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 Dream for Sydney Newman at the BBC

UK TOUR DAY TWO (LONDON): At the end of my first full day in England, I found myself outside the BBC. They opened their brand new headquarters here just last year — on Portland Place a few blocks north of Soho and Piccadilly Circus — at the exact same spot where their original headquarters are still standing. Broadcasting House first opened in the very early 1930s as a home for BBC Radio. It's a gorgeous Art Deco building. The new Broadcasting House was built as an extension to the original — they call the new bit "The John Peel Wing" in honour of the legendary BBC DJ. It's made of beautiful curving glass and at night it's lit up with colour. After sitting across the street for a while, soaking it all in, I casually wandered over to the courtyard entrance, trying to avoid getting noticed by the security guards or the smokers by the doors, and left my dream for Sydney Newman taped to the side of a bollard.

Newman — as I wrote in a big post last year — was the creator of one of the most popular television shows the BBC has ever aired: Doctor Who. He was born and raised in Toronto; he spent most of his life in Canada working for the CBC, the NFB and the CRTC. But for a few years in the 1960s, his career took him to London, where he soon became the Head of Drama for the BBC. He was the driving force behind the new science-fiction show, and he assembled a groundbreaking team to make it.

That didn't happen here at Broadcasting House, though. Up until last year, BBC Television was headquartered a few kilometers away at the appropriately-named BBC Television Centre. I wrote a little post about it, too. And on my very last night in England, I made sure to stop by and leave a copy of the dream for Newman there as well.

I also left the dream at a couple of other spots in London. One was on Westminster Bridge. It was the site of one of the most iconic shots from the early years of Doctor Who — back in the days when Newman was still overseeing the show. When the Daleks invaded the Earth, they rolled across that very same bridge.

The other was on Earls Court Road, where a TARDIS — with a fresh coat of paint — stands outside the tube station. You can even go inside the time machine on Google Maps.

But most of the dreams I left for Newman during the UK Tour were left in a whole different country. Today, Doctor Who is filmed in Wales. So I left a few dreams for him there, in Cardiff, in locations that would be familiar to any current fan of the show, including Clara Oswald's house, Cardiff Bay, and even on the TARDIS itself. You can read a post about all of that right here.

And if you're a fan of the show, I'll be writing lots about it over at The Little Red Umbrella as it returns to our screens on Saturday.

This post is related to dream 39 The Martian-Canadians Sydney Newman, 1956

UK Tour Photos: Cardiff

The second leg of The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour took me to Cardiff, the capital of Wales. I was there to leave dreams for two Torontonians in particular: Sydney Newman and Sir Charles Seymour Wright. Newman was the creator of Doctor Who; the science-fiction show is now filmed in Cardiff. And Wright was an explorer on the infamous Scott Expedition, which sailed from Cardiff to Antarctica in 1910. I've already written a couple of posts about my time in the city — about the legacy of Doctor Who here and about the many ways Cardiff remembers the Scott Expedition here. Now, I've uploaded my photos as well. You can find them all on Facebook — whether you have an account or not — right on over here:

FULL GALLERY

And, as always, you can follow me on Instagram at @todreamsproject.

UK Tour Preview: The Birthplace of Doctor Who

This is the BBC Television Centre. It first opened on Wood Lane in London all the way back in 1960. It was one of the very first buildings in the world built specifically to make television. And while the BBC stopped using it last year, it's been designated as a protected heritage site by the British government. The architecture is iconic, with a circular "doughnut" and a round courtyard — they say the frustrated architect went to a pub, drew a question mark on an envelope, and then realized the question mark was the perfect shape. What happened inside, however, is even more remarkable than the building itself. Many of the greatest shows in the history of television were shot right here: Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Top of the Pops, Monty Python's Flying Circus...

But for Torontonians, this building is particularly remarkable because it's where our own Sydney Newman first came up with the idea for Doctor Who. He spent most of the 1960s working right here as the Head of Drama for the BBC — famous for the radical new Canadian ideas he brought with him from his time at the NFB and the CBC. When the network was looking for a new show to fill a troublesome timeslot on Saturday afternoon, Newman suggested a science-fiction show about a time-travelling old man. Then, he put together a groundbreaking young team — including the BBC's first female producer and first Indian-born director — to make the show a reality. Within weeks of the airing of the first episode, the show was a hit. Fifty years later, it's still quite literally the most-loved drama on British television.

