How Cardiff Remembers Two Torontonian Explorers

UK TOUR DAY FOUR (CARDIFF): The Royal Hotel. Cardiff. This is where I'm staying on the second leg of The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour. It's the oldest hotel in the city — a Grade II listed heritage building from the 1800s right in the heart of the Welsh capital. I've come here because 100 years ago, this is where one of the most famous stories in all of British history began. And that story included two Torontonians.

The story starts back in the summer of 1910. Cardiff was buzzing. Everyone was talking about a ship docked down at the bay. The Terra Nova. Latin for "Newfoundland". She was originally built in the late 1800s by a Scottish company; hunting seals in the frigid waters of the Labrador Sea. But she was eventually bought by a company from Newfoundland: Bowring. They were a ship-based company back then, but they're still around today, having morphed into a chain of Canadian-owned gift shops. You can still find a few of them in Toronto; more than a dozen in the GTA. And more than a century later, their logo is still an image of the Terra Nova.

The ship did more than hunt seals, though. She was built to withstand the relentless onslaught of arctic seas, and had been used to rescue two polar expeditions: an American expedition trapped in the Canadian arctic for two years, and a British one that got stuck in Antarctica. That British expedition was led by Sir Robert Falcon Scott — one of the most famous explorers from "The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration". A few years later, he decided to try again. This time, he hoped to become the very first human being to ever reach the South Pole. And to get there, he was going to use the Terra Nova. 

That's why the ship was in Cardiff. Scott had convinced Bowring to sell him the Terra Nova temporarily. It was in Wales to load up on coal and other supplies. He and his crew would sail the ship to the bottom of the world and then spend two years in Antarctica, recording important scientific observations and making a push south to the Pole. All for the glory of the British Empire.

Charles Seymour Wright was the expedition's physicist. He'd been born and raised in Toronto. His family lived on Dovercourt, then on Crescent Street in Rosedale. He studied at Upper Canada College — even became head boy — and then went on to get his degree at the University of Toronto. He did so well there that he earned a scholarship to Cambridge, where he studied radiation and became very good friends with another student, Thomas Griffith Taylor. Taylor was an Englishman who spent much of his youth in Australia, but he was eventually going to end up in Toronto, too: a couple of decades later, he founded the Geography Department at U of T and spent 15 years there as a professor.

The Terra Nova heads out of Cardiff Bay

It was while they were at Cambridge that Wright and Taylor both decided to become polar explorers. At a dinner one night, Taylor met another towering figure of the Heroic Age — Sir Douglas Mawson — who just happened to have returned from the Antarctic. It was Mawson who told the young men about Scott's planned expedition on the Terra Nova and urged them to sign up. So they did.

Taylor was immediately hired as the expedition's senior geologist. But Wright's application was rejected. Still, he wasn't about to take no for answer. When they got the bad news, the two friends walked all the way from Cambridge to Scott's office in the middle of London — 100 kilometers away — so that Wright could plead his case in person. Scott was so impressed that he hired Wright after all. He, too, would be on the boat when it sailed south from Cardiff.

The expedition had plenty of ties to Wales. A Welshman was part of the crew — and the second-in-command had Welsh roots that he used to gain Welsh financial support for the adventure. Cardiff responded by embracing Scott's expedition like no other city in the world. Welsh businesses donated money and coal and oil and cooking utensils. They convinced the Welsh politician David Lloyd George (a future Prime Minister of Britain) to give Scott a government grant of £20,000. Welsh schoolchildren even donated Scott's sleeping bag. In return, the Terra Nova used Cardiff as her home port, loading up on supplies and doing some last minute fundraising before sailing south. And when she did, she was flying the Welsh flag. Thousands of people lined the shores of Cardiff Bay to watch her go and cheer her on her way.

It was the beginning of one of the most epic tales in all of British history.

The men of the Terra Nova spent two years living in some of the harshest conditions on earth. They froze in temperatures that sometimes plunged below −60°C. They were battered by storms with winds so strong that pebbles were picked up off the beach and hurled through the air. They starved. They were poisoned by their own contaminated food. They fell through the ice. They slipped down crevasses. They were hunted by killer whales. They endured months of nothing but darkness, only to go snowblind when the summer sun finally did return. They dragged equipment and supplies across the ice for hundreds of kilometers, their bodies ravaged by frostbite, their faces blackened by the cold.

And in the end, they failed.

