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Philip Timms' Vancouver: Photographs and postcards from 1900-1910 |
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"Mr. Timms is a real Vancouver pioneer; handpicked, extra special, double refined and forty over proof." Mayor J.S. Matthews, City of Vancouver Archivist, perhaps best described Philip Timms. Born in Toronto in 1874, the son of pioneer music printers who emigrated from London, England. Philip Timms was an extraordinary man whose lifetime spanned the days of horses and buggies; the invention of the first automobile, radio, airplane and television, as well as the landing of the first man on the moon. He lived to one month short of his 99th birthday having lived a long life filled with many interests and considerable accomplishments. |
 Timms' interests varied from shopkeeper, to professional printer and commercial photographer, to amateur archaeologist, archivist and historian, to musician, vocalist, choir and band leader, projectionist, lecturer and frustrated actor. He developed his own home museum, auditorium and theatre, was comfortable in churches of every denomination and was a deeply committed vegetarian and antivivisectionist.
With his amateur camera he one day took pictures of lumbermen clearing trees in Stanly Park and sold them |
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| for a few dollars. At that point he realized his future profession.
Timms' considered his greatest professional accomplishment to be the photographic record that he created of Vancouver between 1900 and 1910, most of which were turned into postcards. He travelled the whole Lower Mainland on his bicycle, recording Vancouver coming of age. He felt compelled to record the Vancouver of his time "before it all got swept away" and we are grateful for that vision, for indeed, much of it has been. Timms was keenly interested in all the ways of life in the new frontier that was British Columbia. As a consequence, the photographic record that he left behind affords us a valuable glimpse of the province during its period of growth from a frontier outpost to a well-established centre of industry and tourism. |
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| Philip Timms was a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society; he was also the official photographer for the Vancouver Museum. Of his work, James B. Stanton, Curator of History at the Museum in the early 1970s wrote: "All of Timms' photographs have a certain recognizable quality about them; much of the kindness and gentleness of the man himself comes through. His shots are candid and uncluttered and capture dramatically the feeling and mood of the time." | ||
 On Thursday, October 25, the Vancouver Historical Society invited Fred Thirkell and co-author Robert Scullion to present some of Philip's images.
Vancouver-born Fred Thirkell was educated in Vancouver and graduated from UBC. His longtime interest in post cards manifested itself in 1986 in the book "Vancouver's Past: thirty-two ready to mail beautifully reproduced antique picture postcards." From that |
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| point he collaborated with Glasgow-born and fellow postcard historian Bob Scullion to produce "Postcards from the Past: Edwardian Images of Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley" (1996) and 6 other photo-illustrated books on Vancouver's history, including "Philip Timms' Vancouver: 1900-1910 (2006)." | ||
 The well attended event was held at the Vancouver Museum and included several members of Philips' family, including Lois Peters, Philip's grand-daughter, who gave some pithy remembrances of her grandfather's life.
Vancouve Public Library is now in posession of all the negatives by Philip Timms. Images in the collection exist in a variety of formats, including: glass plate negative, film based negative, lantern slide, and display print. Subjects include: children, streetscapes, houses, ships, ferries, locomotives, picnics, beach scenes, parks, mountains and local industry. There are more than three thousand photographs in the entire Philip Timms Photograph Collection. Fifteen hundred of these images were digitized during the project entitled Vancouver's Golden Years, 1900-1910: Photographs by Philip Timms which was funded through Canada's Digital Collections Program. The second Timms project, also funded by Industry Canada, entitled British Columbia Through the Camera Lens of Philip Timms, ensures that the remaining images are available for the public to view. |
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| Timms' photographs provide a rich resource that lends itself well to a wide variety of audiences locally, nationally and internationally, including film and television companies, architects and city planners, students, teachers, historians, librarians, and writers.
The Vancouver Public Library Timms collection. |
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