The Making of a Grey Panther: The Derrick Humphreys Story

The Making of a Grey Panther is a superb biography, a life of adventure that begins in Dickensian England before World War I, then moves to the Western Australian mining frontier of the 1930s and 1940s, with excursions into the New Guinea campaign in World War II, the De Beers’ South African diamond empire, a foreign aid project in Brazil and the rebuilding of the townsite at Churchill, Manitoba in the mid-1970s. For many years Humphreys was the mayor of West Vancouver. His memoir of life in office offers the finest published account to date of the ins and outs, the personalities, and the bare-knuckled fights that have marked the politics of North and West Vancouver for over a decade.