Scott took four men with him on the final leg of the journey to the South Pole. And when they got there, they discovered an abandoned tent and a Norwegian flag were already waiting for them. The Scandinavian explorer Roald Amundsen had beat them by a few weeks. "Great God!" Scott wrote in his diary, "this is an awful place..."

Charles Seymour Wright in Antarctica

The trip back to camp was an even bigger disaster. They spent weeks dragging their exhausted, starving, frost-bitten bodies back across the icy plateau and down one of the biggest glaciers in the world. Their toes and feet turned black. Fingernails were lost to the cold. When they reached the bottom of the glacier, the Welshman — Edgar Evans — collapsed and died. A few weeks later, a second man — Captain Oates — decided that he was only slowing the others down. One morning, he simply walked out of the tent to die. "I am just going outside," he told the others, "and may be some time." It's still one of the most famous lines in British history.

The last three surviving men carried on for another few days. But just a few kilometers from the next cache of supplies, they ran into yet another snowstorm. They waited for the weather to clear, but it was too late. They couldn't go any further. "We shall stick it out to the end," Scott wrote in the final entry in his diary, "but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people."

It was the Torontonian, Charles Seymour Wright, who found the bodies. As part of the search party, he spotted the tent half-buried in the snow. Inside, he found the dead men along with their diaries and photographs. That documentation helped turn the Scott expedition into one of the most famous tales in British history.

And so, today, more than a hundred years later, you can still find traces of the Scott expedition in places all over Cardiff. That's in large part thanks to the Captain Scott Society of Cardiff, who have dedicated themselves to preserving the memory of the expedition. Today, as soon as I arrived at the Royal Hotel, I had coffee with the Chairman of the Society, Julian Rosser. I gave him a copy of my dreams for Charles Seymour Wright and we chatted, among other things, about some of the ways the Scott Expedition is remembered in places around Cardiff.

Thanks to the Society, the Royal Hotel has a new blue plaque dedicated to the farewell dinner that was held here in 1910. The room where the dinner happened is still called The Scott Room. They say some of the wood on the walls came from the Terra Nova. Artifacts from the expedition are on display in the National Museum of Wales. There's a memorial to Scott and his men in Cardiff City Hall. There's a lighthouse dedicated to their memory in a Cardiff park. The Terra Nova's binnacle is on display in the historic Pierhead Building right on Cardiff Bay. The Terra Nova restaurant is just 100 meters away. And across the water, in the town of Penarth, there's a road called Terra Nova Way.

There's another memorial on Cardiff Bay, too. It's a striking white monument that stands next to the lock where the Terra Nova sailed off into history. It's right outside the Norwegian Church — a reminder of the expedition's tragic failure. And it was commission by the Scott Society before being giving to the City of Cardiff. It shows Captain Scott, his men and the Terra Nova being swallowed up by an abstract swirl of snow and ice. In the middle of the sculpture, you'll find a hole. The shape of that hole is meant to remind you of the mouth of an ice cave. In fact, it's meant to remind you of one ice cave in particular. It was the setting for the expedition's most iconic photograph. Through the cave in the photo, you look out onto the Antarctic ice. In the distance, you can see the Terra Nova — that hardy ship from the waters off Newfoundland — waiting on the frigid sea. And in the cave itself, you can see two small figures. The Torontonians. Thomas Griffith Taylor on the left and, on the right, Charles Seymour Wright:

The Scott memorial sculpture, Norwegian chapel

A dream for C.S. Wright

Julian Rosser, Chairman of the Scott Society

The Captain Scott Room, Royal Hotel

A dream for C.S. Wright in the Captain Scott Room

Blue plaque for Scott at the Royal Hotel

Memorial lighthouse at Roath Park Lake

A dream for C.S. Wright at Roath Park Lake

The Pierhead Building

Cardiff Bay

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I've already written a more detailed version of the story of the Charles Seymour Wright and the Scott Expedition on Spacing here.

Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here. I'll be posting lots more during the trip! And you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook too.

