John Graves Simcoe's Weird Relationship With Slavery

Meet John Graves Simcoe. Founder of Toronto. British veteran of the American Revolution. And an avowed abolitionist with a very weird and complicated relationship to slavery.

Simcoe hated it. Back home in England as a Member of Parliament, he gave anti-slavery speeches in the House of Commons. And when he was picked to be the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, he made it clear: he saw no place for the practice in his new province. "The principles of the British Constitution do not admit of that slavery which Christianity condemns," he wrote before he officially took his post. "The moment I assume the Government of Upper Canada, under no modification will I assent to a law that discriminates by dishonest policy between natives of Africa, America or Europe." 

And indeed, one of the very first things Simcoe did when he got to Upper Canada was to introduce a bill to end slavery in the province forever. In July 1793, his "Act Against Slavery" became the very first slavery-abolishing law ever passed anywhere in the British Empire. To this day he's celebrated as the man who ended slavery in Upper Canada — more than 40 years before it was abolished across the Empire and 70 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States.

But things weren't quite as simple as that makes it seem.

For one thing, Simcoe's law wasn't nearly as groundbreaking as it sounds. By the time he came to Canada, there were no slaves in England — a court decision had freed them all fifteen years earlier. Compared to the Mother Country, the Canadian colonies were behind the times. Hundreds of slaves were "owned" by the colonists in Upper Canada, many of them brought north to the new province by Loyalist refugees as they fled the revolution in the United States. The British government had actually encouraged the practice, passing a law in Westminster that promised new Canadian settlers they would get to keep their slaves.

So while slavery in England was already over, if Simcoe wanted to get rid of slavery in Upper Canada, he was going to have to pass a new law to actively abolish it. And that wasn't going to be easy.

Simcoe would need support. The bill would have to pass through the Legislative Assembly and then through the Legislative Council. Both of those bodies were full of slave owners. And that, in part, was thanks to none other than John Graves Simcoe.

Peter Russell tries to sell
Peggy & Jupiter Pompadour

The Legislative Assembly was an elected body. But the members of the Legislative Council were hand-picked by Simcoe himself — it worked a bit like the Senate does today. And Simcoe packed his Council full of slave-owners. At least five of the nine members were either slave-owners or from slave-owning families. They formed a majority. Simcoe, determined to abolish slavery in Upper Canada, had made it almost impossible to do.

But he was still going to try. It was the resistance of Chloe Cooley that gave him the opportunity he needed. Cooley was a Black woman living in slavery at Niagara. When her "master" sold her to someone on the American side of the river, he tied her up with rope and forced her into a boat to be taken across the border. Cooley, like many slaves, had long resisted her captivity: refusing work, stealing, disappearing for periods of time, generally trying to disrupt the life of her "master" and ensure her enslavement was as much of an inconvenience as possible. Now, she resisted again. As she was unloaded and handed over to her new "owner," Cooley screamed and put up a fight.

When Simcoe heard the tale, he was appalled — and he saw his chance. During the next session of the legislature, he pushed a bill to abolish slavery.

 
But with his government full of slave-owners, he was forced into a compromise — the exact thing he had promised never to do. The new law didn't abolish slavery immediately; instead, it would be gradually phased out. No new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, but any who were already here would spend the rest of their lives in slavery. Their children would be born into captivity, too; they wouldn't be free until they turned twenty-five. Finally, anyone who wanted to free a slave was discouraged from doing so: they would be forced to provide financial security to ensure the newly freed slave wouldn't be a drain on the resources of the state.

The bill was passed just a few weeks before Simcoe founded Toronto. And so, the foundations of our city were laid with the help of slave labour. During the early years of the new town, there were fifteen Black slaves within its borders — and another ten just across the Don Valley.

Some of Toronto's slave owners are still familiar names today. William Jarvis is remembered by Jarvis Street; James Baby's old estate on the Humber River is still called Baby Point. Peter Russell — a gambling-addict ex-con who Simcoe trusted as Receiver- and Auditor-General — enslaved a woman named Peggy Pompadour and her three children: Jupiter, Amy and Milly. Their acts of resistance were brutally punished by Russell: Jupiter was once bound and strung up in the window of a storehouse as a painful public humiliation. But Peter Russell is still remembered in the names of Peter Street and Russell Hill Road.

Simcoe's relationship with slavery only got weirder and more conflicted after he left Toronto. In 1796, ill-health forced him to sail home to England. Just a few months later — while still officially serving as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada — John Graves Simcoe was sent to Haiti. There, the avowed abolitionist was asked to put down the biggest slave uprising since Spartacus.

Haiti was a French colony back then; they called it Saint Domingue. The leaders of the French Revolution had abolished slavery, but French royalists still controlled Haiti — and they had no intention of giving up their half a million slaves.

Toussaint L'Ouverture

When the slaves rose up in a revolution led by François Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, the French royalists asked the British for help. Thousands of British troops were sent to the island, hoping to crush the uprising, restore slavery, and secure the island's sugar riches for themselves. By the time Simcoe arrived, they'd been fighting for years without making any real progress. His job was to turn things around. He was appointed as commander of the British forces in Haiti — a man who hated slavery fighting a bloody war to preserve it.

The Haitian Revolution was a long and brutal struggle. It raged for thirteen years and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Countless atrocities were committed. Simcoe's attempt to keep his own men in check — an order to halt all "cruelties and outrages" — was ignored. His army pushed Toussaint's forces back, but were stalled by a counterattack. His men were dying by the thousands: some in bloody battles, still more of yellow fever.