I told the full story of Newman's career and the birth of Doctor Who in a recent post; he'll soon be getting his own dream as part of the Toronto Dreams Project. I'm planning on leaving it at the BBC Television Centre as well as other Doctor Who-related sites in London and Wales (including the former location of Lime Grove, the studio where the first episode was shot). You can help me get there by contributing to the Indiegogo campaign in support of the Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour (or by sharing it on Facebook or Twitter).

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Photo via the BBC.

The Torontonian Roots of Doctor Who — The Canadian Behind The Legendary TV Show

Doctor Who is more than 50 years old. The Guinness Book of World Records calls it the most successful science-fiction series of all-time. It's the longest-running, too. Since it first debuted in 1963, the show has aired nearly 800 episodes, plus specials, spin-offs, movies, radio plays, mini episodes, sketches for charity shows, books, graphic novels... It's an icon of British culture; the London Times called it "quintessential to being British." But if you want to trace the show back to the very, very beginning, to the person who more than any other is credited with the creation of Doctor Who, well, then you have to travel back to Canada, back to downtown Toronto, back to a brand new baby boy born in our city during the First World War.

His name was Sydney Newman. He was born in 1917, to parents who had moved to Canada from Russia. They owned a shoe shop, but their son dreamed of being an artist. As a kid, he went to Ogden Public School (just a block north-east of Queen & Spadina); as a teenager during the Great Depression he studied art and design at Central Tech (on Bathurst just south of Bloor). By the time he was in his early twenties, he was making a good living as a commercial artist, designing movie posters. 

But by his own admission, Newman was a restless sort. He was quickly developing a new passion: film. And his timing was absolutely perfect. In 1939, when Newman was just 21 years old, the National Film Board of Canada was created. The government had commissioned a report that recommended they commission another report that recommended they create the NFB. It was a way of strengthening Canadian culture and promoting national unity by making and distributing uniquely Canadian films, especially documentaries. Newman got in on the ground floor pretty much right away, working as a splicer-boy editing film.

He worked his way up quickly, writing and then directing and then producing. He got to work under John Grierson, a documentary filmmaker from Scotland who had written the government report and co-founded the NFB. He's hailed as "the father of British and Canadian film." With the Second World War breaking out just a few months after the NFB got started, Newman found himself working on the "Canada Carries On" propaganda newsreels that ran in movie theatres before feature films. Eventually, he'd be in charge of the whole series. His work would appear on hundreds of movie screens across the country. During his decade at the NFB, he worked on something like 350 films.

But now, with the war over, an even newer medium was catching on: television. By the late 1940s, some Canadians along the border had already bought their first TV sets to watch the earliest American shows. But we didn't have our own channel yet, so the CBC put together yet another report: this one was a plan to launch their own public television network. As part of the preparations for the launch, the government sent Newman down to New York City. He spent a year observing the various television departments at NBC, sending monthly reports back to Ottawa. "I fell passionately in love with television during my year in New York," he later remembered. He was particularly fascinated by the educational potential.

So when he got back from NYC, he left the NFB and accepted a job at the brand new CBC-TV. He was put in charge of all their outdoor broadcasts. Newman was the guy who put Foster Hewitt and Hockey Night in Canada on TV for the very first time. That same year, he broadcast the very first televised Grey Cup game.

But he would make his biggest splash as the head of the Drama department. He took it over in 1954; by then, CBC-TV was a big deal. Well over half the people in Canada now owned a television set; we had quickly become one of the leading television-producing nations in the world.

Newman, still only 31 years old, got to work implementing his new ideas. He was deeply influenced by his time making documentaries at the NFB, and he passionately believed television shows should try to connect with the lives of the people watching. "Canadians seeing themselves in dramatic situations always seemed to me the best way to get them to watch my programmes," he later said. At a time when a lot of the dramas on television were just classic old plays and novels shot with TV cameras, Newman hired exciting young writers and directors to produce original screenplays. He encouraged them to write about current events, tell stories about the world around them, and to break new ground. "[O]ne always complains about Canada," he said, "...we don't know who were are or where we're going or how we connect up with the USA. Well, I would say the bloody simple way to find out is to let the writers talk about themselves... and Canadians will quickly find out what they are."

