War maps from McMaster’s stellar collection land roles in major movie productions

In Los Angeles, there are maps to the homes of the Hollywood stars. In Hamilton, there's a Hollywood star" that is home to the maps.

The map collection at the McMaster University Mills Memorial Library.

It, the maps in the map collection, continues to get roles in major movie and television productions even as such roles threaten to dry up for some of the more traditional stars. For one thing, the map collection is easier to work with. It has been conspicuously scandal free, low ego maintenance and physically incapable of slapping anyone in the face. Plus it's downloadable. Take that, Kevin Spacey.

Downloadable indeed. The collection is among the most digitized map collections in the world.

And talking about the Oscars, even McMaster maps/data associate director Jay Brodeur jokes that, given the collection's presence in the movies these last few years, maybe there should be a Best Maps in a Motion Picture category.

The latest coup for the university's increasingly world famous collection is landing the part of a map of the southern Spanish coast, Second World War vintage, in the recently released (May 11) Netflix production Operation Mincemeat," with Colin Firth.

Maps from the McMaster collection were already Hamilton eye-poppers on the credit rolls of such hits as 2015's Fury," starring Brad Pitt, and the movie 1917," nominated for Best Picture Oscar in 2020 and also starring Colin Firth.

For 1917' they (the movie producers) asked for a dozen or more (trench maps) and they're featured in a shot with Colin Firth standing over one of them," says Brodeur.

He shows me the maps. They are beautiful in their precision, minute detail and antiquity - all the more so for the creases and stains, bullet holes, blood and other markings that reflect their utility and wear through the course of a war.

These are order of battle' maps - base maps overprinted in red with the advancements (of troops). Some of them are showing trenches that are 105 years old."

Because the war offices were scrambling for maps in the First World War, Brodeur explains, efforts were made to ensure the future availability and thoroughness of maps and so, by the Second World War, great strides had been made and a more plentiful and detailed stock of maps existed for battle application.

This is reflected in the collection, which has 10,000 maps from the Second World War. Those maps, like the ones used in Operation Mincemeat" (based on a true story of British intelligence officers who trick the Nazis and change the course of the war), reflect different map-making methods, he explains.

The First World War maps were mostly made before airplane photography. They would send balloons up but these made for oblique photos." Airplanes made possible a more top down accuracy.

The university's map library, says Brodeur, is an astounding one, among the best in the country if not the world. It has one of the best First World War trench map collections. It's a tribute to the foresight of people like the late William Ready, former librarian at McMaster University who in the 1960s began many of the university's collections and especially to the ongoing work of now retired McMaster map specialist, Gord Beck.

Aside from its breadth, quality and instances of rarity and historicity (the oldest map in it goes back to the 1480s), the collection has another powerful pull on prospective users. Digitalization.

Being one of the world's largest digitized map collections, it is available to movie and show makers and other users to look at on their computers. From there they can contract with McMaster to make facsimiles. So, even though each map used in movies like Fury," 1917" and Operation Mincemeat" is definitely a McMaster map, the physical map never leaves the Mac building.

We got our first map scanner in 2012 and worked through the years (until the COVID-19 slowdown) and digitized almost all of our historical maps," says Brodeur. It has worked out really well."

Scanning is the easy part," says Christine Homuth, spatial information specialist. The next step is how do (users) find the maps (they're looking for)." The challenge is to contextualize the maps and the information on them, to categorize, index and catalogue them in the most effective and user-friendly ways. It's working.

Still, there's nothing like the actual maps, some of which are enormous, four metres by three metres in one case, and all of which are stored carefully under environmental control. But they can be taken out and some are displayed and when they are it is like a whole other place, another time, a whole other world, is being exhaled from the past and into the room.

For instance, there are maps from the Napoleonic era, collected by English nobleman - and sometimes spy - Robert Clifford (1767-1817) and acquired by McMaster through the aforementioned Ready in 1969.

Maps are there to help us find our bearings, and we could sure use some help these days in that regard, so thank you, McMaster map collection, for showing the way.

Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com