The Imperial Airship Scheme — A Blimp Above 1930s Toronto

In 1928, Germany launched the world's greatest airship, the Graf Zeppelin. For the next decade, it would make hundreds of flights all over the world: from Germany to the United States, Brazil, Japan, even the north pole. With the Second World War only nine years away, it was enough to make the British very nervous.

Their answer was the Imperial Airship Scheme. It was a contest between a private military contractor and the British government to build the best blimp. The first to be finished was the "Capitalist ship", the R100. It was the fastest airship in the world, with a top speed of 130 km/h. And its first big test was a trip to Canada. For three days in the summer of 1930, it cruised across the Atlantic before finally reaching Quebec. A couple of weeks later, it was flying around the skyscrapers of downtown Toronto.

The whole trip was a rousing success. So much so, in fact, that once it returned home, the team working on the government-built "Socialist ship", the R101, decided to push ahead with their voyage to India, which they'd thought they might postpone due to safety concerns. Their blimp made it all the way from England to France before plummeting to the ground and bursting into flame. The disaster killed 48 people, more than the Hindenberg. The Imperial Airship Scheme was abandoned, the R100 was grounded and then sold for scrap.

The R100 in Bedfordshire, England, just before leaving for Canada

A version of this post was originally published on August 29, 2010. It has been updated to add more photos.

Come To The Ex! Watch Us Slice Open A Pet!

The Ex had never been more popular than it was in 1962 and ’63. More than three million people walked through the gates during those years. The crowds set new attendance records for Canada’s biggest fair — less than half as many visit these days. Many of those flocking to the Exhibition Grounds were about to see one of the most bizarre exhibits the CNE has ever displayed.

It was called Vetescope. The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association organized it. They wanted to show Canadians that vets were more than just “horse doctors” – that they were a vital part of modern society, using cutting edge technology to keep our animals healthy. They billed it as “the biggest public relations venture that organized veterinary medicine has undertaken on this continent.”

It was huge. The full exhibit sprawled over 9,000 square feet in the gorgeous Hydro Building (they call it the Music Building now) and cost $1 million to prepare. There were more than 250 vets on hand to answer questions from the public, manning 18 displays about their profession. There was information about “radiology, anatomy, embryology, histology, pathology, bacteriology and parsitology”. But that’s not all. They also featured some attention-grabbing displays about the modern innovations in veterinary science.

You could, for instance, learn about the role of animal medicine in space exploration. And as part of the Large Animal display, members of the public could meet “Maggie the magnetized cow”. It seems she was equipped with one of the latest breakthroughs in bovine science: a cow magnet. It rested in her gut, collecting all of the metallic odds and ends a cow accidentally consumes over the course of her lifetime, thus preventing troublesome “hardware disease”. It was a brand new development back in the early 1960s; today the use of cow magnets is commonplace.

But it wasn’t the space age exhibit or the magnetized cow that grabbed the biggest headlines. The organizers of Vetescope had put together an even more dramatic demonstration of their profession. They had veterinarians perform live surgeries in front of crowds of curious onlookers.

People loved it. Thousands upon thousands of Torontonians and tourists showed up to witness the surgeries. So many, in fact, they couldn’t all get close enough to see through the windows into the operating room. Those who were too far away to see inside watched on a closed circuit television system.

For some of them, it was all a bit too much. As the doctors made their incisions into the tiny, furry patients on the operating table, many of those who were watching grew dizzy and weak in the knees. In one day alone, at least a dozen people fainted. One man passed out twice. Another recovered only to walk straight into a tree. One American newspaper called the operations “too realistic,” reporting that an average of three audience members were fainting during every surgery. “More than 50 visitors have been carried or helped out, and a few have required hospital treatment.” The organizers, fearing for public safety, made sure there were “fainting assistants” on hand to help those who did keel over.

Despite the queasy combination of cotton candy, corn dogs, roller coasters and live surgery, Vetescope was, by all accounts, a smashing success. Nearly 400,000 people came to see it in the first year alone. “[T]he general reaction could almost be described as one of astonishment,” a supporter later recalled. “It became apparent even to a child that medical care of animals is on par with that of humans.” The veterinary masterminds behind the exhibit were lauded for their public relations success.

