-Robert McBeath, when asked why he stormed a German machinegun nest

Last week the museum had the pleasure of hosting a small group of high school students from a tiny village in Scotland, and I was lucky enough to spend some time with them.

Vancouver’s Police Department has a long legacy connecting it to Scotland, the native home of our first police chief (John Stewart) and many of our early officers. But I was surprised to learn of an even deeper connection between Vancouver and Kinlochbervie, a small hamlet boasting a population of 400 residents – we share a former citizen: Robert McBeath. Both cities have reason to be proud of this heroic man, a man who risked his own life time and time again in World War I before becoming a VPD officer – only to be shot and killed on the corner of Davie and Granville St.

A hero for Canada and Scotland

Not too many people in Scotland knew the story of McBeath until a group of dedicated students from his hometown of Kinlochbervie embarked on a project to highlight his acts of bravery and entered their results in a BBC contest meant to showcase “The Lost Generation” – the men and women who fought in World War One. The student’s entry placed in the top five and piqued local interest in McBeath’s legacy, both in Kinlochbervie and Vancouver.

The project detailed McBeath’s accomplishments, notably his joining the army in 1914 at the young age of 16, lying to the recruiters in his eagerness to fight. It was during his time on the frontlines of France, three years later that McBeath and his unit were attacked by German machine guns. The young man volunteered to rush into the enemy’s nest and disarm it using only a revolver and a Lewis gun – seemingly a kamikaze mission.

To everyone’s surprise, McBeath was a success, capturing 3 officers and 30 soldiers, his heroic act earning him the Victoria Cross, a prestigious  honour bestowed upon only 1353 people in history who have committed acts of unusual bravery. His notoriety spread through his home town, and they rallied to support him in his endeavor to move, with his young bride, to Vancouver in 1919. His dreams of sheep farming having failed, McBeath became a police officer with the VPD.

In the line of duty.

He had been serving for just under fourteen months when, after trying to wave down a drunken motorist, he was gunned down. Tragically, this brave young man died on the way to the hospital.  He was the sixth VPD officer (click the link  to have a look at the VPM’s Fallen Officers page)  be killed  in the line of duty.

The people of Vancouver gave him a hero’s send-off, and his funeral was one of the largest in Vancouver’s history, with thousands attending and many local businesses closing for the day. He was interred at Mountainview Cemetery, and though local historians have kept his memory alive, the general public forgot about him – until the plucky wee Scottish students fanned the flames of history with their prize winning project.

News outlets in both countries have picked up on the story, and we were honoured to have the kids come to the museum and to show them around the city. After a tour of the museum, where we talked about VPD’s deep connection to its Scottish traditions, I had the pleasure to lead them on a walking tour of Chinatown and Gastown detailing the city as it would have been in McBeath’s days walking the beat.

Finally, on Sunday, the children dedicated a stone cairn, a stone structure that is traditional Scottish burial/memorial marker at the brand new Tactical Training Centre for the VPD. The children played the bagpipes, read poetry and honoured our shared “local” hero.

The original students who worked on the project.

It was great to see kids getting really involved in history, and amazing that they had the chance to come all the way to Vancouver to visit the final home of their fellow countryman. The next time you are looking for a great activity for a Sunday afternoon, go and say Hello to humble hero Robert McBeath at his grave in Mountainview and “place a stone on his cairn.”

On Wednesday, June 2 from 6:00-9:00PM, you are all invited to the museum and try your hand at a handful of crime-investigating activities, from analyzing blood spatter and bullet evidence to identifying tool marks and foot prints. This event will be adults-only, as some of the material presented will be somewhat graphic.

The Police Museum, of course, is housed in a building that was once Vancouver’s City Morgue and Coroner’s Court; over 15,000 autopsies were performed in this space between 1932 and 1980 and countless pieces of evidence were analyzed downstairs in the City Analyst’s Lab. This place is as close as you can get to CSI:Vancouver.

Photo by Kim Werker

Stay tuned for additional announcements about this event; we’re working hard to line up some great surprises for you all!

If you plan on attending, please RSVP in the comments below or at http://vancouvertweetup.com/; we’d like to get a rough idea of the number of attendees so that we can plan accordingly.

See you soon!

(Also, we’ve posted the next series of our “Forensics for Adults” workshops. You can find info (and tickets) here.)

We've got our game faces on!

Hard to believe it’s only a few days until the 2010 Olympic Winter Games descend on Vancouver; more than 350,000 visitors are expected to visit Vancouver and Whistler over the two-and-a-half weeks of the games. You can’t imagine how much we want to see some of those folks come through our doors…

The only problem? We’re not exactly rich, so we don’t have a million-dollar marketing budget. Buying advertising during the Olympics? Not unless you’ve got a sizable pile of cash. Guerrilla advertising? Risky, to say the least, since the rules are (understandably) super-strict for events like this. Do nothing? Seems foolish when so many people are coming to town.