Simcoe only lasted a few months before he got sick of fighting for a cause he didn't believe in. He was sick of the war, sick of a lack of support from his superiors, sick of literally being sick. He left Haiti and sailed home to England, where he tried to convince the government to withdraw from the war; he was nearly arrested for desertion. The British kept fighting for a year after Simcoe left Haiti, and the French kept fighting long after that. In the end, the Haitian Revolution was successful — it led to the establishment of a new, independent, slave-free country in 1804.

But while slavery was now over in Haiti, it was still part of life in Toronto. It would take many years before it gradually dwindled out: one by one the city's slaves died or were freed by their "masters." There's no record of when the practice finally ended in Toronto, but there were no slaves left in the city by the time the British abolished slavery across the Empire on August 1, 1834.

By then, Toronto was beginning to gain a very different reputation. Black families like the Abbotts, the Blackburns and the Augustas — some of them former slaves themselves — worked with White allies like George Brown to make Toronto a relatively safe haven for those fleeing slavery in the United States. They organized anti-slavery societies, secured lodging for refugees, and raised funds to help the new arrivals get started in their new home. They struggled every day to make Toronto a more welcoming place for those fleeing racial persecution.

Half a century after Simcoe's chilling compromise, Toronto had become an important stop at the end of the Underground Railroad.

-----

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

This post was based in part on a Twitter essay I tweeted out on Simcoe day last year, which you can find here.

You can learn more about John Graves Simcoe from "John Graves Simcoe, 1752–1806: A Biography" by Mary Beacock Fryer and Christopher Dracott (which is available from Amazon here or the Toronto Public Library here), from his entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography here, and from his entry entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia here. And you can read his letters in "The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe" which you can find at the Toronto Public Library here.

Learn more about slavery and resistance in Upper Canada from Natasha Henry's "Talking About Freedom: Celebrating Emancipation Day in Canada" (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from Robin Winks' "The Blacks in Canada: A History" (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from "The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto!" by Adrienna Shadd, Afua Cooper and Karolyn Smardz Frost (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from William Renwick Riddell's 1923 article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology here (that's a PDF), or from the Canadian Encyclopedia here. The Encyclopedia also has an entry about Chloe Cooley and Simcoe's law here. 

You'll find the Wikipedia entry for the Haitian Revolution here. And a timeline of the history of Haiti here.

Read some my previous posts about the Simcoes:
The story of John Graves Simcoe's vision for Toronto (a city so awesome it would undo the American Revolution)
The story of Elizabeth Simcoe's 1794 nightmare 
The story of their dog, Jack Sharp 
The story of their cat 
The story of how they fell in love and the magical hills where it happened 
The story of their summer home in Budleigh Salterton 
The story of their connection to Samuel Coleridge and his family 
The story of the Simcoe family and Exeter and death

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 18 Russell Creek Peter Russell, 1799

Canada Wasn't Born in 1867

Canadians across the country partied this weekend in honour of #Canada150. But while July 1, 2017 did mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation, the celebrations were also more than a little bit misleading. Canada isn't 150 years old, and Canada Day isn't really its "birthday".

This summer, I'll be hosting a new web series: Canadiana is on the hunt for the most incredible stories in Canadian history: Canadiana. Our first episode — about the bizarre history of "O Canada" — will be coming soon, but in the meantime, we've been posting nuggets of Canadian history on social media. And since the suggestion that our country "began" in 1867 is bizarre and misleading, I took to the Canadiana Twitter account on Canada Day to do a little ranting on the subject.

You'll find my Twitter essay embedded below, and for more tweets about the history of Canada you can follow us on Twitter at @ThisIsCanadiana or like us on Facebook.

You can subscribe to Canadianaon YouTube, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

Dream 23 "Sir Henry & The Sleeping Dragon" (Sir Henry Pellatt, 1923)

Sir Henry dreamed there was a dragon living in Casa Loma. He found it in the Great Hall, asleep atop a mountain of treasure. The beast must have collected every valuable object in the castle: gold and silver, paintings and tapestries, china and books and swords. Noxious smoke curled from the reptile’s nostrils. There were scorch marks on the ceilings and the walls.

Sir Henry crept carefully forward, plucked a sword free from the pile. Then he mustered all his courage, drew himself up to his full height, and bravely cleared his throat. “Excuse me, sir,” he called out in his most commanding tone, “but that is my treasure. I demand you remove yourself this instant!”

The dragon kept sleeping; didn’t so much as twitch.

So Sir Henry tried again. “I am a knight of the British Empire and you will do as I say!” And with that, he brought his sword down upon the slumbering beast’s scaly hide with every ounce of strength he had.

The blade bounced off harmlessly. There wasn’t even a scratch.

Finally, one of the lizard’s drowsy eyes cracked open. Sir Henry found himself staring into a pupil the size of a tabletop — but only for an instant before the eyelid slid back shut. Then, with a flick of its tail, the dragon sent the knight flying through the window, out into the garden, and down the Davenport hill.

-----

Sir Henry Pellatt was one of the richest men in Canada in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He built Casa Loma as an opulent home for himself and his wife before his corrupt business practices destroyed his fortune — and the life savings of thousands of other Canadians along with it. 

You can read more about Sir Henry and the building of Casa Loma here. Explore more Toronto Dreams Project postcards here.

