Born in 1933, Victor DiBello was a musician and conductor. In 1950, after playing in the East York Collegiate Orchestra, he founded the Pro Arte Orchestra of Toronto, originally an amateur group but later becoming a professional ensemble. As well as conducting the Pro Arte Orchestra, he was the conductor of the Hamilton Philharmonic from 1959 to 1962 and Music Coordinator, later Music Director, at the Stratford (Ont.) Festival in the 1960s.
Sid Blum was involved in various social welfare and human rights organizations in Canada, including the National Committee on Human Rights.
C. F. McLoughlin was a member of the United Arts Club in Dublin and an acquaintance of Jack Butler Yeats and other Irish writers. McLoughlin published two volumes of poetry. He used the pseudonym Conn Mecando for Imaginative Meaning: A Prismatic Medium. He also used the pseudonym Maelseachlainn for the annotations he added to letters and manuscripts in his fonds. Finally, he was nicknamed the Gunman. According to Patricia Boylan in All Cultivated People: A History of the United Arts Club, Dublin, "he was a peaceful man who spent most of his time behind a newspaper in the Dante Room [of the Arts Club], scowling at intruders, and was seldom seen in the bar. He got his nickname from his habit of wearing his hat well down over his eyes and his trench coat tightly belted in the manner of a Chicago gangster.
John G. ("Jack") McClelland, publisher, was born in Toronto, Ont. in 1922 and educated at the University of Toronto. He joined McClelland and Stewart in 1946. He sold the company in 1987 and established a literary agency, Jack McClelland and Associates. It was incorporated in January 1989 and operated until 1993. His selected letters, Imagining Canadian Literature, were published in 1998. He died on 14 June, 2004.
Percy, H. R. (Herbert Rolland)
Herbert Rolland (Bill) Percy was born in Burnham, Kent, in 1920. He retired from the Canadian Navy in 1971 with the rank of Lieutenant Commander, 35 years after he entered the Royal Navy in England at the age of 16. In 1942 he married Mary Davina James. Together they raised three children. The author of numerous short stories, Percy has also written novels, biographies, and navy training manuals. He acted as editor of Canadian Author and Bookman from 1963 to 1966, and was involved in a number of professional organizations for writers. Percy died in 1997.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield ("Tom") Clarke, author, was born in Barbados on 26 July 1934. His parents were Kenneth Trotman and Gladys Irene Clarke. His mother later married F.H. Luke. Clarke immigrated to Canada in 1956 and attended Trinity College at the University of Toronto for a short time. His interest in writing began early in life, and in the 1960s his short stories began to be published in Canadian and other periodicals. Clarke's stories and novels primarily centre around the plight of the immigrant West Indian in Canada, although his first two novels, The Survivors of the Crossing and Amongst Thistles and Thorns, take place in Barbados.
He was a member of The Immigration and Refugee Board from 1983 to 1993; he also held a position with The Ontario Film Review Board from 1984 to 1987. Clarke was the inaugural recipient of The Rogers Communications Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for his semi-autobiographical novel The Origin of Waves, published in 1997. His 2002 novel, The Polished Hoe, won the Trillium, Giller and Commonwealth prizes. His novel More was published in 2008. The author currently resides in Toronto, Ont. For further biographical material, please consult McMaster University's Library Research News (6, no. 1, Spring 1982) and Stella Algoo-Baksh, Austin C. Clarke: A Biography (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994). Clarke died in Toronto on 26 June 2016.
David McFadden, poet and travel writer, was born on 11 October 1940 in Hamilton, Ont. He worked as a proofreader at The Hamilton Spectator from 1962-1970 and then as a reporter from 1970 to 1976. He published his first book of poetry, The Poem Poem in 1967.
In 1978 he left Ontario for British Columbia, serving first as writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University and then, from 1979-1982, as instructor, Fred Wah School of Writing, David Thompson University Centre, Nelson, B.C. He returned to Ontario as writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, 1983-1984. His Gypsy Guitar (1987) was nominated for a Governor General's Award. In 2013, he won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his 2012 anthology What's the Score?
McFadden passed away on June 6th, 2018 at the age of 77.
Jack Winter was born on 19 April 1936 in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He was educated at McGill University in Montréal and the University of Toronto. He taught at both the University of Toronto and York University. While in Canada, he wrote plays for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as well as for the stage; he published two books of poetry in 1957 and 1973 and one play in 1972. In 1976 he moved to England where he continued to write radio, television and stage plays. He has held the C. Day Lewis Fellowship of the Greater London Arts Association and the Arts Council of Great Britain Creative Writing Fellowship. Presently he lives in Bath and is a tutor of Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. In 1995 he published his first collection of poetry in Britain, Misplaced Persons.
