A Torontonian Historical Map of London, England

Toronto has a deeper connection to London, England than it does to almost any other city in the world. After all, our entire country was essentially ruled from this place for more than a hundred years. Some of the most important moments in the history of our city happened in this city, nearly six thousand kilometers away. As you walk through the streets of Westminster, or Piccadilly, or Mayfair, you're likely to pass dozens of hidden connections to the history of Toronto without ever realizing they're there.

Lots of that history is found in the centre of the city — in the bits you can see in this photo. So I thought I'd explore some of the Toronto stories hidden in the streets of Central London: from the solider who founded our city, to the mayor who rebelled against it, to the moment when Canadian women were finally seen as people. Each number on the map comes with its own story, plus links to full posts about most of them, some other spots in Central London connected to those stories, and a link to find the exact locations on Google Maps. 

You might want to start by opening a bigger version of the photo here.  

 

01 SIMCOE'S HOUSE. We'll start up here in Marylebone — at 53 Welbeck Street — because this is where the guy who founded Toronto used to live. John Graves Simcoe rented this place in the very late 1700s, just after he got back from being the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. For the most part, he lived at his country estate in Devon, but he needed a place in London too. He spent a lot of time here, trying to convince the government to invest more money in the Canadian colony. He was sure the Americans were going to invade — which, of course, they soon did — and Toronto was still just a muddy little frontier town. Upper Canada was vulnerable. The new province, Simcoe argued, needed more soldiers, defenses and infrastructure.

The government ignored his pleas. But they did eventually give him a big promotion: Commander-in-chief of the British army in India. Sadly, Simcoe didn't live to see his first day on the job. War with Napoleon got in the way. On his trip to the front, Simcoe fell ill. He died soon after.

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+ The British Museum (big green roof about halfway between 08 and 09): Simcoe's wife Elizabeth kept a vital, detailed record of their trip to Canada: a diary, sketches and watercolours. Some of that work eventually ended up here, in the collection of the British Museum.

+ Cork Street (near 04): Elizabeth Simcoe's diary ends with a final line when they get back home to England: "Arrived at the hotel in Cork Street, London, at ten o'clock."

02 LADY ST. HELIER'S SALON. In the early 1900s, 52 Portland Place was the place to be. And that's because it was home to one of London's most influential aristocrats: Lady St. Helier. She was a Baroness, a writer, a philanthropist, even an alderman on the City Council. The guestlists at her parties featured some of the greatest writers and most important politicians in all of England: everyone from Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill. She also changed Billy Bishop's life.

It was a strange coincidence that brought them together during the First World War. This was back before Bishop was a famous pilot; he was just another Canadian solider who had drunkenly fallen down the stairs of the Savoy Hotel on leave. He ended up in the same hospital where Lady St. Helier volunteered. And when she saw his name, she remembered meeting his father at a reception in Ottawa years earlier. She insisted that Bishop spend the rest of his time recovering at her own home, where they quickly became as close as family. When she learned that he wanted to become a pilot, it was Lady St. Helier who pulled the strings to make it happen. And by the end of Bishop’s first week in the cockpit, he'd already shot down five German planes and earned the title of "ace".

READ MORE: "Billy Bishop & The Rich & Famous"

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+ Lady Carnarvon's Hospital for Officers (on Bryanston Square, just to the left of the photo): The hospital where Bishop met the Baroness is still there today. It's a prep school now. It was run by the woman who owned the mansion we call "Downton Abbey". In fact, her hospital inspired the hospital storyline on the show.  

03 THE CHURCH OF THE ASSUMPTION. William Kurelek was one of the most popular artists in Canadian history. His paintings of snowball fights, lumberjacks and Prairie fields hang in the National Gallery, the Parliament Buildings, the AGO, and on kitchen walls all across our country. But he was also deeply depressed, haunted by nightmares and visions. So, after he graduated from art school in Toronto, he headed across the ocean to check himself into a cutting-edge psychiatric hospital in London. During his years in England, Kurelek painted some of his most striking and disturbing images, suffered through a series of electroshock treatments, attempted suicide, and eventually found God, becoming a devout Catholic.

This spot, just around the corner from Carnaby Street, is where he started to hang out. He joined a Catholic social club here at the Church of the Assumption. He said it helped him to become "a happier, more glad-to-be-living sort of person." When he returned home to Toronto, religious themes became one of the most important parts of his work; while he was living in the Annex, he even created a series of 160 paintings depicting the Passion of Christ. But his nightmare visions never left him. Kurelek spent the rest of his life expecting a nuclear holocaust to begin at any moment, heralding the arrival of a Biblical apocalypse.

READ MORE: "An Apocalypse in the Beaches — The Nightmare Visions of William Kurelek"

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+ Blue Ball Yard (a few doors below 05): Kurelek got a job here, making picture frames. The experience would help him back in Toronto: getting another framing gig to support himself and making the frames for his own paintings himself. You can check out a bunch of them at the AGO.  


 

04 THE CANADIAN WAR RECORDS OFFICE. 14 Clifford Street is an important address in the history of Canadian art. During the terrible days of the First World War, this is where you would have found the headquarters of the Canadian War Records Office. The organization had been founded and financed by Lord Beaverbrook — a Canadian newspaper baron turned British politician — to record the Canadian experience of the war. Artists and writers were pulled out of the trenches and given paintbrushes and pens instead of guns and ammunition. Some of our country's most famous artists were hired as part of the project: authors like Wyndham Lewis and Charles G.D. Roberts, sculptors like Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, painters like the Group of Seven's A.Y. Jackson, Fred Varley and Arthur Lismer.

In fact, this was back before the Group of Seven were even calling themselves the Group of Seven. And their work for the War Records Office helped turn them into stars. In Canada, they were being dismissed as "The Hot Mush School." Critics called their work "a horrible bunch of junk" and "daubing by immature children." But when the war ended, their work was exhibited at Burlington House — on Piccadilly Road just a couple of blocks south of the War Records Office. The English critics loved them, helping to lend them more than a little bit of credibility when they headed back home to Toronto. Soon, they were being hailed as the greatest artists our country has ever produced.