Born in the Holocaust — Miriam Rosenthal & Her Miracle Baby

It's easy to miss the shop if you're not looking for it. It blends into the other storefronts, one of many Jewish businesses along that stretch of Bathurst Street. It's been standing there for more than 50 years, just two blocks south of Lawrence Avenue, on the corner of Caribou Road. A plain blue sign lists the wares inside — books, sephorim, gifts — and displays the name of the store itself: Miriam's Judaica. 

At a glance there doesn't seem to be anything particularly remarkable about it. It's a store like any other store. But the story behind that little Jewish shop on Bathurst Street is one of the most extraordinary stories you'll find in Toronto — or anywhere else for that matter.

~~~

Miriam & Bela on their wedding day

The Miriam in Miriam's Judaica is Miriam Rosenthal. Her story begins in the town of Komárno, where she was born. It stands on the banks of the Danube River, in what's now Slovakia, right on the border with Hungary. She had a good childhood, the youngest of more than a dozen children in an Orthodox Jewish family. "I was spoiled," she once remembered. "I had a beautiful life."

When she was 22 years old, her family allowed her to get married — something she'd long been looking forward to. She went to a matchmaker and picked her husband out of a catalogue: Bela Rosenthal was the handsome son of a cattle broker; he lived on the Hungarian side of the border. Before long, they were engaged to be married.

But this was April 1944. Darkness had descended on Europe. The Slovaks had been allied with the Nazis since the early days of the Second World War; the persecution of the country's Jewish population began immediately. Two years before Miriam and Bela got engaged, the first trainload of Jews had left Slovakia for Auschwitz. Komárno had been turned into a major military hub for the Germans; as the young couple planned their wedding, all of the Jews in Miriam's hometown — nearly three thousand of them — were being deported. Some of her brothers had already been sent off to labour camps.

Still, she was determined to go through with the wedding. She used false papers and wore a cross as she slipped across the border, taking a train to meet her fiance in Hungary. They were married just a few hours after she arrived. As the rabbi performed the ceremony, German bombs began to fall; the wedding party rushed underground, finishing the ceremony in the basement. "The rabbi insisted," Miriam explained years later, "bombs or no bombs." The young bride wore a red rose pinned to her lapel to cover her yellow star.

The newlyweds barely had any time to build their new life together. Just two weeks after the wedding, they were rounded up into a ghetto and separated. A few weeks after that, the Nazis came for them again. Bela was sent to a slave labour camp. Miriam was sent to Auschwitz.

More people would die at Auschwitz than at any other Nazi concentration camp: more than a million were killed in the four years the gas chambers and the ovens were in operation. As Rosenthal and the other new arrivals were herded off their trains, Dr. Joseph Mengele — "The Angel of Death" — was waiting for them. By then, they were already weakened by their journey: untold hours spent crammed together in cattle cars without room to sit or food to eat. Many died along the way. Now, Dr. Mengele scrutinized them, his eyes coldly assessing them from beneath the brim of his black cap, the skull and crossbones of the SS emblazoned on the front. He divided them into two groups, their fate determined by a wave of his gloved hand or a flick of his cane: left or right. Those he deemed unfit for work — more than 80% of them — were sent to the left: straight to the gas chambers. The others, to the right: to a life of slavery inside the concentration camp. Rosenthal watched as her mother, her sister, and her one year-old niece were all sent to the left, to death. But she made it through.

And it was there, just a few weeks later, trapped within the horrors of Auschwitz, that Miriam Rosenthal realized she was pregnant.

~~~

Children at Auschwitz, 1945

The Nazis didn't spare Jewish children. They killed more than a million of them during the Holocaust. The leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, repeatedly justified and defended the slaughter in chilling speeches to his fellow party members.

"I believe, gentlemen," he once told a group of generals, "that you know me well enough to know that I am not a bloodthirsty person... on the other hand, I have such good nerves and such a developed sense of duty... that when I recognise something as necessary I can implement it without compromise. I have not considered myself entitled... to allow the children to grow into the avengers who will then murder our children and our grandchildren. That would have been cowardly."

At Auschwitz, many children were immediately gassed, but a few were allowed to live. Some were kept as fodder for horrifying medical experiments carried out by Dr. Mengele and his staff. When he was done performing his bizarre tortures, he would kill some of them himself, injecting chloroform into their hearts and then dissecting them to study their organs. On other occasions, death came more casually: Mengele is said to have once drawn a line along the wall of the children's barracks about five feet from the ground; any child shorter than that line was promptly sent to the gas chambers. Sometimes children were thrown straight into the ovens, burned alive.

Pregnant women weren't given the chance to give birth. They, just like young mothers, were usually declared unfit for work and quickly murdered.

There was no question: Rosenthal would hide her pregnancy for as long as she could. "Not a word," one of her fellow prisoners advised her. "Not a single word. If not, you'll end up at the crematorium."

One day, the SS called for all the pregnant women to step forward. They were, the officers told them, going to be given double their usual ration of bread. But it was a lie: a trap.

"Can you imagine?" Rosenthal asked a reporter from the National Post just a few years ago. "Even women who were not pregnant stepped forward." But she stayed put. "Two hundred women stepped forward and 200 women went to the gas chamber. And I don’t know why I didn’t step forward... I have asked rabbis. I have asked some big people and no one can give me an answer... I have asked myself this question so many times as I lay in bed upstairs."

Declared fit for work, she was soon transferred out of Auschwitz and eventually sent to a factory in Augsberg where she was forced to make airplane parts for the Luftwaffe. Things there were slightly easier: the prisoners were given clean clothes and a little more food, allowed to grow their hair long for the first time since they'd arrived in the camps.

But all the while, Rosenthal's pregnancy was progressing. She was beginning to show. It was only a matter of time before the SS would notice.

