BURST
Weather reports have been a part of newspapers forever. Usually they’re just numbers, but in the fall of 1907 The Vancouver Daily Province tried something different: Weather Predictions by “The Crow.”
It ran near the bottom of Page 8, a space then usually reserved for thoughtful editorials on weighty matters like “A Civic Milk Farm” and “Australian Irrigation.”
The format was a small illustration of a crow cawing out his prediction in a speech bubble. According to the crow on Oct. 4, 1907, it would be a “Pleasant Day.”
Just in case readers didn’t get the message, “Fair” was written across the crow’s black body.
There was no report from the metrological office in Victoria predicting the actual temperature, barometric pressure or chance of rain. Just a cartoon drawing of a crow dispensing advice.
The Province was a pretty serious paper in 1907, but somehow a cartoonist named Stanley convinced owner/publisher Walter Nichol to go with the crow, which probably drew a chuckle from readers.
Cartoonist Stanley had fun with his creation. There were different drawings for different weather, and drawings that left you wondering what kind of weather he was referring to.
For a “Cloudy” prediction, the crow was shown flapping their wings up into the clouds. For “Rain,” the crow opined “I don’t care,” and looked thoroughly disinterested.
But the crow looked perturbed in another cartoon, where he drooled or sweated, and asked “Where’s the fellow that said we wouldn’t have any summer?” Presumably this meant it was hot, even though it ran Oct 8.
Readers also had to do some guesswork on the Sept. 26 illustration, which featured a big-eyed crow huddling on a wire and the message “Daddy fill up the coal bin!” Presumably this meant it would be cold.
Cold was also hinted at in the first crow illustration on Sept. 12, 1907, “A light blanket on my bed tonight.” Lord knows what readers thought — there seems to have been no explanation about the column, it just appeared.
Some of the crow illustrations are simple jokes, like Sept. 18’s cartoon of a diving crow that reads “I’m falling like the barometer.” How many people understood what impact a falling barometer had on the weather, though?
A head scratcher ran Oct. 7, “Great nights for sleep.” It featured the crow snoozing in an old-timey sleeping cap. This could have meant it was going to be a dreary day, but really, who knows?
After a couple of months, somebody must have tired of the joke. The first crow weather prediction ran on Sept. 12, the last on Nov. 7, 1907, an eight-week run.
The big news the week of Oct. 4, 1907 was that the famed British poet Rudyard Kipling arrived in town. Kipling had previously been to Vancouver in 1889 and 1892, and was impressed with Vancouver’s growth after disembarking from the CP train the Pacific Express.
“The one solitary spot I recognized on leaving the C.P.R. station was the corner of the old wing of the Hotel Vancouver,” he told the Vancouver World.
The following day he toured Stanley Park, which he dubbed “delightful, beautiful, one of the beauty spots of the world.” He was very impressed with the park’s famous hollow tree, which some were worried about, because its hole was “gradually getting larger each year.”
The Province said Kipling thought it should be preserved.
“How preserve it?” he said. “Why plug it as you would a decaying tooth.”
As “the Bard of the Empire,” Kipling was asked what he thought about one of Vancouver’s hottest controversies at the time, what to do about immigrants arriving from Asia. He declined to answer.
“I have lived too long among men overwhelmed by problems darker than those which confront you,” he said.
The avowed imperialist did say he had “great faith” in “our breed and in our race.” He also likened the European immigration to B.C. to an army pouring through a mountain pass, “a fertilizing stream that no power can check.
He had bought property in Vancouver during his previous visits, and would hang on to it for his son.
“You have a rightful pride in your city,” he told an audience at the Canadian Club. “My pride is in your destiny.”
jmackie@postmedia.com
