Affichage de 597 résultats

Vera Brittain, writer, lecturer, pacifist, and feminist, was born on 29 December 1893 at Newcastle-under-Lyme. She went up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1914 but left to serve as a VAD in World War I. She returned to Oxford after the war where she became friends with Winifred Holtby, a budding novelist. She married George Catlin in 1925 and became the mother of two children. Her most well-known book is Testament of Youth (1933) about her experiences in World War I. During World War II she was a leading member of the Peace Pledge Union. She died in London on 29 March 1970.

Denis Martin Shaw, Professor Emeritus, McMaster University School of Geography and Geology, was born on 20 August 1923, in Lancashire, England to Norman Wade and Sylvia (Shackleton) Shaw. He attended the King Edward VII school in St. Anne’s and continued his education at Emmanuel College in Cambridge. There, he received his BA in 1943 and later in 1948 his MA, after having served as a Signals Officer for three years. In 1946 Shaw married Doris Pauline (Paula) Mitchell. They had 3 children: Geoffrey, Gillian, and Peter Shaw. Soon thereafter he enrolled at the University of Chicago for a doctorate. By 1951 he had joined the Department of Geology at McMaster University. Shaw divorced Paula Shaw in 1975, and married Susan Evans in 1976. He died in Hamilton on 6 October 2003.

Anna Porter (née Szigethy), publisher and author, was born in Budapest during World War II. In 1956, at the age of 12, she and her mother immigrated to New Zealand to escape the Soviet presence in Hungary. She has B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Canterbury. In the late 1960s, she worked as a proofreader with Cassell’s in England and in sales and as an editor with Collier Macmillan. In 1969 she was hired as an editorial coordinator with McClelland & Stewart and then became Vice-President, Editor-in-Chief, until 1978. From 1978 until 1992, she was the President of McClelland-Bantam Inc. (Seal Books). From 1986 until 1991, she was the Executive Chairman of Doubleday Canada Ltd. In 1979, with Michael de Pencier, she established Key Porter Books. She was the CEO and publisher of Key Porter Books from 1981 until July 2004 when she sold a majority interest in Key Porter Books to H.B. Fenn Limited.

Porter is the author of three novels: Hidden Agenda (1985), Mortal Sins (1987), and The Bookfair Murders (1997). She has also written three works of non-fiction: The Storyteller: Memory, Secrets, Magic and Lies (2006), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust (2007; awarded the Canadian Jewish Book Award for History and the Nereus Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize), and The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe's Troubled Past and Uncertain Future (2010; awarded the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize). She has also written numerous pieces for magazines and newspapers. Porter serves on the boards of many companies and organizations. In recognition of her varied achievements, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1991. In 2003, she was awarded the Order of Ontario. She has been awarded honorary degrees from Ryerson University, St. Mary’s University, and the Law Society of Upper Canada. She is married to Julian Porter, Q.C. and has two daughters, Catherine and Julia, and three grandchildren. She currently lives in Toronto.

Andrew Gordon Chisholm, K.C., was a London, Ont. lawyer. While still studying law, he joined the 7th Fusiliers and served as a lieutentant in the North-West Rebellion of 1885. He ran for Parliament after that as a Conservative but was defeated.

He was called to the bar in 1888 and made a K.C. in 1921. He acted as solicitor for the Six Nations of the Grand River for about forty years. During that time he recovered for them lands valued at $300,000 and some $35,000 in cash according to a letter of 14 April 1942 to the Deputy Minister of Justice. Chisholm died suddenly on 11 January 1943 at the age of 79 while a Petition of Right was still before the courts.

Murray Thomson was born in Honan, China in 1922. His father was a United Church missionary. Thomson came to Canada at an early age. He was a student at the University of Toronto when the Second World War began. He enlisted in the air force and became a pilot although he never flew in a combat mission. Murray received a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Toronto.

As an undergraduate, he co-founded the Humanist Group, a citizen’s group for social change. His first job after graduating was a position in the adult education division of Saskatchewan’s socialist CCF government. Thomson received an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. In 1955 Thomson went to Thailand on a UNICEF research fellowship. He then spent four and a half years in India working in adult education for the American Friends Service Committee. Upon his return to Canada in 1962 he became peace education secretary for the Canadian Friends Service Committee in Toronto. In 1970 he became director of the CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas) programme in Thailand. In 1972 he became the Regional Field Director of the South East Asia CUSO Programme. He also worked with the Canadian Friends Service Committee in South-East Asia sponsored by the Canadian Friends Service Committee, the peace and development wing of Canadian Quakers.

