Vancouver's Fair: An Administrative and Political History of the Pacific National Exhibition

David Mattison is a librarian with the B.C. Provincial Archives and
Records Services Library.

The Vancouver Fair, an institution promoted by the Vancouver Exhibition Association, itself founded in 1907, emerged literally with flying colours at its first fair in 1910. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier attended the opening, as did Boy Scout founder Sir Robert Baden Powell. Grandest of all the permanent structures which eventually crowded the exhibition grounds was the Escher-like Industrial Building put up that first year. Like all good fantasies it came to an end in 1936 by being demolished.

Taking two different approaches to the Vancouver Fair, better known today as the Pacific National Exhibition, Breen and Coates, professor and graduate student at the University of British Columbia at time of publication, have overkilled the subject altogether. A pity the two books could not have been combined.

The illustrated history, by its price and layout, appears to be of interest to those who take their history visually and care little for documentation and the finer complexities of historical debate. The layout is a bit odd, many images being reduced, bled, and cropped. The typefaces, a bold for caption titles and a lighter style for text, are ill matched, as are the super-large quotation marks that set off selections from source material.

The images are interesting and add up to a full view of the PNE over its long history. Both books were published in honour of the PNE’s 75th anniversary (the VEA changed its name to PNE in 1946). Unlike the administrative volume, which supports a full complement of statistical tables, notes and an index, the photo version has none of these referential amenities.

To the credit of the PNE’s management, the authors were allowed full access to the records of the organization. The inner workings of an impor-tant Vancouver institution have been disclosed and the authors have been neutral and fair in their assessment of the PNE’s successes and failures. What emerges from the administrative and political history, then, is a true appreciation of the PNE’s unenviable position of being between the politicians and the public, with nowhere to hide.