One of the jobs that I filled in for summer relief was as watchman at the Great Northern docks in Vancouver harbour. Watchmen were from all stripes of life at the dock. One gent had been a Vancouver policeman in the bad old days when a lot of the force was let go, including the chief, because of graft. This guy passed the time at night by picking every padlock in the place, much to the consternation of the daytime clerks. A son of a railway employee also worked for a while but one night with a friend got into racing around in the warehouse with fork lifts and one went on its side, threw him out, and the mast came down and cut off half of one foot. Another was a PHD English graduate but those jobs were in short supply so...
The dock was right east of Ballantyne Pier and barges of pulp or rolls of paper would come from pulp mills on Vancouver Island. Kincome Navigation had a ship that had an open deck for rail cars full of rolls of paper that could tie up at the end of the dock and match the end of the rail spur. The barges could come in at any time of night depending on weather and tides across the Strait of Georgia and in those days were pulled by these great old wooden tow boats that still had a full crew. That meant skipper, deck hand, engineer, sometimes a 2nd engineer and a cook. The deck house was long, matching the sheer of the deck, with the wheel house on top at the front. Not all of the tow boats had given way to the practice of using tractor tires for bumpers and still sported rope-work puddings as bumpers. The boats would tie up for a few hours if it wasn't busy and I would sometimes be invited aboard for coffee and pie. The galley door was usually a double dutch door and the cook would set up a spot at the galley table. It was bad manners and probably a superstition to wear your hat into the galley and it could be chucked smartly over the side.
The barges full of bales of white pulp sheets were covered barges and were positioned in front of one of the two fixed cranes. These cranes were old technology in that a cable ran from a heavy winch in the operators shack over the pulley at the end of an A-frame made of 12 by 12 wooden beams. The A-frame could also be moved by a second winch. The operator was positioned to the front of everything, on a sheeps hide seat (to cushion his piles) and his hands would work the upright levers that raised and lowered the boom or hook and his feet rested on the brake pedals. In order to unload the barge, the longshoremen would have to lower a Hyster heavy duty forklift, and sometimes two, into the barge. The crane operator had to hold the weight of the Hyster with his legs and slowly lower it into the hold. The Hysters didn't have forks but huge paddles that tightened on the paper rolls and they could be rotated to lay a roll on its side, if necessary. One man in the hold would operate the Hyster and bring the paper or pulp under the hook and two guys would put a sling around it and up it would come. Other forklifts on the dock would then move it into the warehouse and stack it. In due course, the product would be loaded into rail cars and sent on its way.
The waterfront in Vancouver was an active and exciting place. At the foot of Burrard Street, under the shadow of the great art deco Marine Building was the CPR Pier which became known as Centennial Pier when larger cruise ships started using it. In the 1960's, CPR still had a ferry landing just to the west of Centennial Pier, where the new convention centre is. It was more of a ship than the drive-straight-on ferries of today in that you had to load through a door in the side and then manoeuvre into an assigned spot. The passenger areas had lots of brass and mahogany and the dining room still had linen and silverware.
East of Centennial Pier, where the Heliport is today, were docks that used to be CPR's when they ran steamship service up the coast and a marine ways. Then came Fisherman's Wharf, which is much reduced now, then the Port Captain's office which was located in a building built in 1906 as the offices to the lumber mill that had grown up from the original Hastings Mill, and now as the home of the Flying Angels Seafarer's Centre. then came Ballantyne Pier and the G.N. Dock.
In the 1960's crews of longshoremen unloaded ships, before containerization became universal. At that time, the White Pass and Yukon Railway, pioneered containerized transport of goods on their shipping docks in Vancouver, close to the PNE. Their ships then sailed to Skagway, Alaska and loaded the containers onto the train which went up the White Pass, next to the Trail of '98, to Whitehorse. Also, I had a chance to go see the first purpose built car carrier to be unloaded in Vancouver at Ballantyne Pier. These cars were Datsuns and one or two longshoremen would be driving cars off while the rest of the crew, a dozen or so men, played soccer on the dock. Now the car carriers all come to the car docks on Annacis Island on the Fraser River and docks with cranes for loading and unloading huge container carriers have replaced the old-time docks. What remains the same in Vancouver Harbour is loading bulk carriers with grain and coal, and lumber is still slung into ship holds a single lift at a time.
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