Billy Bishop & The Rich & Famous

UK TOUR DAY THREE (LONDON): One spring day in 1916, Billy Bishop woke up here, in this building on Bryanston Square in Central London, where I left a dream for him this evening. Today, it's a prep school, but back in the days of the First World War it was a private home that had been turned into a temporary military hospital. The whole thing was spearheaded by one of the most famous aristocrats in England: Lady Carnarvon (the secret, illegitimate, but still-very-wealthy daughter of a Rothschild). And so, this wasn't exactly your typical military hospital. It was much more like something out of Downton Abbey. Patients were fed with fresh food from the gardens. The beds were made up with fine linen. There were butlers and footmen to serve breakfast in bed and bring the men the newspaper. In fact, the hospital helped to inspire Downton Abbey: the television show is filmed at Lady Carnarvon's country home, where she originally opened the hospital before moving it here.

Now, at this point, Billy Bishop wasn't famous yet. He wasn't even a pilot yet. The young man from Canada had started out the war as an officer in the cavalry — trained to ride his horse into the onslaught of German machine guns. Luckily, he managed to get a transfer into the Royal Flying Corps before seeing any action, but even then he wasn't allowed to fly the planes. He was an observer who sat in the aircraft as it flew over the front lines, taking notes on German positions.

He still got hurt, though. First, he got in a truck accident. Then, he was knocked out for two days after being hit in the head while working on a plane. When he recovered, he promptly injured his knee during a failed take-off: his airplane ploughed through a hedge and into a neighbouring field. On leave in London, he hurt his knee again: this time, he got drunk and fell off a gangplank. But through it all, he refused to get treatment. It wasn't until he fell down the steps of the Savoy Hotel that he finally found himself in the care of the doctors, nurses and butlers of Lady Carnarvon's Hospital for Officers.

And on that spring day in 1916, things were about to get weird. As Bishop woke from his slumber, he found one of the most famous and influential women in all of England sitting at his bedside.

Lady St. Helier was at the heart of social life in London. She was a Baroness, a writer, a philanthropist, even an alderman on the City Council. The parties she threw at her home were the place to be in the early years of the 1900s. Many of the greatest writers and most important politicians were known to be guests at 52 Portland Place: Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, David Lloyd George, W. Somerset Maugham... She even introduced Winston Churchill to his future wife — her niece — and then hosted their wedding reception.

But Billy Bishop didn't know any of that. They'd never met before and he didn't recognize her. He was Canadian; her name meant nothing to him. But she, by an exceptionally strange coincidence, knew exactly who he was.

"I saw your name on the hospital register," she explained. "And I was sure that someone named William Bishop from Canada must be the son of my friend Will Bishop. And when I looked at you, I was sure of it."

And she was actually right. At some point, while on a trip Ottawa, she'd been a guest at a reception held by the Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. For some reason, Bishop's father — who was a relatively ordinary lawyer — was also there. He made enough of an impression that years later Lady St. Helier still remembered him fondly. And when she visited Lady Carnarvon's hospital, the Bishop name stood out.

That coincidence changed Billy Bishop's life.

52 Portland Place

Suddenly, he was a very well-connected young officer. Lady St. Helier invited him to spend the rest of his time recovering at her own home (where I also left a dream for him tonight). The two became very close. Before long, she was introducing him as her grandson — and he, in turn, called her "Granny." When his father had a mild stroke back in Canada, Lady St. Helier pulled strings to get Bishop a leave from the military and a ticket on a ship back home. Thanks to her, he was able to spend a few months visiting with his father in Owen Sound and with his fiancee in Toronto. That trip may very well have saved his life: back in Europe, his squadron was being cut to pieces during the Battle of the Somme.

When he returned to England, he was still determined to become a pilot. But his application was being ignored. So, once again, Lady St. Helier pulled some strings. And before he knew it, Bishop was in flight school.

That, of course, was a stroke of luck for the Royal Flying Corps. By the end of Bishop's first week as a pilot, he'd already shot down five German planes and earned the title of "ace". A few months later, he'd been awarded the Victoria Cross, faced off against the Red Baron, and set the record for the most enemy planes shot down by any pilot from the British Empire.

Whenever he was away from the front lines back in London, he was staying at Lady St. Helier's, drinking and dancing with the most famous and powerful people in England. By the time he got another leave to visit Canada during the autumn of 1917, he was an international celebrity in his own right.

And back home in Toronto, he was wining and dining with the richest people in Canada, too. In another odd coincidence, Bishop's fiancee was the grand-daughter of our country's most famous department store mogul: Timothy Eaton. Back before the war, the Eaton family hadn't approved of the match. But now, things were different. Billy Bishop and Margaret Burden were married at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church on St. Clair West. By then, Bishop was so famous that a crowd of fans showed up at the church to cheer the newly weds on.

