Fatherland <

My father was Canadian, born in Whitby, Ontario. He moved to the UK when he was around twenty five and despite living the rest of his life here in the UK, he never lost his accent. So while the soft A’s and hard R’s of his native lilt were familiar at home to me, it did make him seem very much like a man from another land. For a lot of my childhood then, Canada seemed to me like an almost fabled place. Dad used to go back to Ontario to visit family on a fairly regular basis and nearly always returned to us with unusual gifts only adding to my fascination with this far away land. There were souvenirs made from soapstone and pictures of strange Canadian creatures, miniature wooden totem poles, fur lined moccasins, maple syrup (obviously), although I remember my favourite gift was a far less mythical, Montreal Olympics ’76 red and white baseball shirt.

My first real experience of Canada was when I was around two years old but I have only a very vague, snowy montage of memories from that trip. It wasn’t then until 1992 that I went back with my father to visit family and to officialise my status as a registered Canadian born abroad, that I got my first proper taste. I’ve now been numerous times over the years and had always had a camera with me and consequently still have a number of contact sheets still to catalog and scan.

One particular trip in 1997, I’d been to a friend’s wedding in the Catskills in upstate New York and decided to stay on in their apartment in Manhattan’s lower East side for a few weeks afterwards. The place was between 1st and Avenue A and in the 90’s the occasional sound of a gunshot down there wasn’t uncommon, so together with the frequent wail of police sirens, my break was a little less than relaxing. I decided to hop in a rental and drive back through upstate New York, Vermont, crossing over the Saint Lawrence river somewhere not far from Ottawa and back down along the river, past the spectacular Thousand Islands and on to to visit my grandfather, Julian Balfour Beecroft, who lived off-grid, on the shore of Sharbot Lake, near Kingston, Ontario.

I stayed with him on his rambling lakeside plot for a week or so, getting to know him little better and spent hours listening to his stories and theories on life and the connected nature of the universe. He was an unusual man and had been many things in his life, an inventor and engineer primarily, he had been instrumental in, if not the creator of magnetic tape. He had also been a very talented concert pianist in his youth, until a tragic sawmill accident in which he lost crucial fingers, put an untimely end to that life path. He was a hoarder of the first degree and I guess like many with a curious mind he had accumulated a lifetime’s worth of stuff with the various warehouses on his land packed floor to ceiling; an imaginarium full of old cars, industrial machinery, even a church organ or two. He was fascinating and enigmatic but a man from a very different time.

A lot of the pictures in this folio are from that trip.