McCully's New Brunswick: Photographs From the Air, 1931-1939

Island

Introduction

The McCully photographic collection, or more precisely the McCully-Reid collection of photographs taken from the air beginning in 1931, was the first significant series of aerial photos of the Maritimes. But these photos were not the first ever taken from the air. After the First World War, a number of aerial photographic surveys were conducted by the federal government. During the summer of 1924, a government aircraft flew over Moncton and the lower Petitcodiac River acquiring landscape photographs in order to assess the feasibility of erecting a tidal power dam across the river between Hopewell Cape and Fort Folly. (Fortunately this development did not happen.) But these technical aerial photos pale in comparison to the McCully photos, which offer us a wonderful visual public record of what southeastern New Brunswick and northern Nova Scotia actually looked like more than seventy years ago.

The photographs are significant for a number of reasons. Richard Dick McCully and Harold Reid pioneered commercial aerial photography in Atlantic Canada. Many of the photos were of prominent homes and businesses and were later sold to the owners, since aerial photographs were quite rare in the 1930s. The photos reveal the region in fascinating detail at the start of the Great Depression, an important and very active period in Maritime history. From a historical viewpoint, seventy years is not a long time, but much of what the McCully-Reid collection shows is no longer standing or has been seriously altered, both in the urban centres and the surrounding countryside.

For the photographic collector, historian, or anyone interested in understanding what life was like in the early years of the twentieth century, the collection is absolutely unique; it captures in intimate detail the genuine, day-in-the-life, you-saw-it-with-your-own-eyes feeling of that first day in May 1931 when Harold Reid and Marty Fraser took off in Dick McCully’s small twin-engined plane from the old Moncton airport and began clicking away at many of the most important sights over Moncton, Westmorland County, and beyond. We see the city’s river-front in splendid detail — still a working riverport with vessels tied up — the old cotton mill, the railway yards, Eaton’s, and the community’s numerous sporting facilities, including the Lakeside Golf Links. Outside Moncton, we see Shediac Bay hosting the Italian Armada, downtown Shediac, the Pointe-du-Chêne wharf, and the Cape Tormentine railway ferry. Like a bird soaring over Mount Allison and Sackville, we see a tragic railroad accident and glimpse the Chignecto–Cumberland Basin area before moving upriver to Hillsborough and River Glade, then over to Kent County as far north as Richibucto.

Richard Thorne McCully was a Nova Scotian who worked as a pilot with Canadian International Airways. He convinced his company to establish a flying school in Moncton and became assistant flight instructor as well as operations manager of the facility. He also started a short-lived airline in Moncton and was involved in a number of local entrepreneurial enterprises. Born in Nova Scotia, photographer David S. Reid and his son, Harold, moved to Amherst and then to Saint John, where the elder Reid operated photographic studios. In 1924, the Reids moved to Moncton and set up Reid’s Studio in the Mabel Block at Lutz and Main. They later opened the city’s first photoengraving business at 130 Westmorland Street, and this site became known as the Reid Building. The Reids’ photoengraving plant was later sold when David Reid retired and moved briefly to the southern United States. Harold Reid acquired ownership of the studio in the 1930s and began producing film documentaries and selling photographic equipment. Harold Reid died in 1977.

David V. Reid, grandson of David S. Reid and son of Harold Reid, is retired and currently living in Moncton. He too learned the photographic business and later worked for Fred Lynds at CKCW-TV, Moncton’s first television station. In a recent conversation, David recalled those early years when he was just a boy playing in the Main Street studio:

My grandfather David S. Reid was born in Springhill and operated portrait studios in Amherst, Saint John, and moved to Moncton in the 1920s and opened a studio at Lutz and Main. In the thirties, they had a photoengraving plant where Boomerang’s Steak House is now and did the processing for the Transcript. The Assumption Company also started in this building. The engraving plant was later sold to the Transcript and my grandfather moved briefly to Florida in the thirties.

My father, Harold Reid, was a hard-driving man and didn’t sit around, he worked hard all his life. He started out in a little corner of my grandfather’s studio and sold photographic equipment. He was a dealer for Bell and Howell. My grandfather was mainly a portrait photographer, but my father was interested in film and began producing news reels such as filming Dr. Bethune doing an operation in a Saint John hospital before he went off and became famous with Mao Tse-tung in China. He also did a film project with sound on Magnetic Hill that I still have. I’ve got lots of pictures and old cameras. My father’s company was called Reid’s Picture & Equipment Ltd. and he took most of the pictures in the McCully aerial collection from the 1930s. Marty Fraser was the pilot. Fraser was an ex-RCMP officer, military pilot, and married a Sumner girl [Margaret Sumner, eldest daughter of F.R. Sumner].