But that same fame meant the end of Billy Bishop's career as an ace. He was so famous that the Canadian government was beginning to worry about what would happen to morale if he were ever shot down. And so, they decided to ground him. He was ordered away from the front lines. Bishop — who, by his own admission, had developed a thirst for blood — was deeply disappointed. But he had no choice. Now, Billy Bishop was famous. But he'd never fly a plane into action again. 

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Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here. I'll be posting lots more during the trip! And you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook too.

There are photos of Lady St. Helier here and here. You can read a bit more about Bishop and the Baroness thanks to Google Books here and here and also a little bit here. There's more about Lady St. Helier here and here. And about her connection to Churchill here. Or her other famous friends here. Plus, there's some info about Bishop's London-born pilot son here.

A dream for Billy Bishop outside the former hospital

A dream for Billy Bishop outside 52 Portland Place

Toronto's Secret Viking Heritage

UK TOUR DAY TWO (LONDON): This is the Cuerdale hoard. It's a stash of Viking silver that was originally buried in the early 900s. It was discovered in Lancashire back in the 1840s and it's bigger than any Viking horde ever discovered in Scandinavia. Today, I went to check it out in the British Museum. Which makes this the perfect time to tell you the story of Toronto's secret Viking heritage.

The Vikings, of course, aren't exactly the first people who leap to mind when you think of Toronto's heritage. After all, we're a city founded by the British in territory previously claimed by the French on the ancestral lands of the First Nations. And while many people from Scandinavia have called Toronto home, immigration from the northern reaches of Europe has generally been dwarfed by immigration from other parts of the world.

Today, for instance, in a metropolitan census area of 5.5 million people, only 70 of them say that Norwegian is the language they speak most often at home. That's compared to more than 300,000 who use Chinese languages. In fact, no Scandinavian language comes anywhere close to breaking into the top 50. More Torontonians speak Tigrigna or Marathi or Ilocano.

But if you know where to look, the linguistic traces of a distant Viking past are all around you. You can find them in the names of our streets, our neighbourhoods, our libraries, our schools... In words we use every day. And for the most part, that's thanks to events that happened more than a thousand years ago many thousands of kilometers away. When the Vikings invaded the British Isles.

It all started in the late 700s with bloody raids along the coast. Unprotected British monasteries were a tempting target. And all the Vikings had to do was to sail across the North Sea — only about the same distance as between Toronto and Montreal. By the end of the 800s, they'd launched a full-scale invasion and conquered a huge chunk of the island. Their new territory stretched all the way across the north-east of what's now England. Historians call it the Danelaw. The Norse ruled the land for about 200 years. And that meant waves of new Viking immigration.

While they were there, of course, they named things. Lots of things. Cities and towns and rivers and fields and farms.... Even a thousand years later, when you look at a map of England, you can see their linguistic legacy. It's all over the former Danelaw. In the north and the east of England, the names of places are still full of Old Norse.

And when the British came to Canada, they brought some of those names with them. The British renamed places they found in Toronto — just like the Vikings had done in Britain. So today's modern city — more than 2,000 kilometers away from the closest evidence of Viking settlement — is still full of traces of the days when the Vikings ruled much of England.

So take, for instance, Burnhamthorpe Road, which runs through parts of Etobicoke and Mississauga. It got its name from the settler John Ableton all the way back in the 1860s. He suggested it because Burnham Thorpe was the name of his hometown back in England. It had been part of the Danelaw. And the name originally came from those ancient Viking days — it's one of dozens upon dozens of places in the former Danelaw that still end in -thorpe, which was the Old Norse word for "village" or "farmstead".

The same goes for places that end in -holme. Like Glenholme Avenue near St. Clair West (which, while we're at it, isn't far from tiny Grimthorpe Road — the Viking name "Grim" with the Viking suffix "thorpe".). "Holme" was an Old Norse word for "island". So it's not a coincidence that there are places in Sweden with names like Stockholm, Hässleholm and Ängelholm — or Horsholm in Denmark.

In some cases, the "holme" suffix has evolved over the centuries, turning into the ending "ham". That's what happened to one ancient town near Manchester: Aldehulme eventually became Oldham. And Oldham, in turn, eventually turned up as the name of a road in Etobicoke.