Thomson was the co-founder of the inter-church peace group, Project Ploughshares, a founder of Peace Brigades International in 1981 and of Peace Fund Canada. He helped establish the United Nations World Disarmament Campaign. In 1990, Thomson was awarded the Pearson Peace Medal. In 2001 Thomson received the Order of Canada. Thomson has been an active pacifist and lives in Ottawa. He died on 2 May 2019, in Ottawa, Ontario, at the age of 96.

Charles Hamilton Mitchell was a noted civil engineer and decorated World War I intelligence officer. He was born in Petrolia, Ontario in 1872 to the Reverend George A. Mitchell and Agnes Mitchell (nee Beckett). He had a brother, P. H. Mitchell, with whom he later went into business. Mitchell was educated primarily at the School of Practical Science at the University of Toronto. After his graduation in 1894, he worked as a city and consulting engineer in hydraulic and hydro-electric power plant design and construction until 1906. In 1901 he married Myra Ethlyn Stanton. They had one son, Donald Russell Mitchell, who died in infancy.

In 1899 Mitchell joined the Canadian Militia as a Lieutenant. He served in the 44th Lincoln and Welland Regiment and the Corps of Guides prior to the outbreak of World War I. From 1914 to 1915, he served as an intelligence officer in the 1st Division under Lord Byng. He continued to occupy increasingly senior intelligence roles in the Canadian Corps (1915-16); in France (2nd Army, 1916-1917); and in Italy (British Forces HQ, 1917-1918). He received numerous decorations, including a DSO, CMG, CB, VD, Legion of Honour (France), Order of Leopold (Belgium), Croix de Guerre (Belgium), Order of the Crown of Italy, and the Order of Bath. In 1918 he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General and became a senior intelligence officer at the War Office in London.

In 1919, Mitchell returned to the Canadian Army. Shortly thereafter he was appointed Dean of Engineering at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. He continued to serve both in this role and as an influential consulting engineer until his death in 1941. At the time of his death he was reportedly newly involved in World War II intelligence work.

Harold Hamilton Leather was born on 23 May 1893 in Hamilton, Ont., the son of Thomas Edwin Leather and the former Helen McIntyre Skinner. He was educated at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ont. He served in World War I, joining the Imperial Service Corps in England as a private. He returned to Canada in 1919 with rank of captain.

While in England he married Grace C. Holmes, of Toronto, in 1918. They had one child, Edwin. Harold Leather established his own company, Leather Cartage in 1924 in Hamilton, which was sold in the 1950s, with Leather remaining a director until his death in 1981. During World War II, he was in charge of the Canadian Red Cross parcels scheme. For this service he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire and received medals from six foreign countries.

After the war, he became chairman of the Canadian Red Cross for six years, and subsequently was named an honorary counsellor of the national organization. Among many other activities, he served on the board of directors of McMaster University and the Stratford Festival until his retirement at the age of 80. He died in Hamilton in 1981.

Sir Edwin Hartley Cameron Leather was born in Toronto, Ont. on 22 May 1919, the son of Harold Hamilton Leather and the former Grace C. Holmes. He was educated at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ont. and the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. He married Sheila Greenlees on 9 March 1940; the couple has two daughters. During World War II, he served overseas with the Canadian Army.

After the war he remained in England, becoming a parliamentary candidate in 1945. He was Conservative Member of Parliament for North Somerset from 1950-1964. He was knighted in 1962. In 1973 he succeeded the murdered Sir Richard Sharples as Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Bermuda and remained in this position until 1977. He was for several years an executive and then director of Hogg Robinson Ltd. as well as serving on the board of directors of several other companies. He died in Bermuda on 5 April 2005.

Sir Edwin wrote on politics, business and religion for many newspapers and magazines, as well as being a public speaker and broadcaster. He was also the author of three novels.

Bernard Trotter was born in Toronto on June 16, 1890. He attended the Horton Academy in Wolfville and completed his high school work at Woodstock College. In the fall of 1907 he went to California to improve his health, accompanied by his older brother, Reginald. He first worked at a lemon ranch and then taught privately for two years before returning to McMaster University in Toronto in 1910. In the late summer and fall of 1912 he helped design and build "Valhalla", the Trotter summer place on Lake Cecebe. Trotter obtained his B.A. from McMaster in 1915 and began graduate work at the University of Toronto before leaving for England in March 1916. Ill health had prevented him from being accepted for military service in the Canadian army; determined to serve, Trotter won a commission in the British army. After training, he crossed to France with his Leicestershire Regiment in December 1916. On May 7, 1917, he was killed by a shell just as he and his men were completing their final transport convoy of the night. Trotter was buried the next day in the Military Cemetery at Mazingarbe. He was 26 years old.

