Showing 855 results

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.

Mrs. Bromley's husband served with Canadian forces in France during World War I. She received a letter from Sister E.B. Burpee, No. 1 Canadian General Hospital in France, 5 August 1917, informing her that her husband has "absorbed some of this terrible gas poison" and that he is seriously ill.

Bertram Neville Brockhouse was born 15 July 1918 in Lethbridge, Alberta. At an early age he moved with his family to Vancouver. After graduating from high school in 1935, he worked as a laboratory assistant, and then as a self-employed radio repairman, both in Vancouver and Chicago. He spent the war years in the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve-Active Duty, and he then attended the University of British Columbia, from which he graduated in 1947 with first-class honours in mathematics and physics. He entered the University of Toronto that same year. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1950, with a thesis titled "The Effect of Stress and Temperature upon the Magnetic Properties of Ferromagnetic Materials".

In July 1950, Brockhouse joined the staff of the Atomic Energy Project of the National Research Council of Canada, later to become Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. Over the next eight years Brockhouse, as a Research Officer, developed the equipment and theory which resulted in the installation of the famous C5 triple-axis spectrometer at the NRU reactor. This machine remained in use for more than 20 years and was an important training ground for many present day triple-axis spectrometrists. From 1960 to 1962 he was the Branch Head of Neutron Physics.

Brockhouse was persuaded to come to McMaster University in 1962 with the opportunity to build his own group of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and work at the University's new nuclear reactor. Brockhouse served as the Chair of Physics from 1967-1970. He is the author of many scientific papers and review articles, mainly in solid state, liquid state and neutron physics. He retired in 1984 and died on 13 October 2003. He received many honours over the years, culminating in the award with Clifford G. Shull of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1994 for their studies of solids and liquids by neutron scattering. Their citation by the Swedish academy read in part: "Clifford Shull helped answer the question of where atoms 'are' and Bertram N. Brockhouse the question of what atoms 'do'".

Pte Ronald Broadbent served with the British 21st Army Group at the Number 8 General Hospital in Germany. He was certified as an Army Orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps on 24 November 1938. He married Bessie Denham in 1944.

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.

The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was an ambitious program to train air crew members in Canada for the Allied war effort. An agreement by Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand on 17 December 1939 set up the program. In addition to those nations, Norwegians, Belgians, Dutch, Czechs and the Free French were trained.

Robert Briffault was a novelist, social anthropologist, and surgeon. He was born in Nice, France in 1876, educated at the University of Dunedin and Christ Church University and began medical practice in 1901 in New Zealand. In May 1896 he married Anna Clarke; the couple had three children, Lister, Muriel, and Joan, born from 1897 to 1901. After service on the Western Front during World War I, he settled in England, his wife having died. In the late 1920s he married again, to Herma Hoyt (1898-1981), an American writer and translator, best known for her English translations of modern French literature. The Brifffaults became clients of the literary agent William Bradley and were befriended by his wife, Jenny. Briffault is the author of several books, including The Mothers (1927) and Europa (1935). He died in Hastings, Sussex, England on 11 December 1948.

Charles Bridges served with the Royal Canadian Engineers in World War II. Bridges may have been born in England; there is one photograph of him as a toddler in Bury St. Edmonds, one photograph of him as a boy and one as a young man in 1937 before he joined the military.

Members of Local 2537 are employees of Bridge and Tank Company of Canada--Hamilton Bridge Division.

Local 1 received its charter on 27 June 1881 from the National Union of Bricklayers and Masons of America. This was reported in the Hamilton Spectator, "Bricklayers and Masons", 8 July 1881. Local 1 was the first local to be chartered in Canada. Over the years the union has evolved. Local 1 is currently chartered by both the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craft Workers and the Bricklayers and Allied Craft Workers of Canada.

Havergal Brian was an English composer and musical critic who was born in Dresden, Staffordshire. He died in Shoreham on 28 November 1972. In composition he was self-taught while earning his living from clerical jobs. He eventually found work as an assistant editor of Musical Opinion. He composed 32 symphonies.

Sgt. Major Alfred Beverley Brewer made a career in the military. He was the Sgt. Major of the 79th Field Battery of the Royal Canadian Artillery Regiment in 1932. He was chosen to be part of the Canadian Coronation Contingent (Militia Detachment) which travelled to Great Britain for the coronation of King George VI in May 1937. He served with the Royal Canadian Artillery Regiment during World War II.