Anglo-Saxon helmet at the British Museum

It's a bit confusing, though, because sometimes "ham" doesn't come from Old Norse at all — sometimes it comes from the Old English word for "homestead". And a lot of the examples are more complicated like that. The Old English of the Anglo-Saxons (who ruled much of England at the same time the Vikings did) shared the same linguistic roots with Old Norse — some of the words are so similar that it's not entirely clear which one is responsible for the modern version. In some cases, it's probably both. For instance, they both used a word like "dale" to refer to valleys. And a thousand years later, we do too. Neighbourhoods like Riverdale, Rosedale, Willowdale and Bendale all echo the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons.

Sometimes, their words got mashed together, too. So, for instance, to name one city in the Danelaw, they took the Old English word for hill — "dun" — and then added the Old Norse ending "holme". Over the years, "Dun Holme" gradually morphed into "Durham". Today, that's what the city and the county are both called. And when Upper Canada's first Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe, was looking for names for the new counties he was creating in Canada, he chose to name them after counties back home in England. Including Durham. So a thousand years after the Vikings first named their city "Dun Holme", we still call the land to the east of Toronto "Durham Region".

Durham Region, in turn, is home to Whitby — which has another Old Norse suffix: "by", which was the Viking word for "settlement".

And some examples are even more clear-cut.

Sometime back around the year 1000, the Vikings are thought to have established a new trading post on the coast of Wales. They named it after their King — Sweyn Forkbeard — who may even have founded the city himself. They added on an Old Norse suffix — "ey" for "island" or "inlet" — so the name of the city was essentially the Viking word for "Sven's Island". Over the next few centuries, it became "Sweynesse", "Sweyneshe", "Sweyse" and, eventually, "Swansea". And more than 800 years after the death of King Forkbeard, a man from Swansea moved to Toronto. He purchased the local bolt works company and renamed the business after his hometown. Eventually, the name was used to describe the whole area. Today, we still call the neighbourhood to the west of High Park "Swansea" in honour of a Viking King most of us have never even heard of.

But the most striking example might be this one:

According to one of the ancient Icelandic Sagas, there was once a Viking raider and poet by the name of Thorgils Skarthi The Hare-Lipped. Around the year 966, he decided to move across the North Sea for good and establish a new settlement on a habour near the towering limestone cliffs of the north-east coast of England. He named the new town after himself, calling it Skarthi's stronghold: Skarðaborg. He was eventually driven out by the Anglo-Saxons and the new town was burned down. But when it was rebuilt years later, the name stuck.

Centuries after that, when Governor Simcoe came to Toronto to build his own stronghold on the harbour he found here, his wife came with him. Elizabeth Simcoe was struck by the beauty of this place — including the towering white bluffs to the east of the new town. They reminded her of the same limestone cliffs where Thorgils Skarthi The Hare-Lipped had once built his stronghold. So she christened the bluffs here with the modern version of the same word he used in England. That was the same word we still use to describe the vast expanse of land above those bluffs — the whole eastern half of our city.

Scarborough. Skarðaborg. Skarthi's Viking stronghold.

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Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here. I'll be posting lots more during the trip! And you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook too

You can read more about Skarthi here. And their are some sites about Viking linguistic stuff here and here and here. There's an interactive map tracing their Viking place names in England here.

The Guy Toronto Was Originally Named After (And His Super-Big Sex Scandal)

UK TOUR DAY ONE (LONDON): So! Today, I landed in London and launched The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour — spending the next two weeks leaving dreams at Toronto-related historical spots in England & Wales. And on my very first night in the United Kingdom — as well as dropping some dreams for Sydney Newman, Sir John A., Charles Seymour Wright and John Henry Lefroy — I headed to see this giant-ass column. I found it in the drizzle just as night was falling, towering above the city in one of the most prominent spots in all of London. It's at the top of some stairs just down the street from Buckingham Palace, about a block from Trafalgar Square, a couple of blocks from Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament. And it's, like, really big. More than 40 meters tall. That's about 12 storeys. The statue on top weighs more than 16,000 pounds. Inside, there's even a staircase leading to an observation deck — although they closed it to the public more than 100 years ago. It's all in honour of the Duke of York — the very same guy who Toronto was originally named after, and whose name is still plastered all over our city: from York to North York to East York to Fort York to York Street to York University to York Mills to the York Club to Royal York Road.

So. Who the hell was he?