Trotter had been active in student life, serving for a year as editor of the McMaster Monthly, the journal in which some of his poems first appeared; a poem was accepted for publication in Harper's Magazine in 1914. His themes were often chosen from nature; they evoke the Nova Scotia of his boyhood, California and Northern Ontario. His father, the Baptist minister and McMaster Professor Thomas Trotter, collected his poems and they were published in 1917 by McClelland and Stewart as A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems of War and Peace.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Jackie Washington (1919-2009) was the grandson of a Virginia slave. The second of thirteen siblings, Washington began his musical career at age five when he started singing with The Four Washington Brothers. By the early 1930s, Washington and his brother Ormsley became a self-taught musician, learning the guitar and piano. Before serving in World War II, he worked as a porter for Canadian Pacific Railroad, which inspired his lifelong interest in trains. During this time, the Washington family played host to many talented touring musicians including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Lionel Hampton.

After obtaining a medical discharge from the army, Washington worked in Hamilton at the American Can Company, eventually forming a musical duo with Sonny Johnston. The two soon developed a weekly radio show on CKOC and in 1948 Washington became Canada’s first black disc jockey for CHML radio. His career showed continuing promise in the 1960s when the musician took full advantage of the burgeoning coffee house scene in order to establish himself as a folk musician. When folk festivals gained popularity in the 1970s, Washington became a fixture at such events as the Home County Folk Festival in London, Ontario and the Festival of Friends in Hamilton, Ontario.

In spite of health problems (Washington was diagnosed with diabetes in 1970), he continued to work, recording his first album, Blues and Sentimental, in 1976. In the late 1980s, Washington continued to tour as part of a trio “Scarlett, Washington and Whitely,” with Mose Scarlett and Ken Whitely. During his later years, Washington was upheld as an important musician both locally and nationally. He was recognized with an honorary doctoral degree conferred by McMaster University in 2003. The Jackie Washington Rotary Park was named in his honour in 2004.

Born in the Netherlands in 1942, Gerard Brender à Brandis immigrated to Canada with his family in 1947. After graduating from the Fine Arts programme at McMaster University, he set up his own studio in Carlisle, Ontario. Although he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he studied wood engraving and the art of making books on his own. In 1969 he established the Brandstead Press, and during the 1970s and 1980s, Brender à Brandis gained both a national and international reputation for his delicate work in wood engraving and linocutting. Best known for his botanicals, interior studies and landscapes, Brender à Brandis is also an accomplished bookwright, producing limited edition books combining the arts of paper-making, wood engraving, typesetting, printing, book binding, and spinning, dyeing and weaving flax into linen covers. He has had solo exhibitions as well as numerous group shows. His work is represented in both public and private collections, and public and university libraries throughout Canada and the United States. Brender à Brandis currently resides in Stratford, Ontario.

Gary Lautens was born in Fort William, Ont., the son of Joe and Bertha Lautens. Shortly thereafter the family moved to Hamilton, Ont. where his father had accepted a position at the Hamilton Spectator. Gary Lautens graduated from Hamilton Central Collegiate Institute and then went on to McMaster University, obtaining a bachelor's degree in history in 1950, while writing for the campus newspaper, the Silhouette. After graduation Lautens joined the Hamilton Spectator and within a few years began to write a sports column, "The Gab Bag". In 1962 he joined the Toronto Star, quickly becoming a columnist. He won a National Newspaper Award in the Sports Writing category in 1965.Then, branching out from sports, he began to write a humorous, general-interest column, often relating the problems and delights of his family. He had married Jackie Lane in 1957 and the couple had three children. He published several collections of his columns in book form during his lifetime, twice winning the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. In 1982 he was appointed Executive Managing Editor of the Toronto Star, a position he held until 1984 when he became editor emeritus. He was an active supporter of McMaster University. He died in 1992. Two collections of his columns have been published posthumously. Jackie Lautens has written about her husband's life in the introduction to Peace, Mrs. Packard and the Meaning of Life (1993).

Valerie Tryon was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1934 to Kenneth and Iris Tryon. Her career as a concert pianist began while she was still a child. She made her first concert appearance when she was nine years old, in the Royal Hall, Harrogate. She was one of the youngest students ever to be admitted to the Royal Academy of Music, where she received the highest awards in piano playing, including the Macfarren Gold Medal and a bursary which took her to Paris for further study with the distinguished teacher Jacques Février.