Wallace Balfour Brett was born in Markdale, Ontario on 16 May 1895. Brett had been a farmer prior to enlisting in Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force in January 1917. Brett was a member of the 4th Company of the 8th Battalion. Brett was killed in action on 21 August 1918. He is buried in the Daours Communal Cemetery, 10 kilometers east of Amiens.

Mattha (“Madzy”) Cornelia Brender à Brandis (née van Vollenhoven) (1910-1984), known as “Madzy”, was a writer who was born in Scheveningen, Holland in 1910. She was the third of four children. She studied law in Leiden, but before completing her degree, she married Wim (“Bill”) Brender à Brandis. They had three children: Marianne Brandis, Gerard Brender à Brandis, and Joost (“Jock”) Brender à Brandis. They lived briefly in New York City, but they moved back to Holland just as World War II began. Wim was ultimately sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in 1942, and during this time, Madzy cared for their children in Nazi occupied Netherlands. The family immigrated to northern B.C. in 1947 and lived on a farm for nine years. In 1958, Madzy and Bill moved to Antigonish, Nova Scotia and worked at St. Francis Xavier University, and in 1959 they moved to Burlington, Ontario.

Madzy wrote in both Dutch and English, and much of her writing was autobiographical and details her experience as an immigrant. She wrote columns for four different newspapers in Holland and Canada; sixty-eight columns and other short works remain, though she wrote more that have not survived. She wrote a memoir about life on their farm in B.C. titled Land for our Son, published under the name Maxine Brandis, and which she translated into Dutch. She also wrote short stories and a great deal of unpublished material for family members, such as diaries, memoirs, letters, etc. Madzy contracted rheumatoid arthritis while still living in WWII Holland, and by 1972, unable to use her hands to write, she was using a tape recorder for correspondence, research, and for recording family memories.

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.

James Brasch was born on 11 October 1929. He was educated at the State University of New York, Colgate University and the University of Wisconsin. He has published a guide to Henry James's novel, The Portrait of a Lady in 1966 and edited a volume of Ernest Hemingway's works in 1981. He began teaching in McMaster University's English department in 1966 and became an associate professor before his retirement in 1995.

C.C. Brant was a teamster hauling logs from a logging dump in Whitney, Ontario in the winter of 1919. Shortly thereafter he moved to Fort St. John, British Columbia. In the winter of 1922 he had been there long enough to apply for a land patent. He still had his horses but was also ranching at the Z Cross Ranch. He was considering going into a partnership with others so that he would be free to return back to Ontario for a visit.

Born in the Netherlands in 1938, Marianne Brandis (full last name: “Brender à Brandis”) immigrated with her family in 1947 to Terrace, BC and currently lives in Stratford, Ontario. She was educated at UBC, St. Francis Xavier University, and McMaster University from which she graduated with a BA in 1960 and MA in 1964.

Brandis worked for a time as a copywriter for CKOC in Hamilton and CBC in Toronto in the 1960s. She also taught creative writing and English literature at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (Ryerson University) from 1967 until she resigned in 1989 at the age of 50 after which she pursued writing full-time. She continues to teach creative writing and memoir writing workshops.

Brandis’ writings contain diverse topics and include historical fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, and biography genres. In her historical works, she deals with significant events and the private and daily lives of individuals. Perhaps best known are Brandis’ historical books for younger readers which were published in the 1980s and 1990s, and out of these, The Tinderbox (1982), The Quarter-Pie Window (1985), The Sign of the Scales (1990), Fire Ship (1992), and Rebellion (1996) received various awards and commendations. Brandis’ most recent projects have been creative non-fiction and other life-writing works. Brandis has collaborated extensively with her brother Gerard Brender à Brandis, the wood engraver and bookwright, and whose fonds is also at McMaster.

John Brand, antiquary, topographer, and clergyman, was born on 19 August 1744 at Washington, in the county of Durham and educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. On 6 October 1744 he was given the perpetual curacy of Cramlington, a chapel of ease to St. Nicholas at Newcastle. On 29 May 1777 he was elected a fellow in the Society of Antiquaries, later becoming resident secretary. He was appointed to the rectory of the united parishes of St. Mary-at-Hill and St. Mary Hubbard in 1784. He is the author of several works including Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (1777). He died on 11 September 1806 in his rectory.