Swiss House, German House, and... Big House?

So, what *is* our Games-time strategy? We can’t pay for advertising, but thankfully nothing beats word-of-mouth. We hope that our friends, both online and offline, will help us spread the word that we’re open, we’re worth visiting, and we’re up to interesting things during the Olympics.

We are offering our popular Sins of the City tour every day during the Games; we’re also extending our hours by staying open on Sundays. Some have even suggested that we re-brand ourselves as the “Big House” for the Olympics. (Not so sure about that idea… but if you want to get your mugshot taken here, we’d be happy to oblige!).

So, to put it as plainly as we can, we need your help.

Not for you. (But you can have a great t-shirt!)

Do you have a great idea on how we can promote ourselves or our walking tour over the next few weeks? Do you know someone (who knows someone) who’s profoundly influential and willing to let people know we exist? Can we put our logo on the side of your poodle? If so, or if you have a better idea, post them in the comments below or send us an email at chris@vancouverpolicemuseum.ca. We’ve got a stack of “Sinner” shirts looking for new homes, and we’re happy to pay (in apparel, not in cash… although $1.2 million looks appealing, doesn’t it?) for your great ideas.

You know this place

Milling about outside the Penthouse Nightclub before our (a group of us staff from the Police Museum) Heritage Vancouver-arranged tour, it was interesting to note how many different kinds of people had gathered for a peek inside one of Vancouver’s most notorious hot spots.  The crowd was definitely what you’d call ‘multi-generational’ (one sweet little old lady claimed to have visited the Penthouse in her youth…over 70 years ago!), and most of them looked like they wouldn’t be caught dead hanging around a peeler bar any night of the week, even a tame Wednesday evening at 6pm.  No one quite knew what to expect, but we all hoped for something interesting.

The Penthouse is an iconic building in Vancouver.  Who could claim themselves a Vancouverite and not know about that purple stucco building with the green tin showgirls (who have graced its façade since the 1940’s,  fyi), the lit marquis, and finally, the neon green Penthouse sign?   Well it turns out this place is more than just a strip club.  It is a vibrant piece of Vancouver’s history, and we were about get an ear, and an eye – ful.

The Penthouse is a family business, one of the oldest in Vancouver; Danny Filippone, our guide for the night, told us that his father Ross, and his Uncles Joe, Mickey, and  Jimmy opened the club in 1947, and that this bar and neighbourhood have been a part of his life as long as he can remember.  In fact, he tells us, the late, great George Burns was performing stand-up at the Penthouse the night Danny was born and handed celebratory cigars out to the patrons!  Danny likes to tell people that “God” handed out cigars to celebrate his arrival.   George Burns was not by far the only celebrity to have patronized this club.  Danny, our dynamic and obviously passionate guide, regales us throughout the tour with wonderful stories of the “good ol’ days” when ‘Uncle Joe’ and the Penthouse hosted the likes of Jimmy Durante, Carmen Miranda, Bing Crosby, and a hundred other Hollywood hotshots!

Where Sammy Davis Jr. jammed

Originally, the main floor of the club was a boxing arena and athletic club for youth.  Uncle Joe was big on boxing and passionate about getting troubled kids off the streets.  The grown-up action happened upstairs.  Encouraged to “use our imagination”, we were brought into a small room with a black baby grand piano, a few small tables and chairs, and two mirrored dancers pedestals in the corner.  This is The Lounge.  Slightly rundown in its present form, it once was privy to some real action.  Big names like Sammy Davis Jr. jammed in here and played this very piano!

How would you like your steak, sir?

We were next lead into The Steak Loft.  Again, this room revealed only hints of its previous grandeur, and it was through Danny’s story-telling that we were able to imagine it as it once was:  The Penthouse was a “supper club” in the 1950s, and it was the place to be and be seen in Vancouver.   A small open grill against one wall was one of the many reasons people came:  this was the first restaurant in Vancouver to serve steak!  (The Penthouse also claims to be the first place in Vancouver to serve pizza by the slice.)  The club didn’t open until 10pm, after other clubs in the city like The Cave and The Palomar closed.  In those days, Penthouse patrons wore tuxedos and evening gowns, and if you wanted a drink of liquor, you brought it yourself.  With imagined scents of open-flame grilling and cigars, we moved along.

The Green Room. Pretty self-explanatory.

