PENINSULA
NEWS
Established 1912
Saanich Fair brings out the best in people
Strike ik extends d to Sid Sidney liliquor store
Peninsula residents and visitors alike celebrate a timeless tradition, Photo essay Page A3
BCGEU stages a one-day strike to protest stalled negotiations, Page A5 Watch for breaking news at www.peninsulanewsreview.com
Friday, September 7, 2012
Region’s airport had military beginnings Former Patricia Bay airfield designated as national historic engineering site Don Descoteau News Staff
Ramsay Murray can’t say he was involved in the construction of the former Patricia Bay Airfield. He’s no less a fan of the facility, which began life as a Royal Air Force training station in 1939 and served as the main air base on the Pacific Coast during the Second World War before becoming the Capital Region’s primary land-based air transportation hub. Murray, 86, has been on a mission in recent years. He wanted to see Pat Bay and more than 80 other wartime airfields constructed under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan designated as national historic civil engineering sites. Today (Sept. 7) he’ll get his wish, as the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering – Murray is a member of its national history committee – unveils a plaque at the B.C. Aviation Museum commemorating the military beginnings of what is now know as Victoria International Airport. Completed just in time to begin training air personnel for wartime duty, and to serve as an operational patrol unit watching for submarines off Vancouver Island and B.C.’s North Coast, Pat Bay became the country’s third-largest military airfield. By the war’s end, roughly 7,000 personnel trained or were stationed there. The south island project, planned well before war was declared, was a predecessor for a massive blitz that saw 88 airfields and ancillary buildings constructed in an 18-month period in the early stages of the Second World War. “That was quite a monumental piece of work to execute in that time,” Murray says, noting that $2 billion was spent on
Kyle Slavin/News staff
Ramsay Murray, left, national history committee member with the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, and B.C. Aviation Museum librarian Doug Rollins stand next to a Bristol Bolingbroke patrol aircraft at the museum. The society is unveiling a plaque today acknowledging the construction of the Pat Bay airfield for military use. such construction projects in 1940 alone. Canada had the lion’s share of those, but airfields were also built in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, among other countries in the former British Empire. “It really was quite an effort, and that is what we are trying to recognize. It’s an important part of Canadian history.”
A time of change for region In the mid-1930s, when the powersthat-be in Victoria were looking for ways to create jobs and expand their business
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horizons, the idea of building an airport was floated. The Lansdowne civilian airfield, on the current site of that middle school’s playing fields, had been shut down in 1933 after four years in operation and some proponents wanted to find a similarly close-to-town location. But before a site could be agreed upon, the Canadian military took over the discussion. “They wanted something in the Pacific, with tensions growing,” says B.C. Aviation Museum librarian Doug Rollins. “The closest place they could find that suited
their needs of both open land and a harbour was at Pat Bay.” Especially with the outbreak of war in the Pacific, the site became very strategic, both as a training and patrol base, and a staging area for aircraft carrying on to Alaska and Russia. In fact, very few civilian aircraft were allowed on the runways, Rollins says, the exception being the odd Trans-Canada Airlines plane. PLEASE SEE: Pat Bay facility, page A8
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