T - Toronto's Ill-Fated First Hanging

After the bleak and controversial topics of last week (treasonous nationalism, indigenous rights, and TWO separate cases of genocide), let's keep this week lighter. Monday's topic is... public execution.

Actually, it's still not as bad as last week's posts.

Back in 1798 Toronto was a small frontier town only five years old. It wasn't even called Toronto yet, it was still called York back then. They had a brand-new jail and hanging yard on King Street, a couple of blocks east from Yonge Street, and the local authorities were itching to use it.

This is not the York jailhouse from the story. This is the old Don Jail, which has it's own history of controversy and horror.

In October of that year, a couple of Irish immigrants named John Sullivan and Michael Flannery went on a drinking binge in Toronto's only tavern. Sullivan was illiterate, but Flannery was known as "Latin Mike" for his penchant of reciting Bible verses, and by all accounts was a pretty smart guy. This becomes important later.

When the money ran out, Flannery had the sparkling idea to forge a bank note for three shillings and nine pence (worth a little less than dollar, or twenty bucks in today's money). The bank accepted it and the boys continued their bender. They were soon found out, however, and when word came of their impending arrest Flannery immediately skipped town. Sullivan was not so lucky. He was arrested, tried and convicted of forgery, and sentenced to death.

For forging the equivalent of a twenty-dollar bill.

Is this colourful old lady worth your life?

The judge's ruling was scathing:

Sullivan, may all who behold you, and who shall hear of your crime, and of your unhappy fate, take warning from your example… [I] recommend to you to employ the few days that shall be allowed, of a life spent in wickedness, in humble and fervent prayer to almighty God…

Again, the dude was sentenced to death because his friend forged a twenty dollar bill. Sullivan was illiterate and couldn't write his own name. Obviously the town really, really wanted to try out their new hanging yard.

Again this is not from the York hanging (not many cameras back then). This is from Hull, Quebec, in 1902, not far from where I now work.

The problem was the hanging yard was so new, no one actually knew how to hang a person, and nobody was willing to try. They ultimately had to give $100 and a pardon to another criminal in the same jail, a man by the name of McKnight, to give it a whirl.

(I have been unable to determine what McKnight was arrested for, or how it compares to forging a f*cking $20 bill. Would it be worse if he did something really minor like jaywalking, or had murdered an entire churchful of nuns?)

Yeah, I dunno either, Pierre.

A crowd gathered in their Sunday best to watch the hanging (this was about 210 years before Netflix), and McKnight proved he also had no clue how to hang somebody. The first time the noose slipped off Sullivan's head. The second time the knot came undone. At this point even Sullivan himself was getting annoyed and impatient. It was reported that his last words were something along the lines of: 

"McKnight, I hope to God you got the rope right this time."

Turns out he did, and the third time was the charm.

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My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.

R - J.R. Robertson, Toronto's First Literary Pirate

John Ross Robertson was born in Toronto in 1841. As a child he collected pictures and historical memorabilia (so he was a nerd, basically), and in high school he started his own newspaper, which may have been the first school newspaper of its kind in Canada. He got into trouble with the school administration for printing negative pieces about them, and had to close and rename his paper several times. To be fair to Robertson, he was actually only chastising the school for their movie-villain-style schemes, like trying to tear down the school playground (which Robertson stopped).

After leaving school Robertson started his own print and publishing businesses as well as founded several papers and magazines. By 1865 he was city editor for the Globe, one of Toronto's (and the country's) top papers, which continues to this day as the Globe and Mail. He won numerous awards for journalism and was credited for "introducing to the paper the practice of writing crisp, short paragraphs about a multiplicity of local happenings, rather than sermon-like and wordy essays about outstanding events."

You know, basically the opposite of the way I write.

Preferring to be in charge, Robertson jumped ship just a year later to start his own paper, the Evening Telegraph (later the Evening Telegram). The Telegraph was characterized as news as entertainment, with colourful words, flashy ads, low price and catering to the "average, lower class family" with lowbrow, trashy stories. It was basically a tabloid, and also continues today in its spiritual successor, the Toronto Sun.

Which is also not much better than a tabloid.

The paper was hugely successful, and Robertson became one of Canada's first press barons. Just like today, the people who control the media control the masses, and so JR Robertson was a powerful, influential figure. He used this power to dabble in new enterprises, like rampant literary piracy.

With the rise of popular fiction, and since JRR owned his own printing presses, it was only natural that he would try his hand at book publishing. But instead of finding his own authors and new manuscripts, he just stole works that were already popular in the U.S. or Britain and sold them in Canada without the author or publisher's permission. Due to the lack of international copyright laws, Robertson made a fortune shamelessly reprinting these works. His "Robertson Cheap Editions" (seriously, that was the name) sold for 3 to 50 cents a copy, a fraction of the price of the legitimate volumes. Between 1877 and the early 1890s, it is estimated that Robertson sold up to 2 million copies of as many as 350 titles. He even serialized the works in the Telegram.