By the end of the 1950s, Canada was getting a reputation for being on the cutting edge of the new medium. While Marshall McLuhan was teaching groundbreaking media theory just a few minutes away at the University of Toronto, the producers at the CBC were developing their own new ideas. "We were the only country that had no [pre-existing film or television] tradition," one CBC writer later remembered, "so television was our beginning. We did things on television they didn't do in England or America." The CBC gave them the freedom to experiment and Newman made sure they used it. His Tuesday night show, General Motors Theatre, became a hotbed for new story ideas, camera techniques and young talent.

He hired, for instance, Lister Sinclair, the future host of CBC Radio's Ideas, who had recently been called out in the House of Commons over a radio play he wrote about an unmarried pregnant woman considering an abortion. (The leader of the Conservatives denounced it as "disgraceful" and demanded government action.) Another was Len Peterson; he'd been criticized for daring to write about alienated youth and the erosion of democratic freedoms during the hyper-nationalistic years of the Second World War.

But it was a third playwright, Arthur Hailey, who wrote the biggest hit for General Motors Theatre. It was called Flight Into Danger, a tense thriller about an airplane whose pilots get food poisoning. It starred James Doohan (just a few years before he played Scotty on Star Trek) and it was a HUGE success. One critic called it, "probably the most successful TV play ever written anywhere." Hollywood turned it into a feature film (which was then, in turn, spoofed by Airplane!). The BBC aired the original CBC version, too. In fact, they bought more than two dozen Newman-produced CBC episodes. His shows were grittier, more innovative and more exciting than what the British were doing. And there, at the end of every single one, was Sydney Newman's name.

Flight Into Danger, 1956

So that's how he ended up in England.

The BBC had started their own television network all the way back in the very late 1920s — more than 20 years before the CBC did — and for a long time they had a monopoly on the British airwaves. But now, in the 1950s, they were forced to compete with private broadcasters. It was one of those private channels, ABC, who offered Newman a job. He was happy in Canada — he says he found the television scene here "terribly exciting" — but he just couldn't resist the opportunity.

So he packed his bags and headed off to London to become the head of Drama for ABC. He brought his trademark moustache and bowtie with him — along with his radical, new, Canadian ideas.

"I didn't really like what I saw here [in England] on television," he said. "Most television drama in 1958 — and when I say most, I mean 98% of it — consisted of either dramatization of short stories or a novel, or consisted of hand-me-down theatre plays, which were adapted for television... The theatre has always been a kind of middle class activity... These plays never had any real roots in the mass of the audience."

Or as he put it more bluntly: "Damn the upper classes – they don’t even own televisions!"

As part of his job at ABC, Newman took over a show called Armchair Theatre — sort of the British version of General Motors Theatre — where he again made sure to hire exciting new writers. This time, they were British ones, many of them playwrights who were having trouble establishing themselves in the upper-middle-class world of London's West End theatres. Newman helped launch the early careers of English writers like Harold Pinter, Ken Loach and Alun Owen (who would later write the screenplay for The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night). His writers wrote about issues like race, sexual assault and the potential for a nuclear holocaust. And the work they produced for Newman at ABC met with the same kind of popular acclaim he had achieved with the CBC.

"They were locals," Newman explained. "They were ordinary people... they wrote about the country that they knew... We discovered that the audiences were just eating this stuff up. And in retrospect, looking back, the audience loved the plays because the plays were about them, not about some elegant people in drawing rooms... They were plays, really, about the working class. And for the first time in England, the working class was being presented not as comic foil."

Newman liked to call this kind of TV show "theatre of the people," but the programs would become better known as "kitchen sink dramas."

And it wasn't just the writers. Newman brought some Canadian directors with him to England. People like Ted Kotcheff (a Torontonian who would later direct The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Weekend At Bernie's) experimented with new camera techniques. Instead of boring, static shots, they adopted a more cinematic style, including hand-held camerawork and more frequent close-ups. Newman used those Canadian directors along with young British directors who were interested in the same kind of innovation. "We wanted to push against the limitations of the medium," Kotcheff remembered, "to approach the freedom of film, and not to enslave it to the theatrical tradition in which we found it when we arrived..."

Meanwhile, Newman used the talent he assembled to create a slate of brand new shows. His biggest hit with ABC was an adventure thriller capitalizing on the public's obsession with spies during those early years of the Cold War. It starred one of the British actors Newman had regularly used back in Toronto. It was called The Avengers. It would prove to be one of the most famous television shows ever. But that was nothing. Newman had an even bigger hit coming.

