John Drinkwater, poet, playwright, and actor was born in Leystonstone, Essex on 1 June 1882 and educated at Oxford High School. He was co-founder of an amateur dramatic society, the Pilgrim Players, in 1907. He went on to become the manager of the then fledgling Birmingham Repertory Theatre where he also acted. He is best known for a series of historical plays beginning with Abraham Lincoln. He died in London on 25 March 1937.
Nora Mabel Duncan, nee Dann, was born in 1881. She published a few volumes of poetry with the North Shore Press in North Vancouver, B.C. The poems in this collection were presumably written while she was on vacation in Quebec. In 1908, she married banker Wallace Craig Duncan (1871-1937). They had two daughters in Calgary, before moving to Vancouver. She was on a train, headed west to attend her daughter's wedding when she suddenly collapsed and died.
Lawrence Durrell, novelist and poet, was born on 12 February 1912 in Julundur, India, the son of Lawrence Samuel Durrell, a British civil engineer. He was educated at the College of St. Joseph, Darjeeling, and St. Edmund's College in Canterbury. In 1939 under the auspices of the British Council, he taught at the British Institute in Athens. He became Foreign Press Service Officer at the British Information Office in Cairo in 1941 and press attaché with the same office in 1944. Through his contacts in the diplomatic service during the war, Durrell met Dudley and Mary Honor. His most well known work, The Alexandria Quartet, was started shortly after the war and published from 1957 to 1960. Durrell died on 7 November 1990 in Sommieres, France.
Jane Elliott was married to Thomas F[rederick] Elliott (1808-1880). Thomas F. Elliott was born in London in 1808 and educated at Harrow. He entered the Colonial Office and from 1835 to 1837 served as secretary to the Earl of Gosford's Commission of Inquiry in Canada. In 1833 he marrried Jane Perry, the daughter of James Perry, the owner and editor of the Morning Chronicle. The Elliotts left Canada in 1837 when he was appointed chief of the first Department of Emigration in England. Jane Elliott died in 1861.
Herbert Stuart Finn, of Chesley, Ontario, served in the First World War. He was hospitalized due to a gas attack in France, eventually returning to Canada, but passed away in 1919 at a military hospital in the Ontario Reformatory School in Guelph.
Theodore Goodridge Roberts, journalist, editor, poet and novelist, was born on 7 July 1877 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He was the younger brother of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. He was briefly educated at the University of New Brunswick. Widely travelled, he lived for a time in the West Indies. His best-known novel is The Harbor Master published in 1912 as The Toll of the Tides. He died on 24 February 1953 in Digby, Nova Scotia.
Robert Graves was born at Wimbledon on 25 July 1895 and educated at Charterhouse and St. John's College, Oxford. His powerful autobiography, Goodbye to All That was published in 1929. He is known for both his historical novels, beginning with I, Claudius and Claudius the God in 1934 and his poetry which was collected several times, including 1955 and again in 1975. He died at his home in Deyá, Marjorca on 7 December 1985.
Edward Burnaby Greene, poet and translator, was the son of Edward Burnaby and Elizabeth Greene Burnaby. On the death of his aunt, 30 December 1740, while he was still an infant, he inherited his grandfather's fortune. An Act of Parliament the following year allowed him to assume the surname of Greene. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His literary attempts, both translations from Greek and Latin poets as well as imitations of Thomas Gray and William Shenstone, are not well regarded. He died on 12 March 1788.
Grey Owl was born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney in 1888 in Hastings, England. He moved to Canada in 1906 and became a guide and trapper in Northern Ontario. It was under the influence of his lover, Anahareo, that Grey Owl became a nature conservationist, adopting the persona of an Ojibwa man. He also became an author of books about the north and Ojibwa culture. Near the end of his life he undertook lecture tours of Britain and the United States. Grey Owl died in Prince Albert, Sask., in 1938.
Charles W. Hall was born presumably in England and was a member of the 93rd Derbyshire Regiment. On 11 December 1861, he boarded the steamer H.M.S. Windsor in Dublin, Ireland and set sail for Liverpool. On 12 December 1861, Hall transferred and served aboard H.M.S. Australasian, another steamer, and along with a regiment of 850 and an artillery of 270, set sail for Canada. 1 February 1862 marked Hall's arrival in Hamilton, Ontario.
