BURST
When The Vancouver Sun and Province moved out of our offices in 2024, there was a mad scramble to save stuff and put it into storage.
At the last minute I noticed a couple of tall, thin cardboard boxes on top of a wooden cart. Inside was a cache of old newspapers of historic significance .
One box included a complete Vancouver Daily Province from May 27, 1939, which marked the first royal visit to Vancouver by a reigning monarch.
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later known as the Queen Mother) were on a four-week tour of Canada and the United States, designed to drum up support for Britain before the Second World War.
Both The Province and The Sun marked the occasion with special sections on the royal visit. You can find them online at Newspapers.com, which has digitized all old copies of the Province and Sun.
But the digital versions don’t have the impact of the physical papers, which are true broadsheets — 23 inches high and 17 inches wide (58.4 cm by 43. 2 cm).
The Province’s “Royal Welcome” front on May 27, 1939 is striking. It features the headline “Long Live The King!” in script, above a big photo of King George looking handsome and dignified in a full dress uniform.
A chain links the emblems of Canada’s provinces around the King’s photo. For some reason, Ontario is at the top, B.C. is relegated to the left. At the bottom is the Royal Coat of Arms of Canada.
The old papers on Newspapers.com are taken from microfilm and are in black and white. But the “Long Live The King!” print page is a lovely light blue, with the headline and backgrounds around the provincial emblems darker blue.
The photos and emblems, meanwhile, are in black and white, a contrast that helps to make it a very beautiful page, like a vintage photomontage.
The Sun’s cover is in sepia-tone and features a full-page portrait of the King and Queen, with illustrations of their crowns in the corners, under The Vancouver Sun logo and the declaration “Only Evening Newspaper Owned, Controlled and Operated by Vancouver People.” The Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom is at the bottom, atop a scroll that reads “Their Majesties.”
The Province cover is in very good shape, save for a chunk of paper that missing on the lower left. Sadly The Sun’s cover is in poor shape — it’s split in two. But the image is still clear.
The Sun’s royal section is small, four pages, and is falling apart. But the 20-page Province royal section is part of an entire paper, which you can leaf through without it crumbling.
The Province was a bigger paper at the time — the May 27 Province was 126 pages, as opposed to the 92 page Sun, which also came with a souvenir print of the Royal Family.
What makes the May 27 papers even more alluring is that both came with special sections on the Hotel Vancouver on Burrard Street, which opened to coincide with the royal visit.
The 1939 Hotel Vancouver had taken a decade to complete — they started building the hotel in 1929-30, but left the interior unfinished during the 1930s depression.
The cover of the Province Hotel Vancouver section was an ingenious Lloyd Turner photo of the new hotel taken through the arched portico of the previous Hotel Vancouver, which had opened in 1916 at Georgia and Granville.
The May 27 papers also contain two marvellous full page ads from the B.C. Electric Railway Company, including an art deco illustration of a steamship sailing under the Lions Gate Bridge, with an airplane soaring overhead. It was probably a colour poster, but unfortunately is black and white in the paper.
There is also a wonderful tongue-in-cheek “Bird’s Eye View” map of B.C. by Province cartoonist Jack Boothe. One illustration features a hunter and his rifle being bumped into the sky by a bighorn sheep in the Cariboo, another shows Vancouver Island’s sea monster Caddy Cadborosaurus smoking a cigar in the Strait of Georgia.
Lord knows what the King and Queen thought of the map, but to a modern-day British Columbian, it’s hilarious .
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