In 1962, he left ABC for the BBC. Now, he would be the head of their Drama department. And the new boss wanted him to mix things up.

"Syd brought this breath of fresh air into the stuffiness of the BBC," one of his colleagues later remembered. "With all its invention and all its wonderful storytelling, the BBC had been very stuffy... I don't think Syd had read Dickens. He certainly hadn't read Thackery. And as for Jane Austin, I mean, it was absolutely dead meat as far as he was concerned. He wanted something new."

One of his first challenges was to fix a slot in the BBC's Saturday afternoon schedule. They already had two big Saturday afternoon hits: Grandstand (a sports show) and Juke Box Jury (a pop music show). But right between them, at tea time, the ratings took a dive. The BBC had been airing a serial of classics, stuff like adapted Dickens novels. People were tuning out. Newman wanted to replace it with a new show of original material that would still educate and inform, but also appeal to the younger viewers who were already watching the other two shows.

He decided the perfect solution was a science-fiction show for kids.

Back when he was growing up in Toronto, Newman had been a big fan of science-fiction. And he still was. "[U]p to the age of 40," he said, "I don't think there was a science-fiction book I hadn't read. I love them because they're a marvellous way—and a safe way, I might add—of saying nasty things about our own society."

Pathfinders in Space, 1960

When he was at ABC, he had produced a science fiction trilogy called Pathfinders. And back when he was at the CBC, they'd done a Canadian version of the Howdy Doody puppet show with a science fiction twist: a character called Mr. X who taught kids about history and science by travelling through space and time in his Whatsis Box. (Mr. X didn't last long; parents complained he was too scary.)

The BBC was no stranger to science-fiction either. They had already done a bunch of shows with a sci-fi theme, stretching all the way back to some of their earliest programming. In fact, earlier the same year Newman joined the staff, the BBC compiled a pair of reports exploring the idea of a new science-fiction show.

So that's how Doctor Who started: with a meeting in an office at the BBC during the spring of 1963. Newman brought the authors of the science-fiction reports together with screenwriters from the old Drama and Children's departments (which Newman had now merged). It was the first in a series of brainstorming sessions over the course of the next few months, which produced a series of story ideas and character sketches that gradually coalesced into Doctor Who. A whole team contributed ideas, but it's Newman who generally gets credit for the core of them, from the name of the show to the basic premise. "The idea of Doctor Who," he later explained, "...was basically a senile old man, of 720 years or 60 years of age, who has escaped from a distant planet in a spaceship. And the spaceship had the capacity to go forward and backward in time."

Newman insisted the show had to be educational — about science and history — and that, even if the premise was extraordinary, it still had to connect with the ordinary lives of the people watching. He nixed the idea of making the main characters scientists (they wouldn't need to learn as much), proposed the cast should include a teenaged girl (who young people could identify with) and when the writers suggested the time machine should be invisible, Newman argued it should present a striking visual image instead. In the end, the Doctor's first companions would be a science teacher, a history teacher and his own teenaged grand-daughter, while the TARDIS time machine would take the form of an iconic blue police box — a familiar sight to English viewers in 1963.

But while Newman might have played a leading role in the creation Doctor Who, he wasn't going to produce it or direct himself. So, as usual, he set about finding the most exciting, young, innovative talent he could find.

First up: producer. "I didn't feel I had anyone on the staff who seemed right for the kind of idiocy and fun and yet serious underlying intent," Newman said. So he called up his old production assistant at ABC and offered her a promotion. Verity Lambert was just 27 years old when she became the producer of Doctor Who. At the time, she was the youngest producer in the Drama department and the only female producer at the BBC.

Meanwhile, the director for the first episode would be Waris Hussein. He was even younger: just 24, a recent graduate of Cambridge, where he'd worked with student actors like Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellan. He, like all of Newman's favourite directors, was interested in bringing a more cinematic style to television. And he, too, was breaking new ground: the very first Indian-born director to work for the BBC.

But as talented as they were, shooting that first episode would prove to be a major challenge for Lambert and Hussein. The BBC executives above Newman weren't completely sold on the show. They threatened to cancel it before a single episode had aired. The production team was forced to make do with a small budget despite their need to create entire alien worlds, historical costumes and the elaborate interior of the TARDIS. They were also forced to shoot on a sound stage so old it was nearly obsolete: Studio D at Lime Grove, a long, thin room which didn't give them much space at all. They couldn't even fit the police box in the elevator. "It was so old-fashioned, it didn't even have a lighting console," Lambert remembered in later interviews, "...It was like going into a studio that had come out of Noah's Ark... It was horrendous. If it got too hot, the sprinklers would turn on."

