A Year in Five Minutes: Vancouver 1898

By Chuck Davis, The History of Vancouver
Photos courtesy of Vancouver Archives

The Main Event: The Province began publishing in Vancouver

We can thank Hewitt Bostock for one of the city’s major newspapers, although he wouldn’t recognize the paper today. His Vancouver Daily Province began publishing March 26, 1898. Born May 31, 1864 in Surrey, England, Bostock graduated in law from Cambridge but, oddly, took up ranching when he came to Kamloops in 1888. In 1894 he started a newspaper in Victoria, the Weekly Province, but, on realizing the rapid growth of Vancouver, sent an associate there to test the climate for a daily competitor to the World and the News-Advertiser. It quickly became the biggest paper in town.

Bostock was splendidly up-to-date: two days after his paper began publishing it installed Vancouver’s first long-distance telephone line. It was a separate instrument then.

Speaking of which, the first pay telephones in Vancouver were installed August 6 at English Bay. Cost: five cents.

Boom

We were going through a building boom in 1898. Hastings Street was particularly active, and the Province noted that fact August 11: “That Hastings Street, from Granville to Westminster avenue [note: today’s Main Street] is destined to be ‘the’ street in Vancouver there is no doubt. As has already been pointed out, between Cambie and Granville streets, 234 feet is being built upon, leaving only 702 feet vacant in the four lots. With the continuation of the tram line down Hastings street, east from Cambie Street to Westminster avenue, an immense impetus will be given to that portion of the business centre of the city. Vancouver is the biggest city on the Pacific coast and besides being the metropolis of British Columbia, is surely destined to be the third of the three largest cities in the Dominion of Canada—the Liverpool of the west.

“By far the most important building now in the course of erection in Vancouver is the Canadian Pacific Railway’s magnificent new depot which is being built to fill the pressing need of several years … The building will be roofed in before the autumn rains commence and will be finally completed in the spring.” [Note: The depot referred to is not the present building. It stood at the very foot of Granville Street, just west of today’s station.]

Another Great Fire

The year was bad for New Westminster. The entire downtown section of the city was burned in a great fire September 10/11, including almost all the commercial section. Hundreds were left homeless. Almost 60 city blocks were leveled. Vancouver Fire Department historian Alex Matches writes: “The fire started in a riverfront hay storage warehouse and spread to two sternwheel river boats, the Edgar and the Gladys, which drifted down river setting fire to every wharf they touched. The raging fire then jumped Front Street and was quickly spread uptown by fierce winds.” Damage was estimated at $2.5 million, an enormous amount in 1898 dollars. Only two brick buildings were left standing. The VFD had saved one of them.

The VFD had a busy year closer to home: after a few years in which fewer than 100 fire alarms came in annually (58 alarms in 1894, 97 the following year, 64 in 1896 and 62 in 1897) expansion of the city—largely fueled by the Klondike Gold Rush—led to 131 alarms, the highest the city had experienced since incorporation 12 years earlier.

Bell-Irving

Vancouver was small enough in 1898 (population about 25,000) that the Province could print a sketch of H.O. Bell-Irving August 6 in a series the paper was running—on Men Who Make Vancouver—without explaining who he was. Everyone would know. Henry Ogle Bell-Irving was a salmon canner, born in Lockerbie, Scotland in 1856, who’d come to Vancouver in 1885 and by 1891 had formed a company called Anglo-British Columbia Packing (ABC). The company eventually became the largest exporter of tinned salmon in the world, and flourished for nearly 80 years. The Bell-Irving name is a prominent one in the city to this day.

Major Matthews

Among the important arrivals in the city this year was that of James Skitt Matthews. His fame was still many years ahead: he would become city archivist in 1931. Matthews was born September 7, 1878 in Wales, grew up in New Zealand. He began to work for the local Imperial Oil office. You will meet him many times in these pages.

Mormon coverage

To indicate how newspapers have mellowed, check this October 4, 1898 item from the Vancouver Weekly News-Advertiser: “A Mormon agent has just visited Vancouver, promptly, however, returning to Seattle, where a large ignorant foreign element of the population may be expected to provide the class of perverts for which the creed of Brigham Young especially caters.”

Fragments

On January 16, 1898 ex-Mayor William Templeton died by his own hand.

On February 10 the legislative buildings in Victoria opened. The Victoria Times called it “a theatre for the great deeds of legislators and administrators yet unborn.” Yeah, right.

Crofton House School (for girls) was established March 1.

On April 18 Henry Dallas Helmcken (MLA for Victoria) introduced a bill to extend provincial voting rights to women in B.C. However, the bill ran into stern opposition from James Mutter (MLA for Cowichan-Alberni), who asserted that the female brain was two ounces lighter than a man’s. The bill was defeated.

Yukon became a territory June 13.

On June 24 Vancouver newspapers reported that lady cyclists following the new “bloomer” fashion were finding it hard to get admission to respectable places while wearing them.

The single scull championship of the world was held in Vancouver harbor July 1. Jake Gaudaur beat Vancouverite R.V. Johnston.

Charles Augustus Semlin became BC premier this year. He will serve to 1900.

Prospect Point Lighthouse was activated in Vancouver harbor October 1. It would be “destaffed” in 1926.

Canada’s first motion picture theatre opened on Cordova Street October 7.

Also on October 7, this appeared in the newspapers: “The residents of Fairview, south end of Cambie street bridge, are to be congratulated in having a letter box placed at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Ash street. Mr. Foote has instructions to collect once per day, 10:45 a.m. and Sundays at 7 a.m.” [Note: the Cambie Street bridge referred to is not the present one.]

The Nine O’Clock Gun was fired for the first time in Stanley Park October 15, 1898. But not at 9 p.m. It was at noon.

On November 14 the Province reported that “Despite the fact that a campaign was inaugurated in Vancouver against nickel-in-the-slot machines they are back again in large numbers.”

And on December 14 there was this: “The City Council today agreed to appoint a matron at the city jail at $10 a month. It was explained that there is one woman in the city who has the habit of getting drunk and landing in jail, but who, when sober, is a perfect lady. It was mortifying to think that such a person should have only men to attend to her while a prisoner. ‘If she doesn’t like our jail, she shouldn’t get drunk,’ complained one alderman.”

Thomas Shaughnessy of Milwaukee, Wisconsin became the president of the CPR this year.

Just For Laughs

One tradition we believe today’s newspapers should reinstate: jokes. A full 110 years has barely dimmed the lustre of this one:

“I say, waiter, this salmon cutlet isn’t half so good as the one I had here last week.”

“Can’t see why, sir, it’s off the same fish.”

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Chuck Davis is a Vancouver writer who has written, co-written, or edited 15 books. Most of them are on local history, and he describes his next book, The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, as the capstone of his career.