The Hemisphere: Bad Form

According to its publicity brochures, Victoria’s ivy-covered Empress Hotel is “stately, dignified, charming” and “suavely staffed.” Located in the heart of Canada’s most loyal citadel of British ways and manners, the hotel greets its well-mannered guests with a massive display of paneled walls, beamed ceilings and straight-backed chairs, serves them tea to the discreet accompaniment of a string ensemble. Small wonder, therefore, that an undersized, untweedy man wearing blue jeans, a grey fedora and a blue polka-dot handkerchief over the lower part of his face, was emphatically snubbed when he started to hold up the hotel’s coffeeshop at pistolpoint last week.

The little man entered the coffeeshop, crowded with delegates to the Pacific Logging Congress, and shouted, “This is a holdup!” No one, least of all the suave staff, paid any attention. Then the bandit kicked over a chair and shouted again: “Don’t anyone move!” A few people turned to look in well-bred distaste, then went back to their eating. It was too much for the little man. Waving his pistol desperately in the air, he fired a single embarrassed shot into the ceiling.

It was crude, it was shocking bad form, but it did get results. The patrons swung around in their chairs, stared in stupefaction as the bandit ordered the cashier to fill a paper sack he threw toward her. Then, clutching the sack, containing $285, he scuttled out the door. It was the first time in all its 47 years, the management announced, that the hotel had suffered the indignity of a robbery. Such a moment could not go unrecorded. The Vancouver Sun, which occasionally yields to the temptation to tweak Victoria’s stiff upper lip, assigned star Cartoonist Len Norris to the historical task (see cut).