May Watkis

May Gowen Watkis (née Hilda May Gowen; 1879-1940) served as a projectionist, clerk, and tax inspector at various agencies of the British Columbia government during the years 1913-40. In 1920-21, she was briefly employed as a clerk in the Vancouver office of the British Columbia Patriotic and Educational Picture Service (PEPS), under the service's director, Dr. Albert Richard Baker. This erroneous information about May Watkis has been repeated in a number of books and articles on Canadian film history, which describe her as the director of the Patriotic and Educational Picture Service and the producer of its films. Watkis was determined to become join the film industry, but did not believe she would make it as an actress. In 1913, Watkis applied to become a film censor, however, the attorney-general of the time rejected her application and gave the position to a man. Undeterred, Watkis offered her services to the new censor as his assistant, and he hired her as his projectionist. Although Watkis knew nothing about projecting films, she agreed. Across the border in Washington state, she again faced an all-male union that refused to teach her. Instead, Watkis convinced a friend who worked at a local theatre to explain the techniques for projecting films without explaining why she wanted to know, and alongside him projected several shows.

After a time, Watkis grew bored with her duties, and she became an inspector for the BC Theatres Branch. Her job was to check for breaches of the Amusement Tax Act. These stories probably got traction due to the novelty of a woman supposedly running a government department. Nonetheless, the articles appeared in Vancouver newspapers that regularly reported on the work of PEPS, and on the activities of Dr. Baker and the PEPS cinematographer, A. D. "Cowboy" Kean. The most prominent information source about May Watkis—Edith Cuppage's 1921 profile in Maclean's Magazine—was not properly researched; Cuppage seems to have simply accepted what she was told by Watkis.

The information about Watkis' actual role at PEPS was finally corrected by Mark Terry in a 2020 revision to his 2016 profile of Watkis on the Women Film Pioneers Project'' (WFPP) website.