In fact, it was such a big hit they made sure to capture it on film:

A version of this post was originally published on August 23, 2010.

Bloor & Spadina Was Pretty Beautiful Back in 1933 (Featuring Old-Timey Streetcars)

This is Bloor Street, just west of Spadina, in the summer of 1933. By then, it already been about 50 years since the Annex was annexed into the city of Toronto. But the growth hadn't stopped there, of course. By the time the 1920s rolled around, the city had begun to swallow up villages and neighbourhoods even further north, spreading up the escarpment into places like Moore Park and Forest Hill, and west too, through Parkdale. That's when we decided that our transportation system should be amalgamated as well: the TTC was officially born and a brand new fleet of streetcars hit the roads of Toronto.

You can see them here in the middle of the photo. They're called Peter Witt streetcars, named after the guy from Cleveland who designed them in the early 1900s. We had a few hundred of them, which apparently makes us one of their best-known homes, but they also appeared in cities all over North America and Europe: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Mexico City, Madrid, Naples, Milan... The TTC used them for about forty years, finally taking the last ones out of commission in the '60s, but in Milan, they are still about two hundred Peter Witt streetcars gliding through the streets, painted bright orange. A few of them have even made their way from Milan to the United States, where they grace the hills of San Francisco.

I found this photo on the Toronto Archives Flickr page (which rules). They've got an entire set dedicated to the Peter Witts. I'll post a few of my other favourites below and you can check out the full set here, read more about the streetcars on Transit Toronto here or in Agatha Barc's blogTO post here. You can also watch a little video of one of the streetcars in action here from the Halton County Radial Railway Museum, where they've got one you can ride.

The Peter Witts ran on different tracks from the ones we had before

 

The QEW Looked A Whole Lot Different in 1939

The QEW started out as a much smaller highway called the Middle Road. It was built as a government works project during the Great Depression, connecting Toronto to Hamilton as an alternative between Lake Shore and Dundas, which were getting clogged with traffic. Not long after it was built, it was expanded and extended all the way to Niagara Falls, becoming Queen Elizabeth Way. It was modeled on the autobahns in Germany, the first of its kind in North America, with the longest uninterrupted stretch of streetlamps in the world. The stuttering King George VI was here to officially open it with his wife, Elizabeth, who it was named after. (You might know her better as the Queen Mum, or Helena Bonham Carter in The King's Speech.)

This photo was taken in Etobicoke around the time the highway officially opened. It shows the interchange with what's now Highway 427. Today, this spot is a tangle of concrete ramps in the midst of a big box wasteland just west of Kipling, not far from Sherway Gardens.

Here some more old photos of the highway, mostly found here and here.

The rural road in the days before the QEW

The royal opening ceremonies in St. Catherines, 1939

King George VI and Elizabeth on the QEW, 1939

The entrance to the QEW in Toronto, 1940

East of Oakville, 1938

Fruit trees in spring, Grimsby, 1949

An Especially Neat-Looking TTC Transit Map from 1955

Click to enlarge

One of the most beautiful books written about the history of our city is Derek Hayes' Historical Atlas of Toronto. It's filled with gorgeous maps of the city, stretching all the way back to the time of the earliest European settlers. One of my favourite discoveries is this map of our fledgling downtown transit system from 1955, ringed with images of some of our most iconic attractions.

At least, our most iconic attractions at the time. Some of them (coughthebusterminalcough) might have trouble making that list today. Most obviously, the CN Tower and the SkyDome have gone up since. The ROM and the AGO look a bit different these days. The CBC has moved from Cabbagetown to Front Street. And the Armouries on University Avenue, which are included here, aren't there anymore. In 1955, they stood just north of Queen, behind Osgoode Hall, having been built in the late-1800s. Soldiers were trained there to fight in the First and Second World Wars, as well as the Boer War before that. But it was demolished in the '60s to make way for the new courthouse.

You can click to enlarge the map. And you'll find the Historical Atlas of Toronto for sale here among other places.

