history

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

• Headline "Little Ground Gained or Lost" sums up progress on the Western front. However, the article includes story of a foiled attempt to lead a British ammunition convoy into an ambush that is rather interesting.
• More praise for British troops from India, this time from the Italian foreign office in Berlin, who also go on to condemn "French black troops from Senegal" as "bloodthirsty".
• Two Sikhs arrested in Vancouver for "conspiring to procure persons to murder other persons".
• German aeroplanes chased away from Paris by French aeroplanes.
• Germans have developed a way to launch torpedoes from Zeppelins and plan to use the new technology in naval attacks on the North Sea.
• Details of the shoot-out with Sedro-Woolley bank robbers.
• Further negotiations to secure preferential lumber trade with Australia.

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

Heavy fighting continues on both fronts. Line on the Western front are largely unchanged. On the Eastern front Germans have been repulsed from Warsaw by Russians.

• Indian troops fighting for the British Empire lauded by Lord Crewe, Secretary of State for India.
• Turkey still not officially in the war, but Germans are running the government and in control of the forts.
• Sedro-Woolley bank robbers caught in a gun-fight just north of the border from Blaine. Two of the robbers killed, one immigration officer killed.
• United States imposes a 15% duty on lumber with no warning to B.C. producers.
• Two new battalions to be raised and trained, one in Victoria and one in Vancouver.
• "Members of German and Austrian birth and parentage" are barred from a London golf club.
• Flooding from a typhoon a couple days ago is hampering Japanese and British advance on German fort at Tsing Tau.
• Full page ad for "Made In Victoria Fair"
• Cute Hallowe'en ad.

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

• Panoramic view of River Aisne
• Germans planning aerial raid on London. London preparing.
• Evidence that Germans had been laying foundations for gun emplacements near Dunkirk before the war started.
• Evidence that Germany established a supply and communications network in Russian Poland before war started.
• Sedro-Woolley bank robbery suspects arrested in Burnaby
• Internments of "enemy aliens" beginning in England [Canada won't be far behind]
• Quarter page ad urging merchants to push "Made in Canada" goods.
• Ad for gasoline at 18¢ per gallon [that's about 3.9¢ per litre]
• Fantastically illustrated quarter page ad for Fry's Cocoa

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

German attempts to advance along the coast of Belgium toward the English Channel continue to not go well. Serbians have taken forts in Sarajevo (and even though that's were the war started, it does seem like a side-show now.)

• An estimated two million Belgians are refugees outside Belgium
• Body washed ashore near Carmanah
• Bomb explodes in Montréal.
• Proposal to build "airships of all types" in Victoria.
• Miss Frankie Seigel, "first-rate blackface comedian of the Bert Williams type" to perform at Pantages Theatre.
• "More Reports of Atrocities" by Germans at length and in gruesome detail.

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today:

• German advance toward French ports on the English Channel still stymied.
• Hundreds of thousands of Belgian refugees in England and Netherlands. Those still in Belgium facing starvation.
• Trade negotiations for British Columbia to provide lumber to Australia at a preferential within-the-Empire rate going well.

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today:

• Large photos of Plymouth harbour, where Canadian troops are arriving
• Belgian Queen Elizabeth staying with her husband King Albert at the front, called "an example of dignity and courage worthy of classic times."
• Correspondent recounts experience visiting Canadians encamped on Salisbury Plain.
• German push toward Dunkirk not going well.

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today:

• Estimated the 150,000 Belgian refugees are now in England
• German reconnaissance aeroplane downed over Ostend.
• It is suggested that London's art treasures be moved to safer locations to protect them from possible raids by airships.
• Canadian troops arriving in Plymouth
• Seventy-five or so men from Vancouver and twenty-five from Victoria currently training in Victoria to serve in Bermuda.
• First British ships arriving in U.K. from the west coast via the Panama Canal.
• Panama canal currently closed do to landslide.
• Boston considering starting a professional hockey team

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

Lead news is about how well protected French ports such as Calais are, but it comes off as hollow propaganda after the fall of Antwerp, one of the best fortified cities in Western Europe and...

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today:

• Map of the Russian front featured prominently on the front page, but most of the stories are about Antwerp.
• "Antwerp Gets Usual Orders" - food to be provided to Germans, etc..
• Canadian training and staging area in England established on Salisbury Plain
• Germans reported to be producing heavy guns with an unprecedented range of 25 miles (40 Km).
• Boston Braves win the World Series.
• And in local news, pod of "blackfish" [killer whales / orca] "spoil" sport fishing for most of the day in the Sannich Arm by scaring off all the salmon.

News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

• Antwerp has fallen to the Germans.
• London instituting blackout order and taking other preparations in case of a Zeppelin attack
• C.P.R. executive predicts a very busy tourist season in Canada in 1915.
• Imperial Order Daughters of Empire to provide Thanksgiving dinner for troops in Victoria
• Pantages Theatre to show a theatrical recreation of the wreck of the Titanic.
• Half-page map showing the locations of all fighting in the war thus far.
• The usual summary of the week's events in the children's section of the Sunday magazine
• My usual collection of ads that caught my eye.