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Dame Ethel Smyth, composer, author, and feminist, was born on 23 April 1858 in Sidcup, England. She was educated at the Leipzig Conservatorium. As well as several operas and other musical pieces, she composed suffragette music, including The March of the Women.

She was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Oxford University. She wrote several autobiographical works, beginning with <I>Impressions That Remained (1919) and ending with What Happened Next* (1940). She died in Woking, Surrey on 9 May 1944.

Born in county Antrim, Ireland on 27 December 1861, Albert E. S. Smythe was a journalist in Belfast, Chicago, and Toronto (Toronto Globe, World, The Lamp). He was President of Toronto Press Club in 1907. He also wrote two books of poetry: Poems Grave and Gay (1891) and The Garden of the Sun (1923). He introduced theosophy into Canada, and was the first president of the Toronto Theosophical Society. He died in Hamilton, Ont., on 2 October 1947.

Pelham Webb was an English poet who was killed in action at the Battle of Arras 9 April 1917. He was the son of of Dr. and Mrs. Pelham Webb, of London, and attending Abingdon School in Oxfordshire. He was a Second Lieutenant in the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, D Compnay, 5th Battalion. His only book of poems Wandering Fire was published in Chelsea in 1916. He was buried in the British Tilloy Cemetery, Tilloy-les-Mofflaines, France.

The information in this file originally stated that Webb had been killed in 1914, but this is believed to be incorrect. There are no Pelham Webb's listed in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and while he does generally sign his name 'Pelham Webb', omitting the Arthur, one of the documents is initialed APW.

Healey Willan, composer, teacher, organist and choirmaster, was born at Balham, London, England on 12 October 1880. He was educated at St. Saviour's Choir School, Eastbourne. In 1913 he moved to Canada to become head of theory at the Toronto Conservatory and organist at St. Paul's church. The following year he was appointed lecturer at the University of Toronto. In 1919 he was appointed music director of the Hart House Theatre, a post he held until 1925. In 1921 he became precentor of St. Mary Magdalene church where he established the high-church music tradition through the use of plainsong and Renaissance music. He stayed at St. Mary Magdalene until his death in Toronto on 16 February 1968. His other posts included: Vice-Principal of the Conservatory, 1920-1936; professor at the University of Toronto, 1936-1950; University organist, 1932-1964.
Agnes Butcher (1915-), pianist and teacher, premiered the concerto dedicated to her on 24 August 1944 in a broadcast performance in Montreal for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with the orchestra conducted by Jean-Marie Beaudet. These same performers later recorded the concerto for release on the CBC IS Canadian Album No. 1, RCA DM-1229. The first public performance of the concerto was held in November 1944 with Butcher being joined by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ettore Mazzoleni. Sometime before 1984 Butcher changed her surname to Boucher.

James Williams, the son of Francis (née Porter) and Alexander Raymond Williams, was born on 26 December 1955 in Hamilton, Ontario. He completed a degree (AOCA) in new media art at OCAD in 1989 and BFA and MFA degrees in photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1990 and 1992, respectively. His photographs, which juxtapose workers in factories and other settings, have been exhibited in many galleries and other venues throughout the world. He currently lives in Salford (Great Britain), where he teaches photography at the University of Bolton.

John Busteed Lee, educator, poet, and editor, was born on 24 November 1951 in Highgate, ON, son of George and Irene Lee. He received a B.A. in English at the University of Western Ontario, in 1974, followed by a B.Ed. in English and theatre arts in 1975 and an M.A. in Teaching English in 1985 at the same institution. Lee taught at Waterford District High School in Norfolk County from 1975 to 1987, at which time he made the decision to earn a living exclusively through writing, performing and teaching poetry.

A prolific writer, he is the author of over forty of books and chapbooks of poetry, including Pig Dance Dreams and Stella’s Journey. His poetry, which has appeared in over 500 publications, has earned Lee many grants and awards, most significant of which have been the CBC Tilden Award and the People’s Poetry Award (twice). He has also written children’s books, plays, short stories, reviews, a writer’s guide, and memoirs, and has edited numerous anthologies of poetry, including Smaller than God. In addition to writing and editing, Lee was writer-in-residence at Kitchener Public Library in 2001 and has given many public readings of his work and facilitated poetry workshops for school children. In 2005 he was named Poet Laureate of Brantford, ON in perpetuity. Lee is married to Cathy Jean Morden, and they have two sons, Dylan and Sean-Paul.

Terry Fallis is a Canadian novelist, policial satirist, and political consultant. Terrence Hugh Fallis was born in Toronto on 23 December 1959, the son of Dr. and Mrs. James Fallis (née Barbara Ham); he has a twin named Tim. In 1983 Fallis earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree from McMaster University. He also served as President of the McMaster Students Union.

