Authors: Charlotte Gray
Hartley Dewart, QC (
above
), had his offices in the Home Life Building on the corner of Adelaide and Victoria Streets (
right
).
Florence Huestis, president of Toronto’s Local Council of Women, lobbied for mothers’ pensions, children’s playgrounds, and votes for women.
Sir William Mulock, chief justice of Ontario and the Grand Old Man of Anglo-Canada.
All of Ontario’s lawyers had to be admitted to the bar at Osgoode Hall.
In 1915, ties to Britain remained strong in Ontario, and Queen Victoria’s birthday was an annual opportunity to flaunt them.
Until the outbreak of war in 1914, British immigrants streamed into Toronto, and 85 percent of the city’s residents claimed British ancestry.
Joseph Atkinson was the young and ambitious editor of the
Toronto Star
.
During a typhoid outbreak in 1912, a girl called Beatrice Webb won a
Star
-sponsored “Swat the Fly” contest by trapping and swatting 543,360 flies.
John Ross Robertson was proprietor of Toronto’s
Evening Telegram
, which appealed to “the masses not the classes.”
The
Telegram
moved into a lavish new building on the corner of King and Bay Streets in 1900.
Newsboys as young as nine called out the headlines at street corners.
Printers in the
Telegram
’s composing room set the type for stories of scandal and corruption.