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Ashton James (Jim) Spilsbury
Entrepreneur
By Philip Collings
Radioman, airline operator, businessman,
author, artist, chronicler of West Coast life. The list of
Jim Spilsbury’s accomplishments could be extended almost
indefinitely. But the most important for the purposes of this
article is “author.” Jim wrote Spilsbury’s
Coast, The Accidental Airline and Spilsbury’s
Album. These books are readily available and one hopes
they won’t go out of print for a long time.
Jim wasn’t, in fact, born
on the West Coast – he was born in 1905 at Findern,
Derbyshire, in England. His parents were among those romantic
souls that settled in remote and scenic parts of the Province
prior to World War I. The Spilsburys took their young family
(Jim being a babe in arms) to Savary Island, five miles off
British Columbia’s mainland coast, at Lund. Among the
downsides of this choice were a tent for accommodation and
a one-room school with a handful of students for the children’s
education. The school took Jim up to high school entrance
where his formal education stopped. His mother then apprenticed
him on a merchant ship, the Melville Dollar, with the idea
that he’d take up a career as a ship’s officer.
A combination of chronic seasickness and loneliness led to
his being bought out, but in spite of this, the trip led to
a career for Jim. The only friend he had aboard was the radio
operator, who, to fill the time, taught him the rudiments
of radio theory and practice.
Now, Jim was a born entrepreneur,
with an inbred instinct for spotting a commercial opportunity.
He knew (who better) the solitude of those long winter nights
in the isolated camps and settlements up the coast, and he
appreciated the people’s longing for human contact,
both by communication and by transportation. So first he provided
them with communication by the sale and servicing of radio
sets and then he provided them with transportation in the
form of a fleet of floatplanes...
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