Toppy Topham Crosses The Rhine

Operation Varsity above the Rhine River

 
The war was nearly over. It had already been nine months since the Allies landed in Normandy. The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion had been there, students and shopkeepers and dentists from places like Calgary and Saskatoon and Toronto leaping out of planes into the air above France, dropping behind German lines to secure bridges and roads. Hundreds of them had died doing it. Then, the following winter, the battalion had patrolled the freezing snows of the Ardennes Forest, resisting the brutal German counter-attack at the Battle of the Bulge. Now it was March, and the Allies had pushed all the way across Western Europe into Germany itself. But hundreds of thousands of people were still dying. And the Allies still had one more mammoth task ahead them before they could fan out across the country and overrun it: they needed to cross the Rhine River. What was left of Hitler's army was waiting for them on the other side.

The morning of March 24, 1945 saw the biggest airborne operation in the history of anything ever. Thousands upon thousands of planes and gliders took off in England and soared across the skies of Europe toward the river. They stretched out for more than 300 kilometers — the distance from London to Paris — and took two and half hours to pass by. When they got to the Rhine, tens of thousands of men leapt out of the planes, white parachutes bursting open in the morning light. They were easy targets for the bullets and anti-aircraft shells that rose to meet them. Many men died before they'd even hit the ground. Hundreds of planes fell burning from the sky.

One of the lucky men who did survive the drop was Frederick George Topham. He'd been born in Toronto during the First World War, had gone to school at Runnymede Collegiate on Jane Street, and spent some time working as a miner at Kirkland Lake. His friends called him Toppy. He was in Europe as a medic with the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, stitching up men on the front lines. That morning on the banks of the Rhine, they needed it. Many of the men had been shot on their way down. Their commanding officer, a guy from Winnipeg who'd won the Grey Cup with the Blue Bombers in the '30s, had already been killed. So Topham got to work, rushing from one injured paratrooper to the next: performing first aid, tending to wounds, saving lives.

It was about 11 o'clock — an hour after his jump — when Topham heard a cry for help. An injured solider was lying out in the open, bullets whizzing around him. A medical orderly ran over to help, knelt down at the man's side, and was shot dead. A second medic died the same way. Topham saw it all happen — and then rushed out to help. 

Canadian paratroopers in the drop zone

They say the air was laced with machine gun and sniper fire, but he made it all the way through to the wounded soldier, and began tending to his patient among the dead bodies. That's how Topham got shot, too. In the face. Fighting the pain, blood pouring from his mangled nose and cheek, he stood his ground, gave the solider first aid and then picked him up and carried him through the hail of bullets into the woods to safety. Then he turned around and headed right back out again, to help more of the wounded men. For the next two hours, he refused to stop working, refused to let anyone take care of his bloodied face until the entire area had been cleared of casualties.

And his day wasn't over yet. On his way back to join his company, he came across an armoured machine gun carrier that had been hit by a shell. Mortars were still landing all around it. Flames leapt from it; there were explosions. An officer warned everyone to stand back.

Topham rushed in. He found three men inside and carried each of them to safety. One died of his wounds, but the other two made it. They wouldn't be the last lives he saved that day. The medic kept working for hours.

It would take the Allies a day and a half to win the battle. Then they pressed on deeper into Germany, until they ran into the Soviet army coming the other way. The war in Europe was over. The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion was the very first unit sent home to Canada. They arrived in Halifax on June 21st, having completed every mission they'd ever been given, and having never given up an objective they'd won.

Back in Toronto, the city had been waiting to celebrate their new hero. They threw Toppy Topham a parade down Bay Street to Old City Hall, with a hundred members of his battalion serving as an honour guard. He was asked to lay the cornerstone for the new Sunnybrook Memorial Hospital for veterans of the war. Soon, an entire post-war neighbourhood on St. Clair East would bear his name: Topham Park. And King George V would award him the Victoria Cross — the highest military honour you can get in the Commonwealth. Nearly 60 years later, when the medal went up for auction in 2004, the members of his old battalion raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep it in Canada. They gave it to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa; you can see it on display.

As for Topham himself, he went to work for Toronto Hydro when he got back. That, absurdly, is how he died: in an electrical accident in 1974. Today, you'll find him buried in Sanctuary Park Cemetery at Lawrence and Royal York Road.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

You can read more about Toppy Topham and the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion here and here and here and here. There's a plaque to his memory outside the old Etobicoke City Hall. I went to his old high school, Runnymede, for a couple of years and don't remember ever having heard about him while I was there, which seems like more than a shame.