As we shuffled even further towards the back of the building, we ventured into The Green Room.  Now, if you were someone in Vancouver, you would definitely be seen in The Lounge or in The Steak Loft, but only if you were really the crème de la crème, could you possibly endeavor to enter The Green Room.  The Green Room was aptly named, as the entire room is covered in gorgeous green velvet wallpaper.  It was in this room that the Mills Brothers stayed when they were in town, and where Frank Sinatra went to avoid the crowds.  That’s right, old Blue Eyes himself.  Frank Sinatra famously stood on stage at the Orpheum after a show and announced “I’ll see you at the Penthouse!”  You can imagine the line.

Interestingly, it was in this room that Errol Flynn spent some of his diminishing coin on drinks and entertainment the night before he ended up dead and on our autopsy table here at the Vancouver Police Museum.

Joe Filippone’s Supper Club was definitely a lively place to be in Vancouver’s early social scene.  Before the club had its liquor license, ‘Uncle Joe’ hired full time lookouts that patrolled on top of the roof.  When a fleet of coppers was spotted, alarms were rung throughout the club, and everyone knew to hide their liquor.  However, since most of the club’s regulars were celebrities, judges, and off-duty cops… as long as the booze was hidden, the raiding police officers turned a blind eye.  Around this same time, ‘Uncle Joe’ was holding private parties in his apartment in the house next-door.   These parties were not immune to police raids, and the headline “Joe Filippone’s Penthouse Raided Again” appeared the papers so often, that when the club owners finally got their liquor license, there really was only one name for the place:  and so The Penthouse was born.

Where the end-of-evening magic happened

We were served a lovely Indian buffet and treated to an interesting presentation on the Nightclubs in Vancouver in the 50s and 60s.  Our next, erm, “presentation” was a house specialty, and it’s possible that while mired in all the history we’d forgotten what the house was: a strip club.  If so, the petite girl in the scandalous Minnie Mouse outfit who methodically removed her clothes (all of ‘em) was an excellent reminder.  The Penthouse first got into burlesque in the 1960s and 70s, becoming a full-fledged strip club by the 1980s.  It was fun to watch the expressions on the faces of the history buffs as they nervously watched the dancer flip upside down on the gleaming pole center-stage.

Business at the Penthouse is booming, and that’s a good thing.  After decades in the business, this place is a true piece of Vancouver. It is through Danny Filippone’s willingness to share his family stories that we are able to appreciate it.  So here’s to another 63 years of the Penthouse!  Here’s to keeping the stories coming!  And oh – here’s to keeping the condos at bay!

Support one of Vancouver’s most interesting places and go see some peelers will ya?

Heritage Vancouver has added another date for this awesome tour – You should go.

The Vancouver Police Tug-of-War team at an early Police Sports Day. (P00259, Vancouver Police Museum Archives)

Our whole crew has been working hard the last few months to get this together and it’s finally time to make an announcement:

Come join us as we celebrate the opening of our newest exhibit at the Vancouver Police Museum. This major exhibit explores the history of sport and athleticism in the Vancouver Police Department through profiles of exceptional police athletes, inter- and intra-department leagues and initiatives where the VPD has used sport to build relationships with the community.

Did you know that…

• British Columbia’s first Olympic medal-winner was a VPD member? (Duncan Gillis, in 1912)
• In 1985, a retired VPD member set a World Record at the age of 76, running 100 meters in 18.0 seconds, with a hip replacement? (Jack Harrison)
• 30 past participants of the H.E.R.O.S. / VPD Drug Awareness and Education Program for junior hockey players now play in the NHL?

On August 13th, we will be having our Opening Event. Join our Board of Directors, museum staff and some of our profiled athletes as we celebrate the completion of this fantastic project. Appetizers and light refreshments will be provided. Additional sports memorabilia that is too large or too fragile to be a part of the permanent display will also be on special display for this event only.

This exhibit is the largest we’ve ever installed in our space and we’re really proud of it. Come join us as we show it off! (It will be up until at least September, 2010.)

Christina, one of our employees, approached us a month ago asking if she could have her baby shower here at the Police Museum. Little did we realize that she’d book three bands, have a cash bar, a DJ and invite a couple hundred people! The bands set up in the morgue, the DJ set up in the Autopsy room and food was set up in the main gallery of the museum. We even had a little area set aside for younger kids to hang out and play.

It was exciting to see so many people visit the museum who’d never been here before; the hipster crowd isn’t one we’ve promoted ourselves aggressively to (so far).

If you’re ever looking for a venue to host a most unusual party, think of us. You might have to abide by a few restrictive rules, but we promise that your guests will have such a good time they won’t even notice.

Photo Gallery - All photos taken by Aki Mimoto: www.disconti.nu