Charles Alan Kenneth Innes-Taylor (1900 – 1983)
Alan Innes-Taylor was born near London and his family came to Canada in 1906. He enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 and graduated just as the First World War ended. He joined the Royal North-West Mounted Police in 1919 and was posted to Whitehorse. He left the force in 1926 and worked as purser on the river boats, mined in Keno, and hauled freight between Whitehorse and Dawson on the Overland Trail.1)
The Yukon Airways and Exploration Company was created in 1926 with James Finnegan as president and Clyde Wann as vice-president.2) Allan Innes-Taylor was Secretary-Treasurer. Mayo ex-RCMP Constable Andrew Cruikshank was the pilot and general manager. Finnegan and Wann were not pilots. Cruickshank and Innes-Taylor had served in the Royal Flying Corps in France during the First World War. The company was incorporated at Dawson on 4 May 1927 with its head office in Whitehorse.3) In August 1927, C.A.K. Innes-Taylor announced he was no longer associated in any capacity with the Yukon Airways and Exploration Company Ltd.4)
In 1928, Innes-Taylor joined Richard Byrd as dog driver on an Antarctic expedition and arrived just as the camp was being abandoned. He was on Byrd’s second expedition in October 1933, but dogs had been replaced by tracked vehicles. He worked for a private company for five years and then the federal government in 1942 to survey vessels and shipyards to determine their suitability for war work.5) He received a Carnegie Hero Award in 1941 for saving the life of a drowning woman.6)
During the Second World War, Captain Alan Innes-Taylor met Elizabeth Marie Berglund in Washington, D.C. and they were married in 1944. He was posted to Colorado where he trained Special Forces troops and where their first daughter, Cathie, was born. They moved to Alberta where Innes-Taylor trained the Lovett Scouts, a Scottish Commando Brigade, and where son Rollie was born. They stayed after the war and built the EB Beaver Ranch near Entrance, Alberta. Alan was recalled to active duty in 1952 and was based in Colorado where their youngest daughter Kristin was born. After a year in Idaho, they drove to Fairbanks where they lived in the winter and spent summers in Eagle. Alan was released from the military in the mid-1950s and went to work for SAS and KLM airlines training flight crews in arctic survival for proposed polar flights. The family moved to Dawson in 1959.7)
Innes-Taylor managed the 1962 Dawson City Festival and Elizabeth was a seamstress for an associated Broadway musical staged there. Then she worked as a cook at the hospital and as a seamstress for the Sisters of St. Anne.8)
Alan Innes-Taylor is credited with saving the Dawson Museum archives from a 1966 flood, and later with establishing the Yukon Archives. The family moved to Whitehorse in 1967 and in 1972, Innes-Taylor was a field representative for the Arctic Institute of North America with an office in the old federal building.9) His last job before retirement was a contract for a Yukon River historic sites survey.10) Alan Innes-Taylor was interviewed by Cal Waddington for Parks and Historic Sites, July - September 1978. Yukon River Aural History Project.11)
Alan Innes-Taylor was the recipient of the Centennial Medal in 1967, the Order of Canada in 1977, and the Commissioner’s Award in March 1981. Two mountains are named in his honour, one in Yukon and one in Antarctica.12)