BY MID-AUTUMN OF 1914, almostevery Ontario surveyor youngenough and fit enough to enlist– 45 of them in all – had laid

aside his transit and chain, picked up hismarching orders, and headed overseas.For the surveyors, the gun was ultimatelya less serviceable battle tool than was theknowledge of measurement and anglesand an understanding of topographicaldetail. No sooner were the young survey-ors on British or European soil thanmany were put to work on the vital map-ping of the terrain on which the war wastaking place. Others plotted attack routes,or trajectories for cannon and mortar fire.

No story of Canadian surveyors in theGreat War could possibly be told withoutnoting the crucial work of Major AndrewMcNaughton, an electrical engineer, orig-inally from Saskatchewan, who, backedby a coterie of Canadian surveyors andtechnicians, pioneered the ingenious useof what he called “sound ranging,” amethod for locating the precise positionof enemy artillery. The basis of the tech-

nique was the placement of four well-separated microphones, in a row, asmuch as a mile out in front of the Cana-dian battle line and parallel to that line.Further out than the microphones, a “lis-tener” was stationed to record the mo-ment at which the sound of an enemyartillery cannon reached him. Listenerslinked to each of the four microphoneswould get signals from the front listenerwhen a shell was fired and would recordthe time it took for the sound of the ex-plosion to reach his microphone. Bycombining the auditory data with theknown distances between microphones,and whatever angles were pertinent, menin command posts at the lines could tri-angulate exactly the point on their mapswhere an enemy gun was located. Oftenwithin a minute, the allied artillery wasable to destroy such a gun with artilleryfire of its own.

In darkness, a visual method called“flash spotting” was used for locatingenemy artillery. Watchers at two well-separated posts along the allied line

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CHAPTER FOUR

WAR–VIMY RIDGEA VICTORY FOR ONTARIO SURVEYORS

The Battle of Vimy Ridge, by Donald Jack, circa 1918; oil on canvas. Canadian War Museum.

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corps, and that nearly every shell hadbeen aimed according to informationfrom maps or data supplied by Canadiansurvey units.

In particular, he praised the surveyorsfor their persistence, accuracy andcourage under fire, which he said hadhelped bring an early end to the war andhad thus saved many thousands of liveson both sides – a vivid and defining trib-ute to AOLS members who were there.

OF THE ROUGHLY 65,000 CANADIANS

killed in the war, five were Ontario landsurveyors. There are no statistics on howmany of the 45 Association memberswho served were injured or suffered the

catastrophic effects of, say, mustard gasor chlorine, but there are said to havebeen a dozen or more. Nor is it knownhow many of the 40-odd students whowere articling in Ontario at the time be-came casualties. Because of their age, itcan be assumed that many of them puton a uniform.

At the association’s annual meeting in1915, president Edward Wilkie read aletter written by an articling studentnamed Kenneth Campbell, who at thetime was serving in the Canadian ar-tillery in France, undoubtedly under thecommand of Major McNaughton. Theletter had been written to another arti-cling surveyor back in Ontario, and said

among other things:… Please jog Mr. Wilkie’s memoryabout my OLS exams. I thinkunder the circumstances the asso-ciation might let the odd monthslide and let me write my finalswhen I get back. I’m not over hereon any giddy pleasure trip.

The tragic postscript to the story wasthat Kenneth Campbell, the letter’s au-thor, was killed in action several monthslater, doing the work that surveyors hadbeen doing all along, and thus never ful-filled his ambition to return to Ontario,write his exams, and turn his surveyingskills to peace-time activity.

would look for flashes from enemy ar-tillery and when they saw such flasheswould press their respective signal keys,record the precise direction from whichthe flash came, and send an impulse to acommand post, where surveyors used thetiming and angles to triangulate the pre-cise position of the gun that had beenfired.

The techniques are said to have con-tributed significantly to the allied victoryat Vimy Ridge, in April, 1917 – indeedare thought to have been decisive in turn-ing the tide in favour of the 20,000 Cana-dians who fought the battle (a battle inwhich 3,600 Canadians died, and 7,000

more were seriously wounded). Such techniques were not the only

contribution of Canadian surveyors atVimy, or at, say, the battle of Valenci-ennes in November of 1918. Only afterthe war ended could it be revealed thatCanadian surveyors at Vimy Ridge had,in the days before the assault, used aerialphotos and maps to reproduce, in an areabehind the front lines, a full-scale simula-tion of the complex German defencesatop the ridge. On that schematic stage,the Canadian troops went over and overthe logistics of their assault, rehearsedand memorized every facet of it. Whenthey poured over the Arras Escarpmentat dawn on April 9, they were thus awareof every enemy strongpoint and the loca-tion of every enemy trench, and eachman was able to carry out his assignmentwith directness and precision.