Their first attempt at shooting the first episode — in which the Doctor and his companions travel back to the Stone Age — was a disaster. The Doctor wasn't funny enough. The grand-daughter was too strange. Hussein had been too ambitious with his cinematic camerawork; the early TV cameras were just too clunky and heavy to pull it off. One of the actors remembered the day they screened the episode for Newman: "There was a long silence. And then Sydney got up and just said, 'Do it again, Waris.'"

Newman took Lambert and Hussein out to a Chinese restaurant in Kensington High Street to explain just how bad it was. "By rights I should be firing both of you," he told them, according to Hussein. But he believed in their talent and was willing to give them a second chance. Decades later, Hussein is still grateful: "For Sydney to put himself on the line makes him into somebody who, as far as I'm concerned, is a hero."

Their second attempt at filming the first episode went much better. The night before it was supposed to air they were already working on the filming of a second storyline. It was November 22, 1963. That date is better remembered for another reason.

Carole Ann Ford, who played the Doctor's grand-daughter Susan, was waiting for the elevator on her way up to the studio when she heard the news: John F. Kennedy had been shot. "I'll never actually understand how we got through it," she remembered, "because it was a very, very shocking thing... I was shaking. I thought, 'I'm never going to be able to do this.' ... I think I was trying not to cry, actually; I think we were all like that."

No matter how good it was, the premiere of Doctor Who was doomed to be overshadowed by the death of JFK. When the first episode aired the next day, it was slightly delayed in order to broadcast more news about the assassination. And the public just wasn't in the mood for time-travelling adventure. The BBC decided to the air the first episode again the very next week, but at the end of the first serial — four episodes based on the Stone Age story — the show's ratings were average at best. The BBC was going to need more convincing.

They say it was the Daleks who saved Doctor Who. The Doctor's arch-nemeses both terrified and thrilled children: their creepy robotic voices; their bone-chilling "Exterminate!" catchphrase; the aesthetics of a lethal salt and pepper shaker armed with a toilet plunger and a ray gun. The aliens who felt no emotion but hate were a hit as soon as they appeared for the very first time in the show's second serial. By the end of that storyline, there were more than 10 million people watching Doctor Who. Dalekmania had arrived.

Sydney Newman didn't like the Daleks. He agreed with one of the BBC reports when it said the show should avoid the use of "bug-eyed monsters." Newman called it "the cheapest form of science-fiction." But as you might expect from a 50 year-old show whose main character has been played in a dozen different forms by a dozen different actors, Doctor Who can't be reduced to the vision of one person. It quickly took on a life of its own. Those bug-eyed monsters became a staple of the show's format and a large part of its appeal, sending generations of delightfully terrified children scrambling to watch the action from behind the safety of their sofas.

But even half a century later, the use of those alien monsters still reflects the values Newman brought to the show when it first started. They're about more than just cheap scares; they're a learning opportunity. They give the Doctor a chance to demonstrate his respect for others and his belief that violence should be used only as the very last resort. He prefers to use his brain to solve problems. He's willing to risk his own life in order to open a dialogue with those bug-eyed monsters who, more often than not, turn out to have perfectly logical motives. Even if they're not always good ones.

"The Dalek Invasion of Earth," 1964

Those ideas about peace-making and peace-keeping had a new weight in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War. In fact, at the time Newman left Toronto, they were helping to forge a new Canadian national identity. The year before Newman's departure, future Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson had won the Nobel Peace Prize for being the champion of the brand new idea of United Nations peacekeeping. The idea quickly became a central part of the Canadian identity.

It was also, at the very same time, helping to reshape the British national identity. Pearson's peacekeepers were a response to British and French military aggression during the Suez Crisis in the Middle East. The Crisis was, for many Britons, a sign the Empire was not only over, but immoral. The BBC played an important role, clashing with the Conservative Prime Minster who wanted to muzzle opposition, pressuring the public broadcaster to support the government's position. It became a defining moment in the history of the BBC.