READ MORE: "How England Helped Save The Group of Seven"

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05 THE RITZ. Just a few doors down Piccadilly Road from the spot where the Group of Seven's war paintings once hung on the walls, stands one of the most famous five-star hotels in the entire world. This is the Ritz. And in 1920, just a few months after the War Records exhibition, one of the most famous Torontonians of all-time was staying here. Mary Pickford was on her honeymoon. And it was causing riots.

Pickford had been born on University Avenue (where Sick Kids is now) and started her career as a young girl on stage at a theatre on King Street. But by the time 1920 rolled around, she'd become one of the most famous icons in Hollywood history. And she'd just married another one: Douglas Fairbanks. London was the first stop on their honeymoon. The English public, starved for good news after the horrors of the war, went crazy for them. Crowds packed the streets for miles in every direction around the hotel. Even the King himself couldn't get through. Every time Pickford and Fairbanks stepped outside or tried to go anywhere else, the newly-wed couple risked getting crushed to death. No one had ever seen anything like it. Some say that trip to London marked the very beginning of modern celebrity culture.

READ MORE: "Mary Pickford's Nightmare Honeymoon"

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+ Waterloo Station (the big silver thing in the bottom-right corner): The first sign of trouble came when their train arrived in London. Huge crowds gathered to greet the couple and their carriage could barely push through the excited fans. 

+ The Alhambra Theatre (on Leicester Square, a block to the left of 12): When Pickford and Fairbanks came to see a play here, the crowds made them late. When they finally did arrive, the performance was interrupted by a ten-minute standing ovation for the couple. Fairbanks was forced to give a speech from their seats in the Royal Box before the play was allowed to continue.

06 THE BRITISH ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION HEADQUARTERS. In 1909, one of the most famous explorers in all of British history opened an office here on Victoria Street. Sir Robert Falcon Scott was planning an expedition to Antarctica; if all went to plan, he would become the very first person to ever reach the South Pole. And he was looking for a few good men willing to join him on his adventure. One of the hopeful candidates was Charles Seymour Wright. He'd grown up in Toronto and was now studying physics at Cambridge. When Scott rejected his initial application, Wright refused to take no for an answer. So he walked all the way here to Scott's office. From Cambridge. A hundred kilometers away. Scott was so impressed that he changed his mind and hired the young Canadian. When Scott's ship sailed south, Wright was on board. And he wasn't the only Torontonian, either: Thomas Griffith Taylor was an Australian who would eventually go on to found the Geography Department at U of T.

But the expedition proved to be a disaster. Scott and a few men made it all the way to the Pole only to discover they'd been beaten there by a team of Norwegians. On their long march back to camp, all the men in the polar party died. It was Wright who found the bodies —  along with the dead men's diaries, full of the chilling details that helped to cement the expedition as the most iconic tale from the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

READ MORE: "Toronto's First Great Antarctic Explorer"

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+ Waterloo Place (right near 08): There's a statue of Scott here, in the shadow of the Duke of York Column.

+ The Natural History Museum (a couple of km to the left of the photo): On the way back from the South Pole, the doomed men stopped to collect rock samples. They still had them with them when Wright found the bodies. Today, you can see some of those rocks on display at the Natural History Museum. 


 

07 THE WESTMINSTER PALACE HOTEL. It was on this spot, right across the street from Westminster Abbey, that the Westminster Palace Hotel once stood. It was one of the grandest hotels in all of London — the very first, in fact, to have an elevator. And it was here, in a big room on the main floor, that one of the most important events in Canadian history happened. In 1866, delegates from all over the Canadian colonies met here to hash out the final details of Confederation. It was in this hotel that they drafted a bill the British parliament would eventually approve, turning Canada into a country.

At night, the Fathers of Confederation would retire to sleep in their rooms upstairs. So that's where Sir John A. Macdonald was when he drunkenly fell asleep one night while reading the newspaper. He woke up in flames. His bed, his sheets, his curtains, his nightshirt were all on fire. He leaped to his feet and smothered the flames as Sir George Étienne-Cartier rushed to his rescue from the room next door. It was a close call; Macdonald was lucky to survive. And just eight months later, he officially became the first Prime Minister of Canada.

READ MORE: "Sir John A. Macdonald, Drunk and In Flames"

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+ The Athenaeum Club (just above 08): Sir John A. was an honourary member of the Athenaeum, one of the most exclusive gentlemen's clubs in the world. Other members have included everyone from Darwin to Dickens to Churchill. 

+ Bond Street (runs along the left of 04): The fire and Confederation weren't the only life-changing events on Macdonald's trip. One day while walking down the street, he ran into an old friend from Canada. Within weeks, Macdonald and Susan Agnes Bernard were engaged to be married.

+ St. George's, Hanover Square (just above 04): The wedding happened here, at one of the most prestigious churches in London. Twenty years later, Teddy Roosevelt would also tie the knot at St. George's. And the church even pops up in My Fair Lady.


 

08 THE DUKE OF YORK COLUMN. In the aerial photograph above, it looks like nothing more than a thin brown line, just to the right of the number 08. But from the ground, it's massive. The column soars 12 storeys into the air. The statue on top weighs more than 16,000 pounds. It was built in the early 1800s to honour a prince born just down the street at St. James' Palace — the son of "Mad" King George III. In the days of the wars against Napoleon, the prince was in charge of the entire British military. Mostly, he's remembered for being inept and for the time he got mixed up in one of the most notorious sex scandals in British history. But in the end, his name was cleared and every single soldier in the British army gave up one day's pay to build him this column right in the middle of London.

His name was Prince Frederick. But he was better-known as the Duke of York. And when he won a big victory against the French in the late 1700s, the news spread all the way across the ocean and up the St. Lawrence to the brand new province of Upper Canada. Eventually, it reached the northern shore of Lake Ontario, where the Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe, had just founded a muddy little frontier town to serve as his capital. To honour the Duke's big victory, Simcoe gave his town a new name: York. Two hundred years later, the name of that prince is still plastered all over Toronto: 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.

