Traveling back in time with the Queen, the Zalm and photographer Peter Hulbert

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As one of The Province’s finest photographers in the 1970s and 1980s, Peter Hulbert filmed many of Vancouver’s biggest events: Royal Visits, the implosion of the Devonshire Hotel, the construction of BC Place Stadium.

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“He was the kind of person you send because you know he’ll come back with something you know?” said his former colleague John Denniston.

“He was the guy you could really depend on. Some guys would be brilliant, and next time they wouldn’t. But not Peter. He always came up with something good. “

Sadly, Hulbert was forced to retire after suffering a stroke in the early 1990s. He passed away from cancer in 2004 at the age of 68.

His son Jason recently came across a couple of boxes of his father’s old prints. For a Vancouverite, flipping through them is like traveling back in time.

One of the most intriguing shots is an aerial view of False Creek in the mid-1970s, just after the south side had been cleared of industry for parks and homes. It’s basically bare land.

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The north side, meanwhile, is still industry and train yards – there are log barriers in the water. Today’s south central is all low-rise industrial; there are no waterfront skyscrapers until you get to the West End.

Hulbert’s photo of the area that would become Robson Square is equally striking: The complex had two holes in the ground, surrounded by vacant lots. The area looks like a big parking lot.

The timing of his 1981 photo of the Devonshire Hotel collapsing in on itself after a controlled demolition is perfect, freezing the moment when the walls and ceiling collapsed and a cloud of dust rose up like a nuclear explosion.

Jason Hulbert said the most famous photo of his father was a 1974 shot of a stolen BC Hydro bus pulled out of the water by Cates Park in North Vancouver. The destination sign says “Not in service.” He won the Canadian Press Photo of the Year for his photographs.

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But some of his best shots were never printed, like a classic BC photo of then-Prime Minister Bill Vander Zalm introducing his wife Lillian to Queen Elizabeth on October 15, 1987.

The editors chose to publish photos of the Queen mingling with the masses. So the photo will be published for the first time and the print will be handed over to the Vander Zalms, who hadn’t seen it until a digital copy was emailed to them last week.

Hulbert was born and raised in London, England, where he learned photography and worked as a freelancer for newspapers and magazines. In 1967, he immigrated to Vancouver with his wife Ann, later a Port Moody councilor.

In the late 1960s, he began freelancing for The Vancouver Sun. But he didn’t get a permanent job, so he moved to The Province in 1972.

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In the mid-1980s he became the chief photographer, assigning his fellow photographers. As an April Fool joke, several photographers from the province sneaked into her garage and filled her car to the top with debris from the photography department.

“You know when they used to develop film cans, they had to break them?” Jason Hulbert said.

“There were thousands of cans of film there, thousands and thousands of pages of old newspapers and all the plastic they used to wrap them. I was crammed to the ceiling with these things. Of course he walks up to the car and ‘oh these idiots’ they fill up my car! “

A large color impression of the scene was among the photos Peter Hulbert kept from his journalistic career. But he seemed more loving with a series of photos he took of BC Place going up.

Hulbert’s photo the day the roof was inflated in 1982 appeared on the cover and was so popular that La Provincia made a postcard of it.

Now that is a BC collectible.

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