One of the McCully planes was equipped with a glass nose for photography, and the cameras used in those early flights were either a speed graphic or some sort of aerial camera. I remember other old cameras were always lying around and something called a machine gun camera. Later, my dad used German cameras and they were the best. I remember Dad and Marty talking about getting lost in the fog over Nova Scotia and coming across the DAR railway tracks near Digby and following the line back into Halifax. Don McClure and Charlie McEwen were also around those airplanes a lot and in and out of the studio. I can remember an old Fairchild camera that was used by the military that my dad could have used taking those aerials. I’m not sure if Dad took all those aerials, but the General Balbo in Shediac harbour are definitely his. Dick McCully later got into the brake-lining business and had a shop on Main Street. My recall of those years is still pretty good.

Convinced that the aviation age would provide great opportunities for exposing people to exciting new ways of seeing the world around them, Dick McCully commissioned David S. Reid to take a series of aerial photographs of southeastern New Brunswick. In May 1931, a young pilot named Marty Fraser flew Reid as far south as Fundy Bay and up into Kent County, and the result is a fascinating collection of aerial photos that reveal the landscape in wonderful bird’s-eye views that capture an age long vanished.

The 1930s marked the arrival of big commercial airlines in the Maritimes. The Moncton airport was soon acquired by the city and operated by Canadian Airways Limited, a Winnipeg-based airline. It remained at the old Tingley Farm site until 1937, when Trans-Canada Airlines (now Air Canada) chose Moncton as its East Coast airbase and a new airport was established at Lakeburn. But prior to the building of this second airport, Moncton became home to another airline that showed great promise but unfortunately lasted less than two years. Launched in 1936, the new East Coast regional airline was named Eastern Canada Air Lines; it was started by Dick McCully, who sold shares in his new business to friends and acquaintances. He almost succeeded in having a feeder air service from Halifax, Sydney, Fredericton, and Charlottetown fly into Moncton.

McCully’s concept would have certainly established the city as the premier air hub of the east, since Halifax as an airport centre was well behind Moncton at this period. McCully got the pioneer air service off the ground, but the five British planes he acquired (aptly named Miss Moncton, Miss Halifax, Miss Sydney, Miss Charlottetown, and Miss Saint John) needed expensive repairs, and poor flying weather the first winter forced the upstart airline to suspend its operations after only one flying season. Once Trans-Canada Airlines announced it would locate in Moncton, McCully knew he could not compete and lost his entire investment. Eastern Canada Air Lines was shut down, but McCully was a born salesman and quickly got a job as a sales representative for a company on Main Street called Asbestosis, which made brake lining material. He also was involved in the Lakeburn Airport land assembly deal, which became controversial after the site sold for a price much higher than its assessed value.

Despite losing his airline, McCully remained an enthusiastic promoter of local projects he personally believed in. Besides aviation, he loved sports and the outdoors. Curling was a special passion, and he became responsible for establishing the Beaver Curling Club. But Richard Thorne McCully will always be associated with Moncton’s early aviation years, and special recognition of his role in establishing Moncton’s proud flying tradition was given to this aviation pioneer at the time of his death in the 1970s. As the hearse left Moncton for burial in Amherst, a single plane took off from Moncton’s airport and escorted the hearse to the cemetery in Nova Scotia.

This collection of more than 450 aerial photographs showing southeastern New Brunswick from 1931 through to 1939 now forms part of the extensive photographic collection of the New Brunswick Public Archives. The photos were acquired from a private collector in Nova Scotia and are known as the Time Frame–McCully Collection.

CHAPTER 1

Early Aerial Photography

From balloons and cameras to aerial photography and spy planes, the history of photography has a fascinating connection with flight, and each technological advance in the camera has seen a corresponding improvement in its ability to capture the earth from above. Free flights in hot air balloons became popular public performances after the first flight occurred over Paris in 1783; two years later, a hydrogen balloon managed to cross the English Channel. The military genius Napoleon pioneered the balloon’s use in battlefield operations during the Battle of Fleurus in 1794 by having different flags waved to ground reconnaissance indicating enemy positions. Experiments with kites and balloons continued for the next fifty years, and the first balloon ascension in Canada was undertaken in 1840 by Professor L.A. Lauriet at Saint John.

With the invention of the early forms of the camera in the 1840s, there developed a corresponding interest in photographing the earth’s surface. The pioneer daguerreotype process involved a lengthy exposure that proved impractical aloft in a balloon, and the gyration of the windswept basket under the balloon was also a problem. The ingenious Frenchman Gaspard Félix Tourhachon, who adopted the pseudonym Nadar, solved the puzzle by keeping the camera stable through a gimbal suspension device. A new wet plate development process allowed Nadar, while aloft over Paris, to capture the image below on his glass plates. On a sunny autumn morning in 1858, Nadar succeeded in producing the world’s first photographs taken from the air. He soon became obsessed with aeronautics and built the largest balloon of the era. It was called the Giant, but it unfortunately crashed and was destroyed in only its second ascension. Nadar did not succeed in