On the day before the armistice, Mc-Naughton was awarded for his effortswith a promotion to Brigadier Generaland an appointment as General Officer in charge of Canadian Heavy Artillery,both of which titles he carried into World War II.

In an address to the Association ofDominion Land Surveyors in 1926, sevenyears after the armistice, McNaughtonnoted that during the last hundred daysof the war, some 73,000 tons of artilleryshells had been fired by the Canadian

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Charles Unwin oversaw the plan to straightenToronto’s Don River in 1888.

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forth dozens of times in precise linesover London – 168 miles in all, at an alti-tude of exactly 5,000 feet. On each pass,they snapped off dozens of images, eachof which would contribute to an enor-mous photo-mosaic, representing, intotal, 42 square miles of the city below.

During the late afternoon, the trio,weary from the vibrations and noise of

the plane, dropped off the film, arced thebiplane into the northeast, and wingedtheir way back to Base Borden. Likemost Canadian flyers of the era, they re-lied for navigation on a simple compass,an altimeter, and on what they could seeof the farms, forests and rivers below.

This milestone project was the inspi-ration of Simcoe-born surveyor, Douglas

H. Nelles, a 30-year-old RAF pilot whohad survived a pair of air crashes duringthe war and who believed aerial photog-raphy could be a revolutionary surveyingand mapping tool, one that would bringabout a radical reinterpretation of theplanet.

In order to tie each individual photointo the mosaic, in perfect alignment andproportion, Nelles, a participant in theongoing Canadian Geodetic Survey, es-tablished control monuments on theground. Some were merely the usualbrass pucks, atop posts and anchors,while others were as prominent aschurch steeples or office buildings, visi-ble for miles around. The aerial work, itshould be noted, was merely an adjunct

THE FOLLOWING YEAR, at the annual meet-ing of the association, in Toronto, WillisChipman organized the first-ever Veter-ans’ Dinner, at the Engineers’ Club, forthose with at least 30 years of experienceas surveyors. A group photo from theevent shows a rather dour-looking groupof mostly white-haired, mostly musta-chioed AOLS old-timers, who judging bythe wartime frowns on their faces mighteasily have passed for a convention of un-dertakers.

IT WOULD BE A PREPOSTEROUS UNDERSTATE-MENT to say that the Great War was hardon Canadians – killing 65,000 of them,wounding 250,000 more. Worldwide, thewar left 17 million dead, 20 millionwounded. If one tiny ray of utility founda peep hole through the mustard gas andtrench dust and made its way to Canada,it was that the war, once ended, providedCanada with some 3,000 trained pilots,courtesy of the British Royal FlyingCorps – this at a time when aerial pho-tography was about to emerge as a forcein Canadian surveying and mapmaking.The deathly back-story to this surfeit ofpilots is of course that some 1,600 Cana-dian flyers, many of them in their early ormid-twenties, were killed in action,mostly during the latter years of the war,as flight took on a greater role in thefighting.

Nor did aerial photography as it per-tained to surveying flourish immediatelyin Ontario after the armistice. For onething, there was, until 1922, only oneproper takeoff and landing field in theprovince, at the military base at CampBorden, west of Barrie.

It was on that airstrip on a morning inearly May, 1921, that two Canadian pi-lots, Captain Hubert Holland and Cap-tain Edward Owen, both veterans of thewar, zippered themselves into well-insu-lated flight suits with fur collars, donnedleather helmets and goggles, and took offin an open-cockpit biplane, a deHavillandDH4, built for bombing raids over Ger-many. Their mission was central to aunique experiment: With the Eastman K-1 camera and the 25 rolls of film thatwere aboard, they were to fly southwestsome 170 miles and take hundreds of aer-ial photos of the flourishing city of Lon-don, Ontario – the first time this sort ofdocumentation had been attempted inCanada.

As the DH4 approached the city, Hol-land, who was at the controls, droppedthe plane to 500 feet, located a scatteringof men waiting by a truck on a rural road,and brought the aircraft in for a landing.Having picked up the details of their as-signment, the flyers again took to the air.

