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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.

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.

Boievoi Karandash (The Militant Pencil) is an organization in Moscow that sells Soviet art in poster form. The posters were intended to satirize Soviet bureaucracy. The publisher of the posters is Khudozhnik RSFSR, and the series is Na Obcshii sud.

The Book Society of Canada Ltd. was incorporated on 29 May 1945. Its founding president was John C.W. Irwin (1900-71) who worked from 1927 to 1929 as Assistant Manager of the Educational Department of the Macmillan Company of Canada Limited. In 1930 he and his brother-in-law, W.H. Clarke, began Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited. Together they developed and managed the publishing company of Clarke Irwin along with the Canadian branch of the Oxford University Press (from 1936 onwards). Irwin left Clarke Irwin in 1944 to form The Book Society. The latter was a school textbook publishing company. In the 1960s The Book Society published approximately a dozen books per year, many of which were approved by various departments of education across Canada. The founder's son, John W. Irwin, left teaching in 1960, joined the firm, and worked in various capacities of the company. He became President of the firm in 1971. In 1973 The Book Society acquired an educational publishing firm, Bellhaven House Limited (see boxes 56, file 14, and 59, file 1 for authors' contracts and questionnaires), and in 1982, a trade firm, Peter Martin Associates Limited. When Clarke Irwin went into receivership, The Book Society acquired its assets in June 1983. Clarke Irwin was maintained by The Book Society for a short period as a separate entity and reconstituted under the name, Clarke Irwin (1983) Inc. In 1984 The Book Society was renamed as Irwin Publishing Inc. At that time two-thirds of the company's business was in the area of educational publishing and the remainder in trade. The total business sales were {dollar}3 million, 5% of which came from foreign rights revenue.

Local 2151 consists of employees (drivers and mechanical workers) of Travelways School Transit Ltd. with offices in both Burlington, Ont. and Stoney Creek, Ont. The company was taken over by Laidlaw Transit Ltd. (Hamilton Division) in 1991.

The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) was founded in 1970 by Hardial Bains as a party for the working classes.

The Dickens Fellowship is an organization devoted to the study and appreciation of the works of Charles Dickens. It also has a philanthropic side in charitable causes related to children. Numerous branches of the Fellowship have been established throughout the world. The Hamilton branch (no. 47) was founded on 5 February 1908. It suspended its activities in 1912 and resumed meetings on 26 January 1931. The last known activity of the branch was at the Annual Conference held in Bath, May 1939, though it was still listed in the Dickensian, the Fellowship's journal, in the 1946/47 Winter issue. The Hamilton chapter is among the list of branches "lost during the war" in the Fall 1947 issue of the Dickensian.

Dominion Steel Casting Company Limited was incorporated under the Companies Act of the Dominion of Canada in 1912 by Clifton and Frank Sherman. They added the Dominion Steel Foundry Company in 1913. In 1917, they became Dominion Foundries and Steel Limited. The company officially changed its name to Dofasco in 1980, though it had long been a popular nickname. In 2006, they were acquired by Arcelor and are now a standalone subsidiary of ArcelorMittal.