READ MORE: "The Guy Toronto Was Originally Named After — And His Super-Big Sex Scandal"

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09 A.Y. JACKSON'S STUDIO. The Group of Seven's most famous studio is in Toronto: in the Rosedale Valley, just a few blocks from Yonge & Bloor. That's where A.Y. Jackson shared a space on the top floor of the Studio Building with Tom Thomson, becoming fast friends in the days before the Group of Seven became famous. But when the First World War broke out, Jackson volunteered, heading to the blood-soaked trenches outside Ypres. The war took a terrible toll on the painter. When he ran into a fellow member of the Group, Fred Varley, his friend was deeply worried about him. "I’m sure if he had to go through the fight any more," Varley wrote in a letter back home, "he would be broken." And things were only getting worse: Jackson was wounded during a German bombardment, received word from back home that Thomson had died mysteriously in Algonquin Park, and his unit was headed toward mutiny and the slaughterhouse of the Battle of the Somme.

Jackson was saved at the best possible moment: while digging a latrine as he recovered from his wounds. An officer came to tell him that the Canadian War Records Office was looking for artists. They wanted Jackson to come work for them. He spent the rest of his war traveling across the Western Front sketching the devastation and then returning here, to his studio on Charlotte Street, to turn them into full paintings. No artist produced more work for the Canadian War Records Office than Jackson did. And his paintings for them helped to establish his reputation as one of the most promising artists in Toronto.

READ MORE: "A.Y. Jackson Goes to War — The Group of Seven on the Western Front"

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10 THE REBEL MAYOR. Just a couple of years before he became the first Mayor of Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie was living right near here — on Wakefield Street. He was in London to find a peaceful solution to the political crisis sweeping Upper Canada. Back home in Toronto, he was desperately fighting to pass democratic reforms. But the Tories of the Family Compact were opposing him at every turn: they threw him out of his seat in the legislature, burned him in effigy, attacked his home and business, beat him half to death in the street. Still, he was hopeful; he was sure the British government would to listen to reason. So in 1832, Mackenzie came to London to formally present a long list of grievances on behalf of Upper Canadians. He spent a year living here with his family, presenting petitions to the Colonial Office and staying up all night writing lists of his complaints. He even taught himself to write with both hands so he could switch from one to the other when he started getting tired.

But none of it worked. In the end, the British did ignore his complaints. And when Mackenzie returned home to Toronto, he was more radical than ever.

READ MORE: "William Lyon Mackenzie's Mission to London"

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11. THE CROWN & ANCHOR TAVERN. While Mackenzie was in London, England was seized by its own battle over democratic rights. And over here on the Strand, you could find one of the hotbeds for radical politics: the Crown & Anchor Tavern. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, some of the biggest names in Britain came here to drink and to argue, to hold meetings and to give lectures: people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Johnson, and William Hazlitt. Hundreds — sometimes even thousands — of Radicals and Reformers would gather here, listening to speakers, holding meetings, or throwing a party when someone was finally released from jail. They even printed some of the very same radical texts Mackenzie was printing in his newspaper back home in Toronto. The Crown & Anchor became synonymous with the campaign for democratic reform.

But there was lots of space at the tavern. Not everyone who held a meeting here was a radical. Far from it. And in the very late 1700s, the tavern was home to a series of meetings by the most famous secret organization in the world: The Freemasons.

In 1792, they met here to make an important decision. The British had just created a new province in Canada, which meant a new branch of the Masonic Lodge and a new Provincial Grand Master to run it. To fill the post, they picked an American who'd been driven out of the United States for fighting on the British side of the American Revolution. He was one of Simcoe's men. Soon, he would be joining his old commander on the trip to Upper Canada. His family would become one of the founding families of Toronto. And in time, as leading members of the conservative Family Compact, they became Mackenzie's arch-rivals. Two hundred years later, people in Toronto still recognize the family name: the man's name was William Jarvis.

READ MORE: "The Jarvis Family: 60 Years Fighting Revolutionaries and Radicals — And How It All Backfired"

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+ St. George's, Hanover Square (just above 04): William and Mary Jarvis got married here while they were in London: at the very same church where Sir John A. Macdonald would get married decades later.


 

12. THE RADICAL TAILOR OF CHARING CROSS. One of the most influential Radicals in England was a man by the name of Francis Place. He was a tailor by trade, with a shop here at 16 Charing Cross, just around the bend from Trafalgar Square. His backroom had been turned into a library filled with revolutionary ideas. The shop was ground zero for radical politics in England, where politicians and protesters alike came to discuss the ideas they were fighting for. And while Mackenzie was living in London, he too was invited into the backroom here, exposed to some of the most revolutionary ideas in England.

This was a very dangerous time. During Mackenzie's year in London, he watched the battle over a bill called the Great Reform Act plunge England into crisis. At the height of the fight, shops and factories shut down. Political unions mobilized. Huge crowds gathered in protest. There were riots. Mackenzie himself saw the Tory Prime Minster — the Duke of Wellington, the hero of the Battle of Waterloo — pelted with fish heads and mud in the street. Francis Place was one of the leaders of the unrest: his angry posters were plastered all over London; he organized a run on the banks that threatened to bankrupt the nation. And he was willing to go even further than that: if the Tories didn't back down and allow democratic reform, Place would have no problem helping to lead an armed revolution.

In the end, the bill did pass. Mackenzie was there that day in the House of Lords to watch it happen. But the British government refused to bring similar reforms to Upper Canada. And when Mackenzie returned home to Toronto, not only had he lost his faith in the British system, he'd also been exposed to some pretty radical and violent ideas. Within a few short years, he'd be leading his own army down Yonge Street, trying to overthrow British rule in Canada.

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13 WESTMINSTER BRIDGE. The Victorian age officially began a little after noon on a Thursday: June the 28th, 1838. That's when the Imperial Crown was placed upon the young queen's head. And at that exact moment, one of the most fascinating scientists in the history of Toronto was standing right here: in the middle of the old Westminster Bridge.