Klaus H. Pringsheim was the son of Klaus Pringsheim, a conductor and composer. He was born in Germany in 1923 but he grew up in Japan where his father taught music. He remained in Japan until after the Occupation at the end of World War II. He then studied Political Science in the United States at both Berkeley and Columbia. He taught in the Political Science Department at McMaster University for 23 years. Upon retirement, he became president of the Canada -Japan Trade Council, a post he held from 1989 to 2000. He died on 6 February 2001. He published an autobiography, Man of the World: Memoirs of Europe, Asia and North America in 1995.
Don Lake, antiquarian bookseller, was born in Toronto on 11 July 1950. In the late 1970s he was involved in the establishment of a Toronto chapter of the Independent Socialists and in the publication of Workers' Action. In 1978 he began a bookstore called October Books. His current antiquarian business, D. & E. Lake Ltd., houses a large inventory of rare books (especially pertaining to early printed books, voyages and travels, Canadiana/Americana, and illustrated books), antique maps and prints, and modern books on art, architecture, and the decorative arts. In addition to antiquarian books, his company also sells Canadian art and has regular exhibitions of artwork in this area.
Roy MacSkimming was born in 1944, grew up in Ottawa and attended the University of Toronto. From 1964 to 1968 he worked as an editor with Clarke, Irwin. In 1969 MacSkimming co-founded New Press in Toronto with James Bacque and Dave Godfrey. He later co-founded the Association of Canadian Publishers, a lobby group focused on strengthening the publishing industry. When New Press was acquired by General Publishing in 1974, MacSkimming became books editor, literary columnist and publishing reporter at The Toronto Star. In 1977 he moved to Ottawa to work with the Canada Council for the Arts, administering policies and programs for book publishing. In 1990 MacSkimming began a ten-year involvement with the Association of Canadian Publishers as policy director and government relations advisor. He is the author of several books including The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers.
Cyril Greenland was a, social worker, co-founder of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health), professor at McMaster University, government advisor, researcher and author of a number of books. His thoughts on child welfare, the rights of the blind, and humane treatment of the mentally ill created a lasting change in Canadian social policy. Born 20 December 1919, to Henry and Annie (née Levy) Grundland, Cyril was the second of five children in an impoverished Jewish family living in Bethnal Green in London’s East End. Henry Grundland abandoned the family and Cyril’s mother struggled to feed her brood. Yet she never turned away anyone in even greater need. Annie, who had a great influence on him, suffered from chronic depression and died in 1949 in a mental hospital, of liver cancer.
Greenland left home at 16 to become an apprentice watchmaker, but later managed to take a degree in social work at the London School of Economics, and much later a PhD at the University of Birmingham. It was while he was at LSE that he changed his name to Greenland. He worked at various hospitals in England, ending up at Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, Scotland, where he met Jane Donald, a psychiatric nurse. They married and started a family that was to include five children. They moved to Canada in 1958 when Greenland became director of social work at the provincial psychiatric hospital in Whitby, ON. He joined McMaster University in 1970 at the School of Social Work studying child abuse, criminal violence, and mental disorders. He retired in 1989. He was diagnosed with leukemia and lymphoma in 2002 and died in 2012.
Harry J. Waisglass was a pioneer in labour relations and mediation. He retired as Director of McMaster University's Labour Studies Programme in 1981. Before coming to McMaster in 1975 he had worked as a researcher for the United Steelworkers of America, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and other labour organizations. He also held the position of Director-General of Research and Information at the Canadian Department of Labour for some years. He passed away at the age of 93, in October 2014.
Elizabeth Evans was born in Lincoln, England on 16 March 1916. She worked as a nurse for 30 years while living in England before moving to Hamilton, Ont. in 1970. Evans is her maiden name, and the name she uses in writing her poetry. Her married name is Joyce Elizabeth Crouse. Her four books of poetry are: A Mundane Magic (1986), Soft Syllables (1988) The Yin & Yang of It (1990), and A Sense of Wonder (1993).
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, composer, pianist, and music critic, was born Leon Dudley Sorabji on 14 August 1892 in Chingford, England, the son of a Spanish-Sicilian mother and a Parsi father. He adopted his Parsi names later in life. He was educated at private schools and self-taught as a composer. He composed orchestral works, chamber music, and works for piano, voice, and organ. For a long time he discouraged public performances of his music but relented in the mid 1970s. He died at Winfrith, Dorset on 15 October 1988.
Charles Henry (Marty) Gervais was born in Windsor in 1946. He received a BA degree from the University of Guelph and later studied writing under Morley Callaghan at the University of Windsor, where he received an MA in Creative Writing. Gervais has undertaken many roles in the arts community. He established Black Moss Press in 1969, one of the earliest and most enduring literary publishers in Canada.