After graduation, he joined future Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's full time staff for the 1984 federal Liberal Leadership campaign. He has worked as a legislative assistant for the Honourable Jean Lapierre and the Honourable Robert Nixon. From 1988-95, he was a government affairs and communications consultant with the PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, including stints as Vice President running the Ontario government affairs group and finally President of Berger & Associates, a Hill and Knowlton subsidiary. In 1995, with Joe Thornley, he co-founded Thornley Fallis, a communications consulting agency with offices in Ottawa and Toronto.

Fallis is also a novelist and political satirist. In 2007 he self-published The Best Laid Plans. It won the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and then was published by McClelland & Stewart in September 2008. In 2010, the Waterloo Region chose The Best Laid Plans as the One Book, One Community selection. A sequel entitled The High Road was published by McClelland & Stewart in September 2010.

Fallis continues to publish highly praised and well received novels, including his 4th novel, No Relation, which also received the Leacock Medal for Humour. Further information about Fallis, including podcasts from his novels, can be obtained at his <a href="http://terryfallis.com/">website</a>.

David Lewis was a political leader, labour lawyer, and university professor.

David was born in Svisloch, Poland on June 23, 1909. He was the son of Rose (nee Lazarovitch) and Moishe Losz, a prominent labour leader in Poland and Canada.

David immigrated to Montreal with his family in 1921. He attended Baron Byng High School where he befriended Irving Layton, A.M. Klein, and his future wife, Sophie Carson.

He attended McGill University from 1927-1931. While at McGill, he helped found the Montreal branch of the Young People’s Socialist League, and founded a campus magazine, The McGilliad.

In 1932, David was awarded a Rhodes scholarship and attended Oxford University. At Oxford, he was active with the Oxford Union and developed a reputation as a leader and a talented speaker.

Following his return to Canada, he practiced law in Ottawa. In 1935, he became the national secretary for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. With the CCF, he helped draft the Winnipeg Declaration of 1956.

In 1943, he co-authored Make This Your Canada with F.R Scott.

In 1950, David resigned as national secretary and moved to Toronto to practice law in partnership with Ted Joliffe. Through his support of Tommy Douglas, David played a role in the founding of the New Democratic Party in July 1961. He was elected as Member of Parliament for York South in 1962. He lost his seat in the 1963 general election but returned to the House of Commons in the 1965. He was re-elected in 1968 and became the federal leader of the party in 1971.

David lost his seat in 1974 and resigned as leader. In his post-political life, he became a professor at the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University.

David was named as a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1977. His memoirs, The Good Fight: Political Memoirs 1909-1958 (Toronto: MacMillan) were published in 1981. He died on May 23, 1981.

David is the father of Stephen Lewis, the diplomat and former leader of the Ontario NDP, Michael Lewis, Janet Solberg and Nina Libeskind.

Thomas Cunningham (Tom) Wilson (b. 1959) is a Canadian rock musician and songwriter based in Hamilton. He is also an author and visual artist. At the age of 53, he learned that he was adopted and that his ancestry is Mohawk.

As a musician, Wilson has a solo career and was also a founding member of The Florida Razors (1981-1987), Junkhouse (1989-1997), Blackie and the Rodeo Kings (1996 onward), and Lee Harvey Osmond (2009 onward). Collectively, they have recorded at least 18 albums.

He is the author of the acclaimed memoir Beautiful Scars: Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home, published by Doubleday Canada in 2017.

The first exhibition of his visual art was held at the Art Gallery of Burlington in 2018-2019.

Daniel David Moses is an award-winning poet, playwright, and essayist who is of Delaware descent. He grew up on a farm on Six Nations lands near Brantford, Ontario, and he has a B.A. from York University and a M.F.A. from UBC.

Daniel David Moses is known for his original voice and his ability to portray a thriving, “organic” native culture in his plays, eschewing the tragic motif often apparent in depictions of native people. His plays include Coyote City (1988), Big Buck City (1991), Almighty Voice and His Wife (1991), and The Witch of Niagara (1998), and Moses’ works of poetry include Delicate Bodies (1980) and The White Line (1990). He has been a writer-in-residence at various institutions including Theatre Passe Muraille, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the University of British Columbia, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Windsor, the University of Toronto (Scarborough), the Sage Hill Writing Experience, McMaster University, and Concordia University. He has also served on various boards relating to native culture and the arts, including being a founding member of the Committee to Re-establish the Trickster. Moses passed away on 13 July 2020, at the age of 68.