Here are some more posts for Remembrance Day:

The story of Toronto's John McCrae writing "In Flanders Fields" amidst the muck and death of Western Belgium here.
What William Faulkner was doing drunk in the cockpit on a biplane in Toronto on the day the Great War ended in 1918 here. 
The story of bloodshirtsy fighter pilot hero Billy Bishop here. 
How Canadian troops held occupy Iceland during WWII here.
What it looked like in Toronto on the day the Great War ended here.
A great photo of a women working in a Toronto munitions factory during WWII here.
The story behind on the most famous photos of all-time, "Getting Napalmed As A Child In South Vietnam" here.

Crushing Mr. Communism

Tim Buck celebrated by a crowd

Things weren't going so great for R.B. Bennett. He'd become Prime Minister, but at the worst possible time: in 1930, just as the Great Depression was hitting its stride. And his policies were not working. He was crazy-rich, a die-hard Conservative, pro-big business and pro-big banks. He hated social programs, welfare and the whole idea of government intervention, so he stubbornly refused to implement the kind of massive government works projects that were going to save President Roosevelt south of the border. People were getting angry. They were looking for new alternatives. And for a growing number of people, that meant the Communist Party of Canada.

They were led by Tim Buck. "Mr. Communism" was an Englishman-turned-Torontonian, who lived a few blocks from Dundas and Dufferin, for decades the most famous and powerful Communist in the country. He'd become General Secretary of the party just a couple of years earlier thanks to his staunch support for the mass-murdering crazed lunatic of a Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. But Buck wasn't exactly the imposing dictatorial type himself. He was a short, unassuming man. People tend to compare him to a shoe salesman. And the policies he proposed weren't the kind of revolutionary call to arms you might expect. He wanted a minimum wage. Unemployment insurance. A 7 hour work day.

But that was still too much as far as Prime Minster Bennett was concerned. When the Communists organized protests, he had the police break them up with beatings and arrests. In a speech in Toronto, he called on every Canadian to "put the iron heel of ruthlessness" to them. And in 1931, he went further still: a raid of Communist Party offices intended to "strike a death blow" to the organization. Eight party members, Buck included, were arrested under the Orwellian, anti-union "Section 98" of the Canadian Criminal Code. They were charged with sedition. Convicted. And sentenced to hard labour. Years before the McCarthy trials and blacklisting in the States, Canada was pioneering a new level of anti-democratic, Red Scare bullshit.

Tim Buck's mugshot, 1931

And the Conservatives still weren't done. A couple of years into Buck's sentence, a riot broke out at the prison in Kingston. In the confusion, Buck's guards seized their opportunity: they fired shots into his cell. One bullet whizzed past his neck. Another grazed his hair. Later, Bennett's Minister of Justice would admit the attack was deliberate and defend it, claiming the whole thing was just meant "to frighten him".

People were outraged. There were massive protests. A petition demanding Buck's release gathered nearly half a million signatures. There was even a play written about it — the police (surprise!) shut it down before it opened. Eventually, the pressure was too much. Bennett was forced to back down. And Buck was suddenly released.

Just a few hours later, when he arrived at Union Station, there was already a huge, cheering crowd waiting to meet him. They lifted him up onto their shoulders and paraded down Front Street chanting his name. Women fainted. Children cried. A few days later, when he spoke at Maple Leaf Gardens, twenty five thousand people showed up. Thousands were turned away at the door.

The battle wasn't over. There would be more protests, more beatings and arrests. When workers marched across Canada, from B.C. to Ottawa, they were met by the mounties in Regina; two protesters were killed. But Bennett was on his last legs. Another election loomed. And this time, he would be absolutely destroyed at the polls. The Conservatives lost nearly 100 seats and 20% of the popular vote. There wouldn't be another Conservative government in Canada for the next 25 years. And once Mackenzie King's Liberals were back in power, they repealed "Section 98", brought in a minimum wage, introduced unemployment insurance, and guaranteed a shorter workday. Bennett, meanwhile, gave up on Canada entirely. He left for England, where he would be appointed to the House of Lords and made a Viscount. He is the only Prime Minister in the history of our country to be buried on foreign soil.

