Photo: Factory Worker During WWII

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

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

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

Canada's First Beatnik Happening

The Bohemian Embassy

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEC VAX 11/780

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos Of Old-Timey Car Crashes

The City of Toronto has its own official Flickr page for historical photos and though there are just a few galleries there, one of them is the oh-so-awesome "How NOT to drive in Toronto". It has a bunch of photos of car accidents in the city, almost all of them from the early years of the twentieth century. My favourite is probably the one I've posted above, an electric car hanging half off the north Glen Road Bridge in Rosedale sometime around 1912. But there are lots worth seeing: auto polo at the Ex,  a vehicle swallowed by a giant sinkhole; another upside-down in a ditch. You can visit the gallery on Flickr, but I'll also embed the slideshow right here (for captions, make it fullscreen and click on the photo):

Screwing Over The Locals

A map of the Toronto Purchase

It was the Seneca, one of the nations in the Haudenosaunee Conferation (the Europeans called them Iroquois) who were here in the 1600s, when the first Europeans started to visit this land. They'd established a village at the mouth of the Don and another on a bend of the Humber, where Baby Point is now. They were recent arrivals though, having just pushed the Wyandot—weakened by war and European diseases—north and taken over. And by the time the British showed up in the late 1700s, the Seneca had been driven out by the Mississaugas. And so it was with them that the British government negotiated the official purchase of the land our city is built on.

The Empire wanted everything from Etobicoke Creek in the west to Ashbridges Bay in the east, stretching north from the lake for 28 miles. In return, they were willing to pay £1700, hand over some supplies and make sure the Natives never really understood what was happening. As Chief Bryan LaForme put it a few months ago, when the Canadian government paid the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation $145 million in an attempt to make up for it, “They knew they were trying to screw us and they didn’t hesitate to do it.”

The exact details of the Toronto Purchase seem to vary slightly from one source to the other, but here is pretty much the exact list of the stuff Toronto was "bought" for:

£1700
6 bales of heavy cloth
4 bales of rough coats
196 hoes
8 half-barrels of gunpowder
5 boxes of guns
3 cases of shot
10 kegs of ball
24 brass kettles
4 pieces of broadcloth
5 pieces of embossed serge
200 pounds of tobacco
47 "carrots" of tobacco
432 knives
120 looking-glasses
4 trunks of linen
18 pieces of garter
30 pieces of ribbon
60 plain hats
24 lace hats
2000 gun flints
432 fish hooks
10 pieces of flowered flannel
160 blankets
1 case of barleycorn beads
96 gallons of rum

Photo: Front and Church and Wellington around 1885

Agatha Barc, who writes the excellent "Nostalgia Tripping" column over on blogTO, posted this photo as part of her history of the Flatiron Building—the iconic triangle-shaped building at the intersection of Front and Church and Wellington. This is what the corner looked like in the days before the Flatiron Building was built—when the very same spot was occupied by another one of the Toronto's most iconic historical landmarks: the Coffin Block.

The Coffin Block is the three-story building in the middle of the photo. You can't tell, of course, but it was yellow. It was built in the 1830s, when the city was only a few decades old, by the same architect who designed Osgoode Hall. Back then, Front and Wellington and Church was easily one of the most important intersections in Toronto, with the harbour just a few steps to the south and the St. Lawrence Market a stone's throw away. The Coffin Block would spend 50 years at the heart of city life, home to a variety of businesses, most notably some of our earliest telegraphs companies and William Weller's stagecoach company. The stage would pull up right out front—with the Wellington Hotel conveniently located right next door—and you'd buy your tickets from the small room at the from the building (where the stripey bit is in the photo). Before you knew it you'd be in Montreal; William Weller's stagecoach held the record for the fastest trip between the two cities in the days before trains: a blistering 35 hours and 40 minutes.

The photo was taken by F.W. Micklethwaite, who was one of Toronto's most important early photographers. I'll definitely be posting more of his stuff. Just a few years after he snapped this shot, the Coffin Block was torn down so that George Gooderham, owner of the massive Gooderhan & Worts distillery, could put the Flatiron Building in its place. You can find out more about him in the post I wrote about his company, here.

You can find out more about the Coffin Block here and here. And there's a drawing of it here.

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

Reykjavik, 1942

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The photo was found via a postcard on Ebay here.

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