During the next three hours, Hollandand Owen guided the DH4 back and

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latest in photogrammetry and wingedtransport.

The survey was initiated becausepost-war mining had spread north alongthe unsurveyed boundary. Governmentsin Winnipeg and Toronto considered itcrucial to know precisely which metalsand minerals belonged to whichprovince. The southern part of theboundary, running north from the U.S.border to Lake of the Woods, had beensurveyed and established 40 years earlierby the federal government – but notwithout great controversy. Indeed, its es-tablishment had caused violent battlesbetween hastily appointed border copsfrom both provinces. Manitobans res-olutely believed the boundary shouldhave been set 250 miles to the east, nearpresent-day Thunder Bay, giving Mani-toba “room to breathe,” as a reporter forthe Winnipeg Tribune phrased it. Oft-drunken officers from both provinces aresaid to have lined themselves up alongthe new boundary, taking turns throwingone another into makeshift jails, on thepresumption that each was trespassingon the other’s sacred terrain. In one in-stance, near Kenora, a jailed officer fromManitoba is said to have burned an es-cape hole in the wall of the woodenhovel in which he was imprisoned, tohave leapt from the hole, arrested theOntario drunkard who had arrested him

and, with help, to have pitched “the devilfrom Ontario” head-on through the burnhole into the charred jail.

At the initiation of the northboundsurvey, in 1921, the Manitoba govern-ment was still smarting over the per-ceived injustice of the border’s location.On that account, it refused to pay its

share of the cost of the survey.Ontario and the Dominion agreed to

go ahead anyway, and immediately hiredone of Canada’s most respected survey-ors, John W. Pierce, who, while born inQuebec, possessed surveying licences inboth Manitoba and Ontario. A prototyp-ical Marlboro Man (mustachioed,

to the aforementioned geodetic survey.Indeed, the London portion of that sur-vey was the true wunderkind here, in thatit took six years to complete, containeddetailed drawings of every street, walk-way and building footprint in the city,and ultimately occupied 61 large-formatbooks of 200 pages each – a total of12,200 pages.

Not surprisingly, it was the grand pho-tographic mosaic rather than the 12,200pages of exquisite drafting that caughtpeople’s attention (the aerial mosaic existsto this day, as big as a foresail, in the pos-session of the London Museum of Art).

Unfortunately, when Nelles and histeam began piecing together the individ-ual photos, they discovered a number ofgaps in the assemblage (perhaps the cam-era had misfired, or territory had goneunrecorded while film was being re-loaded). The result was that a few monthslater, in the spring, Holland and Owenwere back in their DH4 en route to Lon-don to finish the assignment. Somewherenear Brantford, having encounteredharsh weather and perhaps off course,they lost control of their airplane, andcrashed, killing Holland, seriously injur-ing Owen. Beyond the obvious sorrowand loss, it was an ironic death for ayoung pilot who had survived bombingraids during the Great War, in the acci-dent-prone DH4, only to die on a peace-

time assignment, in the name of surveying.A few weeks later, a flyer whom the

records recall only as Pilot Grady and aco-pilot known only as Sergeant Le Seurcompleted the assignment in a BristolFighter, a more stable biplane, also fromBase Borden. The last batch of photos en-abled Nelles to create what Owen Thorn-ton, a London writer, has called “the firstcomplete aerial photograph mosaic ofany Canadian city.”

Because of Thornton’s interest in thesad fate of Hubert Holland, the great aer-ial photo will now forever be associatedwith both Holland and Owen, who dis-played the kind of courage without whichaerial surveying in Canada could nothave advanced as rapidly and function-ally as it did.

PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE AIR could cer-tainly not have advanced fast enough forthose conducting the legendary survey ofthe Ontario-Manitoba border during theearly 1920s. The vast and dramatic proj-ect began under conditions of the sortthat had driven many an honourable sur-vey crew to drunkenness and despon-dency, if not mutiny. Paradoxically, bythe time the survey was completed manyyears later, it had become a kind of objectlesson in progress, amalgamating five-thousand-year-old transportation, in theform of horses and dog teams, with the

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of spruce and jack pines, the traversingof dozens of unanticipated lakes andbogs, and the daily packing and trans-port of tents, supplies and survey equip-ment. Plus of course there was the dailysurveying itself, hour after hour, and thepainstaking construction of stone andconcrete monuments.