Sam Lipshitz was born on 14 February 1910 in Radom, Poland. He was sent to live with an aunt in Montreal at age 17, where he joined the Jewish Cultural Club of Montreal. He joined the Young Communist League while working at the Jewish Public Library. He was dismissed from the library following the 1929 Hebron Massacre because he aligned himself with the Soviet interpretation of the event. He married Manya Lipshitz on 20 January 1930 and they settled in Toronto. He became editor of Der Kamf (later renamed Vochenblatt) in 1932. He was appointed secretary of the party’s Anti-Fascist Committee in 1933, became head of the Jewish National Committee and sat on the Party’s Central Committee from 1943 to 1946. He was arrested and briefly detained in the Don Jail with Tim Buck and fourteen other party leaders in 1942. He joined the executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1943. Through the Congress, he was sent to Poland in 1945 to report on the condition of Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust. He and Manya visited the USSR in 1956 and shortly following their return, they resigned from the Communist Party. Sam went on to a career as an editor, author, and printer.

Rose Eizenstraus was born in 1913. Her parents were socialist atheists, and she was raised in the Toronto Jewish community. At an early age, she became involved in the Young Pioneers. In 1939, she was Tim Buck’s private secretary. Rose was one of the founding members of the New Theatre Group in Montreal. In Toronto, she was involved in the Belmont Theatre Group and the Theatre of Action. She performed in the notorious play, Eight Men Speak, in the role of Zelda, during its sole performance at Toronto’s Standard Theatre on December 4, 1933.

Rose was the wife of Dave Kashtan.

Stewart Smith was born in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. His father, A.E. Smith, was a social gospel church minister in Brandon and leader of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In 1923, Stewart moved to Toronto and began organizing. The following year he accepted an offer from the CPC to become the National Secretary of the Young Communist League. In 1926, he attended the Lenin School in Moscow and was later appointed to the Political Bureau of the CPC. In 1937, he was elected alderman on the Toronto City Council as the first communist elected to office in Toronto’s history. In 1946, he was elected to the Board of Control. Stewart was a prominent member of the Labor-Progressive Party of Ontario and served as party leader between 1951 and 1957. He resigned from the Communist Party of Canada in 1957.

Born in England, Harold Saville emigrated to Hamilton, Ontario just before the outbreak of the First World War. When war broke out he returned to England and enlisted first in the Cavalry and then in the Air Force. He served with the RAF and was shot down, but survived. He returned to Hamilton where he lived until his death in 1950.

Ruthven Colquhoun McNairn served in the Second World War with the Algonquin Regiment. Born in Toronto on 24 August 1914, to William Harvey McNairn, a professor at McMaster University and Hester (Wilson) McNairn. He was the third of four brothers, with Robert and Norman proceeding him, and Ian following. The family relocated to Hamilton in 1930 when the University did.

In February 1933, after finishing high school, McNairn hitchhiked to travel to California and travelling around before being jailed on a charge of vagrancy. His father bailed him out and McNairn made his way home by June.

He began his studies at McMaster University, beginning in Mathematics and Physics, and then transferring to General Arts. He enjoyed being part of the Dramatic Society and appeared in a number of plays. He also was part of the literary society. He graduated in 1938, and did some more travelling before returning to Hamilton.

On 1 November 1940, he began military training with McMaster’s COTC and part time militia with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He completed his training in 1941 and hoped to join the Navy, which his younger brother also hoped to join. With no offers forthcoming, he formally enlisted 11 May 1942, and was sent for training at Gordon Head, BC. He would join the Algonquin Regiment in 1943 and shipped to Europe in early summer.

He was part of the operation to attempt to closed the ‘Falaise Gap’ and would then carry on towards Belgium, the Netherlands, and finally into Germany. Throughout this time he kept his own diary, as well as helping to write the regiment’s war diary when the official diarists were busy. He would carry on this work and though he died before the official history was published, he is credited with doing much of the work on Warpath.

Returning home, McNairn had aspirations of writing, either as a journalist or in longer form. Unfortunately, in June 1946, he was diagnosed with an especially virulent form of TB, tuberculous empyema. Likely contracted while still in Europe, he was transferred to Hamilton’s Mountain Sanatorium for care, but would never recover. McNairn died 5 September 1946 and was buried in Grove Cemetery, in Dundas.

Morris Biderman was born in 1908 in Chenchine, a small town near Kielce, Poland. He was the youngest of five sons; his father immigrated to Canada when he was four years old. Morris’s childhood memories of Poland include the Russian and German troops fighting in his town during the Great War, and the 1918 Kielce Pogrom, which prompted his family to join his father in Toronto. The family emigrated to Canada in 1920, living on Leonard Avenue, then later Bellevue Avenue, in Toronto; he attended Ryerson Public School until he dropped out at age 16. Morris then entered the trades as a needle worker and became involved in Leftist politics. He joined the Freedom Choir (Freiheit Gesang), which was held at Alhambra Hall, 450 Spadina Avenue, which housed the Labour League (a Toronto-based, Communist-led secular Jewish organization) and in 1927 he joined the Young Communist League. He worked as an under presser and was later hired as an operator for sportswear at Eaton’s, where he worked until 1937.