So it's not surprising a Canadian in the early 1960s would create a TV show reflecting something of a Pearsonian worldview — or that upon his arrival at the BBC, he would find plenty of people who agreed. Within a few years, in fact, Doctor Who had made the United Nations a major part of the show's storyline. And even today, the modern version of the series echoes the lessons learned in those dark days: the Doctor is haunted by the horrors of a recent Time War between his own people and the Daleks, and he's troubled by his own role in the violence.

Newman would continue on with the BBC until the late '60s — he was still there when the show made its next genius leap forward: the idea of "regeneration." It allowed them to replace the aging actor who played the First Doctor, William Hartnell, with a new actor playing a new twist on the same old character. It gave the show a built-in way of evolving over time, connecting with successive generations of viewers, and helping to ensure that it would still be a huge hit long after Newman and all the other original creators of the show had moved on. 

And for Newman, that time would come sooner rather than later. After he left the BBC, he stayed in England to make feature films for a while, but he didn't find much success with it. Besides, he missed Toronto.

"I am eternally interested in going back to Canada," he told one interviewer, "...it is my country. I mean, just the sheer thought of Yonge & College streets sends shivers... I can't wait to see the Toronto City Hall. I can't wait to go to Georgian Bay. It's my country. And there's something deep about this. It's corny and it's junior Chamber of Commerce stuff, but it's me."

Finally, after a decade in England, Newman headed back home to Toronto. London's Sunday Times mourned the loss. "Sydney Newman flew back to Canada yesterday, and British television will never be quite the same again. Arguably the most significant individual in the development of British television drama and a central architect of Canadian television in the fifties."

But the Canadian television scene he came back to wasn't quite the same as the one he'd left behind. The CBC had drastically slashed their drama department, prompting an exodus of Canadian talent. Homegrown writers, directors and actors all decided they would be better off in England or the United States. Newman called it, "a tremendous loss to... the consciousness of the nation... a tragedy for the country as a whole."

Instead of heading back to the CBC, Newman took a job as the head of the NFB. But it, too, was an organization in turmoil. This was 1970: the height of the separatist terrorist attacks by the FLQ. The desire to separate from the rest of Canada had reached a boiling point in Québec: there were riots, bombs going off, kidnappings of diplomats and politicians. Two months after Newman returned to the NFB, the FLQ murdered a cabinet minister. The Prime Minster temporarily declared martial law in Québec. Newman — who didn't even speak French — spent a lot of his time at the NFB clashing with separatists inside the organization. He claimed Québecois filmmakers were too focused on high-minded politics, ignoring ordinary people. And when Denys Arcand — one of the great Québecois filmmakers, who won an Oscar in 2004 for The Barbarian Invasions — made a documentary for the NFB that included two members of the FLQ calling for armed revolution, Newman kept it from being released. He was denounced for censorship. The FLQ even considered him as a target for kidnapping.

Meanwhile, the greatest success of his career wasn't even being aired in Canada. The CBC had shown the first 26 episodes of Doctor Who, but then stopped. Canadians wouldn't be able to watch it on TV again until the late 1970s, when TV Ontario finally picked it up for good. They even added to the educational angle of the show: an intro or wrap-up put each episode in its scientific or historical context, hosted at first by a futurist U of T professor and then Torontonian science-fiction writer Judith Merril.

Sadly, by the late 1980s, the show's popularity was slipping even at home in England. On Saturday afternoons, it was forced to complete with Mr. T in the wildly popular American show The A-Team; when it got moved to Mondays, it was up against the mother of all British kitchen sink dramas: Coronation Street. Doctor Who was almost cancelled in 1986, survived and then got cancelled for real. Newman had some meetings with the BBC in an attempt to save it and take over as producer, but he didn't get along with the network's new management. For more than a decade, the BBC didn't make any new episodes of Doctor Who. A full-length movie by FOX, featuring a new Doctor in an American setting, was meant to spark new interest and a new series, but it didn't work. It looked like Newman's greatest triumph was finally, completely dead.

But not for long. A new generation of BBC executives and producers realized what they'd lost. In 2005, Doctor Who came back with a new Doctor, a new companion, a new look, and all the old villains. This time the CBC played a more direct role. They aired the new series right from the very beginning — even accidentally allowed a leak of the first episode before it aired — and then co-produced the next two seasons. Canada had invested public funds in the career of the show's creator and now Canada invested public funds in order to help the show regain its position as one of the most popular dramas on TV. The reboot has been shown every week in more than 50 countries. The biggest episodes are seen by more than 10 million viewers in the UK alone. And there's not a single drama on television that gets a better appreciation rating from viewers. Half a century after the TARDIS first materialized at Studio D in Lime Grove, Sydney Newman's greatest triumph is quite literally the most loved drama on television.

