knows he will be looked after when he is drunk; and getting drunk, he will not be distressed by spasms of anxiety lest someone should go through his pockets and leave him broke. There are some shady characters in a town like Vancouver, and persons of the underworld.

Of course, the first two days in town a man will get good-and-drunk. That is all right, as any doctor will tell you; that is good for a fellow after hard days and weeks of work in the woods.

Sources: Photo of the Klondike Hotel, 218 Carrall Street ca. 1912 by Stuart Thomson (cropped), City of Vancouver Archives #359-36; excerpt from M Adderdale Grainger, Woodsmen of the West (London: Edward Arnold, 1908), via the Internet Archive.

Big news for us! We’ve penned a deal with Arsenal Pulp Press and our resident historian, Lani Russwurm, is currently working on a history book called VANCOUVER WAS AWESOME! Releasing this October, it will be available in bookstores all over Vancouver, and across Canada.

Arsenal Pulp publisher Brian Lam and Lani Russwurm discussing VANCOUVER WAS AWESOME

A few of Arsenal Pulp’s history/local interest titles that I personally love include Charlie Demers’ Vancouver Special, City of Vancouver Book Award finalist V6A, the recent Liquor, Lust and the Law, D.M. Fraser’s Class Warfare, Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo, and Stan Douglas: Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 as well as Every Building on 100 West Hastings.

Stay tuned for more details concerning VANCOUVER WAS AWESOME!

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Albert Kahn was a stinking rich French photographer when he discovered colour photography not long after the Lumière brothers made their patented autochrome process – the first user-friendly colour film process — commercially available in 1907. Between 1909 and 1931 when he lost his fortune, Kahn sent photographers around the world to create a documentary record of and for the peoples of the world. He was an idealist and internationalist, and conceived of this “Archives of the Planet” project ”to promote cross-cultural peace and understanding.”

Curiously, considering Kahn’s mandate for the project, the photographer he sent to Vancouver in 1926, Frédéric Gadmer, focused on capturing land- and streetscapes rather than people, hence the empty Georgia Street scene above showing the second Hotel Vancouver. If you look closely, however, there are some faint blurs that are likely pedestrian victims of a long exposure.

Autochrome photos have a painterly quality that make them resemble hand-tinted images often used on much earlier post cards, so a colour photo from the 1920s might not appear so novel. Nevertheless, this photo is probably among the first ones of Vancouver actually taken in colour.

Kahn’s archive grew to 72,000 autochrome plates (in addition to 180,000 metres of black and white film) from all over the globe. His project has only received significant attention in recent years, but some now consider his autochromes ”the most important collection of early colour photographs in the world.”

Most of the colour pics from the Archives of the Planet project are held at the Albert-Kahn Musée et Jardins, and you can view more on their site, including a couple more of Vancouver.

Source: Photo by Frédéric Gadmer, via The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet by David Okuefuna (Princeton University Press, 2008)

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Charlie Chaplin came to Vancouver twice for week long engagements at the Orpheum Theatre with the Fred Karno London Company, first in May 1911 and again the following April while on the Considine and Sullivan vaudeville circuit, which operated the Orpheum chain in the west. The show was immensely popular, and although he wasn’t billed until later in the tour, Chaplin clearly stole the show playing a drunk, according to the  News-Advertiser:

The much heralded act, “A Night in an English Music Hall,” was the reason of the crowded houses at the Orpheum Theatre yesterday. Such laughter as greeted it has not been heard for a long time. The chief cause of their amusement, and the one to whom all the honors go, is Charles Champlin, who plays the part of the inebriated swell. During the whole action he does not say a single word, but expresses himself in pantomime. His gestures, his facial expression as the various artistes appeared in their turns, and his approval or disapproval of the same, all are inimitable, and evokes roars and roars of laughter. The wrestling bout at the finish, in which he bests the “Terrible Turk,” is the best of all, and brings the offering to an enjoyable conclusion.

The show toured down the coast, then back east before returning here again. Because of the show’s popularity in 1912, the Orpheum squeezed in an extra show, and this time the News-Advertiser got Chaplin’s name right:

This is the last time that the Fred Karno Company will present “A Night in an English Music Hall” in Vancouver and nobody should miss seeing it, especially Chas. Chaplin, who plays the part of the “inebriated swell” so inimitably and whose equal  would be hard to find.

Vancouver apparently didn’t make a huge impression on Chaplin, who at the time was actively embracing his new life in the US, largely because the rigid English class system back home meant limited opportunities for a working class kid in show business. In his autobiography he simply recalled: “In Winnipeg and Vancouver, audiences were essentially English and in spite of my pro-American leanings it was pleasant to play before them.” In contrast, his next paragraph begins: “At last California!”

Chaplin’s film career began because Mack Sennett made a mental note of the talented performer playing the “inebriated swell” during a New York performance between the two Vancouver dates on the tour. A couple of years later, Sennett started Keystone Studios and lured Chaplin away from Karno with a lucrative contract.

Charlie Chaplin would return to Vancouver, but as a big movie star, not a live performer. Despite what the internet says, there’s no evidence he ever performed at the Pantages (either one, though his ex-wife performed at the second Pantages when it was called the Beacon), and the Orpheum he did perform at was at 805 West Pender at Howe Street, not the current one.

Sources:  Photo of Orpheum Theatre, ca. 1910, City of Vancouver Archives #Bu P440; Orpheum Theatre advertisement, Vancouver World 6 May 1911; photo of Chaplin in “A Night in an English Club,” 23 June 1912, Kansas City, MO, via TheRoyalZanettos.com