Sir John Henry Lefroy was just a young solider back then — tasked with passing the signal along from Westminster Abbey to the crowds at the Tower of London when the big moment arrived — but he had a long and interesting life ahead of him. His scientific curiosity would eventually bring him to Canada, where he was in charge of Her Majesty's Magnetical and Meteorological Observatory at Toronto. It was part of an Empire-wide project to figure out why the magnetic field kept changing. And while he was here, Lefroy left a lasting legacy in Toronto. He co-founded the Royal Canadian Institute. And thanks to a famous trip to the Northwest Territories, he became the subject of what is now the most expensive painting in Canadian history: Paul Kane's Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy. More than 175 years after he stood on the Westminster Bridge at the dawn of a new age, you can now find Lefroy on the walls of the AGO.

READ MORE: "Sir John Henry Lefroy & Queen Victoria's Coronation"

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+ Cambridge Terrace (right side of the big park at the top of the photo): After getting back to England, Lefroy became a major figure in the administration of the Empire, including Governor of Bermuda and Director of Ordnance for the army. He lived here, in the swanky Cambridge Terrace, looking out over Regents Park.

+ St. Martin-in-the-Fields (on Trafalgar Square, the big square to the bottom-left of 12): As a baby, Lefroy was baptized here, in this church, by the Bishop of London.

+ St. George's, Hanover Square (just above 04): Lefroy also got married here, just like Sir John A. Macdonald and William Jarvis did.

+ The Egyptian Hall (on Piccadilly Road, a couple of blocks below 04): One of the most important moments of Paul Kane's life happened here, too. The young artist from Toronto saw a lecture at the Egyptian Hall by the American painter George Caitlin. Caitlin had dedicated his life to painting the people of the First Nations (sometimes very inaccurately). Kane was so inspired, he decided to do the same thing in Canada. 


 

14 THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH. It was a guy from Toronto who created Doctor Who. Sydney Newman worked at the NFB and the CBC before eventually landing a gig in England as Head of Drama for the BBC. He'd been a big science-fiction fan growing up in Toronto, so one of the first things he did at his new job was to assemble a groundbreaking team — including the first woman producer in BBC history, as well as the first Indian-born director — to make a new show about a strange old man who travelled through time and space in a police box. It would prove to be one of the most successful television programs of all-time.

 And that was in large part thanks to the Daleks. The genocidal aliens — giant salt-shakers armed with toilet plungers — were featured in the second story Doctor Who ever told. And they were a smash hit. At first, Newman wasn't pleased. He wanted the show to be educational. He didn't want any "bug-eyed monsters." But he quickly changed his tune. In the second season of the show, the Daleks were back in a serial that included one of the most iconic moments in British television history: the invading aliens rolled across Westminster Bridge during the Dalek invasion of Earth.

READ MORE: "The Torontonian roots of Doctor Who — The Canadian Behind the Legendary TV Show"

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+ BBC Broadcasting House (to the bottom-left of 02): The old BBC headquarters, where Newman used to work, are way off to the left of this photo. But the brand new headquarters are on Regent Street where, more than 50 years later, they still boast Doctor Who as one of the most popular parts of their schedule. 


 

15 The Colonial Office. We end here, in Whitehall, just down the street from the Houses of Parliament. Because once upon a time, this building was the very heart of the British Empire. Today, they call it the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, but it used to be known as the Colonial Office. For more than a century, this is the spot where Canada was essentially ruled from. As a result, some of the most important moments in Canadian history happened right here. Many of the most powerful and important Canadians have sailed all the way across the Atlantic to come to this spot: all in the hope of getting a meeting with the British bureaucrats who ran this place. They waited long hours in reception, presented petitions, negotiated with our imperial overlords... sometimes they were turned away altogether. Some of them had names that are still familiar to Canadians today: Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, William Lyon Mackenzie, Sir Sandford Fleming, Robert Baldwin...

But maybe most important of all, this is where the Privy Council used to meet. And even though they were all British judges, they served as the court with the highest authority over Canadian law. Higher even than the Supreme Court of Canada. So it was in this building in 1929 that the British judges on the Privy Council overruled the Canadian courts: they declared that women are, in fact, persons. To this day, it's one of the most famous and important moments in the history of our country — even if it happened six thousand kilometers away.

READ MORE: "Three Dreams in the Heart of the British Empire"

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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. 

 The original photo was taken by Wikimedia Commons user Stevekeiretsu in 2006. You can find it here. I've cropped it and adjusted the contrast and colour balance.

A.Y. Jackson Paints For His Life

UK TOUR DAY SIXTEEN (LONDON): On my very last morning in London, I left this dream for A.Y. Jackson at the top of Earls Court Road — because this, it seems, is the spot where he once saved his own life by painting a portrait during the First World War.

This was back before Jackson was famous. In fact, none of the painters in the Group of Seven was famous yet. They weren't even called the Group of Seven yet. So while Jackson would eventually become known as one of the greatest painters in Canadian history, he started the war as an anonymous soldier crawling through the blood-soaked trenches of Flanders outside Ypres.

It didn't go well. Within a few months, Jackson was injured in the shoulder and hip during a German bombardment. And while he was recovering from his injuries, he received word from back home in Canada that his friend, Tom Thomson, had died mysteriously in Algonquin Park. Those sad and dangerous months took a toll on the painter. When another member of the Group of Seven — Fred Varley — saw what the war had done to Jackson, he was worried. "I'm sure if he had to go through the fight any more," he wrote in a letter back home, "he would be broken."

Things didn't look like they were going to get any better. While Jackson was away recovering, his unit was in turmoil; there was a mutiny gathering steam. And soon, they'd be back on the front lines outside Ypres, at the bloody Battle of Passchendaele, where most of them would die — along with hundreds of thousands of other men — in just a few short months.

But then suddenly, out of nowhere, Jackson was offered a way out.