THE WEIGHTILY ENCUMBERED processionstruggled north until mid-October, whenPierce decided that it was time to returnto civilization, even though he and hiscrew had run and marked just 70 milesof their 180-mile assignment.

During the winter, it occurred to

Pierce that if he could obtain aerial pho-tos of the landscape ahead, he could bet-ter plan for traversing the lakes andswamps, and could, he imagined, pick uphis pace. One of his difficulties all alonghad been an inability to guess how far totraverse around large lakes, whose di-mensions he was unable to calculatefrom ground level. He had beenpainfully discouraged to realize that inworking around the many bodies ofwater in the boundary’s path he and hismen had trudged some six miles laterallyfor every mile they had moved forward.“If it had been an east-west boundary,”he once joked, “we would have been fine,

would have run 400 miles of it in fourmonths… Unfortunately, we were tryingto go north.”

In late 1921, desperate to speed thingsup, Pierce contacted the Air Board,Canada’s first aviation control agency,and asked for help.

Curious about the boundary projectand how aerial photos might be appliedto survey work on the ground, the boardobtained a Vickers Viking – basically, aflying rowboat – and sent it north fromVictoria Harbour on Lake Winnipeg totake what photos its crew could get ofthe welter of lakes and marshes that layalong the line.

lantern-jawed, nicotine-addicted), Piercewas perhaps the last surveyor to be men-tored, if briefly, by the fabled AlexanderNiven. In 1909, Pierce furthered hiswilderness experience by heading for thePorcupine, where he surveyed prospect-ing claims during the gold rush. But heleft hastily for Pembroke in 1911 after acataclysmic fire killed nearly 40 residentsof South Porcupine, injured and disfig-ured dozens of others, and eliminated thetinderbox that was the town.

On the bitterly cold afternoon ofMarch 13, 1921, Pierce led a party of 26well-bundled technicians, line cutters andteamsters east from Winnipeg to a mus-tering point north of West Hawk Lake,from where he and his men planned toproceed due north, clearing and marking180 miles of boundary.

It is the stuff of legend, not to mentionof potential revolt, that the party tookwith them more than ten tons of supplies– nearly 800 pounds per man – the lot ofit drawn over snowy bush roads byClydesdales and Percherons, then by sleddogs as the northbound roads dwindledto trails.

The actual boundary-making, whichbegan on June 6, was a more epic grindyet, necessitating the felling of thousands

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gallon drums – this in the days beforechainsaws. In a wilderness where a hun-dred miles of line was the merest frac-tion of the total grid, battalions of menwere kept busy chopping ten hours a day,six days a week, for months on end.Years of a life could be consumed in sea-son after season of axe-swinging andbuck-sawing, in rising daily at dawn, en-during black flies in summer and thefiery cold of the Ontario north in winter– only to be forced to start again assaplings on the cleared ground embarkedupwards, quickly filling the swath.

The requirementto keep wildernesscrews nourishedwas in itself an ex-traordinary chal-lenge (althoughmuch easier onceairplanes couldbring food to

remote camps). During the Great Surveyof 1900, team leader James Robertsonnoted that one of his crewmen “ate atdawn the fillets from a pickerel of 18inches fried in lard, and then a quart ofoatmeal with lard, and then half a dozenslices of camp bread with lard, as well asa half-quart of beans with lard.” All ofthis he washed down with “numberlesscups of tea” – presumably minus the lard.Robertson noted that the same crewmanconsumed an identical meal of high-calorie staples at sunset, “with renewedvigor and appetite.”

IT HARDLY NEEDS SAYING THAT, except forthe occasional female camp cook (oftenan Aboriginal woman), surveying in On-tario during the early 1920s was the ex-clusive domain of men. Even the idea ofa woman becoming a surveyor in theprovince was at the time inconceivable,although several female surveyors heldlicences in the U.S. The AOLS member-ship did include a prominent surveyorwith the somewhat ambiguous name,Shirley King. But nobody close to theprofession was even remotely confusedover Shirley’s gender. By the simple syl-logism “Shirley King is an Ontario sur-veyor; all Ontario surveyors are men,”Shirley was a man.

Coincidentally, the man who com-pleted and retraced the Ontario/Quebecboundary with Shirley King, beginningin 1930, bore the given name Marie. Bythe same incontestable syllogism, J. MarieRoy, QLS, was a man – and everybody

As Pierce had anticipated, those earlyaerial images were a transformative bene-fit to him in planning the next phase ofhis task. Come summer, he also madegood use of a simple traverse that hadbeen run during the winter up the entireeast side of the waters and wetlandsahead, meaning that he did not have totraverse each feature individually.