The dreaded day came during the winter of 1944. Two SS officers arrived at the factory with angry German shepherds; they demanded that any woman who was pregnant immediately identify herself. This time, there was no hidding.

"I had to raise my hand," she explained. "I was showing, and if I didn’t put up my hand all those other women would be killed. How could I not put up my hand?"

The SS officers were furious. "You bitch!" they barked. "You're coming with us — to Auschwitz."

"I said goodbye to my friends," she remembered, "who were crying, but it was a relief for me. The suffering would be over, as well as the fear of what would happen to my baby." Rosenthal resigned herself to death.

She was taken out into the snow with nothing to protect her from the bitter cold but the dress she'd been wearing in the factory. The SS loaded her onto a train. This time, strangely, it wasn't a freight train packed full of prisoners, but a regular passenger train. There were civilians on board, seemingly oblivious to the genocide taking place all around them. One woman was shocked to see Rosenthal in her emaciated state. "Frau, what is with you?" she asked the prisoner. "You don’t have hair. The clothes you are wearing. What are you, from a mental hospital?"

"She didn’t have a dream, this German woman," Rosenthal remembered, "of all the horrible things the Germans were doing. I told her I am not from a mental hospital, I am going to Auschwitz — I am going to the gas. She looked at me like I was crazy, opened her purse and gave me some bread. I ate it so fast. I was so hungry."

She was 22 years old and seven months pregnant.

~~~

Mass grave, Kaufering III, 1945

Now that the Nazis knew Rosenthal was carrying a child, Auschwitz would mean almost certain death. But that's not where the SS took her. The Russians, they told her, had just bombed Auschwitz, so instead they were headed toward another one of the most notorious concentration camps: Dachau.

By then, the war was going very poorly for the Nazis. The Allies had landed at Normandy six months earlier and begun their push across Europe. That year, the British and the Americans dropped more bombs on Germany than in the entire rest of the war combined — hundreds of thousands of tons of them. In response, the Nazis were moving their facilities underground. Near Dachau, in a town called Kaufering, they established eleven smaller sub-camps and used the slave labour of the prisoners to build giant subterranean airplane factories. There, they were put to work making Hitler's new "miracle weapon": the Messerschmitt, the world's first fighter jet. 

Rosenthal was taken to one of those sub-camps: Kaufering I. It held thousands of prisoners, the vast majority of them Jewish, half of them doomed to die. The guards took her below ground and left her there in a dark room. It was hard to see. Only a single bulb cast dim light in the subterranean prison. But there were voices: other women, speaking Hungarian. "Where are you from?" they asked. "What happened to you?" There were six of them, they told her. And they were all pregnant.

"We started to cry and we just cried and cried," Rosenthal remembered. "It was like we were all sisters. We had no one else in the world. We hugged each other. We kissed each other."

With the end of the war approaching, it seemed as if some of the Nazis were beginning to realize there would be consequences for their war crimes. They were starting to worry. The killing was far from over, but it seemed as if some things were beginning, ever so slightly, to change — if only so the Nazis could save their own skins.

The seven pregnant women were eventually taken above ground, to a small wooden hut that would serve as meagre shelter against the most terrible winter Europe had seen in the last fifteen years. What little heat they had came from a stove smuggled in for them by a fellow prisoner — one of the "kapos" who agreed to help oversee the camps in return for special treatment. She had taken a great risk by getting it for them. When the guards discovered the stove, they took it away and beat the kapo bloody. The next day, she brought it right back. 

The SS officers brought them a doctor, too: one of the prisoners in the camp had been a gynecologist in Hungary before the war. But there was only so much Dr. Vadasz could do for them. He broke down in tears when he first saw the seven women, all of them now very far along in their pregnancies. He begged the Nazis to give him the equipment he would need for the deliveries. "I have no instruments! I need hot water! Towels! Soap!" But he would have to make do.

Within days, the first of the women went into labour. And in the weeks to come, the others would follow, one after another, suffering terribly as they gave birth on a hard, wooden bunk without anesthetic or the necessary medical equipment. Dr. Vadasz, terribly weakened himself, was given nothing but a bucket of hot water to use.

Still, one by one, the first six mothers did what seemed to be impossible: they gave birth in a concentration camp. Six new babies were brought into the world. Six new lives in the middle of all that death.

Eventually, it was just Miriam Rosenthal who had yet to give birth to her child. She finally went into labour during the last week of February. But as she struggled through the contractions, it was clear that her delivery wasn't going as smoothly as the others had. There were complications. She became frightened that she couldn't hear the baby's heartbeat. And she was growing weak.

Dr. Vadasz urged her on. "Miriam push, push, you must help me. I can't do it on my own. He's going to die." Her strength was failing her. "Miriam please try, try try try..."

"I couldn't keep going any longer," she later remembered, "but all of a sudden the baby is out... And what a beauty. With blond, beautiful hair; big, blue eyes. The other women were crying. Dr. Vadasz was crying. Everyone was crying."

On February 28, 1945, Leslie Rosenthal was born. 

~~~

The seven mothers & their babies, Dachau, 1945

It was a miracle. But they weren't safe yet. The Allies were still fighting their slow, bloody way across the continent. The war against Germany wouldn't end for another ten weeks.

And those ten weeks would be hard weeks. An outbreak of typhoid tore through the camp. Prisoners were still dying everywhere. And even as they recovered from the strain of childbirth, the new mothers were forced to keep working, washing prisoners' clothing and unloading dead bodies.