For his part, Tim Buck would lead the Communist Party for another 30 years, but his popularity would come and go. Canadians were willing to stand up for his rights, but not so much to vote for him. The closest he came to getting elected was just a few years after his arrest — in an election for Toronto City Council. With the start of the Second World War, his party would find itself outlawed all over again. And then, when Stalin came in on our side, they were heroes again. And then, during the Cold War, they were hated again. Some years, party members were being arrested as spies. Others, Buck was appearing on stage with the Prime Minister and even Eaton's was preparing window displays in tribute to the glory of Joseph Stalin. But gradually, as Soviet crimes were made clear and the superpower eventually disintegrated, most of the party's support ebbed away. In the last couple of elections, it's been lower than ever, just over three thousand votes.

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During the last election, I interviewed both the Communist Party of Canada and the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) for a series of profiles on our federal fringe parties over at the Little Red Umbrella. You can check them all out here.

You can learn more about Buck's triumphant return to Toronto after his imprisonment in this post from Kevin Plummer over at Torontoist. There are more articles about him here and here and here. And the CBC archives have a video about a speaking tour of Canada Buck did in the '60s here.

Eaton's window display during WWII

Photo: Factory Worker During WWII

Last week, blogTO posted a whole whack of old Toronto photographs from the 1850s to the 1990s. There are plenty of nice ones that I hadn't seen before, but the photo that's stuck with me the most is this one, of a woman who (like my grandmother) worked at an armaments factory in Toronto during the Second World War. 

Unfortunately, they don't give any more information than that. You can see the whole post here, which is a round-up of some of the best images they posted in a fifteen-part series covering one decade at a time.

Update: blogTo reposted the image again, this time with a link to a Wikipedia page with more information. It seems this is Veronica Foster, who worked at the John Inglis Co. factory in what's now Liberty Village. They called her "Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl" because that's a Bren machine gun, which became one of the most common weapons on the front lines of the war. This photo was taken as "official government coverage" in May of 1941.

Canada's First Beatnik Happening

The Bohemian Embassy

In the late '50s and early '60s, while the Ginsbergs and Kerouacs were making names for themselves south of the border, Toronto's own Beatniks were taking over a swath of our city's core. Their scene was centered around Gerrard Village, at Yonge, and stretched up into Yorkville, transforming old Victorian homes into coffee houses and poetry clubs.

At the heart of it all was the Bohemian Embassy on St. Nicholas Street. "The coffee-house was on a little cobbled side-street," Margaret Atwood explains in her short story "Isis In Darkness", "up on the second floor of a disused warehouse. It was reached by a treacherous flight of wooden stairs with no banister; inside, it was dimly lit, smoke-filled, and closed down at intervals by the fire department. The walls had been painted black, and there were small tables with checked cloths and dripping candles."

The venue became a proving ground, providing vital support to the fledgling careers of an impressively long list of Toronto's finest poets, writers, folk musicians and comedians: Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Macewen, Milton Acorn,  Irving Layton, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Ian and Sylvia, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy, Dennis Lee, Lorne Michaels. Bob Dylan came to see a reading when he was seventeen. Peter, Paul and Mary would hang out when they came through town. A young Bill Cosby did stand-up, taking a break from his regular gig a few blocks away at the Fifth Peg on Church.

In 1963, the Bohemian Embassy attracted the attention of the CBC when it played host to an absurd, Dadaist free-for-all billed as "Canada's First Beatnik Happening". Here's the video. (Seriously. Click it. It's worth it just for the expression on the anchor's face when they cut back to him at the end.)

This post is related to dream 11 Feeding The Annex Dennis Lee, 1974

Mabel The Swimming Wonder Monkey, or The Great Dead Monkey Project

DEC VAX 11/780

Okay, so, this story seems to vary wildly from one source to the other, so I have no idea how much is true and how much is urban legend. But there's no way in hell I'm passing up the opportunity to write a post about The Great Dead Monkey Project, so here goes:

They say Mabel was a monkey, maybe a chimpanzee, trained by scientists at the University of Toronto in the late '70s. They called her Mabel The Swimming Wonder Monkey  because they'd taught her how to swim underwater; she could breathe with a kind of scuba system. The researchers would pump in various gasses to determine the kind of effects they had on her body. 