In 1937, Morris joined the Labour League and became manager of Der Kamf, the Communist weekly Yiddish newspaper, later renamed Der Vochenblatt. When the Communist party was briefly outlawed during the Second World War, Der Kamf was closed, and Morris returned to work in the sportswear industry. In 1942, he became president of the Labour League. In 1945, he was elected as the first national secretary to the newly founded United Jewish People’s Order. In 1955, Morris was one of eight delegates in a delegation chosen by the Canada-Soviet Friendship Society who visited the Soviet Union. Following the revelations of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, Morris broke with the Communist Party and resigned from the UJPO at their annual conference held in December 1959 at Toronto’s Union Station. He later co-founded a new organization, the New Fraternal Jewish Association. In 2000, he wrote his memoir, A Life on the Jewish Left: An Immigrant’s Experience (Toronto: Onward Publishing).

Morris married Minnie Usprich (1909-2001) in September 1929. Morris’ older brother Dave Biderman is the father of Ruth Borchiver.

Susan Musgrave was born on March 12, 1951 in Santa Cruz, California. She has lived in Hawaii, Ireland, England and Columbia and presently resides in Sidney, British Columbia. She is married to Stephen Reid whose fonds is also at McMaster. She has published novels, children's books, collections of essays and poetry. Her published works include Entrance of the Celebrant (1972), Selected Strawberries and Other Poems (1977), The Charcoal Burners (1980), The Dancing Chicken (1987), Great Musgrave (1989) Forcing the Narcissus (1994), The Situation in Which We Are Both Amateurs (1997), Things That Keep and Do Not Change (1999) and Cargo of Orchids (2000) and Origami Dove (2011), A Taste of Haida Gwaii (2016), More Blueberries (2019) (Chldren’s book) and Kiss Tickle Cuddle Hug (2010) (Children’s book).

Born in 1924, Dr. Ian Spenser received his undergraduate training from the University of Birmingham. He completed his postdoctoral work at the University of London, King's College in 1952 and went on to complete his D.Sc in organic and biochemistry at the University of London in 1969. Dr. Spenser began his academic career at McMaster as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry in the Chemistry Department in 1957. He is currently a professor emeritus in the Chemistry Department. He has served the university in numerous capacities including terms on the McMaster Board of Governors and the Senate. Dr. Spenser has received numerous honors throughout his long and distinguished career. These honors include: the FRIC (Fellowship, Royal Institute of Chemistry, 1957), the FCIC (Fellowship, Chemical Institute of Canada, 1957), the FRSC (Fellowship, Royal Society of Canada, 1980), and the FRSC (UK) (Fellowship, Royal Society of Chemistry, 1980). He died in Dundas, Ontario on December 28, 2022.

Rachel Lili Gerstenzang, known as Lili, was born on July 25, 1918 in Harbin, China. Her father, Aaron Tunik was a businessman in the Export Import business. Her mother was Raisa Tunik, née Levin.

Lili Gerstenzang moved to Tientsin in 1921, where she was educated at the British Tienstin Grammar School until 1933. The family moved to Shanghai, where she attended the Shanghai Public School for Girls. She was active in entering art contests and won notable mention in local newspapers.

She married Leon Gerstenzang in 1938. With her husband, Leon Gerstenzang, she left northern China upon the Chinese Communist occupation. They moved to Hong Kong in July 1949.

They moved to Sydney, Australia and lived there from Nov 1950 to Feb 1953. Lili Gerstenzang attended the East Sydney Technical College, studying Art from 1950 to 1952 and moved to Toronto, Canada in late 1952, becoming and immigrant in 1953. Lili Gerstenzang attended the Ontario College of Art from 1955 to 1956 and 1963-1964.

She died 9 February 2019.

Moseley Stephen Scarlett was a Toronto-based musician who specialized in jazz, blues, ragtime, and swing music from the early 20th century. Scarlett was a known entity in the industry, and frequently collaborated and recorded with musicians such as Jackie Washington, Ken Whiteley, Bruce Cockburn, Marg Stowe, and others.

Scarlett was born in Peterborough, Ontario to an electrical engineer and schoolteacher. At the age of 10 his family moved to Ohio, with Scarlett returning to Canada at the age of 18. Scarlett would marry Anne Tener, with whom he had two daughters, Jessica and Gaelyn. Scarlett and Tener eventually divorced, and Scarlett found a long-time partner in Tina Cohen.

Scarlett routinely played at music events across Canada, and the world. He undertook several tours of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany, and frequented music festivals such as Summerfolk and Northern Lights. Scarlett died in Toronto on 30 May 2019 of leukemia.