Vancouver City

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 73, 27 March 1936, Page 3

Vancouver City

PENDING JUBILEE £ VANCOUVER, Feb. 2G. Served by 4-4 shipping lines, only 22 hours from New York and live days from London, Vancouver is preparing to celebrate its golden jubilee. In the year before the Great War 132 vessels entered tho port; in ouo recent year the number had risen to 1500 vessels. In 1929 of 59,000,000 bushols of wheat shipped from Vancouver 61,000,000 bushels went through tho Panama Canal, mainly for Britain. Vancouver is said to bo tho most Empire-minded city iu Canada. Its neighbour, Victoria, half au hour by air ferry across tho Gulf of Georgia, is the most English city in tho Dominion. Transplanted Britons aro building here a last -west Empire outpost, in a climate that resembles Capetown, New Zealand and the South of England. They began to arrive in Victoria in tho ’fifties, around the Horn. British Pioneers

Adventurous Britishers came north after the gold rushes in California, Australia and South Africa. They "panned” the placer and alluvial fields of the Cariboo and Yukon. When the gold fever waned they settled on tho rich irrigated Okanagan fruit lands, or ranched in the range country west of the Rockies, or developed the mixed farming areas of Vancouver Island. Each year a steady stream of Britons is arriving, lured by the success of their pathfinding predecessors, or seeking relief from taxation.

These people are proud of their links with the Old Land, The first nursery book presented by the Queen to King Edward VIII, is hero, in the home of the family of the late Mrs. Knight, the King’s nurse. A nephew of Gladstone lives in Vancouver; also a companion of Little Dorritt, who romped with Dickens. The only living holder of the Lucknow Medal, Mr. Charles Palmer, tends his garden on one of the “show” properties near Victoria, the city of English gardens. . Pensioner of Charles 11. A pensioner of Charles 11. died in Vancouver last year—Professor Walker, of the University of British Columbia, descendant of Elizabeth Penderell of Boscobel, who hid the King in the famous oak tree. On the Hudson Bay farm near Victoria the English skylarks make their only home in North America. Saanich Peninsula, Vancouver Island, is the site of the .first Pairbridge Farm School in Canada. The opening of the Panama Canal created the most economic route to England for the wheat of Alberta and Saskatchewan, by way of Vancouver. The Ottawa Empire Conference brought a new tide of prosperity, with the markets it created for two key industries of British Columbia, lumber and fish. President Roosevelt’s decree, increasing the price of gold by G 9 per cent, added further to the wealth of the Pacific Province, which is second to Ontario as Canada’s chief gold producer.