The whole system was controlled by an early computer—the DEC VAX-11/780. It was a brand new, state of the art machine which took up most of a room, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and came with up to 2 MB of memory. But the one the researchers at U of T were using had developed some kind of problem, so one day, while Mabel was in the pool, a technician came in to fix it. And while he was working on it, he accidentally screwed with part of the system regulating Mabel's air. The Swimming Wonder Monkey drowned.

Her death, according to a dictionary of computer geek slang, is how they got the term "scratch monkey"—an extra drive used to back-up data while troubleshooting. Apparently it's a common expression for safety-conscious computer folk: "Always mount a scratch monkey". If they'd done that at U of T, their monkey wouldn't have died.

There's another version of the story out there as well. It comes from someone who claims to have interviewed the woman who programmed the computer. According to her, the experiment had nothing to do with swimming underwater, but involved five monkeys who were hooked up to the computer so that it could read their brain waves. When the DEC VAX-11/780 was being worked on, it supposedly accidentally sent out electrical signals, directly into the monkeys' brains. It killed three and stunned the other two. The experiment became known as The Great Dead Monkey Project.

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I was tipped off to this one by a couple of friends who run the Once Again, to Zelda blog and are editors with me over at the Little Red Umbrella and who were trying to figure out why an ad for a "Toronto Bucket List" with a photo of a chimpanzee in a wetsuit kept showing up in the sidebar of their Facebook feeds. Which is still confusing. You can read the online dictionary's version of the story here, and The Great Dead Monkey Project version here. Also, coincidentally, there's a monkey gargoyle at U of T, on one of the doorways to University College, which you can see a photo of here.

The Canadian Military Occupation of Iceland — A Strange Tale from World War II

Reykjavik, 1942

 
Iceland didn’t want any part of the Second World War. It was all tiny and defenseless and alone out there in the north Atlantic. Most of the hundred thousand people on the island were peaceful farming and fishing families. They had no army; only a few dozen hastily-trained police officers. For the most part, the Icelandic arsenal was limited to a few pistols and rifles and a couple of antique cannons. But that was the point: ever since the end of the First World War, when they had been granted their autonomy under Danish rule, Iceland had been an officially neutral country. They weren’t going to be doing any invading — and no one was supposed to invade them.

Winston Churchill, however, had other plans. At the beginning of the war, he was in charge of the British navy. And he was worried. In April of 1940, the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway — both neutral, just like Iceland — giving the Nazis a strategic advantage. If Iceland were captured next, the Allies would be in serious trouble in the north Atlantic. “It has been said,” Churchill wrote, “‘Whoever possesses Iceland holds a pistol firmly pointed at England, America, and Canada.'” He tried to convince Iceland to join the Allied cause, but when his efforts failed, he turned to a new plan.

In early May, Churchill launched “Operation Fork”. A few hundred British soldiers set sail for Reykjavik to invade Iceland, occupy the island and defend it against the Nazis.

Things got off to a rocky start. The plan was thrown together in a rush; they were still figuring out the details en route. None of the invaders spoke Icelandic. They had only a few maps and even those were unreliable; one of them was drawn from memory. The soldiers — who weren’t supposed to know where they were going — figured it out anyway. And on the trip over, lots of them were getting seasick. One of them even committed suicide. Then, the element of surprise was ruined: the plane sent ahead to scout the island woke people up in the middle of the night. By the time the Allies got there, a crowd had gathered at the harbour in Reykjavik and the German consul was already burning documents in his bathtub.

But when you’re invading a country that has no army, you can afford to make a few more mistakes than usual. When the Allied destroyers arrived — on the very same day Churchill became Prime Minister back in England — they were met by throngs of curious onlookers, but no resistance (expect for one guy who took a gun away from an Allied solider, stuck a cigarette in the barrel and handed it back). The Allies quickly fanned out across the island, disabling communications, arresting all German citizens and sympathizers, seizing whatever Nazi documents hadn’t been burned, and taking over strategic positions.

