Spilsbury's Album: Photographs and Reminiscences of the BC Coast

Hans B. Neumann is a history lecturer at Scarborough College, University
of Toronto.

This is Spilsbury’s third book dealing with his many years of living
on the B.C. coast. This one covers the gamut of his colorful life from
his youth around the time of World War I right up to the present. Unlike
his earlier books, this one is lavishly illustrated with black-and-white
photographs taken by him during his long life on the “frontier.”
These pictures serve all as almost a family album of his eventful
sojourns as a pioneering spirit out West. Spilsbury first worked in the
lumber industry, then established a radio repair service (which he
developed by the 1920s into Canada’s leading exporter of
radiotelephones). In 1943 he started Queen Charlotte Airlines, which by
1955 had become the third largest airline in Canada, and has since then
been active mainly in tourist charters and pleasure cruising in the
Interior Passage between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland.

As his checkered and successful career indicates, Spilsbury is a
remarkable man: self-reliant, energetic, and not afraid of taking risks.
His text reflects this somewhat roguish, buccaneering approach to life,
a life that in many ways closely parallels the growth and development of
British Columbia since World War I (many of the photographs also
underline this connection).

Yet there is also a certain innocence about the text and the pictures.
Both seem to reflect a simpler age—an age when natural resources were
seemingly unlimited, when the sky was the limit, when dynamic men like
Spilsbury could build thriving businesses from extremely meagre initial
financial resources.

Spilsbury has permitted the reader an intimate look at life on the B.C.
coast through his eyes from the 1920s to the present. In doing so he has
served up a genuine slice of Canadiana.