For some couples, their honeymoon is a getaway, a starry-eyed celebration of their wedding and new life together. Such romantic thoughts were only part of the reason for an island trip for the newlyweds in early October 1938.

With movie camera in hand, Frank R. “Budge” Crawley, and his bride, Judith Sparks Crawley, made a short film. Wait, no, stop thinking X-rated. They filmed a travelogue. Ile d’Orleans featured the churches, horse-drawn wagons, and cheese-making of the charming Quebec island. Their effort won the Hiram Percy Maxim Award for Best Amateur Film the next year, and Judith Crawley launched as a cinematic pioneer.

Crawley enjoyed going to the movies as a teenager in Ottawa, but a career in cinematography was nowhere in her plans. Studying Economics and English, Crawley received a BA in 1936 at age 22 from McGill University in Montreal, and then took a job as a stenographer. Her then-sweetheart Budge, the real boy next door, was training to be a chartered accountant and worked at his father’s firm. Budge was delighted to have a movie camera, an earlier birthday gift from his father.

The Stewart-Warner camera cost “$75 and was crackle black. It had no diaphragm so you would change the f-stop by rotating a metal disc in front of the fixed focus lens,” according to James A. Forrester in The Crawley Era in 1989 (Cinema Canada Magazine archives, Athabasca University). It featured a 25mm lens and “the big attraction was the 64 frames-per-second speed.” In 1933, Crawley moved up to a Kodak Cine-Special and made “a number of black and white industrial films with intertitles, as well as amateur films.”

Nudged by the cinematic bug, Judith Crawley and her husband began a part-time film operation in their apartment. Her father-in-law then gave them attic space as their studio in his large Ottawa home. Producing a film about power in Canada for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Crawleys were paid $700. That sealed it-Judith was bitten; her husband’s contagious enthusiasm and dramatic salesmanship no doubt made an impression, too.

Under an Act of Parliament in 1939, the National Film Board (NFB) was established. The board came calling on the Crawleys to make a film to help sell the surplus of Nova Scotia apples. “Crawley poured his heart into Four New Apple Dishes, the film board’s first color movie,” said Alan Phillips in “The home movies people pay to see” (Maclean’s Magazine, April 15, 1954). Judith learned to make applesauce for the scenes, but they were racing to finish filming; their first baby, a girl, was born shortly after.

Learning all aspects of filmmaking, the new mother was adept with the camera although its size was overwhelming. From falling through wilderness ice while filming portaging First Nations to “blowing out the lights in every building for miles around” in an urban setting due to a faulty generator, Crawley was “convinced that handling a heavy camera was no job for her,” Phillips said. Finishing the segments, two days later Crawley gave birth to her second child, a son. (That’s dedication to her art!) She next aimed her skills at directing.

“During the war, Crawley Films made propaganda and training films with the NFB,” mentioned James Powell in Historical Society of Ottawa News, June 2017. Hiring a small crew, the Crawleys took on their brothers and sisters, plus several new people. The filmmakers used their own kids, family, friends, and strangers to play parts in their movies.

In 1948, under the gentle care of the Crawleys and sponsorship of Imperial Oil, the 12-minute film, The Loon’s Necklace breathed life into British Columbia’s Tsimshian legend of how a loon came to have its distinguishing white neckband. The traditional story highlights carved ceremonial masks, and a blind medicine man who saves his village and has his vision restored. While Budge worked his usual magic as director, producer, and actor, Judith Crawley was both co-scriptwriter and film editor.

Still available for viewing, the tender and heartwarming The Loon’s Necklace earned Crawley Studios top billing as Canadian filmmakers and was celebrated with the Canadian Film Award’s inaugural Film of the Year.

A million-dollar company, “at its height, Crawley Films had roughly 150 employees, working out of their studios at 19 Fairmont Avenue in Hintonburg [an Ottawa neighbourhood], a location to which the company had moved when it had outgrown the Crawley attic,” said Powell. The filmmakers were active, with steady income from government and private business.

Purchasing 40 acres in Gatineau near their family home, the Crawleys built an 8,500 square foot studio to produce television shows. One of the first was a 39-episode series about the RCMP. The show was sold to stations in Australia, Nigeria, United Kingdom and more. Crawley Films was considered “the mini-Hollywood in the Gatineau.”

Directing was just a part of Judith Crawley’s talents, as she was capable in nearly every role. Duties as screenwriter, lab technician, editor, and sound recorder filled her days, along with running a house gradually expanding to six children.

A distinctly busy working mother, Crawley was inspired to make a film on child rearing. Guided by professional advice, “she wrote, directed and starred as the mother in the 10-minute firm Know your Baby,” said Library and Archives Canada in Celebrating Women’s Achievements. “Starring Baby Roddy [baby #3], this short film provided practical instruction on the basics such as bathing, burping and feeding.”

Sold at a loss to Department of National Health and Welfare, the film was so popular that a series was commissioned to help Canadian mothers, titled Ages and Stages. Grabbing the attention of American textbook and film giant McGraw-Hill, Crawley was commissioned to produce two series on child and adolescent development Scriptwriting became Crawley’s passion, work which she could do at home with her children. Her script about Japanese risk-taker Yuichiro Miura’s 1964 world ski speed record (a startling 173 kms/hr) in The Man Who Skied Down Everest brought acclaim. It also brought an Academy Award in 1975 to Crawley Films for Best Documentary Feature. It was the first Canadian-produced movie to take home the honour.

As the company flourished, receiving accolades and well-earned awards, the relationship between the ingenious creators disintegrated. By 1965, Crawley and her husband were separated. With two of her children, she established another film company and continued her pioneering work as a filmmaker. Budge Crawley kindled a romance with another woman and spent his time between Ottawa and Toronto. Two years later, Crawley Films was struggling without Judith Crawley’s practical vision. Then the firm floundered.

Producing successes and expensive failures until the early 1980s, Budge was compelled to sell his company and its holdings in 1982 for the distressing amount of $1.

Judith Crawley was elected president of the Canadian Film Institute, serving from 1979 to 1982. Four years later, Crawley, with her estranged husband, and Graeme Ferguson were invited to the Genie Awards, receiving the Air Canada Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Canadian Film Industry.

At age 72, the woman regarded as the “first lady of Canadian films” was suffering with respiratory illness. Judith Crawley died at home on September 16, 1986. Frank “Budge” Crawley passed away eight months later on May 13, 1987 at age 75. The magnificent Crawley era of cinematography was over.

Daughter Michal Crawley described the enchantment of her parents’ home in book about her father. “Our living room had a screen at the end, and a projector window was set into our kitchen. Night after night, all through our growing up, Mum and Dad would bring home the ‘rushes’ – all the footage shot on location, without editing and without any sound or words, just as it came out of the camera – and screen hours of footage.” No matter what else the kids had planned, “we would drop in, wordlessly, just to watch the country unfolding before us, unedited.”

Susanna McLeod is a writer living in Kingston.