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Boris Brott, conductor, violinist, and producer, was born in Montreal on 14 Mar 1944, the son of renowned conductor and composer Alexander Brott and cellist Lotte (Goetzel) Brott. He studied violin with his father and performed at the age of five with the orchestra of the Les Concerts symphoniques de Montréal (Montreal Symphony Orchestra). He studied at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal and the McGill Conservatory. In 1959 he founded the Philharmonic Youth Orchestra of Montreal and led it in his conducting debut in that city. His first international success came in June 1962, when he won third prize at the Liverpool Competition.

Brott has held the following positions:
1963-1965 Assistant conductor to Walter Susskind with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra
1964-1968 First conductor of the Northern Sinfonia at Newcastle-on-Tyne.
1964-1967 Principal conductor for the touring company of the Royal Ballet Covent Garden.
1968-1969 Assistant conductor to Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
1967-1972 Directed >Lakehead Symphony Orchestra
1971-1973 Directed Regina Symphony Orchestra
1969-1990 Artistic director and conductor of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra; under his leadership the orchestra grew from an amateur ensemble to a professional one with a 42-week season and 16,000 subscribers.
1972 Appointed conductor of the BBC Welsh Orchestra
1975 Assumed directorship of the CBC Winnipeg Orchestra
1982 to 1985 Artistic director and conductor of Symphony Nova Scotia
1983-1991 Led the Ontario Place Pops Orchestra
1987-1989 National president of the Youth and Music Canada (Jeunesses musicales du Canada)
1988 Founded (with his wife, author and attorney Ardyth Webster Brott) the Boris Brott Summer Music Festival in Hamilton
1989 Appointed associate director of Alexander Brott’s McGill Chamber Orchestra
1989 Founded the National Academy Orchestra of Canada, a mentor-apprentice program.
1995 Appointed music director of the New West Symphony, California
2002 Assumed leadership of McGill Chamber Orchestra
2004 Appointed principal conductor of youth and education concerts for the National Arts Centre

In addition, Brott has been guest conductor of symphonies and opera companies throughout Canada, Europe, the U.S., Israel, central and South America, Japan and Korea. Brott has produced, conducted, or hosted a large number of television and radio programs for the CBC, and the BBC and ITV in the UK, and recorded with various orchestras for CBC, Mercury, Pro-Arte and Sony Classical. In 1986 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, and received an American Music Award. In 1988 he received an honorary doctorate from McMaster University. He was named Knight of Malta (1990), International Man of the Year (Cambridge, England, 1992), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of Great Britain (1996). In 2000, he conducted the Vatican premiere of Leonard Bernstein's controversial Mass before Pope John Paul II.

Cyrus Eaton was born in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1883 and educated at McMaster University, receiving a B.A. in 1905. After moving to the United States, he had a successful business career in steel, coal, railways, public utilities and agriculture. In the 1950s he agreed to finance the Pugwash conferences, named after his birthplace. The conferences brought together scientists who were trying to diminish the threat of nuclear war. In 1964 Eaton travelled to the Soviet Union and met with Nikita Khrushchev in an attempt to bring more understanding between capitalism and communism. Mr. Eaton was the recipient of many honorary degrees and awards. He died in 1979.

The son of the prolific writer Leslie McFarlane, Brian McFarlane was born in New Liskeard, Ontario on 10 August 1931, and raised in various towns and cities such as Haileybury, Whitby and Ottawa. He accepted a hockey scholarship to St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. and graduated in 1955. McFarlane is perhaps best known as a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada for 25 years. He made similar broadcasts on NHL games for the major American networks CBS and NBC. His contribution to hockey also includes the creation of the character Peter Puck.

McFarlane is an expert on hockey history and has written more than 50 books on the sport, many for young readers, with such publishers as McClelland and Stewart, Methuen, and Scholastic. In 1995, after a lengthy career in broadcasting and journalism, McFarlane was inducted into the media section of the Hockey Hall of Fame. McFarlane has also been admitted into the St. Lawrence University Hall of Fame, the Ontario Sports Legends Hall of Fame, the Ottawa Sports Legends Hall of Fame and the Whitby Sports Hall of Fame and. His memoirs, published by Stoddart, Toronto in 2000, are entitled Brian McFarlane's World of Hockey.

More recently, he has turned to writing the Mitchell Brothers books, a series of young adult fiction, the first volume of which was issued in 2003. McFarlane currently resides in the Toronto area. He is married to Joan Pellet, also a St. Lawrence graduate, and the couple have three children: Lauren, Brenda and Michael.