The 19th-century equivalent of Torrenting an ePub file.

Of course, what he was doing wasn't technically illegal, but it made him unpopular in certain circles, especially among British copyright lawyers. They argued that as a dominion of Great Britain, Canada should follow their copyright laws, which of course Canadians balked against. Prime Minister John Sparrow Thompson (no relation to Captain Jack Sparrow) appointed Robertson as lead to sort out the copyright laws and actually sent him to London to negotiate with the British, which spelled an end to the Robertson Cheap Editions. I imagine it would have been hard for Robertson to strike any kind of deal with the British while he was ripping them off at the same time.

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Like many rich industrialist of his era, JR Robertson was a fascinating and controversial figure. I only touched on a fraction of his life today. If you want to know more, check out: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/robertson_john_ross_14E.html

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My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.

P - Pussy Black-Face and Margaret Marshall Saunders

Earlier this month I wrote about May Agnes Fleming, Canada's first big name author. While Fleming certainly had great (and longer-term) success, she didn't come close to the explosive impact of Margaret Marshall Saunders.

The daughter of a baptist minister, Margaret was born in 1861 in the village of Milton, Nova Scotia. She traveled widely, attending boarding school in Edinburgh and studying French at Orléans.

In 1889 she submitted her first novel, Beautiful Joe, to the American Humane Education Society Prize Competition "Kind and Cruel Treatment of Domestic Animals and Birds in the Northern States" and won $200. (For reference, that would be worth over five grand today, so that's a pretty sweet writing contest payout.) It was the "true story" of a dog from Meaford, Ontario that had his ears and tail snipped by an abusive owner as a puppy, but is rescued by a family and then goes on to save the family's lives. Of course it was written from the dog's point of view.

The book was published in 1893 and came to international attention (this was on the heels of Black Beauty, and animal books were really big back then). It was the first Canadian book to sell over a million copies (the population of Canada in 1893 was under five million, so every household must have had at least one copy of this friggin' book), going on to sell over seven million copies worldwide by 1930.

As with my previous post about Winnie the Pooh, I maintain once again that the secret of literary success is writing about weird Canadian animals.

Margaret would go on to write twenty other stories and novels, mostly about animals. You can actually still get some of them on Amazon, the most stunningly-titled example being "Pussy Black-Face," which to calm your concerns is neither racist nor about some weird sexual fetish. Supposedly it's a children's story about a cat.

(Well, actually, it was written in 1913 so it may very well have racist elements. And, fair warning, if you Google "Pussy Black-Face" you do get porn hits on the first page.)

Here, I googled it for you to save the embarrassment of someone finding it in your search history.

Margaret was never married and by all accounts grew to be a weird cat/animal lady, living with her sister in an apartment in downtown Toronto with an excessive number of rescue animals. She often named the animals after the locations where she found them, including a dog named Johnny Doorstep and a pigeon named 38 Front Street.

She and her sister toured Canada and the US, giving lectures and collecting stories of domestic animals that were the inspiration for many of her writings. A charming and humourous woman, she held strong interest in humanitarian concerns for animals and children. In addition to her lectures she wrote articles for several newspapers on social concerns such as the abolition of child labour and the improvement of playground facilities. She belonged to many organizations, including founding the Canadian Women's Press Club with Lucy Maud Montgomery. (Montgomery of course went on to be even more successful than Margaret, but Saunders paved the way).

Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has no less than 22 film and TV adaptations, including TWO Japanese anime series and a new "gritty reboot" airing right now on CBC. So where's the Pussy Black-Face movie?

At age 73 she was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Canada's highest civilian honour. She passed away in 1974 at the age of 85.

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My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.

The Toronto Circus Riot of 1855

Some of you know that I love weird Canadian History (see: The soldier who adopted a bear and brought it overseas to World War I), and the following is one of the weirder stories out there. How this hasn't be dramatized as a film, I have no idea. I'm thinking I'm going to have to write a novel about it myself.

Picture this: Toronto, mid-nineteenth century. Victorian prudishness has not yet settled into the only recently-incorporated city, which was mostly still a booming frontier town. Canada would not officially exist as an independent country for another twelve years. The city had a huge Irish Catholic population that clashed regularly with the Irish Protestants (as well as the English and the Scottish), having brought the ancestral grudges with them when they came to the colonies to escape the Great Irish Famine.

Source

Can you picture what we're dealing with now?
 Downtown Toronto c. 1868 

On the evening of July 12, 1855, the Hook and Ladder Firefighting Company visited Mary Ann Armstrong's brothel on King Street, as was the accepted after-hours activity for a volunteer fire department at the time. Now, it must be pointed out that two weeks prior, this same company had gotten into a brawl with a rival firehouse when both groups showed up to combat the same blaze.

Yes, they had a "rival" firehouse. Yes, they fought over who got to put out a fire.

Trust me, it gets even better.