It came at the best possible moment: while he was digging a latrine. An officer came to see him with a proposition. A Canadian newspaper baron turned British politician — Lord Beaverbrook — had started something called the Canadian War Records Office. The idea was to have artists document the Canadian war effort. They were looking for men who were already enlisted. And they'd heard that Jackson could paint. If he were able to land the gig, his days as a soldier in the trenches would be over.

That's how he ended up at 3 Earls Court, in a big art studio the War Records Office had taken over. There, waiting for him, he found paint and canvas and a war hero.

Corporal John Chipman Kerr had been awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest honour for military valour you can get in what was then the British Empire. He'd had a finger blown off by a grenade during the Battle of the Somme, but refused to have his wound treated until he'd rushed the enemy lines, taken 62 prisoners and captured their trench. The Canadian War Records Office wanted a portrait of him. That was Jackson's first assignment.

And that was a problem. Jackson was a landscape artist; he wasn't used to painting portraits. It had been years since he even tried. Worried, he hoped to talk his way out of it. But it didn't work. He would have to give it a go. 

"Hanging over me," he wrote later in his autobiography, "was the prospect of being returned to the infantry if I failed in this first assignment."

So he set down to work and painted for his life.

Things got off to rough start. He kept having to give up, to scrape the canvas clean, and begin all over again. It was slow work. And it probably didn't help that Corporal Kerr — excited to be on leave — kept suggesting they play hooky and head down to the pub instead. But in end, Jackson was able to produce a half-decent portrait. Not great, they say — the legs look weird — but good enough that he didn't get fired.

And so, thanks to not screwing up that portrait, A.Y. Jackson was able to spend the rest of his war travelling across the Western Front, painting the ravaged landscapes in his trademark Impressionist style. Most importantly, he lived long enough to see the end of the fighting, long enough to return home to Toronto, to rejoin the group of friends who were about to change the Canadian art world forever.

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The old Canadian War Records, 14 Clifford Street

A dream for Jackson outside the old War Records Office

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've already written a full post about the rest of Jackson's experiences during WWI here. And I've got a post about how England embraced the Group of Seven before Canada did here. 

This post is related to dream 27 The Longest Earthquake in the History of the World A.Y. Jackson, 1914

UK Tour Preview: How England Helped Save The Group Of Seven

The Group of Seven's A.Y. Jackson painted this painting right at the very end of the First World War. He'd spent the last few years on the front lines in Europe: first as a soldier crawling through the trenches in Flanders, then as an official war artist with the Canadian War Records Office (a department created by Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian newspaper baron turned British Cabinet Minister). But when the war finally ended, Jackson's job wasn't quite over: he was sent to Halifax to capture the scenes of Canadian soldiers returning home. Arthur Lismer — one of the two British-born members of the Group of Seven — was already there. He was working for the War Records Office, too. Together, during the spring of 1919, they painted the warships as they came home. That's when Jackson made the sketches for this painting, Entrance To Halifax Harbour, which he probably finished back home at the Studio Building in Rosedale.

In those early days, the Group of Seven weren't famous yet (in fact, they weren't even called the Group of Seven yet). And Canadian critics hated them. They were too modern, too experimental. They were dismissed as "The Hot Mush School." "A horrible bunch of junk." "The figments of a drunkard’s dream." "Daubing by immature children." More than 30 years after Van Gogh painted Starry Night, Canada still wasn't ready for Impressionism.

But in England, it was a whole different story. After the end of the war, an exhibition was held in London. Some of the Canadian paintings created for the War Records Office were put on display at the majestic Burlington House, a couple of blocks from Piccadilly Circus. Jackson wasn't the only member of the Group of Seven with work hanging on the walls — Fred Varley (the other member of the Group who was raised in England) had also been painting on the Western Front. But there were more pieces by Jackson than by anyone else. And the show was a big success. Thousands of people came to see the exhibit on the first day alone — including the Prime Minster of Canada, Robert Borden. Jackson's paintings for the War Records Office would eventually end up in some of the most important collections in Canada, including the National Gallery, the War Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Entrance To Halifax Harbour wasn't part of that exhibit. But just a few years later, the painting finally got its chance. In 1924, the English government put on a massive display of industry, engineering and artwork from all over the British Empire. The British Empire Exhibition was a VERY BIG deal: the biggest and most popular exhibition that had ever been held anywhere. Back in Canada, the job of picking the Canadian art to submit sparked a major battle between the old guard of conventional, established artists and the modernist up-and-comers like the Group of Seven. In the end, the modernists won the right to be included. And Entrance To Halifax Harbour was sent to London.

The reviews by Canadian critics were harsh. The Toronto Daily Star compared Jackson's work to "a spilt can of paint." But the English critics loved it. The Morning Post called the Group of Seven "the foundation of what may become one of the greatest schools of landscape painting." Only one piece of Canadian art was sold during the British Empire Exhibition — and it was Jackson's. Entrance To Halifax Harbour was bought by the Tate Gallery. It's still part of their collection today.

The show in London helped to establish the Group of Seven's reputation back home in Canada. Now that the British took them seriously, Canadian collectors started taking them seriously, too. The Group even used the reviews from the Empire Exhibition to promote their upcoming shows: they printed posters with the angry Canadian reviews side by side with the glowing British ones.

Even today, the Group of Seven are lauded by some British critics. A major exhibition of their work was mounted by a London gallery just a couple of years ago. According to the gallery's director, "[The Group of Seven] produced some of the most vibrant and beautiful landscapes of the twentieth century." He calls Tom Thomson "Canada's very own Van Gogh."

In a couple of months, I plan on heading to London myself. I'll be there to leave dreams from the Toronto Dreams Project at Toronto-related historical sites across the city. They'll include my dream for A.Y. Jackson, "The Longest Earthquake in the History of the World," which I launched as part of the AGO's First Thursday back in December. I'll visit Burlington House, where the War Records exhibition was held, along with other Jackson-related spots.

You can help me get there by contributing to my Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign (or by sharing it on Facebook or Twitter).