Rosenthal was in especially poor shape. After the delivery, her placenta had never emerged. It was another life-threatening complication. "After a week I started to bleed," she remembered. "The blood was flowing like water from a tap. Terrible. So much blood." Dr. Vadasz warned the others that Rosenthal wasn't going to make it. "If you die," one of them promised her, "I will take Leslie."

Rosenthal kept fighting, and eventually recovered. But death was still a constant threat. When Leslie was still just two weeks old, the camp's head physician signed an order to have all of the new mothers and their babies sent to Bergen-Belsen to be gassed. His order, for some unknown reason, was never carried out.

Meanwhile, the Allies were getting closer: by the end of March, they were across the Rhine, marching through Germany itself, pushing on toward victory. Soon, the Soviets were on the outskirts of Berlin, shelling the capital. Hitler had retreated into his bunker, never to emerge again. In just a few days, he would put his gun to his head and end his own life.

As the Third Reich collapsed, the SS officers at the Kaufering camps were debating what to do with their prisoners. Some were determined to kill as many Jews and destroy as much evidence as they could before the end. As the Americans approached, the Nazis set fire to some of the barracks. Hundreds of prisoners were too weak to escape the flames. They were burned alive.

Thousands of others — including the seven mothers and their babies — were evacuated, forced into a death march from the sub-camps of Kaufering toward Dachau itself, nearly sixty kilometers away. "Anyone who was unable to keep walking was shot on the spot," one of the other mothers remembered. "People were sick, weak and malnourished. We had to march without shoes."

Rosenthal could barely keep moving, but if she stopped she knew she would be killed — and Leslie with her. At one point, as she struggled to carry on, one of the Nazi officers offered to help. More than sixty years later, she was still moved to tears by the memory of that small, unexpected act of humanity. "I couldn't believe it: an SS man says, 'Let me carry your child.' You see, there are good people in this life. They were SS but this man had a heart. He took the child. I could hardly keep walking and he said, 'I'll carry him.'"

"Some Germans helped," she once told the Toronto Star, "maybe not enough, but there were some."

Rosenthal kept going, struggling on long enough to get loaded onto yet another train. But even the train wasn't safe. The American air force didn't realize it was filled with the people they had come to save — so they bombed it. As prisoners fled the wreckage into the surrounding woods, the SS opened fire. The forest was filled with bodies.

"I kept saying, 'Leslie, we're going home. God will help us... Please God, please God. Help me, help me.'"

In the end, it took two days for the prisoners and their guards to make the journey from Kaufering to the main camp. Thousands of prisoners died in death marches around Dachau in the final few days of the war. But Rosenthal, the six other mothers, and all seven of their babies survived.

The morning after they arrived, they were lined up for one last roll call. A few hours later, the Americans arrived.