William Nobleman was born in Toronto in 1930. He attended the University of Toronto and Toronto Teachers College. He taught in public and secondary schools in Ontario from 1949 to 1956. He was also vice-principal and principal for several years. He served as a Board of Education member of various standing committees in the areas of management, property, finance and vocational advisory and was instrumental in the achievement of upgrading public and secondary school libraries. From 1957 to 1963 he was a representative for advertising sales for Chatelaine magazine in Toronto. In August 1963 he was appointed Director of Advertising for Saturday Night magazine. He was Director of Marketing in January 1965; Vice-President and General Manager in September 1966 and President in November 1969. In 1971 Saturday Night Publications Limited entered into agreement with Second Century Canada Publications Inc. to manage the publication of Saturday Night and Monday Morning and Nobleman also became President of Second Century. In 1981 he served as President of William Nobleman & Associates. Currently he is the managing director of Know the World Tour Organizers Inc., a company founded by his wife in 1989. He lives in Toronto.

George Stephen Vickers, was born on 19 December 1913 in St. Catharines, Ontario, the son of William Vickers and Jane E. Vickers (nee Rooke). After attending St. Catharines Collegiate Institute, he entered McMaster University and took his B.A. (Hons.) in English and History in the spring of 1936. While at McMaster, he also took a few courses in Fine Art, where he met Elizabeth Smith. In the fall of 1937 he entered the graduate program in Fine Art at Harvard University. In the summer of 1939, he sailed to Europe to begin his doctoral studies but had to return with the outbreak of World War II. On 3 June 1940, he married Elizabeth Smith, and until 1942, they lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where their daughter, Hannah, was born. They would have a son, Daniel, in 1952.

In 1942, they returned to Canada, where Stephen became a machinist in Hamilton and then joined the Canadian Signal Corps. Between 1943 and 1945, he served as a corporal at Camp Vimy in Barriefield, Ontario, mainly as an instructor. At the war’s end he was discharged, and he returned with his wife and daughter to complete his Ph.D. at Harvard. In 1946, however, he was offered a permanent position in Fine Art at the University of Toronto. He dedicated his career to teaching – both graduate and undergraduate – and to building the Fine Art Department at Toronto. He also played a role in designing the first secondary school program in art history for the province of Ontario and was the primary author of Art and Man (1964), the first high school textbook in art history published in Canada. He retired in 1980. On 1 November 1993 he was struck by a car near his home. Two days later he died of a massive coronary at St. Michael’s Hospital.

Stelio Cro was born in Rome, Italy, on 7 April 1936. He was educated in Rome up to the junior high school years; he finished his secondary school at the Scuola Cristoforo Colombo, the Italian school run by the Italian Government in Argentina. In 1963 he obtained a Licenciatura en Letras at the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras of the University of Buenos Aires; in 1966 he obtained a Doctorate at the Facolta de Lingue e Letterature Straniere of the University of Venice, Italy.

After teaching at the University of Buenos Aires and at Florida State University, he joined McMaster University in 1972. He retired from the Department of Modern Languages in June of 1996, as Professor Emeritus. In 1995 he was awarded the McMaster Student Union Teaching Award for the Humanities. Cro is the author of nine books.

Bob Jaggard, born in Hamilton, Ont., was a trade unionist and community activist. A long-time employee of the Hamilton Street Railway, retiring in 1988 after 36 years of service, Mr. Jaggard was a member of Local 107 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, serving several terms as president. He was also a founder of the Hamilton Beach Preservation Committee, a member of the Hamilton and District Labour Council, and a member of the Communist Party of Canada. He was a candidate for that party in the Ontario provincial election of 1987 in the Hamilton East riding. Mr. Jaggard died in 1994.

R. Norris Wolfenden was a medical doctor and graduate of Cambridge University who did biological research in the North Atlantic, 1899-1907. He was a fellow of the Linnaean Society and the Zoological Society. His first cruise was around the Shetland Islands where he collected plankton in June 1899. In 1904 he made an extended cruise from Valentia, Ireland to the Azores on his own yacht and repeated much of that cruise in 1905. He seems to have been inspired in his work by the 1876 voyage of the Challenger. He published his observations as Scientific and Biological Researches in the North Atlantic (1909).

Lord Alfred Spencer Churchill was the second son of the sixth Duke of Marlborough (1793-1857). He was born on 24 April 1842. He served in the military and also as Member of Parliament for Woodstock, 1845-1847 and 1857-1865. He was a member of the Society of Arts, serving as chairman, 1875-1880. He married Harriett Gough-Calthorpe in 1857. Their daughter, Adeline ("Daisy") Spencer Churchill was born in 1861. Lord Alfred died in London on 21 September 1893. His daughter married Colonel William Hugh Williams on 1 August 1895. They had two sons, Herbrand Alfred Collam ("Sam") Williams, born 30 June 1896, and Geoffrey Williams. Both sons served during World War I. Herbrand was a Lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He later rose to the rank of Captain. Herbrand married a Russian, Xenia Poushkine, on 8 April 1927. Geoffrey served on H.M.S. Queen, H.M.S. St. Vincent and H.M.S. Dragon.

