Skip to content Skip to navigation

The Daily Colonist, August 31, 1914

« previous next »

#dailycolonist1914 - News from Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today.

This is the last of the Monday extra editions, and it is pretty scant. It's one sheet of paper again. The two pages inside the fold are the same two-page map that was published in the Sunday magazine section and there is another large map taking up about a third of the last page. The front page is about one quarter image, so there is barely more than one page of news, and some of that is reprints and rehashing of old news. However, there are still some interesting things:

  • The first real mention of the enormity of the carnage, a four-day battle with an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 British casualties with the Germans suffering "very heavy losses, far in excess of anything suffered by us [the British]" 
  • Samoa is taken from the Germans by "a British force from New Zealand"
  • Prince Albert is out of active service (previously on the H.M.S. Collingwood) and in Aberdeen, recovering from appendicitis. [And if you thinking, "so?" - Prince Albert is the second son of King George V and will, after his father dies and his elder brother, Edward, abdicates to marry socialite and two-time divorcée Wallis Simpson, will change his name to George VI and be king during World War II and father to our current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II].
  • Editorial about the difficulty of getting reliable news out of the war zone

http://www.britishcolonist.ca/dateList.php?year=1914