It was over. They were free.

~~~

Bela, Leslie and Miriam

He was there, in the distance, running toward her. Somehow they had both survived — and they had both made their way back home to find each other. Bela was stunned to see Leslie in Miriam's arms. He couldn't believe she'd gotten pregnant so quickly, in those two brief weeks before the Nazis tore them apart. He was overjoyed. "I can’t describe that feeling of when he saw our baby," she remembered, "when he saw Leslie for the first time. We cried and cried and cried."

With the war over, they decided to leave Hungary behind and to set out in search of a new life: they travelled through Bratislava, Prague, Paris and Cuba before they finally reached Canada. For a while, Bela worked at a mattress factory. And then as a rabbi in Timmins and Sudbury. But in the end, they settled in Toronto, where they would spend the rest of their lives.

In 1965, they opened a shop on Bathurst Street at the corner of Caribou Road. They called it Miriam's Fine Judaica. They ran the store for more than 40 years, and raised their growing family: three children, and then grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They would both live into their 90s.

At first, Rosenthal didn't tell her story to very many people outside her own family. She was still haunted by nightmares of SS officers coming to steal her newborn child. But in her later years, she began to share her extraordinary tale. "I believe," she told the Star in 1997, "as I get older I think more and more about the Holocaust and my family... I feel my memories more, but still I am not bitter."

In 2010, she was interviewed for an award-winning German documentary about the seven mothers and their children called Born In A Concentration Camp. A couple of years after that, a journalist from the National Post interviewed her for an article about her remarkable life.

Leslie was there, too. By then, he was nearly 70 years old. As he arrived, Miriam proudly introduced her son: "Here is my miracle baby now."

"And here," Leslie answered, "is my miracle mother."

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You can watch the documentary, Born In A Concentration Camp, online here. And you can read the National Post interview here. And if you've got a Toronto Public Library card, I think you should be able to read the Toronto Star article here (Page E1, April 21, 1997). The website for Miriam's Fine Judaica shares Bela (William) Rosenthal's obituary from the Canadian Jewish News here.

Haaretz wrote about the mothers and their babies here. The Canadian Jewish News wrote about the Rosenthals here. 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shares more information about the Kaufering camps here and Auschwitz here. The Guardian has some more information about Auschwitz here, as does the London Jewish Cultural Centre has some more information about Auschwitz on their "The Holocaust Explained" site for students here. 

You can learn more about the Jewish history of Komárno from the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center here. 

PHOTOS: Miram and Bela's wedding photo comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here, which also shares their story. The photo of the children in Auschwitz comes via the Globe and Mail, which shares the story of one of those children here. The photo of the mass grave at Kaufering III — and the German prisoners being forced to uncover it at the end of the war — comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here. The same site has the photo of the seven mothers and their babies here.  

Toronto's Founding Purpose: A Haven For Refugees

More than two hundred years ago, the city of Toronto was founded to serve as the new capital of Upper Canada — a province created to be a home for Loyalist refugees forced to flee from the chaos and persecution they faced in the United States after the American Revolution. Today, as our neighbours south of the border turn their backs on the world, it seems especially important to remember Toronto's founding purpose. Many of our city's greatest moments have come when we've opened our arms to welcome those in need of shelter: from the victims of the Irish Famine, to those fleeing the Soviet crackdown after the Hungarian Revolution, to the Syrian refugees of today. And many of our darkest times have come when we've shut our doors on those who needed our help.

I shared some thoughts about refugees and the history of Toronto on Twitter recently, and have turned them into a Storify post here:

The Tragic Final Days of Lucy Maud Montgomery

This is where Lucy Maud Montgomery died: the house she called Journey's End. It's on Riverside Drive in Swansea: the west end of Toronto. Montgomery spent her last decade living here, perched high above the Humber Valley as she grew old and wrote the last few sequels to Anne of Green Gables.

Those were dark years for the beloved Canadian writer. "There has never been any happiness in this house — there never will be,” she confessed in her journal. "The present is unbearable. The past is spoiled. There is no future."

She had been suffering from depression for years — and it deepened near the end of her life. She was plagued by mood swings and waves of crippling anxiety, haunted by nightmares and painful memories, beset by headaches, vomiting, shooting pains, and trembling hands. She had difficulty sleeping. At times, she couldn’t concentrate well enough to write. The pills the doctors prescribed only made things worse, and before long she was hooked on them.

Meanwhile, her literary legacy was under attack. Once upon a time, Montgomery's stories had been enjoyed by men, women, boys and girls of all ages — even the Prime Minister of Great Britain sang her praises. But now her work was being dismissed by a new generation of male, modernist critics who claimed her books were too "sugary" to be enjoyed by anyone but little girls, and that her stories were too regional — too Canadian — to have any appeal for a worldwide audience. "Canadian fiction," according to one of Montgomery's harshest and most influential critics, "was to go no lower."

And yet she still kept fighting. Even as her depression deepened, her family life crumbled, and the Second World War broke out, Montgomery acted as a passionate advocate for Canadian authors: giving speeches and readings, imparting advice to young writers, insisting that Canadian stories were worth telling and that Canadian voices were worth hearing. 

It was on a spring day in 1942 that it all finally caught up with her. On the very same day the manuscript of her final sequel to Anne of Green Gables was dropped off at her publisher's office, her maid found Montgomery dead in bed. There were pill bottles on the table next to her along with a sheet of paper that read:

"I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best."

Her family kept Montgomery's depression and her apparent suicide a secret for more than sixty years, until her granddaughter finally revealed the truth in 2008, hoping to contribute to a more honest conversation about mental illness.

“I have come to feel very strongly,” she wrote in the Globe, “that the stigma surrounding mental illness will be forever upon us as a society until we sweep away the misconception that depression happens to other people, not us — and most certainly not to our heroes and icons.”

Depression — far being from being a sign of weakness or of failure — plagued even one of the most celebrated Canadian authors of all-time.

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A version of this story appears in The Toronto Book of the Dead Out now Order from Amazon, Indigo, or find it at your favourite bookstore

The Globe and Mail has more about Lucy Maud Montgomery's depression in articles by Irene Gammel here and James Adams here. There's also lots more in Mary Henley Rubio's biography of the author, "Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings," which you can borrow from the Toronto Public Library here. 

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.

Coming Soon: The Toronto Book of the Dead