Richard C. Hilborn was born on 10 May 1918 in Kitchener, Ontario to Percy Richard Hilborn and Gertrude Roos Wells. He was educated at Upper Canada College, in Toronto and the Royal Military College in Kingston. He graduated from the Royal Military College in 1939, immediately joined the Toronto Scottish Regiment and then went overseas to England for the Second World War. Hilborn met John Jacob Astor (later Baron) during the Second World War and a friendship ensued between him and the Astor family. Richard married Laurette Parsons (6 June 1945) after the end of the War. Richard returned to Preston (now Cambridge), Ontario to work in his father's furniture factory, The Preston Furniture Company and Canadian Office and School Furniture Co. Laurette arrived in Canada in January 1946 and they settled in Preston. (Taken from It's Been Fun by Richard C. Hilborn.)
Thomas Alfred Hollick was an important collector of eighteenth century books, and particularly of the works of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). At the sale of his books in May 1980, McMaster University Library acquired seventeen items for its Swift collection.
Ghizi Kirshen-Baras, an actress, was born in Romania in 1935. She graduated from the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Bucharest. In 1962 she moved to Israel. She married ca. 1965 Joseph Ijaky, a painter and set designer. She was mainly a stage actress using her birth name and then her married name. She appeared in one short film, “Strange Holiday”, produced by the Women’s International Zionist Organization in Israel in 1963, using the name “Gisella Kirschen”. She died on 31 December 1971.
Irving Layton was born in Neamts, Rumania on 12 March 1912. He moved to Canada the next year with his parents Moses and Keine Lasarovitch. He was educated at McGill University. A prolific and controversial poet, he published his first collected poems in 1959, A Red Carpet for the Sun, which won the Governor's General Award for Poetry. His poems have been collected several times since then. Layton died on 4 January 2006.
William Douw Lightall, lawyer, historian, novelist, poet, philosopher, anthologist, and editor was born on 27 December 1857 in Hamilton, Ontario. He was educated at McGill University. He practised law in Montreal from 1881-1944, became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1902, Mayor of Westmount, Quebec from 1900 to 1903, and president of the Canadian Authors Association in 1930.
His first novel, The Young Seigneur; or, Nation-making, using the pen name of Wilfrid Châteauclair, was published in 1888. The next year his poetry anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada was published. His Canada: A Modern Nation was published in 1904. In 1933 The Person of Evolution: The Outer Consciousness, The Outer Knowledge, The Directive Power, Studies of Instinct as Contribution to a Philosophy of Evolution was published. Lightall died on 3 August 1954.
Fred R. Miller was born in 1878. He married Edna A. Noxon in Toronto in June 1903. The couple had one daughter, Helen, born in 1914. He joined the family business, Roger Miller & Sons, an engineering company. The company was involved in many projects in Toronto including the Eastern Gap.
Frederick Niven, author, was born on 31 March 1878, in Santiago, Chile, where his father was in the British consular service. At the age of five he moved to Scotland and was educated in Glasgow. He visited Canada several times from the mid-1890s onwards. In 1920 he settled permanently in British Columbia, mainly for health reasons. Niven published over twenty novels, as well as short fiction, poetry, non-fiction and an autobiography titled Coloured Spectacles (1938). He wrote novels set in urban Scotland as well as the Canadian west, including a trilogy, Mine Inheritance, The Flying Years, and The Transplanted (1935-1944). He died on 30 January 1944 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
James Rennell Rodd, diplomat and author, was born in London on 9 November 1858 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He served as British Ambassador in Rome, 1908-1919. Later, he was Conservative Member of Parliament for St. Marylebone, 1928-1932. He was created 1st Baron Rennell of Rodd in 1933.
He published 3 volumes of memoirs, Social and Diplomatic Memoirs (1922-1926) in addition to his poetry and prose.
Sammy Shields, comedian, was born in Glasgow on 20 June 1874. He made his first appearance on the variety stage at the Holborn Empire in June 1905 and went on to a successful career in music hall theatres. He died in London in 1933.
Charlotte Turner, poet and novelist, was born in London on 4 May 1749. On 23 February 1765 she married Benjamin Smith. She turned to publishing her poetry after she and her husband were imprisoned for his debts. In 1788 he published her first novel, Emmeline, in four volumes. She was a mother of twelve; eight of her children were still alive when Charlotte Smith died on 28 October 1806 in Tilford, near Farnham, Surrey.