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You can read the full story of A.Y. Jackson and the First World War in one of my previous posts here.

A.Y. Jackson Goes To War — The Group of Seven on the Western Front

"What war?"

In the summer of 1914, A.Y. Jackson was far from home, high among the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. He was there to paint. This was back in the earliest days of the Group of Seven, years before they used that nickname. Jackson was still new to the group; the others had only recently convinced him to join their efforts to change the Canadian art world forever — and with it, the way Canadians saw their own country.

Even before they met him, the other artists admired Jackson. His style was deeply influenced by his studies in Paris, at the heart of the Impressionist revolution that had yet to reach Canada. The group saw Jackson’s work — particularly a painting called The Edge of the Maple Wood — as the example they wanted to follow. So they and one of their patrons offered him free room and board for a year if he was willing to move from Montreal to Toronto and do nothing but work on his art. They even had a brand new building to put him up in: the Studio Building in Rosedale. He accepted.

But in those early days, the group’s paintings were terribly controversial. Established critics dismissed them in much the same way Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso had been dismissed. "The Hot Mush School," they called them. "A horrible bunch of junk." "The figments of a drunkard’s dream." "Daubing by immature children." "A spilt can of paint."

Luckily, not everyone agreed with those critics. Some people were thrilled with the way Jackson and the others were using vivid colours and Impressionist techniques to capture the spirit of the Canadian landscape. When the Canadian Northern Railroad built a new line through the Rockies, they commissioned Jackson to travel with their construction camps as they worked along the Fraser River. That’s how he made his first trip out West.

While he was in the Rockies, Jackson would leave the camps behind for days on end, hiking up in into the mountains with a guide. "We took many chances," Jackson remembered later in his autobiography, "sliding down snow slopes with just a stick for a brake, climbing over glaciers without ropes, and crossing rivers too swift to wade, by felling trees across them."

It was at the end of one of these "scrambles" that he heard the news. When he returned to camp, an engineer was waiting for him. "What do you think about the war?" he asked the painter. It was the first Jackson had heard of it.

Before long, he would be all too familiar with the First World War, fighting on the front lines. But for now, it seemed a long way away. As the military might of Europe shifted into gear, Jackson kept painting. Most people thought the war would be over soon; there didn’t seem to be any pressing need for the artist to join the fight. Instead of heading back to Toronto, where young men were lined up outside the Armouries on University Avenue waiting to enlist, Jackson headed straight from the Rockies to Algonquin Park. There was someone waiting for him there.

Thomson at Grip Ltd. (via)

Tom Thomson was one of the most promising young artists in Toronto. But Thomson found that hard to believe. He had a steady, paying gig at Grip Ltd., a downtown design firm where many of the Group of Seven artists worked. He was known as the most accomplished outdoorsman of them all; it was Thomson who first fell in love with Algonquin Park and introduced it to the others. But he lacked their confidence when it came to his art. He worried that if he quit his day job, he wouldn’t be able to make a living off his paintings. And so, as part of Jackson’s deal to get a free year in the Studio Building, the others also asked him to take Thomson under his wing. The two artists would share a studio on the top floor. And while Thomson taught Jackson about life in the bush, Jackson would teach Thomson about painting.

The two met in Algonquin that autumn for their very first sketching trip together. While Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley (two future members of the Group of Seven who had recently emigrated from England) stayed in a lodge with their families, Jackson and Thomson roughed it in the bush: living in a tent, travelling by canoe and working on birch panels small enough to be carried through the wilderness. That fall, they made sketches that would lead to some of their most famous work. Jackson’s The Red Maple was a result of that trip. And so was Thomson’s Northern River.

Meanwhile, six thousand kilometers away, young men were facing a very different reality. "There was a war on too," Jackson later wrote, but "in Algonquin we heard little about it and hoped it would soon be over."

Of course, it wouldn’t be. The war on the Western Front had kicked off with a big, fast, German drive into France and an Allied counteroffensive that pushed them far back. But now that quick, dramatic war of sweeping movement — the kind everyone had been expecting — was settling into a grueling stalemate. That September, in order to avoid being driven back any further, the Germans dug the very first trenches. The French soon followed suite. By the time the artists got back from Algonquin, it was already becoming clear that this would be a new, more horrifying kind of war. And not a short one. "When we reached Toronto," Jackson wrote, "we realized that we had been unduly optimistic, that the war was likely to be a long one, and that our relatively carefree days were over."

He tried to get back into the swing of things at the Studio Building, turning sketches like The Red Maple into full canvases. "But I could not settle down to serious work. The war made me restless." With his free year at the Studio Building coming to an end, Jackson decided to head back to Montreal and join the army.

As it turned out, it would still be a few months before he finally signed up. The news from Europe shifted again and it seemed, again, as if it might be a quick war. Jackson seized the opportunity to take another sketching trip, this time to one of his favourite spots in rural Québec.

But in April, the Germans successfully deployed a deadly new weapon for the very first time: chlorine gas. In Belgium, near the town of Ypres, a thick cloud of poison yellow smoke descended on trenches full of French, Moroccan and Algerian troops. They say six thousand people died in the first few minutes: suffocating, lungs burning, frothing at the mouth, cut to pieces by German guns. The Germans attacked and drove the Allies back to a spot near the village of St. Julien, where Canadians rushed to plug the hole in the line, holding urine-soaked handkerchiefs over their faces as feeble protection against the deadly fumes. Three-quarters of them would die, too, but they would hold the line and keep the Germans at bay. That was just the beginning of a long, bloody battle — the same one that would inspire another Canadian, John McCrae, to write "In Flanders Fields."

"At the railway station one morning I heard the first news of the Battle of St. Julien," Jackson wrote. "I knew then that all the wishful thinking about the war being of short duration was over."

Finally, he saw this recruitment poster:

 It "ended any doubts I had about enlisting," he said. A few months later, he was on his way to the front lines.