Things have been a bit quiet on the Dreams Project blog this year — but there's a pretty good reason for that: I spent most of 2016 working on my first book. It's available for pre-order now (from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite local bookseller). It hits shelves in September 2017.

The Toronto Book of the Dead will explore the history of the city through the stories of some of its most fascinating and illuminating deaths. There will be morbid tales of war and plague, of duels and executions, of suicides and séances. It will cover everything from ancient First Nations burial mounds to the grisly murder of Toronto’s first lighthouse keeper; from the rise and fall of the city’s greatest Victorian baseball star to the final days of the world’s most notorious anarchist.

Countless lives have been lived and lost as Toronto has grown from a muddy little frontier town into a booming metropolis of concrete and glass. The Toronto Book of the Dead will tell the story of our ever-changing city through the final moments of those who have called this place home.

Simcoe's Weird & Complicated Relationship With Slavery — A Tweetstorm

August 1 was both Simcoe Day and Emancipation Day in the City of Toronto. One is meant to remember the British soldier who founded our city; the other marks the day slavery was abolished across the entire British Empire. It's an interesting overlap: Simcoe was responsible for abolishing slavery in Toronto; he passed the first law to end the practice ever passed anywhere in the Empire. But his relationship to slavery wasn't anywhere near as clear-cut and simple as that might make it sound. And so, to mark this year's Simcoe and Emancipation Days, I thought I'd do some tweeting.

You'll find the Twitter essay embedded below. And if you can't see it for any reason, you can read it all on Storify here.

Some Stuff You Should See At Doors Open 2016

This weekend is Doors Open weekend in Toronto. More than a hundred and thirty buildings across the city will be opening their doors to the public over the next two days — including some of the most interesting, beautiful and historic buildings that Toronto has to offer. And since there's no way one person can manage to catch all of the cool stuff without a TARDIS or a DeLorean or a Time-Turner, I thought I'd share some of my own picks for this year's event.

I might be out and about myself this weekend and, if so, I'll be sharing my adventures on Twitter and on Instagram (@TODreamsProject). So you can follow me there!

 

THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST. JAMES

Not only is the Cathedral Church of St. James one of the most spectacular buildings in Toronto, it's also one of the most important buildings in the entire history of Canada. The story of St. James stretches all the way back to a small wooden church built at what's now the corner of Church & King in the very early 1800s — and over the course of that century, it played a central role in the battle for democracy in Canada. This was the church most our city's leaders attended. The first preacher, John Strachan, was also our city's first Anglican bishop, arch-nemesis of William Lyon Mackenzie and a figurehead of the infamously anti-democratic Family Compact. He's still there today, buried under the chancel. (I wrote the full story for Torontoist a while back; you can check it out here.) To this day, it's still the heart of the Anglican faith in Canada. Even the Queen prays here when she's in town.

The doors to the church will be open from 10 to 5 on Saturday and 12:30 to 4 on Sunday afternoon.

FORT YORK

Fort York is one of the jewels of Toronto. A National Historic Site hidden between the highways and the skyscrapers. The fort has been standing on this spot — the place where the modern city of Toronto started — for more than 200 years. Its story stretches back through one war after another, back through the bloody battle that raged here during the War of 1812, back all the way to the very first day the city of Toronto was founded. It was here, at what was then the mouth of the Garrison Creek, that the first British soldiers showed up to start chopping down trees and building the military base that would guard the mouth of our harbour. Meanwhile, Governor Simcoe and his wife Elizabeth lived in an elaborate tent overlooking the construction from the other side of the creek, exploring the beaches and the forests with their young children, their pet cat and a dog they called Jack Sharp.

The site will be open from 10 to 5 on both Saturday and Sunday, with tours pretty much every hour.

THE HIGH LEVEL WATER PUMPING STATION

Just like the much more famous R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant out in the east end (which will also be open this weekend), the High Level Water Pumping Station takes Toronto's water infrastructure and transforms it into something beautiful. And the old building also played a central role in one of the most delightful episodes in the history of our city. Back in the 1960s, the residents of the surrounding neighbourhood — Rathnelly — declared independence from the rest of Canada. As the story goes, they wrote a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau, elected a Queen, issued their own passports, and sent an "air farce" of children holding a thousand helium balloons to surround the Pumping Station until their demands were met. To this day, the neighbourhood is known as the Republic of Rathnelly. They've even got their own custom street signs featuring a national crest.

The doors will be open from 10 to 5 on both Saturday and Sunday.

OLD CITY HALL

 

Old City Hall has been keeping time above the intersection of Queen & Bay since the very end of the 1900s. It was built by one of Toronto's most important architects, E.J. Lennox, the same guy who did Casa Loma, the King Edward Hotel, and the west wing of Queen's Park. It's Old City Hall that he gets the most attention for, though. In large part because of his battles with city council. He went waaaaaaaaaaaay overbudget, spending six times as much as he was supposed to. They retaliated by saying he wasn't allowed to carve his name into the building, like he usually did, but he did anyway. And hid his face among the grotesques adorning the entrance. Inside, you'll also find one of the most wonderful stained-glass windows in Toronto.

The site will be open from 10 to 5 on both Saturday and Sunday

OSGOODE HALL

Osgoode Hall has been on the corner of Queen & University, nearly as long as there has been a Queen & University. It was originally built in the 1830s, with lots of additions and subtractions since then (including that iconic, black, wrought-iron fence). The architect was William Warren Baldwin, a doctor and lawyer who was one of the most important pro-democracy figures in Toronto's early history. He's also the same guy who built the original Spadina House, and had Spadina Avenue carved out of the forest. Today, it's still home to the Law Society of Upper Canada and some of Ontario's highest courts.
 

Osgoode Hall is also where an escaped slave, Thornton Blackburn, got a job working as a waiter when he first came to Toronto. He used the money he earned there to launch the city's first horse-drawn cab company, which in turn gave him enough money to help other former slaves get on their feet after coming to Toronto through the Underground Railroad. (I wrote more about him here.)

The site will be open from 10 to 5 on both Saturday and Sunday.
  

Dream 22 "The Star Harvest" (William Peyton Hubbard, 1911)

The alderman dreamed of a night when the people of Toronto climbed up onto their rooftops, up to the highest branches of all the trees, up cathedral spires and skyscrapers. He joined them, too, high up the clock tower of City Hall. From there, you could reach the stars with a butterfly net. One swipe through the sky might bring down two or three at a time. They shone a soft, cold blue and were smooth to the touch, perfect and round. All over the city, they were collected in baskets and pillowcases and brought down to earth. They were taken to the sides of the roads, along sidewalks and ditches and lawns, where they were planted in the dirt by the light of the moon. By the time the sun rose, they had sprouted into tall, slender silver birches. They lined every street in graceful rows. And when night came again, those trees unfurled lush blue flowers. Inside each one was a brand new baby star. And all of Toronto glowed.

