Michael, Richard, Alison and Christopher Harvey in Deep River (1951)
Over the past year the Society for the Preservation of Canada’s Nuclear Heritage Inc. (SPCNHI) has received a string of emails from descendants of staff, who were at the Montreal Labs (ML) or Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories (CRNL), who are trying to trace their family histories.
One of the earlier emails came from the U.K. from the family of Frank W. Cornish. Frank’s son, Paul, contacted us early in 2023 for information about his father, who had been on attachment at CRNL from the U.K. in the early 1950’s. The Society was able to find a photograph of his father at the lab, pinpointed the family home (71 Forest) and, during his recent visit to Canada, guided Paul and his wife to the swings Paul had used in the small Huron Avenue park some 70 years earlier.
Another request came from the Mary Allan, daughter of Arnold H. Allan, who lives in New Zealand. Arnold Allan was one of a New Zealand contingent of researchers who were part of the Tube Alloys researchers first at the ML and later at CRNL. (NRT, 14 February 2024). Mary Allan and her sister, Barbie Mathieson, have provided us with a series of photographs of their father’s early days in Deep River and have become members of the Society.
A more recent request for family history has come from Simon Eden-Walker of Ottawa. Simon is the grandson of Charles William Eden Walker, who Simon had been told had worked at CRNL in the late 1940s. To research this information, we needed to go the National Research Council (NRC) records since AECL was not incorporated until April 1952. The search revealed that C.W. E. Wallker was a physicist from the U.K. who had graduated from Clare college, Cambridge. NRC records from 1946 show him serving as Administrative Assistant for W.B. Lewis. He may have been recruited by Lewis at Cambridge. Walker left Chalk River in 1952 and later had a renowned career in the field of acoustics and microwaves in western Canada. The family had lived at 1 Iberville. Simon and his wife recently toured the Canadian Nuclear Heritage Museum, visited the 1940s family home and acquainted themselves with the present occupants.
Our most recent contact was with Alison Harvey, daughter of Bernie G. Harvey who worked both at the ML and at CRNL. Alison, rather than seeking information, was offering some. She had digitized many family photographs from the family albums and offered them to the Society. Her father, an Oxford graduate, was a chemist who published the first scientific paper on the chemistry of plutonium. In 1953 he left CRNL and joined the team of Glenn Seaborg at Berkeley where in 1955 he became the co-discoverer of the new element, mendelevium. He also played a part in the discovery of einsteinium and fermium. The family had lived at 58 Parkdale and Alison was pleased to receive a recent photograph of their former family home which she has shared with her siblings.
All four of these contacts have occurred as a result of people learning about the Society on our website www.nuclearheritage.com The Society is very pleased to announce that it has received two grants – one from the Deep River and District Community Foundation and the other from the Canadian Nuclear Energy Alliance – for upgrading our website. We invite everyone to revisit the site in the next few weeks when the upgrade should be complete. In addition to a much-enlarged section that allows you to see our complete collection of artifacts, it will provide links to the interviews with pioneers that we have been conducting over the past three years.
Bernie Harvey and son Richard at Mont Royal Town Hall (1946)
