Charles Heaney on Dam Mountain, 1912. F205-SF2-f1-192.
By Georgia Twiss, Reference Historian
Saved from the Fire
In the early 1970s Glenn Woodsworth received an urgent call from fellow British Columbia Mountaineering Club (BCMC) member Dick Chambers, informing him that the family of Charles Heaney was clearing out Heaney’s house in preparation to sell it and that they were burning all the things they did not want to keep. Heaney, born in Woolwich, England in 1880, had emigrated to Vancouver with his brother Leonard in 1907 and soon joined the BCMC, later becoming the president of the club from 1919-1922 and an honorary member until his death in 1971. As the informal archival collector of the club, Chambers asked Woodsworth, who lived closer to Heaney’s house, to head over immediately and save anything important from being destroyed.
When he arrived at the house a 45-gallon drum incinerator was burning in the backyard. “I salvaged what I could”, Woodsworth noted while recounting the story recently. Those salvaged items included some textual records relating to the BC Sugar Refinery, as well as negative albums containing 442 nitrate negatives taken by Heaney from 1909-1919. Now, over 50 years later, some of these negatives can be viewed in MONOVA’s latest feature exhibit: Found in the Mountains and serve as a reminder that archival collecting is not simple and straightforward, but often requires luck, chance, and for someone to make the choice that the records they are keeping matter.
After rescuing Heaney’s records, Woodsworth stored them in his own home until a friend mentioned the potential danger of keeping nitrate negatives in an unstable environment. Seeking a home for the records Woodsworth donated the albums to UBC Rare Books and Special Collections in 1978, and in 2018 they were transferred to MONOVA to join the larger BCMC collection.
Into the Ice
Negative of the title image on a light table.
The preservation of nitrate negatives requires them to be frozen to slow down the process of chemical breakdown and to reduce the fire hazard that they pose. With the assistance of long-time volunteer Richard de Lhorbe, the MONOVA Archives is currently scanning the negatives at a high-resolution before they will be vacuum sealed and placed in the freezer for long-term storage. Almost all the photographs have corresponding captions provided by Heaney that tell us of the subject of the shot, and in many cases the date it was taken.
The first album is largely made up of photographs taken during an expedition to the North-Central Interior in the summer of 1909. The three-month journey brought Heaney and his group from Ashcroft to McLeod Lake, the traditional and ancestral lands of the Tse’khene, Takla and Dene people. Here, documenting the topography and geology of the region. The album also includes several photographs of early BCMC members including Billy Gray and Charles Chapman.
The second album includes photographs taken during BCMC expeditions to Mount Rainier and the Sunshine Coast, as well as snapshots of Heaney’s everyday life with his wife Gwladys in North Vancouver and Kitsilano. Included amongst these a series of photographs of the Seaforth Highlanders leaving for Valcartier, and a single shot of the Komagata Maru in Burrard Inlet taken from the North Vancouver ferry – a reminder of the ways in which important historical moments were viewed and recorded by people as they happened.
Photographs from the Charles Heaney Collection
Moments Captured
The scanning process, while long, has allowed us to come across some funny moments captured within the albums, including the journey of a mosquito trapped on the film plate of Heaney’s camera during the North-Central Interior trek. Over a series of photographs, you can see the mosquito move across the film plate, until only the wings remain visible.
T. H. T’s party on way up Parsnip [River]. Note the mosquito in the top right corner of the image. F205-SF2-f1-100.
On the left is a shot Heaney took of Charles Chapman taking a photograph of Billy Gray sleeping in the woods near the BCMC Cabin on Grouse Mountain. On the right is Heaney’s own photograph of the same scene.
Moments like these, along with the documentation of the early excursions of the BCMC and the areas surrounding North Vancouver captured by Heaney’s photography would have been entirely lost if Dick Chambers had been unable to reach Glenn Woodsworth all those years ago. Not every record can be saved, but we are grateful that these were.
You can view the photograph collection in its entirety on the MONOVA Archives Database and purchase high-resolution scans by contacting the archives directly: archives@monova.ca. The purchase of photos helps support the digitization and processing of our archival records.
The MONOVA Archives would like to thank the BCMC, and the BC Mountain Foundation for their generous donation in honour of the late Michael Feller which has supported this digitization and processing project. A special thank you to BCMC President Glenn Woodsworth for participating in an interview for this piece.
We rely on contributions, monthly or one-time gifts, to help MONOVA safeguard and expand our community’s archival and museum collections, build learning experiences and inspire future generations.
Donations are accepted through the Friends of the North Vancouver Museum & Archives Society, Registered Charity No. 89031 1772 RR0001.