Still, while Jackson was willing to fight, he was far from being seized with a patriotic lust for battle. His letters made that perfectly clear. "I'm a Social Democrat," he wrote to his sister from the battlefields of Belgium, "and don’t believe in war." He scorned the wealthy, Empire-loving Canadians who glorified the war from the safety of home while the poor were forced to fight it. "I don't think I ever in my life took so little pride in being British,” he wrote in a second letter. “The rough neck and the out of work far outnumber the patriot. Volunteers by pressure... when you hear all the bosh talked and written about our precious honor, Christian ideals, etc. it just about makes you sick… people who entrust their national honor to men they would not allow to enter their houses in times of peace are not worth fighting for."

Before he'd even left for Europe, Jackson wrote, "I wish we could send all our politicians to the front." And later, he added that warmongering members of the clergy would benefit from the same treatment. "At the front we would see examples of self sacrifice and sublime courage by men the church would regard as outside the law. His faith in the church might weaken but his faith in humanity would be better stuff after it."

When Jackson had first signed up, Lawren Harris (another, wealthier artist in the group) had offered to buy him a commission as an officer (and all the preferential treatment that came with it). But Jackson refused, preferring to earn his rank through experience. "This Canadian army," he wrote, "would be a far finer machine to my mind if all class distinctions were done away with, and officers lived under exactly the same conditions as the men…"

It was early in 1916 that Jackson ended up in the trenches just outside Ypres, not far from the spot where the St. Battle of St. Julien had raged a year earlier. It was a bombed-out, blood-soaked mess. "The flag waving was over," he wrote. But he did see some haunting beauty in the desolation. "Flanders in early spring was beautiful, as was Ypres by moonlight and the weird ruined landscapes under the light of flares or rockets."

Troops near Ypres, WWI (via)

That summer, the Germans launched an attack against the high ground held by the Allies outside the town. Jackson was there "crawling along a trench in Sanctuary Wood, and an aeroplane circling overhead like a big hawk, signalling to the artillery who were trying to blow us up. It was a day of glorious sunshine and only man was vile, in general, individually they were magnificent."

Once the Germans had pushed the Allies off the high ground it was up to the Canadians to counter-attack — the first time our army had ever been given such a task. It was, according to the official British history of the war "an unqualified success." The Canadian forces developed new methods for fighting this new kind of brutal war — changing, for instance, the number of artillery barrages before they went over the top, so the Germans wouldn’t know when they were coming.

Now, nearly 100 years later, a museum stands on that spot, still run by the grandson of the farmer who owned the land. Nearby, a monument has been erected as a memorial to the Canadians who died there. Some of the craters and the trenches where they fought are still there, too, preserved by the museum. In Toronto, we remember the battle every year with a parade at Fort York. We call it "Sorrel Day."

Jackson survived the barrages, the attack and the counter-attack, but it was hard for anyone to last very long in that devastated place. A week later, during a German bombardment, he was wounded. It got him in the hip and the shoulder.

He was taken to a hospital in France and then to England to recover. That’s where got a letter delivering tragic news from Canada.

When Jackson had left Toronto to enlist, Tom Thomson had stayed behind to paint. He had a medical condition that kept him out of the army. But at that point, his free year in the Studio Building was over too, and without someone else to help make rent, he was forced moved into the shed out back instead. He spent the warmer months away on sketching trips in the northern bush, while he spent the snowy months holed up in the shack on the slopes of the Rosedale Valley, deeply immersed in his work. There, he would paint some of the most famous canvasses in Canadian history, works like The Jack Pine (now in the National Gallery) and The West Wind (now in the AGO).

All the while, he worried about the war. The shed, as rustic as it was, was still only a few blocks away from the intersection of Yonge and Bloor, where thousands of soldiers marched by on their way to war. The military was all over the city. And Thomson had friends on the other side of the Atlantic to worry about, too. "I can't get used to the idea of Jackson being in the machine," he wrote to another artist in the group, "and it is rotten that in this socalled civilized age that such things can exist…"

Jackson would survive to see the end of the war, but Thomson wouldn't be so lucky. During the summer of 1917, he took another trip to Algonquin. It would be his last. The accomplished outdoorsman disappeared on a canoe trip and was found eight days later, floating dead in Canoe Lake, fishing wire wrapped around his leg. At the time, he was still barely known outside the small group of artists in Toronto. But over the course of the next few decades, his fame grew — and so did the legend of his death. A century later, he's hailed as one of the most famous Canadian artists ever and his suspicious accident is one of our most infamous mysteries.

But for Jackson it was a very personal tragedy. "I could sit down and cry to think that while in all this turmoil over here... the peace and quietness of the north country should be the scene of such a tragedy," he wrote in a letter home. "Without Tom the north country seems a desolation of bush and rock. He was the guide, the interpreter, and we the guests partaking of the hospitality so generously given."

In his autobiography, Jackson remembered, "The thought of getting back to the north country with Thomson, and going father afield with him on painting trips after the war was over, had always buoyed me up when the going was rough. Now I would never go sketching with Tom Thomson again."

Canadians at Passchendaele, 1917

And things looked like they were about to get even worse. Jackson had recovered from his wounds just as the Allies were getting ready for a big offensive — and just as the men in his unit had gotten so sick of the conditions, they were ready to mutiny. Soon, they would be back on the front lines outside Ypres, at the muddy Battle of Passchendaele, where hundreds of thousands of men would die in just a few short months. Meanwhile, Jackson was reaching the end of his tether — he had been worn down by the war and friends worried he couldn't take much more of it.

But a few days after he learned about Thomson’s death, Jackson got some good news. He was digging a latrine when an officer interrupted him. The army had a new project and they wanted him to be a part of it.

The man behind the idea was Lord Beaverbrook — a Canadian businessman turned British politician and newspaper baron. He was determined to make sure that there would an historical record of the Canadian contribution to the war. And so, he used some of his own fortune to establish the Canadian War Records Office. Part of his plan was to hire artists to capture the Canadian experience of the war. Eventually, there would be almost 120 of them, producing nearly a thousand paintings by the time it was all over. Jackson was one of the very first who was asked to join the cause. He would paint more canvases for the War Records Office than any other artist.