It turns out the circus was in town, and actual honest-to-gods clowns from SB Howes' Star Troupe Menagerie and Circus showed up to partake in Ms. Armstrong's "services." It doesn't mention in the history books whether they were still wearing their costumes and make-up, but I would like to assume that they were. The story goes that a drunk fireman named Fraser picked a fight with one of the clowns (because of course he did) and a brawl broke out. The clowns then proceeded to beat the ever-loving daylights out of the burly firemen, putting two of them in the hospital.

Source

Seriously, how would you react if these guys showed up at your whorehouse in the middle of the night?

Yes, clowns beat up firefighters. I'm not sure if that's some kind of fever nightmare or really weird fetish porn.

The firefighters were all Irish Catholic Orangemen, and an army of their countrymen showed up at the circus fairgrounds the next day (poetically, Friday the 13th) to cause trouble and get retribution. Police were called, but since they were mostly members of the Orange Order themselves, they just stood by and smoked cigars while the crowd grew more and more violent, demanding that the carnies "send out the clowns."

Source

See? Actual newspaper clipping of the event. I'm not making this up.

The situation got nastier as the locals set fire to the circus tents and wagons. The Hook and Ladder Company was called, but instead of putting out the fire (someone should have called that rival firehouse), the firemen started tearing down the last of the tents where the carnies were hiding. The mayor and police chief Samuel Sherwood showed up at the scene themselves to try and restore order, but to no avail. Chief Sherwood actually attempted to personally arrest a rioter and got beat up for his efforts. The mayor allegedly grabbed an axe from a dude who was about to commit coulrocide. Yes, that is the academic term for "clown murder."

Source

This ad seems to imply the circus had tigers. TIGERS. Why didn't they unleash their tigers on the rowdy Irishmen??? 

Finally the mayor had to call in the army to put the riot down. Amazingly no one was killed. Several locals were hurt but I can't find records of what sort of injuries were suffered among the circus folk. Something tells me the carnies wouldn't have cooperated with the police even if they had bothered to question them, and the circus quickly fled town. Many of them actually jumped into the lake and swam away.

Source

I would like to imagine that Lake Ontario wasn't as disgusting back then, but somehow I doubt it.

Afterward, seventeen rioters were arraigned in court but the police present at the scene claimed they were unable to identify even a single participant in the riot. This came as a surprise to no one, as they acted similarly during the previous firemen's brawl as well as the ongoing Protestant-Catholic street fights. Police constables of the day were appointed by city councilors with no training or vetting processes, and were, to be polite, massively corrupt bastards.

The public and the press put heavy pressure on the local government to fix the much-maligned police department. In 1858 the province finally put down legislation for an overhaul of the police force, and in 1859 the entire force was fired, leading to the basis of a new, better and less corrupt police organization in Toronto that exists to this today.

I can hear you snickering about a "better" and "less corrupt" police force in Toronto today, but compared to where it was in 1855, it's miles ahead.

Well, slightly better.

Sources:
http://www.russianbooks.org/crime/cph4.htm#_ftn36

http://torontoist.com/2013/09/how-a-fight-with-clowns-led-to-the-birth-of-modern-policing-in-toronto/

http://blogs.canoe.com/parker/news/the-great-toronto-circus-riot/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto

We're going to the Zoo... how about you?

Actually, we just got back from the zoo. You missed it. Sorry.

This past weekend the wife and I packed up the kids and traveled to our old stomping grounds of Toronto to visit friends and check out the Toronto Zoo. I love the zoo and haven't been in many years, so it was great to go back and revisit old favourites like the polar bears and tigers, as well as check out the new additions like the giant pandas. I don't think the 4-month old really appreciated it, but the 3 and a half year old really enjoyed certain parts. The jelly fish tank was a big hit, as was the camel ride.

I think his favourite part of the whole weekend was the elevator in the hotel, though. He's 3 and a half, what are you going to do?

Here's a few pictures. I wish I had more but it's tough to juggle a camera and a toddler.

I love tigers. The zoo has 2 that they keep in cages on opposite sides of the walking trail. The first time I went many years ago the female was in heat and the male was trying to get at her through the cage. It was both awesome and terrifying.

Look! We're riding a camel. For reference, camels are way more uncomfortable than horses.
I have no idea how someone can spend weeks crossing a desert on one of these things.

This one's my favourite. Credit goes to my good friend (and photographer extraordinaire) Jason Salvatori.

Random zookeeper with an owl. She told us not to come too close or it would bite us.
And they let these things deliver letters to children???

Panda sighting! I actually have a better picture but I can't find it, must be on my wife's phone.
Anyway, pandas are the laziest f***ing creatures on the face of the planet. They just look like fat guys in furry costumes sitting around eating all day.

This is from the hotel room. My son has decided he likes Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering.
He mostly just dumps the cards and dice into piles, but it's a start!

So how about you? Have you been to a zoo recently?