He was also an award-winning journalist with the Windsor Star, for 35 years, beginning his career in 1974 and retiring in 2008. He was a special correspondent, based in Iraq for three months in 2007. He continues to write "My Town" column on a freelance basis. His books, often concerned with the history of the Windsor area, including Baldoon (1976, a play written with James Reaney), The Rumrunners (1980), The Fighting Parson (1983), The Border Police (1992), and, more recently, Keeping with Tradition: The Working Man's Choir, Forty Years of Song with Il Coro Italiano (2002). His first published novel, Reno, appeared in 2005 from Mosaic Press. Another book, Taking My Blood, charting his time in a hospital, and including photographs he took while he was there, came out in 2005. In addition to being the author of 14 books of poetry (the most recent Wait for Me [2006]), he is the resident writing professional at the University of Windsor and managing editor of the Windsor Review. Gervais is also a trained photographer. His exhibition entitled "A Show of Hands: Boxing on the Border" documented the life of young boxers on the Canada-U.S border.
Stephen Douglas Reid was born in Massey, Ontario on 12 March 1950, the second of nine children born to Douglas Reid and Sylvia Shiels. At the age of sixteen, Reid turned to criminal activities, and he was jailed in 1971 for his part in the theft of gold bars in Ottawa. Escaping from prison, Reid, along with Patrick Mitchell and Lionel Wright, formed The Stopwatch Gang, robbing over 100 banks in Canada and the United States from their home in Arizona in the late 1970s. The FBI apprehended Reid in 1980, and he served time in Marion Penitentiary in Illinois until his extradition to Canada.
In 1984, while incarcerated at Millhaven Institution in Ontario, he began to write. The manuscript of his first novel, Jackrabbit Parole, attracted the attention of Susan Musgrave, who agreed to edit the manuscript. The book was published in 1986, the same year that Reid and Musgrave were married. He was released on parole in 1987. They then lived with their daughters Charlotte Musgrave and Sophie Musgrave Reid on Vancouver Island, and Reid joined in the activities of the literary community in British Columbia. His works include short stories, poetry, plays, articles, many of which have been published by Canada's leading newspapers and magazines. Much of Reid's writing and other work has involved issues relating to prison.
In 1999, as a result of a relapse into addiction, Reid participated in one more bank robbery, for which he is now serving an 18-year sentence at William Head Institution in British Columbia. In January 2008 he was granted day parole. Late in 2010 he was back in prison for violating parole. Reid had been living at his home in Massett, BC when in June 2018, he was admitted to hospital and died five days later of pulmonary edema and a heart blockage.
Roy McKeen Wiles was born on 15 October 1903 in Truro, Nova Scotia, and educated at Dalhousie University and Harvard University. He began his academic career at the University of Alberta as a lecturer in English in 1928. He came to McMaster University as an assistant professor of English in 1935, eventually rising to professor and then department chair. He also served as a lay reader for the Anglican Diocese of Niagara. He is the author of Serial Publications in England Before 1750 (1957) and Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England (1965). He died in Ottawa, Ontario on 9 March 1974.
Klaus Pringsheim, conductor, teacher, music critic and composer, was born in Munich on 24 July 1883. His father was Alfred Pringsheim (b. 1850). Klaus Pringsheim studied music under Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) in Vienna. In 1931 he left Germany for Japan where he became a professor at the Ueno Academy of Music. From 1941-1946 he directed the Tokyo Chamber Symphony Orchestra. After a brief period in the United States, he returned to Japan in 1951. He was appointed director of the Musashino Academy of Music. He composed an opera as well as music for the piano and chamber music. Pringsheim was the brother-in-law of Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and his fonds contains some letters written by Mann. He died in Tokyo on 7 December 1972. One of Klaus Pringsheim's sons, Klaus H. Pringsheim, has published a memoir, Man of the World: Memoirs of Europe, Asia & North America (1930s to 1980s) (1995).
J. L. (James Louis) Garvin was born at Birkenhead on 12 April 1868. After a rudimentary education, he began work as a clerk in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1891 he became a proof reader on the Newcastle Chronicle with the option of contributing to the newspaper for free. His reporting on Charles Stewart Parnell's (1846-1891) funeral launched Garvin's career. In 1899 he joined the Daily Telegraph as a leader and special writer. In 1908 he became editor and manager of the Observer a post he held until February 1942 when he had a falling out with the owner, Waldorf Astor. Garvin finished his career at the Daily Telegraph after an interim stint at the Sunday Express. Garvin was the editor of the 13th and 14th editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and well as a three-volume Life of Joseph Chamberlain (1932-1934). He died on 23 January 1947 at his home, Gregories, Beaconsfield.
