The Tragic Tale of a Dead Man's Penny
Plus a talk about the Circus Riot, a new season of Canadiana, and more.
This week’s newsletter is arriving in your inbox a day later than usual because this has been a particularly busy week, with lots of exciting news projects on the go. In fact, I’ll share a couple of fun announcements about them below.
But first I want to tell you a story about a dead man’s penny…
The Tragic Tale Of A Dead Man's Penny
ARTIFACT — In September 1915, the Gailer family received a heartbreaking telegram. Fred was dead.
Fred Gailer had once been a butcher. He lived in Parkdale and worked on Queen Street West — his storefront was on the block between the Drake Hotel and the Gladstone — but he’d left the sawdust floors and lamb shanks behind at the tender age of 21 to pursue a career in the army.
And so when the First World War broke out, Fred Gailer found himself preparing to be sent overseas. During the war’s opening months, his unit underwent training just a short walk from Gailer’s Parkdale home: At the military camp on the Exhibition Grounds.
That’s him standing right in the middle of this photo of his unit, published in the Star just before Christmas that year:
And when spring arrived, they were sent off to Europe. Gailer said goodbye to his young wife Sarah for the last time and steamed across the Atlantic — on a ship that would later be torpedoed by a U-boat, sinking off the coast of Ireland. It took 45 souls into the depths with it.
That tragedy was still years away, so Sergeant Gailer made the crossing safely, but he still wouldn’t live to see the frontlines. He was killed on his first full day in France, felled by a fatal accident that fractured his skull before his service could really even get started. He was 29 years old.
It would have been a few years later that a medallion arrived in the mail. More than a million of the large bronze medals were sent to the families of men and women who’d died in the war, arriving at grieving homes all over the British Empire as a token of thanks — including the one above, which commemorated Frank Gailer’s death. (It has since made its way into the Toronto History Museums Art & Artifact Collection. One thing I’ve been thinking of doing with the newsletter is digging through their online database from time to time and sharing the stories behind some of the most fascinating pieces I find.)
The morbid medallions became known the “Dead Man’s Penny.” This one is inscribed with Gailer’s name — but not his rank. And that was very much on purpose; ranks were omitted so there would be no distinction made when it came to honouring the ultimate sacrifice.
And the other details are interesting, too. The Dead Man’s Penny features the figure of Britannia with a lion at her side, both symbolizing the British Empire that Canada was still very much a part of. The two dolphins are meant to represent the power of the Royal Navy. The words “HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR” are inscribed along the edge of the medal. And right at the very bottom, squeezed in under the floorboards beneath the big lion’s feet… well, there you’ll find a second lion, ripping an eagle to shreds. The German Imperial eagle.
Just a quick reminder before we get to my fun announcements, this week’s most fascinating local history links, and upcoming event listings that this newsletter is a ton of work, so the only way I’ll be able to keep it going is if enough of you switch to a paid subscription. You can do that — or subscribe for free if you haven’t already — by clicking here:
Thanks to everyone who reads, subscribes and spreads the word!
TALKING ABOUT CLOWNS FIGHTING FIREFIGHTERS AT A BROTHEL
CIRCUS RIOT NEWS — Some fun news! This year’s Toronto History Lecture will be delivered by… me!
The annual talk is organized by the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society, and they very kindly asked if I had any interesting ideas for the 2022 edition. One particularly bizarre and fascinating event from our city’s past leapt immediately to mind: this year’s Toronto History Lecture will be all about the Circus Riot.
I’m calling it “The Toronto Circus Riot: A True Tale of Sex, Violence, Corruption and Clowns.”
The strangest riot in our city’s history broke out in the summer of 1855. It was sparked by a brawl at a King Street brothel, when some rowdy clowns picked a fight with a battle-hardened crew of firefighters on the most dangerous night of the year. That bizarre encounter would reverberate through the city. The circus performers had made a terrible mistake; those firefighters were members of the Orange Order, the powerful Protestant society that ruled Toronto for more than a century. And they wanted revenge. The circus grounds would soon become the scene of a bloody clash that shook Toronto to its core and laid bare the fault lines that once violently divided our city.
The lecture will be held over Zoom on Wednesday, August 3 at 7:30pm.
A NEW SEASON OF CANADIANA IS ON THE WAY
THE DOCUMENTARY SERIES I HOST NEWS — Some more fun news! A new season of Canadiana (my Canadian history documentary series) is only a couple of weeks away. And we’ve just released a new trailer to get you all excited about it.
This season is by far our biggest and most ambitious yet. We spent months away from home last year, crisscrossing the country to dig up the most fascinating stories we could find. And now we finally get to start sharing them with you.
We headed into the badlands of Saskatchewan on the hunt for prehistoric beasts. Descended into the earth beneath Ottawa searching for the spark that ignited the Cold War. Travelled through the Yukon on a highway that helped beat Hitler. Paid a visit to the herds of wild horses who roam a shifting sandbar in the middle of the ocean. Found the traces of 500-year-old whale hunts on the shores of Labrador. And much, much more.