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William Peyton Hubbard was Toronto's first Black alderman — and even served as acting mayor on some occasions. The son of a former slave, he got into politics after saving George Brown (Father of Confederation and owner of the Globe newspaper) from drowning in the Don River. In the early days of electricity, Hubbard was a champion of public ownership of power utilities, teaming up with Sir Adam Beck to bring public power to the city of Toronto and the province of Ontario. 

You can read more about Hubbard on Torontoist here. Explore more Toronto Dreams Project postcards here.

Toronto's Depression-Era Beauty Queen Baseball Star

Women have been playing baseball for as long as anyone can remember. And for much of that time, they've been playing despite the men who've tried to keep them off the field. In baseball's early days, women were told they were much too fragile to swing a bat or field a grounder. Even Al Spalding, founder of the National League, said that women were welcome to sit in the stands and cheer for the men — but that was it.

"Neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, nor our sweethearts may play Base Ball on the field," he declared. "Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind, except as she may take part in the grandstands, with applause for the brilliant play, with waving kerchief to the hero of the three-bagger." As if playing shortstop were somehow more physically demanding than, oh, say, giving birth.

Luckily, many women ignored that poor, Victorian advice. And when you look through the oldest photographs in the Toronto Archives, you'll find plenty of women already there, playing baseball on diamonds all over our city. They were forming their own teams and their own leagues, drawing their own big crowds.

By the time the end of the 1930s rolled around, even Miss Toronto herself was getting in on the action.

In 1937, the winner of the annual beauty pageant was a teenage softball pitcher from the Beaches. Billie Hallam's grandmother convinced her to enter the competition. And so, on a hot Saturday afternoon in July, she raced down to the Exhibition Grounds in her swimsuit, where she would parade before a panel of judges and 20,000 spectators. When Hallam was announced as the winner, the Mayor of Toronto presented her with a sash. She was only 17 years old, but in heels, she was already taller than he was.

That night, as the new Miss Toronto, Hallam was due to appear at a celebratory banquet at the Royal York Hotel. But she had business to take care of first. She rushed straight home from the pageant to change her clothes. From there, a police escort rushed her through the streets to Kew Gardens, where her ball team was playing a big game. She cheered them on from the bench in her evening gown, and then raced back downtown to the banquet.

The next morning, she woke to find the press knocking on her door, eager to interview the city's newest beauty icon. One journalist asked a version of the same question men had been asking for years: should women really play sports? Hallam's answer was pretty much the exact opposite of what Spalding had said decades earlier. "[T]here is nothing like exercise and sport," she told the reporter, "to make a girl a real lady."

The next time she returned to the mound, a crowd of more than 10,000 people was there to see her pitch — the most ever for a game at Kew Gardens. At one point, she even did a photo shoot wearing her uniform. You can find those photos in the Archives, too.

Hallam was far from the last Toronto woman to make her mark in the baseball world. More than 10% of the players in the famous All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — the league from A League of Their Own — were actually Canadian. In real life, the star of the Rockford Peaches wasn't Geena Davis, it was Gladys Davis, an interior designer from Toronto. Today she's in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and part of a display in Cooperstown.

Decades later, when the Blue Jays brought Major League Baseball to town, The Toronto Star's Alice Gordon made history as the first woman to cover an MLB beat. And she did it in the face of misogynist discrimination from many men in the game, including some of the Jays' own players. When the team travelled to Texas, the Rangers banned all reporters from the clubhouse just so they wouldn't have to let her in.

We have, of course, come a long way since then. Today, there are countless women writing about the game. This season, Jessica Mendoza is breaking new ground as a broadcaster with ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball. And on the field, players like Mo'ne Davis are making history, too. But we still have a long way to go. We were reminded of that just last week, when Blue Jays manager John Gibbons claimed that a new rule is making the sport less manly. "You know what, maybe we’ll come out wearing dresses tomorrow," he complained. "Maybe that’s what everyone’s looking for."

Well Gibby, Billie Hallam proved it nearly 80 years ago: you can sure as hell wear an evening gown and still be a damn fine ballplayer, too.

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Kevin Plummer has a much more detailed post about Billie Hallam's crowning as Miss Toronto here. Lots of my info comes thanks to him. And from old articles from Toronto Star written by another one of our city's pioneering journalists, Alexandrine Gibb.

The full, misogynist Al Spalding quote can be found in the book "Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line", which you can find on Google Books here. And I originally found part of it in another book, "Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball" which is also on Google Books here. 

The Rhino, in Parkdale, has a Miss Toronto mural overlooking the patio, as The Vintage Inn points out here.

Photo of Billie Hallam via the Toronto Archives. 
 

Why Do We Celebrate Toronto's Birthday On A Day That Isn't Actually Toronto's Birthday?!

On March 6, we celebrated Toronto's 182nd birthday — which is weird, because Toronto isn't 182 years old, and it wasn't founded in March. Our city was founded 203 years ago, in the heat of July. But along the way, we've switched from celebrating the day Toronto was actually founded to the day it was officially incorporated as a "city." The reasons have a lot to do with Victorian whitewashing and there are allll kind of implications. And since it's always driven me nuts, I figured that this year I would mark the occasion with a Twitter rant.

(If you can't see the embedded tweets below, you can read them all on Storify here.)

An Awesome Empire Day Float from 1927

It's Commonwealth Day today, which we used to call Empire Day back when there was still an empire. The holiday started here in Ontario in the late 1800s and then spread across the rest of the colonies. And it was actually the Trudeau government who suggested the current date: the second Monday of March.

Every year, they have a big multi-faith shindig at Westminster Abbey in London; all the best royals show up. Today, the Queen used it as a chance to ask all members of the Commonwealth to welcome those "who feel excluded from all walks of life" — a big change in tone from the oppressive old world-conquering, Catholic-hating, Anglican-or-bust days of the empire, which saw plenty of blood spilled in the streets of Toronto back in the time when we were known as the Belfast of North America.

The best part of Empire Day? The awesome archival photos of old-timey floats. Like the one above: the Britannia float from Toronto's Empire Day parade in 1927.

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Photo via the Toronto Archives.