Robert James Sawyer, novelist, was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on April 29, 1960 and lives in Mississauga, Ontario with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink. He is one of Canada’s best known science fiction writers. He is the only Canadian writer to have won all three of the top international awards for science fiction: the 1995 Nebula Award for The Terminal Experiment, the 2003 Hugo Award for Hominids, and the 2006 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Mindscan.

Sawyer is the author of 22 novels. His short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories and many anthologies. In addition to his own writing, Sawyer edits the Robert J. Sawyer Books science fiction imprint for Red Deer Press. Sawyer has also worked on radio, film and television productions. His novel, FlashForward (1999) was made into an hour-long dramatic TV series consisting of 22 episodes by ABC in 2009-2010. Sawyer has written and narrated documentaries about science fiction for CBC Radio’s Ideas series and hosted documentary series for Canada’s Vision TV. He has also been a freelance writer of technological articles.

Sawyer has taught science fiction writing at Ryerson University, University of Toronto, Humber College and the Banff Centre. He holds an honourary doctorate from Laurentian University. He has been a Writer-in-Residence at three Ontario libraries: the Richmond Hill Public Library, the Kitchener Public Library and the Toronto Public Library. Sawyer has given numerous talks at many venues, including the Library of Congress and National Library of Canada and has been keynote speaker at dozens of events in places such as Boston, Tokyo and Barcelona.

Sawyer has been an advocate of Canadian science fiction. He helped establish the Canadian Region of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1992 and served as the first Canadian Regional Director from 1992-1995. Sawyer’s work is well received internationally. His novels have been translated into many languages.

Guiseppe Buonamici was an Italian pianist, teacher, and editor, born in Florence in 1846. He died there in 1914. He studied first with his uncle, Ceccherini and completed his studies with Hans von Bülow and Joseph Rheinberger at the Munich Conservatory (1868-1870), where was he was then appointed professor.

Pieter Tas (1868-1947) was born in Holland but became best known as a musician in England. From 1907 to 1910 he was resident conductor of the private orchestra of the Duke of Devonshire. His son Pierre Tas (1902-1971) was a well-regarded violinist and teacher.

Norman Angell, author, was born in the Mansion House, Holbeach, on 26 December 1872 and educated at Geneva University. Rather than going on to Cambridge, at age seventeen, he left for the United States, supporting himself by manual labour. He later became a journalist, working in San Francisco, before returning to Europe. From 1904 to 1912 he was the Paris editor of The Daily Mail. His 1910 influential book The Great Illusion, on the prevention of war, was very widely read and discussed.

He was one of the founding members of the Union of Democratic Control. From 1929 to 1931 he served as Labour Member of Parliament for North Bradford. He was knighted in 1931 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. He died in Croydon on 7 October 1967.

Virginia Woolf, novelist and essayist, was born in Kensington on 25 January 1882 and educated at home by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf. Together they established the Hogarth Press in 1917. Although her early novels employed a more traditional style of writing, she later explored different techniques such as stream of consciousness. In addition to her fiction, Woolf wrote essays, biography, and the feminist classic A Room of One's Own. She suffered from bouts of mental instability throughout her life and drowned herself on 28 March 1941.

Eric White, music critic and arts administrator, was born in Bristol on 10 September 1905 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. From 1929 to 1933 he worked as a translator for the League of Nations. Later on, from 1942 to 1971 he was employed by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and its successor, the Arts Council. His most important book is considered to be Stravinsky: The Composer and His Work (1966), based on a long study. He also wrote The Rise of English Opera (1951) and A History of English Opera (1983). He died in September 1985 in London.

Doug Ward was active in the Company of Young Canadians.

J. N. (Pat) Kelly served as public relations adviser to the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco) during the 1946 strike. He lived with Hugh Hilton, President of the Company, at the Royal Connaught Hotel during the strike.

Ernst Zundel, Holocaust denier, was born in Germany on 24 April 1939. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a trade school. He had shown promise as an artist and was sent into a training program of a graphic arts institute. He moved to Canada in 1958 and was hired as an apprentice in commercial art at Simpsons in Toronto. He became a very prolific graphic artist. In 1959 Zundel met Adrien Arcand, leader of Canada's National Socialist Christian Party. Through him Zundel formed North American and European contacts. He ran for leadership of the Liberal Party in 1966. Beginning in the 1970s Zundel organized revisionist conferences, and began his mass mailing of revisionist books and pamphlets. In 1984 he was charged under Canada's Criminal Code for publishing hate literature which promoted social and racial charges. The trial was held in 1985 and he was found guilty.

George Clarke was the son of Sir William Clarke, England’s first Secretary at War (1661-1666), and his wife Dorothy. George himself became the fourth Secretary at War sometime before March 1690. The Battle of the Boyne took place in July of that year. He held an estate at Kilkenny in Ireland.

Denis ApIvor, an English composer and musicologist, gathered together a variety of materials relating to Van Dieren and Darton.