The Icelandic government was understandably upset. They officially protested, pointing out that their sovereignty had been “flagrantly violated” and their “independence infringed” — but they also asked their citizens to treat the occupying forces as “guests”. For their part, the Allies promised to pay for everything they broke and leave just as soon as the war was over. Today, the Icelandic government remembers the “brave and gallant” Canadian occupiers “with great gratitude”. They even gave us the very last shell from those antique cannons.

And after the invasion, it was the Canadians who were left to do the actual occupying. Leading the way was the Royal Regiment of Canada — one of Toronto’s most storied forces, with roots going all the way back to the Battle of Lime Ridge in 1866. Young men from places like Forest Hill and Kensington and Sunnyside — many of whom had never even left the city before their training in Halifax — were living in drafty military huts in places like Reykjavik, Hvalfjörður and Sandskeið, expanding airfields, building defenses and getting drunk on the local moonshine, “Black Death”.

It didn’t last long. About a year after they arrived, the Canadian troops were needed elsewhere in the war; the Americans took over. The Royal Regiment of Canada soon found themselves in much more dangerous places. The very next summer, they stormed the beaches of Dieppe. More than half of them were captured; almost half of them were killed.

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Iceland, who declared independence from Denmark before the war was over, still doesn't have a standing army, but they are now apparently very happy that we occupied them back in the day. They even gave the very last cannon shell from those two antique cannons, inscribed thusly: “In honour of the brave and gallant Canadian soldiers who fought in the defence of a small nation. Iceland remembers them with great gratitude." Some Icelanders still live in the huts our troops built for shelter, and there's apparently a small graveyard of the Canadians who died while serving there.


Most of my information came from here and here and, of course, here. There are some neat wartime photos of the Icelandic police officers' training here and here. And another one of Reykjavik here.

The photo was found via a postcard on Ebay here.

Ooh and I also across this quote on Wikipedia. It's from the diary of Alexander Cadogan, one of the British military's civil servants during the war: "Home 8. Dined and worked. Planning conquest of Iceland for next week. Shall probably be too late! Saw several broods of ducklings."

Donkey Baseball

Donkey baseball

Okay, so I haven't actually been able to find much information about this, but according to what I've pieced together from the internet and my dad's memory, it was an American promoter who first came up with the idea of donkey baseball. He figured people would be willing to pay to see baseball played on donkeyback—which of course they were. The  regular old non-donkey-riding pitcher would throw to the batter, who, once he'd gotten a hit, would clamber up onto his steed and do his best to coax it around the bases. Meanwhile, fielders would try to goad their own donkeys into going after the ball.

The promoter and his team toured around  North America challenging local baseball squads to mount up. It became quite the fad; people started organizing their own games, there was even a movie made about it. And when they came through T.O., they'd head  down to a diamond in New Toronto—by the lakeshore in Etobicoke—right across from the Goodyear plant where my grandfather worked. He and the rest of the company's softball team would cross the street, pair up with a donkey and play a few frustrating innings.

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You can read more about one old game of donkey baseball in this Sports Illustrated article. And apparently people still play the game from time to today. There's YouTube video of it here and here, which really seems a lot less fun when you think of it from the donkey's perspective. There are also those who also play donkey basketball. It has its own Wikipedia page and denunciations from PETA and everything.

Photo: Eaton's Racist Christmas Display in 1955

Eaton's window, Christmas, 1955

Oh boy. So. According to the Archives of Ontario, Eaton's was pretty hesitant to start using religious imagery in their famous Christmas window displays. At first, they played it safe, sticking with Santa Claus and toys and gifts, worried that Christian church leaders would be offended if the department store mixed Jesus with commercialism. But in 1945, they were feeling ballsy: they added some religiously-themed Christmas carols to the mix, playing them over a loud speaker to accompany their displays. It was a hit. Church leaders, far from being upset, actively encouraged their congregations to head down to Yonge and Queen. After that, it was open season. There were nativity scenes and baby Jesuses all over the place.