His real name was Frederick. Prince Frederick. He was born just around the corner from where his column stands today, at St. James's Palace. (I stumbled across it last night, too.) His dad was King George III, who you probably know because he was the king who went "mad" and had a movie made about him. He was in charge back in the late 1700s and early 1800s: reigning over the battle at the Plains of Abraham, the American Revolution, the wars with Napoleon, and the War of 1812.

So, it's probably not surprising that the young Duke of York grew up in the army. And by the time he was 26, he was already a General, fighting on the edge of France against Robespierre's revolutionaries. They'd beheaded their own king a few months earlier and were at war with pretty much all the other monarchies in Europe — England included. Now those monarchies were invading France in an attempt to end the French Revolution once and for all. In early 1793, the invasion was going pretty well. And that's when the Duke of York led his troops in a victory over the French in the Battle of Famars. Before long, some people in France were hailing him as a liberator, declaring him to be their true King.

This, of course, was in days before Twitter and CNN — or even steamships and telegraphs. So word of the Duke's victory took a lonnnnnng time to cross the Atlantic and head up the St. Lawrence to reach the brand new frontier province of Upper Canada. It took three whole months. But by the end of August an official British government report was finally delivered to John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant Governor. At that point, he was living with his family in an elaborate tent pitched on the the northern shore of Lake Ontario. This was the place where, just a few weeks earlier, he had started to build a new capital for his new province. And he was still looking for a name.

This place did already have a name: Toronto. It was derived from a Mohawk word, which meant "where there are trees standing in the water." It originally referred to a fishing spot on the northern end of Lake Simcoe, but it was eventually used as a name for the portage route between Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario, and then, finally, to the spot on Lake Ontario where the portage route started. That's where Simcoe was building his town. 

But Simcoe didn't like the word Toronto. He thought First Nations words were weird and ugly and "uncivilized". Everywhere he went, he was renaming things in honour of the British Empire instead. And he was pretty flipping excited about the Duke of York's latest victory.

So Simcoe announced that he was naming his new town in honour of the Prince. It would now be known as York. To commemorate the occasion, he ordered a Royal salute: all the canons on the shore, all the guns on all the ships in the harbour, all the muskets of Simcoe's soldiers were fired in honour of a man waging a war against French democrats more than 6,000 kilometers away. 

That honour might have been a little premature. The invasion of France sputtered, fell apart, and suddenly the French were sweeping across Europe taking over countries. The Duke of York's next campaign — as the head of the entire British army now — didn't go very well, either. In fact, it seems that even children started mocking him with his very own nursery rhyme: "The Grand Old Duke of York". Before long, the French had a new general — Napoleon — and it looked like even England might be in danger of invasion.

And that was only the beginning of the troubles for the Duke. In the early 1800s, right in the middle of leading the war against Napoleon, he was caught up in a big political sex scandal. The Duke's former mistress claimed that while they'd been together, she was taking bribes in return for convincing him to give people commissions in the army. It was a particularly cutting attack, because his lasting legacy was making reforms to get rid of that kind of thing. His defence wasn't exactly reassuring: he said he was innocent of corruption because he didn't understand what was happening. More than 200 years later, The Independent still calls it "the greatest scandal in the history of the British Parliament."

The House of Commons eventually voted to acquit him, but enough people were questioning his leadership that he was forced to resign in disgrace anyway. A few years later, he was completely cleared of the charges: the mistress published a book revealing that the whole thing had been a conspiracy to discredit the Duke. She said she'd been paid thousands of pounds to make false claims against him. She fled to France and the Duke of York was reinstated as the head of the army. So he was the guy in charge of all the British forces during the years of the War of 1812 and when the Duke of Wellington finally beat Napoleon for good at the Battle of Waterloo.

When the Duke of York died, every single soldier in the British army gave up one day of wages to raise enough money to build a column in his honour. And that's the one that stands in the heart of London to this day.

By then, though, the bloom was most certainly off the rose. And a few years after the death of the Duke, our little town of York in Upper Canada was going to officially become a city. We chose, as our first Mayor, a man who was no great fan of the way the British were treating Canada; William Lyon Mackenzie took much more inspiration from revolutionaries than from monarchists. City Council debated whether to keep the name Simcoe gave us, or to embrace the name this place had when he first arrived. Some argued in favour of keeping "York", but in the end the majority agreed:

Toronto was more beautiful, more distinctive, more Canadian.

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Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here. I'll be posting lots more during the trip! And you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook too.

