Renaissance Woman

Before Vancouver, B.C. had "Garbage Collectors"- or as we said when I was a kid: "Garbage Men" - they had "Scavangers". Private companies used to remove trash for people, apparently not only being paid, but also scavenging through materials for sellable garbage as the name suggests. The 1896 Vancouver City Directory   has a list of 4 scavenger companies in Vancouver - also three in Victoria and one in New West: These scavengers would dump the garbage they could not salvage. False Creek was used for such dumping events, and there are likely many dump areas underneath a lot of beautiful apartment buildings and parks in the city. But one of those dumping areas seems to have been accepted as the consolidated dump at the south end of the Cambie Street Bridge. In 1907 an incinerator (a Heenan Froude) was installed at 120 Barnard St. (Union St.). The city was getting more involved in garbage collection around this time and bought out the largest private scavengin...

 The Merry Widow Sauce Bristol, U.K. Purnell & Panter (Sauce) Ca. 1907 - ca. 1926 #30 One “The Merry Widow Sauce” bottle was found on site (False Creek Flats, 2021). It is a mould blown bottle made in a 3-piece cup-bottom mould. A small dot is embossed in the centre of the base. The bottle was about 20 cm tall (at least more than 17 cm) and 4.5 cm across on the base. The bottle is broken where there was a string rim about half-way down the neck. Embossing reads: “THE MERRY / WIDOW/ SAUCE” on three recessed panels. The fourth panel is not recessed. There is no maker’s mark to indicate who made the bottle, but two newspaper articles attribute it to Purnell & Panter in Bristol, UK. Merry Widow Sauce was created to market the Operetta “The Merry Widow”, which premiered in London in 1907 (Scott 2014; Traubner 2003:231).     Merry Widow Sauce bottle recovered from False Creek #30 A couple of ads from the Edmonton Journal in 1913 and 1914 call it a Worcestershire Sauce. ...