In early July of that second year, theAir Board’s Viking flew into the surveycamp with mail and supplies, allowingPierce to get up into the air and discoverfor the first time what the territorylooked like from above. While the aerialphotos he was using were by no meanshigh-quality, they were at least func-tional, and in a country as large and open as Canada they proved to be the beginnings of a vastly productive alle-giance between aircraft, photography

and the art of surveying. Pierce and his men finished the 180-

mile run to the Twelfth Base Line early inthe autumn of that second season. How-ever, Pierce did not proceed further withthe survey until 1930, when aerial photoslightened his work to the extent that hewas able to push the line another 90 milestoward Hudson’s Bay in just 17 days.

By that time, aerial photos werewidely available to surveyors, and a kindof functional tango had begun betweenthe Department of Lands and Forests(which continued to advance surveyingin New Ontario) and the RCAF, whichwas busy doing aerial work on the Topo-graphical Survey of Canada. For its part,Lands and Forests decided to “open up” adozen or more wilderness base lines andmeridians, including Niven’s Meridian, sothat the lines would be easier for pilotsand photographers to locate from the air.

WHILE THE NOTION OF “OPENING UP” abase line so that it was visible from theair might sound simple enough, what itmeant in reality was a preposterous ex-penditure of human time and energy. Tocreate a six-foot-wide opening at treetopor “skyline” level required a swath thirtyfeet wide at ground level. Cutting even amile of such swath could require thefelling of several hundred trees, oftenold-growth spruce as big around as 40-

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knew it when Shirley and Marie went offinto the woods to retrace the old bound-ary.

Perhaps moved by the Supreme Courtdecision in 1919 to give all Canadianwomen the vote, the AOLS made an attempt in 1922 to make women morewelcome at its annual general meeting inToronto. One can only imagine the deeptremor of excitement that must havegripped members’ wives when they wereinvited to listen to a lecture on the topic,“Design Specifications for the Trans-portation Systems of Brazil andVenezuela.” For reasons not entirely elu-sive to the imagination, the followingyear’s lecture was cancelled and thewomen released to their own ideas of anafternoon’s enjoyment.

By 1924, a “Ladies Committee” hadbeen formed, leading to several years of

noteworthy upgrades in entertainment atthe association’s AGM: museum and artgallery visits, “motor bus” tours ofToronto, theatrical productions, and,perhaps inevitably, shopping expeditionsto Eaton’s and Simpsons and Birks. In1929, the women had tea at the newlyopened Royal York Hotel – and the fol-lowing year a special “women’s dinner,”including a tour of the hotel, with its 66-foot telephone switchboard (requiring 35operators), its cavernous kitchen (stillthe largest scullery in Canada, with spacefor the fuselages of seven Jumbo Jets); itsinside golf course (gone now); and itsconcert hall, where a pipe organ made bythe famous Quebec firm, CasavantFrères, was then the largest in Canada.

The 1930s saw little change in the sta-tus of women in surveying or in anyother Canadian profession. Indeed,

nearly four decades would pass beforethe male citadel that was surveying inOntario was penetrated by Canada’s firstfemale surveyor. For now, it is worthnoting that during the winter of 1932,that very surveyor, Lorraine Gladstone,was born into a mining family in CopperCliff, Ontario. Thirty-seven years later,having articled in Leamington with herhusband Bill Setterington, Lorrainewould gain her Ontario surveyor’s li-cence, and from 1976 to 1992 wouldserve as executive director of the AOLS.

However, apart from the birth of itseventual executive director, the 1930s,with their desperate economics, held little promise for surveyors, or for any-one else in most parts of the country or continent.

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Sam Archibald W.J. Baird H.D. Currie J.H. Diamond

W.L. Dutton C.W. Gibson Jack Gray George Noble

Fred Pearce John Peters Lloyd Peters Red Petzold

This hand-lettered honour roll namesthe 23 Ontario land surveyors whovolunteered to serve in Canada'sarmed forces during World War II.Many more who fought in the war,often doing surveying or mappingwork, became Ontario land surveyorsupon returning home after the Euro-pean armistice in 1945. This frameddocument hangs in the AOLS officeson McNicoll Avenue in Scarborough.