The first installment of the new season will be released at the end of this month; it’s the first half of a big two-part episode about the history of pirates on the East Coast.
Canadiana is all 100% free to watch on YouTube. So, once you’ve checked out the trailer below, you can catch up on all the episodes from our first two seasons. And if you like the series, you can become a subscriber with one quick-and-easy click. That’ll make sure you don’t miss any of the new episodes, while also helping us by showing funders that Canadians really do care about their history:
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
UNBUILT PYRAMID NEWS — Bob Georgiou reminded us on Twitter this week that the famous architect Buckminster Fuller once proposed building a giant pyramid near the spot where the CN Tower and SkyDome now stand. As the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario explains:
“The glass pyramid would have contained buildings of up to 20 stories, with skywalks and a mini-rail linking to exterior buildings. Fuller's plans for the site were extensive, and also included a glass enclosed "Galleria" that would cover University Avenue from the Harbour to King Street, an office building to rival the Toronto-Dominion Centre in height, and floating communities in the harbour, accessible from by a raised bridge. The plans were ambitious, but ultimately purely conceptual, and the complex never came to be.”
TORONTO SPECIAL NEWS — Also on Twitter this week, Eric Sehr responded to Gil Meslin by taking a dive into the history of Toronto duplexes, from their early days in the 1930s all the way up to the development of the 1950s “Toronto Special”.
THE FIGHT FOR YONGE STREET NEWS — The Champlain Society’s Witness To History podcast interviews Daniel Ross about his new book, The Heart of Toronto: Corporate Power, Civic Activism and the Remaking of Downtown Yonge Street. Listen.
BABY FOOD NEWS — Jamie Bradburn wrote a new entry for The Canadian Encyclopedia all about pablum, which was created at Sick Kids in 1930 to fight infant mortality. Read more.
VICTORIAN MAP NEWS — John Lorinc explores a map of the city from 1878, when it was “a much smaller city on the cusp of exponential growth.” Read more.
ISLAND NEWS — A new documentary about the history of the Toronto islands debuted this week and Kimia Afshar Mehrabi interviewed the director, Elizabeth Littlejohn, for blogTO. Read more.
WORLD WIDE COSMETIC CETNRE NEWS — Misha Gajewski looks into the Black history of Bathurst & Bloor, and of one building in particular which is now up for sale after 50 years as a home for beauty parlours, hair salons, and cosmetic shops. Read more.
HIP HOP NEWS — Kassandra Guagliardi talks to Ajani Charles, the photographer behind the Toronto hip hop history exhibition, currently displayed at City Hall. It’s free to check out. Read more.
DELI NEWS — The City of Toronto Archives share a photo of one of the city’s first delicatessens:
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
ERNEST D. BANTING’S LIFE IN WESTON
June 16 — 7:30pm — Online — Etobicoke Historical Society
“Ernest D. ‘Doc’ Banting (1892-1973), a distant cousin to Dr. Frederick Banting, discoverer of Insulin, was a leading citizen of the Town of Weston in the mid-1900’s. As a salesman and politician in a career that spanned more than five decades from the 1920s to the 1970s, ‘Doc’ was a shameless self-promoter but a constant home-town booster … and a bit of a rogue.
“Join EHS Historian Richard Jordan as he follows ‘Doc’ around the town while exploring topics like small town sports, municipal politics, the Orange Order, the effects of the Depression, the birth of Canada’s unemployment system, the role of service clubs like the Lions and, last but not least, temperance. Vividly recreating a community from a vanished era, Richard will draw on research from his newly-published book, Ernest D. Banting and Life in Weston 1921-1973.”
Free for members; an annual membership is $25.
TORONTO STREETCAR PHOTOS: INTERPRETING URBAN CHANGE THROUGH A CRITICAL VISUAL ANALYSIS
June 16 — 12pm — Online — University of Waterloo
“This talk is based around the book Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto, which studies the city’s urban transformations through an analysis of photographs taken by streetcar enthusiasts, beginning in the 1960s. These photographers did not intend to record the urban form, function, or social geographies of Toronto; they were "accidental archivists" whose main goal was to photograph the streetcars themselves. But today, their images render visible the ordinary, day-to-day life in the city in a way that no others did. These historic photographs show a Toronto before gentrification, globalization, and deindustrialization. Each image has been re-photographed to provide fresh insights into a city that is in a constant state of flux.”
Free with registration!
SUMMER HISTORY SERIES: THE KINGSWAY
July 21 — 7:30pm — Online — Etobicoke Historical Society
“One of Canada’s premier neighbourhoods, The Kingsway was the vision of one man, Robert Home Smith. A lawyer by training but a natural-born town planner, Home Smith took 3,100 acres of ordinary Etobicoke farmland and turned it into an elegant series of subdivisions that were deemed ‘A bit of England far from England’. Centered around the Old Mill, they offered not only a new vision of town planning but of upper middle class life in Toronto. So ‘jump on the bus’ with EHS Historian Richard Jordan for an enjoyable virtual journey through this picturesque and historic neighbourhood.”
Free for members; an annual membership is $25.