There is, however, one provincial capital in Canada still named in honour of the Duke: Fredericton. You can watch some crazy old British Pathé footage of the Duke of York Column being cleaned in 1961 here. The Independent tells the story of the sex scandal here. And Natural Resources Canada has "The real story of how Toronto got its name" here.

Coca-Cola on Queen Street West in 1937

It's the spring of 1937 and we're on Queen Street West. We're on north side of the street, looking east toward University Avenue. It's just a block away. Today, this very same spot is home to the big glass wall of One Eighty Queen Street West — a fifteen story building with a bunch of commercial tenants. Next door is one of Toronto's Historic Sites: Campbell House (that old building on the northwest corner of Queen & University). It was built in 1822, but it wasn't on Queen Street back when this photo was taken. They moved it to the current location in 1972.

By this point, of course, Coca-Cola was already an iconic brand. Coke had just celebrated its 50th anniversary. The first bottles of the world's most famous pop were sold in the 1880s. By the 1930s, it was a massive business with lots of advertising. So, while I'm at it, here are a few American ads from this very same year this photo was taken:

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I discovered the photo of Queen Street thanks to the Toronto Archives Flickr page. You can check it out here.

Dundas East Before It Was Dundas East

Dundas is one of the weirdest streets in Toronto. And one of the oldest, too. The guy who founded our city, John Graves Simcoe, ordered it built all the way back in the 1790s. It heads west from Toronto for a couple hundred kilometers — and it also, of course, winds its way through the middle of our city in complete defiance of our grid system.

Part of the reason Dundas doesn't follow the same layout as most of the major thoroughfares in Toronto is because it didn't actually start out as one street at all. The original Dundas — built by Simcoe so troops could move through the province quickly in case of an American invasion — only reached as far east as what's now the intersection of Queen & Ossington. That spot was near the military reserve that once surrounded Fort York. It wasn't until after the First World War that Dundas was extended through Toronto by cobbling together a bunch of smaller streets.

One of those smaller streets was Wilton Avenue. It ran east from Yonge (beginning at the southern end of what's now Yonge & Dundas Square) all the way east to the Don Valley and across it to a spot just beyond Broadview. That's Wilton in the photo above, getting a facelift in the spring of 1912. That spot is just west of Sumach Street — it's completely unrecognizable today, in the middle of Regent Park.

A few blocks to the west of there, between Jarvis and Sherbourne, Wilton took a gentle curve. It was called Wilton Crescent for that bit. And you can still see the curve on Dundas today. It's where Fillmore's Tavern is.

Here it is getting new streetcar tracks in June of 1911:

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Sean Marshall tells a more complete history of Dundas on Spacing here. And Chris Bateman does the same for blogTO over here. You can see what the curve on Dundas looks like today on Google Maps here.

I used one of the city workers in the photo at the top of this post as part of the design in my dream postcard for the artist Kathleen Munn. You can check that out here.

UK Tour Update: It's Really Happening!

Well, the flights are booked and the dates are all lined up, so I guess I can finally announce that The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour is actually, really, truly happening. Next month, I'll be heading across the Atlantic to leave dreams at Toronto-related historical sites in England and Wales. I'll be there for two weeks: from July 4-19. And while I'm there, I'll leave more than a dozen different dreams at dozens of sites in a dozen different cities, towns and villages.

London, Windsor, Cardiff, Penarth, Whitchurch, Thornbury, Exeter, Budleigh Salterton, Hontion, Buckerell, Dunkeswell, Hemyock... I'll trace stories of Toronto's past from the urban frenzy of Europe's biggest city, to the lush green valleys of South Wales, to the towering cliffs of the Jurassic Coast, to the rolling Blackdown Hills of Devonshire.

As I do, you'll be able to follow along here where I'll be sharing the stories of how the history of our city is tied to the history to those places. From the Englishman who almost became the first President of Canada, to the founder of Toronto facing off against Napoleon, to the Antarctic explorers who nearly froze to death on an infamous expedition to the South Pole.

I'll also be doing lots of tweeting (so be sure to follow me @TODreamsProject) and posting tons of photos to Instagram (also @TODreamsProject) and uploading stuff to my Facebook page, too.

But most importantly! I want to thank everyone who made this possible by contributing to my Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign — and to those who shared it on Facebook and Twitter. This absolutely wouldn't be happening without your support. THANK YOU! And for those of you who picked a perk, I'm hoping to mail them out from across the pond — if not, you can expect them shortly after my return.