Harbour City: Nanaimo in Transition, 1920–1967

Ann Turner, formerly the financial and budget manager of the University
of British Columbia Library, is a freelance writer.

This volume completes Vancouver Island historian Jan Peterson’s
trilogy on Nanaimo, B.C. The first volume, Black Diamond City (2002),
covered Aboriginal settlement of the area through the city’s modern
development as a centre of coal production in the Victorian era. The
second volume, Hub City (2003), chronicled the period of rapid growth
from 1886 to 1920. This final instalment describes how the city coped
with the Great Depression, World War II, and the booming economy and
industrial change of the postwar decades up to the year of Canada’s
centennial, 1967. A short epilogue covers the economic and cultural
diversification that has taken place since then and is still underway.

As in the two earlier volumes, Peterson tells the history of the city
through the stories of the people who lived and worked there. Her
original sources include audiotapes of interviews with some of them, as
well as corporate documents, government records, and the newspapers and
magazines of the times. Quotations and historical photographs bring life
to the text. This era of Nanaimo’s history is recent enough that some
of the players and their descendants are still active in the community,
or at least well known there. The names in the detailed index are
helpful in tracking down their contributions over the years. The amount
of carefully documented historical data woven smoothly into the
narrative is amazing, and it is supplemented by five appendixes: Those
killed in action, 1939–1945; Mayors and councils, 1920–1967; Freedom
of the City recipients, Provincial representatives, and Federal members,
1920–1967; individuals in a group photo taken at the Pacific
Biological Station in 1929; and those in a group photo of the mayor,
council, and staff of 1933. The entire trilogy is a “must have” for
B.C. history collections, and a good read for anyone with an interest in
Nanaimo past and present.