Page 7 - April 2018

wearing a parachute at Crystal Beach, Ontario
The Man Who Jumped into History
by Laird Rankin
Frank Henry Ellis would have been an ideal contestant on
CBC Television’s Front Page Challenge or a rich subject
for Monty Hall’s radio quiz program Who Am I?
Why? Ellis almost defies categorization. There is just so
much to the man.
Best-known, respected and honoured for his considerable
and authoritative contributions to Canada’s aviation
history through his prolific writings on the subject, Ellis
was, by no means, just a chronicler. While his
book Canada’s Flying Heritage (1954; revised and
reprinted, 1961) remains the gold standard on the subject,
there is another Frank Ellis that perhaps few people know.
At various stages in his 86 years, he could legitimately
have claimed to be: a model airplane builder, an airplane
builder, a self-taught pilot, a mechanic, an employee of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, a records clerk with the City of
Toronto, a parachutist, a barnstormer, a photographer and
cartoonist, a bus driver with the West Vancouver
Municipal Transit System, a poet, journalist and author.
He was also a certifiable packrat.
Ellis was a native of Nottingham, England having been
born there in 1893. Twenty-one years later, he and his
mother immigrated to Alberta where they purchased a
farm near Stanmore. Ellis’s areas of interest, however,
were aerial not agrarian. He was already keen on aviation
– a love affair that manifested itself initially through
model-plane building in his early teens: in 1913, he won a
prize for his model of a Blériot monoplane. Modeling
became a life-long hobby. This not only produced a
number of finished products (the Aviation Museum has
two of them), awards and honours, but it lead to the
publication of Duration Flying Models (1936), a book for
boys on the subject.
(1919); a mechanic with the Canadian Aircraft
Company, Winnipeg and on flights (1920) that
marked the first time an aircraft had been used to
cover a news event in Canada, and on the first flight
to The Pas, Manitoba from which he took the first
aerial shot of Canada north of the 53rd parallel.
Ellis retired from active flying in 1923 and moved to
British Columbia where he married Elsie Harrison in
1934. It was here, in West Vancouver, where Ellis
began his formal research into Canadian aviation
history in the early 1940s with Elsie serving as his
secretary and research assistant. His approach was
thorough and comprehensive and, among other
strategies, involved writing to over 6,000 individuals
in Canada, the United States and Europe for
information, recollections, photographs or whatever
else they might have to illuminate and flesh out the
subject.
In the process, Ellis not only made a huge
contribution to Canada’s aviation past, but he
amassed an even bigger collection of material, all of
which he donated to the Aviation Museum in July
1979. Gordon Emberley, one of the Aviation
Museum’s founding members and its first Executive
Director, facilitated the gift and its transfer.
“It arrived in three or five plastic garbage bags”, said
Loraine Joiner, a long-time volunteer in the
Museum’s Archives. It was left to the Museum staff
and volunteers to make some sense of the jumble, to
sort it out, organize and catalogue it in proper
fashion. Today, the Ellis Collection occupies some
60 regulation-size, blue filing boxes, plus a couple
of oversized boxes for oversized material, and
commands approximately 34 metres of space. “It is
one of the Museum’s largest collections.”
As such, it seems fitting that it came from the
Museum’s first member. And it seems ironic and
unfortunate that Ellis died July 4, 1979, one day
short of the 60th anniversary of his ‘jump into
history’ at Crystal Beach.