From the archives: This column was first published on Feb. 11, 2012.
Some reflections on the week in news:
• The city of Victoria might sell the naming rights to public facilities.
May I suggest: Crown Royal Athletic Park, Waterford Crystal Pool, Labatt’s Blue Bridge.
• The operators of the Saveon-Foods Memorial Centre have rejected overtures from the Lingerie Football League.
Best team name that never was: the Victoria Secrets.
• The premier will appear on CKNW radio Monday in what her office billed as an alternative to a throne speech.
No truth to the rumour that the Feb. 21 provincial budget will be aired from the basement set of Wayne’s World. (Party on, Christy.)
• The census shows the population of the entire West Shore is booming except for aggressively rural Metchosin, which grew by just eight people in five years.
In other words: Many are Colwood, but few Metchosin. (OK, I stole that from an old headline, but it fits.)
• Please, enough of this fiction that all the growth in the West Shore makes it a self-contained island that residents need never leave.
As the increasingly constipated Colwood Crawl proves, that’s not the way real families function: Dad works at the base, Mum’s job sends her driving all over the city, Junior goes to UVic and they all buy their heroin on Pandora.
About 4,000 West Shore residents work for the Department of National Defence alone. Unless they move CFB Esquimalt next to Costco, the crawl will only get worse. Pretending otherwise does nothing to solve our transportation problems.
• Bill Vander Zalm has bad luck with libel law.
The former premier was successfully sued by the Hon. Ted Hughes (note to self: don’t get in a fight with anyone named “the honourable”) who won a $60,000 award Thursday.
Longtime readers might remember that Vander Zalm himself sued Bob Bierman in 1980 after the Victoria Times cartoonist depicted the Social Credit welfare minister pulling the wings off flies. The B.C. Court of Appeal ultimately upheld a cartoonist’s right to engage in satire and hyperbole.
Bierman, who like Vander Zalm was born in Holland, died in Victoria in 2008.
• This week marked 60 years on the throne for Queen Elizabeth. Tuesday’s column noted that just four months before her sudden ascension, the then25yearold princess wound up an official visit to Victoria by being driven to a Qualicum vacation with, surprisingly, Prince Philip at the wheel.
Several readers were able to elaborate. Oak Bay’s Brian Young, whose granddad was the senior Mountie on the trip, wrote: “As they were heading up the Malahat, Philip asked my grandfather if he could drive. It was totally against protocol, but how do you say no to a prince?
“So Philip took the wheel and my grandfather hung on for dear life. Philip was a both a terrible driver and a very fast driver. Supposedly they made the trip in record time. All the while Liz is in the back seat loving it.”
Duncan’s Flora Mackenzie remembered taking her children to see the royal couple that day: “We waited on the highway just north of the silver bridge to see the procession. I had camera and binoculars ready when suddenly - whoosh - an Oldsmobile sped by with a tiny girl in the back seat looking terrified. That was our future queen.”
Don Duke, a retired RCMP officer from Saanich, remembers Prince Philip’s love of speed almost leading to disaster as the entourage headed over the Malahat and up to Eaglecrest: “He drove at such a pace that our four motorcycle escorts had difficulty keeping ahead of him, to the extent that two of them momentarily locked together.”
Apparently Prince Philip also wanted to go partridge shooting while at Eaglecrest, but “had to wait a while until all the RCMP security detail were flushed out of the woods.”
Duke himself (that is, the Duke of Saanich, not the Duke of Edinburgh) had one of the less-glamorous assignments during the 1951 Victoria visit. “I spent several hours one day on one of the more remote stretches of Admirals Road in the pouring rain, awaiting the royal cavalcade,” he wrote. “There must have been at least a half dozen or so spectators. Meanwhile, my normally stiff-brimmed Stetson hat became steadily softer and gently folded itself over my ears.”