Her participation in the 1956 International Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest gained for her an hors concours and brought her to the attention of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Thereafter, she appeared regularly on BBC radio, BBC television, and several times in the BBC Promenade Concerts. Her career eventually took her to North America where she has appeared in such cities as Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

She now lives in Canada but spends a part of each year in her native Britain. Tryon has returned to Hungary since the 1956 Competition, forming over the years a deep affection for Budapest and the Hungarian people. In 1994 the Hungarian Ministry of Culture awarded her the Ferenc Liszt Medal for her lifelong commitment to, and promotion of Liszt’s music.

Iris Murdoch, novelist and philosopher, was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 15 July 1919, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She was a fellow and university lecturer in philosophy at St. Anne's College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1963 when she became an honorary fellow. Her novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) won the Whitehead Literary Award for fiction in 1974 while The Black Prince won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the same year. In 1978, The Sea won the Booker Prize. She has also published several books of philosophy, beginning with Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). Iris Murdoch died on 8 February 1999 in Oxford.

Richard Slobodin (1915-2005) was an American anthropologist and a founder of the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Born and educated in New York City, he worked extensively from the 1930s onwards as an ethnologist. The chief focus of his ethnological studies were the Dené peoples of the Yukon and Alaska, particularly the Gwich'in (Kutchin). His scholarly interests were broad, however, and he published extensively on a variety of subjects. These publications included significant biographical treatments of pioneering anthropologists <a href="http://holdings.mcmaster.ca/index.php/rivers-w-h-r-2">W.H.R. Rivers</a> and Northcote W. Thomas.

After a brief stint in the United States armed forces during and after the Second World War, he returned to academic life only to fall afoul of Sen. Robert McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUUAC) in the early 1950s. This blacklisting saw him disbarred from academic employment for a period of seven years, during which time he worked a variety of jobs to support himself before eventually completing his Ph.D. in 1959. He spent the next four years working various academic appointments in the United States while seeking entry to Canada, which repeatedly denied him a visa owing to his supposed Marxist connections.

He finally was admitted to Canada in 1964, accepting an academic appointment at McMaster University, and he became a Canadian citizen in 1970. During the 1960s and 1970s Slobodin continued extensive fieldwork in the Arctic while also playing an instrumental role in developing the faculty of anthropology at McMaster, of which he was a co-founder. In 1981, he was forced to accept compulsory retirement owing to his age, but remained active in the United Church and the New Democratic Party while maintaining voluminous correspondence with friends and fellow scholars around the world. He died in 2005 at the age of 89.

William Burton Hurd was born in Brockville, Ontario in 1894. He was a Rhodes scholar, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and president of the Canadian Political Economy Association. In 1921 he became Professor of Political Economy at Brandon College and was appointed Dean of Arts in 1928. He came to McMaster University as Professor of Political Economy in 1935, became Associate Dean of Arts in 1939, and chaired the Department of Political Economy from 1947 to 1949. A regular contributor to economic, political, and banking periodicals, he was an expert on population problems and the author of several books, including Origin, Birthplace, Nationality and Language of the Canadian People and Racial Origins and Nativity of the Canadian People.

John Coulter, playwright, was born on 12 February 1888 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was educated at the School of Art in Belfast and at the University of Manchester. He taught English and art from 1913-1919 before moving to London to become a drama critic and playwright for sixteen years. In London, he met his Canadian wife, the poet, Olive Clare Primrose, and moved with her to Canada in 1936. In later years they divided their time between Ireland and Canada. His most famous work is his trilogy of plays about Louis Riel, published 1950-1960. He died on 1 December 1980. There is a much more comprehensive biography available in Library Research News 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1982).

Edward Manning Saunders, clergyman and historian, was born in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia on 20 December 1829. He was educated at the Newton Institute, Mass. He was appointed pastor at the first Baptist church in Halifax in 1867. His published works include Three Premiers of Nova Scotia (1909) and The Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Tupper (1916). He died in Toronto on 15 March in the same year as the Tupper book was published.

Sir Charles Haukes Todd Crosthwaite (1835-1915), a career civil servant, was born at Donnybrook in Ireland on 5 December 1835. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St. John's College, Oxford. He joined the Indian service in 1857. He served as chief commissioner of Burma from March 1887 until 1890. While in Burma, he cleared the province of rebels and set down the roots of British administration. In 1893 he became lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. He wrote several books in retirement, including The Pacification of Burma (1912). He died on 28 May 1915 at Long Acre, Shamley Green, Surrey.

Marjorie Freeman Campbell was a local Hamilton historian. Her books include A Mountain and a City: the Story of Hamilton (1966) and Hamilton General Hospital School of Nursing (1956).