Now, instead of a gun, his main companion was a sketchbook.

It was challenging work — and not just because he was trying to make art in the middle of a war zone. In the past, battles had tended to be fought by men standing in fields in straight lines; they wore brightly coloured uniforms; artists were commissioned to glorify their exploits. Now, they were hidden away in trenches being torn apart by distant machine guns or blown to pieces by a rain of artillery. The old style of war painting wasn't going to work. "What to paint was a problem for the war artist," Jackson wrote. "There was nothing to serve as a guide. War had gone underground, and there was little to see. The old heroics, the death and glory stuff, were gone for ever; there was no more 'Thin Red Line' or 'Scotland For Ever.'"

Instead, Jackson chose to paint landscapes, much as he did back home in Canada. But these places were more dead than alive, dreadful and haunting, ruined by the ravages of the most destructive war in human history. Individual soldiers were dwarfed by the scale of the devastation around them.

He would start in France, in the same region he had visited years earlier on a sketching trip as a student. "The country around Lens was exciting, in a way, for an artist," he wrote in his autobiography. "The permanent lines had long been established, and back of them was a swatch, about five miles wide, of seemingly empty country, cut up by old trench lines, gun pits, old shell holes, ruins of villages and farm houses. In the daytime there was not a sign of life. Of all the stuff I painted at Lens the canvas I liked best was 'Springtime in Picardy,' which showed a little peach tree blooming in the courtyard of a smashed-up farm house."

It’s on display at the AGO:

"I went with Augustus John one night to see a gas attack we made on the German lines. It was like a wonderful display of fireworks, with the clouds of gas and the German flares and rockets of all colours." He wrote notes to go with sketches that night: "Sudden bursts of flame ... coloured glow ... old house silhouette ... Bright green lights behind clouds shining through gas clouds ... Blow star a shower of orange." The painting that resulted, Gas Attack, Liévin, is at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa:

The War Museum also has A Copse, Evening, which one of Jackson’s biographers, Wayne Larsen, writes about in his book, The Life of a Landscape Painter:

"Just west of Liévin, Jackson sketched what would prove to be one of his most striking and memorable wartime images — A Copse, Evening. This eerie scene of dead tree trunks in a wasteland of shell craters and war debris shows a few tiny figures of soldiers making their way along a makeshift walkway of planks. Above them, diagonal searchlight beams slash the sky. The atmosphere is chilling enough, but Jackson's bitterly ironic title drives home the anti-war message — the copse itself is no more; all that's left are the skeletal remains of the shattered trees." 

Jackson's House of Ypres is also in Ottawa at the War Museum:

But Jackson wasn’t the only future member of the Group of Seven who enlisted. Lawren Harris and Fred Varley were also in Europe. Varley ended up working for the Canadian War Records Office, too, producing paintings that were even more disturbing than Jackson's.

"I tell you, Arthur," he wrote to Arthur Lismer (one of the British-born artists who had been in Algonquin with Jackson and Thomson), "your wildest nightmares pale before reality. You pass over swamps on rotting duckboards, past bleached bones of horses with their harness still on, past isolated rude crosses sticking up from the filth and the stink of decay is flung all over. There was a lovely wood there once with a stream running thro' it but now the trees are powdered up and mingle with the soil."

Varley’s piece, For What?, is also in the collection of the War Museum:

Meanwhile, back in Canada, Lismer was also working for the War Records Office. He was in Halifax, painting the war effort on the home front. And before too long, his subjects would include war ships returning home to Canada, full of soldiers on their way back to their friends and family. The war, after four long, agonizing years, was finally over.

By the spring of 1919, Jackson had joined Lismer in Halifax to paint the final stages of the return to peace. Another one of his most famous paintings came out of those days. Entrance to Halifax Harbour now belongs to the Tate Gallery in England. You can barely even tell it's a war painting at all; the only sign is a few camouflaged ships in the distance:

Now, with the war over and Thomson gone, Jackson's darkest days were behind him. He returned to Toronto, to the top floor of the Studio Building, and reunited with the other artists in the group. He had earned an international reputation thanks to his war paintings, and had been accepted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Art. It would take him a while to recover from the war, to regain his enthusiasm for the Canadian landscape. But soon, his momentum was back. A memorial exhibition of Thomson's work, which Jackson helped to organize, met with the usual disdain from the older critics. The fight within the art world would last for at least another decade. But the tide was finally turning.

Canada had a new sense of itself in the wake of the First World War, and for the first time since Confederation, people seemed ready to support artists who wanted to capture the unique spirit of their own country. Jackson and the others had attracted the attention of younger artists. They were selling their work to the National Gallery. Their war paintings had won glowing reviews from the British press. Soon, they would have their first group show together at the AGO. The year after they returned from the war, they decided to publicly declare themselves as a new movement with a new name. They were called the Group of Seven. And they were going to do exactly what they promised to do: change Canadian art forever.

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

You can get A.Y. Jackson's autobiography, A Painter's Country, from Amazon here or from the Toronto Public Library here. The biography by Warren Larsen, The Life of a Landscape Painter is here and here.

You can learn more about the trenches of the First World War here and here. The Canadian War Museum has more on Lord Beaverbrook and the Canadian War Records Office here. They've also got a great piece by Susan Butlin, "Landscape as Memorial: A.Y. Jackson and the Landscape of the Western Front" here, as a PDF. The CBC interviews Jackson as the Studio Building in a video here. You can find a bunch of his letters home from the war here.

There's a very interesting old piece about modernist art and the First World War here. And a blog talks about the Group of Seven and "the virtues of localism" here. There are lots of reviews of their early shows here. There's a website devoted to Tom Thomson here. And one that focuses on the mystery of his death here. The patron of the Group of Seven, Dr. John MacCallum, writes a tribute to Thomson here. And there's a kinda neat damaged photo of his canoe here. There's more about Grip Ltd. here.

This post is related to dream 27 The Longest Earthquake in the History of the World A.Y. Jackson, 1914