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Tonight the BBC airs a drama all about Newman, Lambert, Hussein and the making of Doctor Who: An Adventure In Space and Time. This Saturday, they air the big 50th anniversary special. I could not possibly be more excited. #OMFG It's also being shown in theatres on Saturday and on Monday, though Saturday is already sold out. Cineplex has all the deets here.

I'll be writing about the new episode at the Little Red Umbrella, where I've already got posts up about the recent mini episode and pretty much all of last season. You can check that all out here.

Newman and Lambert have both been referenced a couple of times in the new version of the series. There's a character in one episode called Verity Newman; in another, in which the Doctor forgets who he is and think he's human, he gives his parents' names are Sydney and Verity.

There's a whole documentary about the origins of Doctor Who called, appropriately enough, Doctor Who: Origins. There's another one, too, called The Story of Doctor Who. They're both great. The BBC also did a radio program all about he creation of the show recently, which you can stream online here. And they have a whole website dedicated to the creation of the show, including all those early reports and character sketches. They also have an article about one of the documents here.

Jamie Bradburn has the full story of Flight Into Danger and "The Adventures of Sydney Newman" in a post for Torontoist here. Sydney Newman gave a long interview to the CBC in 1966, while he was still with the BBC, which is where some of the quotes in my post come from. You can watch it online thanks to the CBC archives here. The Museum of Broadcast Communications has a webpage about him here. The Canadian Film Encyclopedia has one here. The British Film Institute has another one here. He's also featured a bit in the book Rewind & Search which you can, in part, online thanks to Google Books here. And in When Television Was Young here. His Wikipedia page is here.

Sydney Newman interestingly enough, was also the first person to Marshall McLuhan on TV, as part of a series on University of Toronto professors which you can learn a little bit more about here.

Newman died of a heart attack in 1997. He lived in Governor's Bridge, just north of the Brickworks. When he passed away, the Guardian declared, ""For ten brief but glorious years, Sydney Newman... was the most important impresario in Britain... His death marks not just the end of an era but the laying to rest of a whole philosophy of popular art."

Verity Lambert has also passed away. The Independent shares more about her story in her obituary here. She would eventually run her own Drama department at Thames Television. Sad they're not both still here to enjoy the show's 50th anniversary.

You can watch a couple of Sydney Newman's WWII propaganda films here and here. The Canadian Film Encyclopedia has more about the entire "Canada Carries On" series here. You can learn more about the founding of the NFB here. And about the NFB in general from the book In The National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada which is, in part, online thanks to Google Books here. The Canadian Encyclopedia shares the history of the CBC here. You can learn more about General Motors Theatre here. And about Lister Sinclair's controversial abortion CBC radio play here. Wikipedia has a bit about the Canadian version of Howdy Doody here. And there's a blog with a little bit more about it here.

There are a bunch of Canadian Doctor Who fan sites. In fact, the Canadian fan club offshoot of the original British fan club — The Doctor Who Appreciation Society — is the longest-running Whovian fan club in North America. 33 years old this year. They're called the Doctor Who Information Network. There's a terribly popular podcast, too: Radio Free Skaro. And countless blogs and Tumblrs, as well as reference sites like The Doctor Who Reference Guide and Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time (Travel).

You can learn more about the BBC and the Suez Crisis in this PDF from the BBC.

You can learn more about the Torontonian director of Weekend At Bernie's, Ted Kotcheff, here.

Oh and here's an interesting comment from Sylvester McCoy, who played the Seventh Doctor, linking the Daleks to that sense of historical militarism: "I think Doctor Who played a lot on the fears we were growing up with. You know, the Daleks were kind of like fascistic. Those images of tanks in the First World War coming over, a Dalek looks like one of those in a way."

I also wanted to include something about the amazing original theme song and title sequence, both done with cutting edge experimental technology by 1960s standards. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop put the music together using tape loops, piano strings, oscillators and filters. The TARDIS sound comes from scrapping keys along piano strings. Soooooo nerdily cool.

Alright, that's it. I'm done.