Re: "Daily paper called the Colonist for a reason," Sept. 6.
Yes, indeed, B.C was de facto a British colony until well after the Second World War. And it's still British Columbia.
My father was an Austrian civilian POW in England for five years in the First World War, but became a thoroughgoing Anglophile, and after his release and return to a ruined Austria, obtained his professorship in languages, majoring in English.
After Goering's "guns or butter" speech at Christmas 1936, we emigrated here to Victoria, beating Hitler's takeover by a few months. As a "bloody German," I was regularly beaten up.
My sister and I attended Burnside and Tillicum schools, then Lord Byng High school in Vancouver. We were instructed that the printing press was invented by Caxton, that Georg Friedrich Handel was English, as was John Cabot.
We were at the side of Gorge Road waving a Union Jack during the King George VI and Elizabeth's parade in 1939. At Byng we were taught British and some Canadian history, very little about Europe and nothing about the U.S.
When England declared war in 1914, my uncle Max Kilburger's well-known watch and jewelry shop downtown was ransacked by what we would now call "Brits." However, as an American citizen, he received compensation after the war.
Max was the first to give a time signal on the radio here, and timed the Empire Games at the Crystal Gardens with an Omega watch.
My first Canadian passport, issued in 1950, described me (by then a naturalized Canadian) as a "British subject," with the right to live in the U.K. When I left Canada to go to England in 1951, my father's parting words were: "Farewell, and I hope they teach you some manners."
H.U.P. Edwards
North Saanich