And so it was that in 1955, with their fears of religious insensitivity far behind them, T. Eaton & Co. decided to decorate their windows with scenes of what it would have been like if other cultures around the world had been witness to the Christmas star. There were Africans in a thatched-hut village, Inuit in the frozen north and, dropping to their knees in prayer, aboriginals outside their tee-pees. (Also, for some reason, Dutch people.)

The Archives of Ontario have photos of each of them (Africans here, Inuit here and the Dutch here) as part of a brief history of Eaton's Christmas displays, which you can find here.

Photo: Rush Hour in 1941

That's a gridlocked Yonge Street at rush hour in 1941, looking north toward the intersection with College. (That white building on the left is College Park back when it was still an Eaton's.) I found it here, on the city's website, presented as an example of the kind of congestion that was suffocating the downtown core before we finally built our first subway line.

That same webpage has some neat drawings of what they thought King and Eglinton Stations might look like, plus this photo taken further down Yonge Street on Christmas Eve in 1935, looking north from Louisa Street (one of the four roads that disappeared when they built the Eaton's Centre on top of them)

 Yonge Street, Christmas Eve 1935

Video: Canada's First Subway Opens In 1954

The world's first subway—in London—had been running for about a hundred years before Toronto finally got ours. People had started suggesting one in the early days of the 1900s, but it took decades of lobbying, a rapidly growing population and fears that the downtown was going to be overwhelmed by cars before a referendum on the issue overwhelmingly passed in 1946. Three years later, construction started. It was, of course, a massive project: workmen spent the next six years ripping up Yonge Street pretty much all the way from Front to Eglinton. In 1954, it opened: an underground railroad that could take you from Union Station to Eglinton in just 20 minutes. To mark the occasion, the CBC produced this video, a seven-minute documentary about the new line. The sound is kind of crappy, but it's well worth  having to squint your ears a little.

The construction project also made for a lot of good photos. I'll post one of Front Street below (click to make it bigger), but there's another great one of Yonge Street near Queen here. You can also find some more, including a neat aerial shot of the trench, if you scroll down on  this article. There's a photo of the official opening ceremonies at Davisville Station here. And there's a YouTube video of one of those very first, very red subway trains rolling into Rosedale Station here.

Front Street outside Union Station, 1950

Maple Leaf Stadium

Maple Leaf Stadium, 1958

This photo is looking north at the intersection of Bathurst and Fleet Street (nowadays Lake Shore Boulevard passes through too). Today, the eastern side of the intersection is pretty much the same: Rogers now owns that building on the south-east corner and the old abandoned Daily Bread Food Bank warehouse is still on the north-east. The west side, though, is completely different. On the northern corner, there's a condo tower these days and Douglas Coupland's tin solider monument commemorating the War of 1812. On the south side, where the gorgeous Maple Leaf Stadium once stood, there's now an Esso station and some co-op housing.

The stadium opened in 1926 as the home of Toronto's minor league baseball team, the Maple Leafs. (Before that, they played at Hanlan's Point Stadium on the island, where, as I wrote in an earlier post, Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run.) It was built by the same architectural firm—Chapham, Oxley & Bishop—who designed some of the lakeshore's other icons: the Princes' Gates at the Ex, the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion and the Palais Royale. It had seating for 20,000 people, also played host to a few football games, and saw the home team win more than their fair share of championships—two of the Maple Leafs teams who called the stadium home are considered to be among the greatest minor league baseball rosters ever assembled. It was eventually demolished in the late '60s, when the team was sold and moved to Kentucky.

Maple Leaf Stadium, 1929

You can read more about Maple Leaf Stadium on Toronto Before here and Mop Up Duty here. blogTo has a bunch of photos of other old Toronto stadiums here.


Weird Coincidence Update: In the hour or so since I posted this, the news broke that Sparky Anderson, who played shortstop for some of those great old Maple Leafs teams, died today. It was actually the team's owner who suggested that Anderson, who wasn't an amazing shortstop, might have the leadership qualities necessary to be an excellent manager. And holy crap, was he ever. He'd go on to have a 25 year career as the skipper of the Cincinnati Reds and the Detroit Tigers, winning three world championships, more total games than all but five other managers in the history of the sport, and a well-deserved spot in the Hall of Fame.