As the archivist for the CBC in Vancouver, Colin Preston looks after more than 250,000 items and programmes on film and videotape. And, as he’ll tell you, it’s the best historical archive of film footage west of Toronto.
Preston says that over the last decade staff has been shoveling all this archival material into a common database that’s searchable through the CBC’s Intranet. The hope is that one day it will eventually be publicly accessible through the Internet.
Still, it’s a wonderful source of information about a much older Vancouver and it’s another source for anyone looking for footage of an old house or neighbourhood.
For instance, Shannon Mews, the development around B.T. Rogers (the sugar baron’s) 1925 mansion at Granville and 57th Avenue, is in the news again, and there’s old CBC news footage showing it neglected and ghostly. Preston says there’s also some interesting footage of Hycroft, a Shaughnessy mansion that sat empty and reputedly haunted for a few years before the University Women’s Club took it over in 1962. “[The CBC] did a wonderful, whimsical piece where a couple of teenagers were daring a young couple to go through there in the early ‘60s when it was all rundown.”
Start with a date
Preston says the best place to start your research is with a date. “In the game of news, the magic bullet is the date. That’s usually where most institutions can find out if they have something or not.”
But Preston also warns that finding footage of a particular house or building is a bit of a long shot, unless something happened there that was “illicit or horrific or honorific.”
“Sometimes there’s a wonderful story about neighbourhoods and the ‘50s and ‘60s were particularly rich that way, but a camera wouldn’t talk about a house by and large unless somebody was arrested there, or it burnt down or was demolished.”
Colin will be doing a show and tell for the Vancouver Historical Society at the Vancouver Museum in Vanier Park tonight.
You’ll be able to see footage from “A Day in the Life of,” a 1960s television series that follows a bus driver to Richmond in one of the old Brill buses. There’s a 1961 film that captures a day at Hastings Park races and there’s a 1966 clip of Fraser MacPherson at the Cave nightclub.
© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.